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Sex & Math in the Harvard Yard
by Hubert Kennedy
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At first blush, math and homosex have as much to do with each other as fish and bicycles. But on second thought, what about Alan Turing, the famous World War II code-breaker, driven to suicide after the exposure of a queer relationship? And is there maybe a latent fascination with the Cartesian plane expressed in the title of the magazine XY?

James Mills Peirce, math professor at Harvard in the latter 19th century and champion of the now-forgotten quarternion, may or may not count among the ranks of homosexual mathematicians-- too little is known about his life to say for sure. But the supposition that Peirce-- older brother to well-known philosopher Charles-- belongs in math's gay pantheon provides the major premise of Hubert Kennedy's charming Sex & Math in the Harvard Yard (Peremptory Publications, paper, $12.95)-- a fictional "autobiography" of Peirce that recreates the world of late-19th century Boston, as it explores the green shoots of the early gay movement in Europe-- and gives readers a short course on quarternions to boot.

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Math professor turned historian, Hubert Kennedy has written before about the politics and culture of pre-Stonewall homosexuality, and he sharpened his novelistic pen translating the works of the anarchist John Henry Mackay. Sex & Math brings together these themes as Kennedy's conjured Peirce tours Europe to meet the likes of gay pioneer John Addington Symonds, and has some politically-incorrect and steamy sex with his Harvard students.

Tracing Peirce's life from college in the wake of the Civil War until his death in 1906, Sex & Math nicely conveys the changes of sense and character over time. All this is wrought by a writer steeped in the gay history and math of the period. Sex & Math is an intellectually chewy, compelling story.

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