Angel on a Freight Train

<p><b>The story of a nineteenth-century New Yorker's struggle to reconcile his same-sex erotic desires with his commitment to a Christian life.</b></p><p><i>Angel on a Freight Train</i> 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 <i>Angel on a Freight Train</i> 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>