I have but one thought, Susie, this afternoon of June, and that of you…I need you more and more…forgive me Darling, for every word I say — my heart is full of you, none other than you is in my thoughts, yet when I seek to say to you something not for the world, words fail me. If you were here — and Oh that you were, my Susie, we need not talk at all, our eyes would whisper for us, and your hand fast in mine, we would not ask for language — I try to bring you nearer, I chase the weeks away till they are quite departed, and fancy you have come, and I am on my way through the green lane to meet you, and my heart goes scampering so, that I have much ado to bring it back again, and learn it to be patient, till that dear Susie comes…and I add a kiss, shyly, lest there is somebody there! Don’t let them see, will you Susie?—Letter of Emily Dickinson to Sue Gilbert, June 1852.

It has become common recently to portray Emily Dickinson as a closet homosexual. Reading her letters to her sister-in-law Sue from a 21st century perspective, such an assignation is easy to believe. There are also many indications that she had an unrequited love for a married man. Theories vary on who that man might be. Part of what allows TV shows and movies to be made about Dickinson is that there is little we can confirm about her interior life.

And what about Herman Melville, who in an anonymous review of Hawthorne’s work wrote, “Already I feel that this Hawthorne has dropped germinous seeds into my soul…(he) expands and deepens down, the more I contemplate him; and further, and further, shoots his strong New-England roots into the hot soil of my Southern soul.”

Something we can ask is: how common was what now appears to us as homoeroticism in the letters of Emily Dickinson to Susan Gilbert, and those of Hermann Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, in the mid-19th century?

The terms “heterosexual” and “homosexual” were first used in 1868. Which was at least a decade and a half after Dickinson and Melville were writing their most homoerotic letters to Gilbert and Hawthorne. As Melville stated in one of his effusive letters to Hawthorne, “Ineffable socialities are in me.”

The most frustrating issue with the correspondence of Dickinson and Melville is that though letters by them survive, we have no idea how many other letters were lost or destroyed. Melville enjoyed a brief celebrity early on, and Dickinson exchanged letters with a number of mid-19th century intellectuals, yet both of them died in relative obscurity.

When Melville, the man who wrote what in my opinion is the greatest American novel, died in 1891, he had not published a novel in thirty-five years. There are 313 letters by Melville that are known to exist. Only eleven letters survive from the correspondence between Melville and Hawthorne—and ten of those are by Melville. Why would Melville not have kept every letter from Hawthorne, a man he repeatedly expressed love to, and to whom he dedicated his masterpiece, Moby Dick?

Of Dickinson’s letters, over a thousand survive. If this sounds like a vast amount, it is only because we have lost the art of letter-writing. Scholars estimate that the number of letters Dickinson composed in her lifetime was probably ten times that amount.

Among her closest friends and relatives, such as Sue and her two favorite nieces, there seems to have been something of a conspiracy regarding Emily’s life after her death. Sue alluded several times later in her own life to having always kept “Emily’s secret”. When Mary Loomis Todd attempted to collect Dickinson’s letters, after the first editions of Dickinson’s poems were published to great success, many of her friends and family refused to hand over the originals. They would copy out passages from the letters and only share those. Reading Dickinson’s letters, especially those from the 1860’s, we can find a number of times when she alludes, in notes to close friends, to other letters, enclosed with those notes, which she entrusted that friend to deliver to an unnamed person.

I wish I was more of an expert on the 19th century. The period fascinates me as a whole. I have read a number of biographies of writers from that period. From everything I’ve read, I believe people of that time had far less of a sense of a strict binary in human sexuality. Those boys and girls who were able to receive and education were educated in either all-boys or all-girls schools. If Byron had some sexual fun with a couple of boys he went to school with, which he almost certainly did, no one later made him feel any shame for it, despite all the other things people wanted him to be ashamed of.

It is also important to remember just how influential the Greeks and Romans remained to Western culture at the time. Latin was a language many could still speak because they learned it in childhood. Those with a higher education could read Homer in the original with ease. The Classical Greeks remained the ideal culture, as the Classical Romans remained the ideal civilization. And in both Classical Greece and Rome, sex with someone of the same gender was not considered abnormal. The Spartans, in fact, seemed to think of it, in men at least, as a stage in the growth to adulthood. Anyone who reads Plato will soon realize how often the men are flirting and lusting after each other. The Roman emperor Nero even officially married a man—a random man Nero saw in a crowd, while visiting Greece, who had the unfortunate luck to resemble Nero’s dead wife—the same wife he had beat to death.

Though sexuality could not be explicitly expressed in Victorian England and America, men and women tended in general to be much more affectionate to each other at that time than they are now. Though it was improper to mention sex, two people of the same sex who were friends would not have any hesitation in holding each other and expressing their love for each other.

I also think it is important to remember that both Dickinson and Melville were extraordinarily intense people. Given the image of Dickinson the recluse, it would be easy to imagine her as demure in conversation. In fact, when they met her in person, some of her associates, such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson, found her absolutely exhausting. Melville could entertain a group of people for days with his sea-adventures. They were both passionate and expressive.

Though some will go on producing “creative” biopics of them, and critics who wish to claim them will write books that argue what they were or were not, no one can definitively say what their sexuality may or may not have been.