The Modern Period

Abstract

During the twentieth century the ways in which sexual relations between men were understood changed almost beyond recognition. In the early years, theorists published accounts of what was variously calle? ‘homosexualit?’ o? ‘inversion’. The German lawyer Carl Heinrich Ulrichs argued in the later nineteenth century that homosexuals were to be thought of as female spirits in male bodies, an intermediate sex. At the turn of the century, Havelock Ellis in hi? Sexual Inversio? demonstrated the widespread historical occurrence of homosexual behaviour, and urged that it should be regarded as an abnormality or sport of nature rather than a disease or a degenerate condition. Edward Carpenter, in his long Whitmanesque poe? Towards Democrac? (1883-1905) developed a socialist vision of a community based upon love between men, and his idealization of working-dass men added a new element to literatur?’s repertoire of homosexual motifs; meanwhile his antholog? Ioläu? (1902) assembled literary examples of passionate friendship from ancient times to the present, forming a homoerotic canon. The present chapter focuses first on the writings of two novelists of the early twentieth century, Lawrence and Forster, the latter timidly homosexual, the former passionately devoted to the ideal of male comradeship which included a strong homoerotic element. The discussion then turns to the literature produced in the two world wars, when languages of companionship and of desire were often interwoven?

Now he comes back to me in memories, like an angel, with the light in his yellow hair, and I think of him at Cambridge last August when we lived together four weeks in Pembroke College in rooms where the previous occupan?’s name, Paradise, was written above the door?

Siegfried Sassoo?, Diaries 1915-191? (1983) p. 4?