Angel on a Freight Train

Additional Book Details

<p>The story of a nineteenth-century New Yorker's struggle to reconcile his same-sex erotic desires with his commitment to a Christian life.</p><p>Angel on a Freight Train examines the experiences of Samuel Edward Warren (1831–1909), a teacher and college professor in Troy, New York, who struggled to reconcile his same-sex erotic desires with his commitment to a Christian life. Unlike twenty-first-century evangelicals who try to "pray the gay away," Warren discerned no fundamental conflict between his faith and his attraction to younger males. Growing up in the antebellum Northeast, in a culture that permitted and even celebrated emotional bonds between men, he strove to build emotionally intense relationships in many overlapping forms-friendship, pedagogy, evangelism, and romance-which allowed him to enjoy intimacy with little effort at concealment. However, as he passed into mature manhood and built a prestigious career, Warren began to feel that he should have grown out of romantic friendships, which he now feared had become emotionally and physically excessive.</p><p>Based on Warren's deeply introspective and previously unexplored diaries, Angel on a Freight Train traces his youthful freedom and sensuality, his attempt to join with younger men in a spirit of loving mentorship, and, finally, the tortured introspection of a man whose age seemed to shut him out from an idyllic lost world. In the end, Warren came to believe rather sorrowfully in a radical division between his angelic, ideal self and what he called "the freight train of animal life below."</p>