Abstract In 1869, Viscount Adare privately published his account of the 2 years he spent with the celebrated – and controversial – spiritualist medium Daniel Dunglas Home, entitled Experiences in Spiritualism with Mr. D. D. Home. His father, the 3rd Earl of Dunraven, wrote a foreword to that account, stating that the contents of the book were purely moral. The spiritualist press reported on the account’s publication with admiration. The text itself includes an exhaustive description of the séances the two men undertook together, as well as descriptions of their intimate and sometimes erotic relationship. Modern scholars have approached Adare’s account with suspicion, using it as evidence of Home’s sinister control over Adare, or alternatively with a delicate unwillingness to address the queer implications of the content of his book in detail. The responses from sympathetic nineteenth-century observers, including Adare’s own father, suggest that the nineteenth-century context of spiritualist belief and practice could encourage intimacy between men. In this context, queerness can be situationally contingent: Home was frequently the subject of suggestive, phobic accusations, but Adare appears not to have carried on his interest in spiritualism, and led an otherwise conventional life. This article examines the ways in which the theology and culture of nineteenth-century spiritualism afforded new possibilities and spaces in which intimacy between men could evolve in the service of spiritual investigation.
Avery Curran (Sat,) studied this question.