Reproducing more than one hundred never-before-published vintage photographs dating from shortly after the introduction of photography in the United States to the end of World War I, this groundbreaking book focuses attention on the physical intimacy between men that challenges the conventional view of the Victorian era as more inhibited than our own. David Deitcher's provocative text combines historical research, social observation, pictorial analysis, and personal reflection to explore the nature of same-sex affection between men during that period and the meaning of its ambiguous photographic legacy for people today. We now understand that the Victorians had a surprisingly broad-minded attitude toward intimate friendships: men and women were in many ways encouraged to establish intense, even passionate, bonds with members of their own sex. These ties could be romantic in ways that we would identify as sexual but that Victorians, in their state of pre-Freudian innocence, would not. Enthusiastic collectors - most of them gay - have rescued these enigmatic objects from oblivion. Dear Friends investigates the social conditions that made these photographs possible and examines both their abandonment and subsequent retrieval by those who cherish them as rare historical visual evidence of love between men.