![]() Wilde had sunk into a “gulf of obscenity”, Henry James remarked, “over which the ghoulish public hangs and gloats”. If Douglas’s father, the Marquis of Queensberry, had not left a semi-illiterate card at Wilde’s club, accusing him of being a “posing Somdomite”, and if Wilde had not then foolishly sued him for libel (thereby denying that he was any such thing), then perhaps Wilde would never have ended up in Reading Gaol.Īnd had Wilde not sensationally met his nemesis, the great wave of homophobia that swept over Britain in 1895 would never have been. It’s an irony, then, that when Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, wrote in a poem of the “love that dare not speak its name”, it was in fact beginning to speak up (the poem itself being further proof). Around the time Symonds and Ellis were working on their book, Carpenter was working on his own defence of homosexuality, to be called Homogenic Love and its Place in a Free Society. and The Picture of Dorian Gray there was the poetry of Walt Whitman, which for many gay men seemed, in its glorification of male comradeship, to be offering a cultural model for a homosexuality that could find legitimacy, honour and social purpose in the present. There were Oscar Wilde’s nudging and winking stories The Portrait of Mr. In the 1890s, gay men in Britain were more likely than at any previous time to encounter cultural justifications for their feelings and wants. The great life-cramping injustice is that they are forced to conceal who they really are, even forced to marry unsuspecting women for reasons of respectability. None of them refers to any trouble with the law on the contrary, Case XXI reports that “I like soldiers and policemen for the sensuality of the moment, but they have so little to talk about that it makes the performance unsatisfactory.” Almost all state that they are comfortable with their sexuality and do not wish to change it. They had friends, professions, and sexual and romantic partners. Case XXI is the latter, and prefers it “done roughly” by “men who are carried away by their lust and bite my flesh at the supreme moment”. They open up about their sex lives: how often they masturbate whether they like fellatio whether, if it comes to what was called paedicatio, they are active or passive. Case XI (all the men are anonymised) is fond of boating and walking he’s a smoker and eats out a lot “big muscular men have little attraction for him”. We learn about their appearances and interests and the sorts of men they go for. Symonds and Ellis collected the personal testimony of more than 30 gay men (as well as at least six gay women), charting the apparent ease with which these men were managing, despite the obstacles, to live reasonably fulfilling lives. (There has never been a British law affecting lesbianism.) In 1892, the writers John Addington Symonds (gay but married for nearly three decades, with four daughters) and Havelock Ellis (straight but married to a lesbian) began collaborating on a book about homosexuality, titled Sexual Inversion, arguing that it was a harmless human “variation” and in the case of men should be legalised. Common sense tells us that this must be true – even if it means subduing our idea that to be gay in the 19th century was necessarily to exist in a private hell, or in prison, or both. Meetings such as this were constant occurrences in Victorian Britain. ![]() (The same was true in Wales it remained illegal in Scotland until 1980, Northern Ireland until 1982 and Ireland until 1993.) Carpenter and Merrill’s relationship was by its very nature extraordinary, but its origins were entirely ordinary: a meeting of eyes, a burst of conversation, the giving of names and addresses. Yet in that period, and until 1967, sexual activity between men was illegal in England. (Their partnership would inspire EM Forster’s novel Maurice, begun in 1913.) The “so forth” had to wait until Carpenter’s guests had departed, but it proved the beginning of a relationship that would last until Merrill’s death in 1928 – from 1898, they even lived in the same house. They found a way to speak, and Merrill urged Carpenter to “let the others go on, to return with him to Sheffield, and so forth”. There was a “look of recognition”, Carpenter wrote privately later.Īs he led his friends to his house, he realised that Merrill was following behind. The train steamed in among those disembarking was a handsome young man called George Merrill. In the spring of 1891, Edward Carpenter – former Anglican priest turned socialist campaigner, poet and sandal-maker – was awaiting the arrival of some friends at Dore and Totley station, outside Sheffield. ![]()
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