Gay tolerance might have triumphed in Britain – were it not for Oscar … – The Telegraph

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. The train steamed in; among those disembarking was a handsome young man called George Merrill. There was a “look of recognition”, Carpenter wrote privately later. 

As he led his friends to his house, he realised that Merrill was following behind. 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”. 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. (Their partnership would inspire EM Forster’s novel Maurice, begun in 1913.) 

Yet in that period, and until 1967, sexual activity between men was illegal in England. (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. All on a spring day. 

Meetings such as this were constant occurrences in Victorian Britain. 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. 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. (There has never been a British law affecting lesbianism.) 

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. We learn about their appearances and interests and the sorts of men they go for. 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”. 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 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”.

These men were not outcasts. They had friends, professions, and sexual and romantic partners. 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. 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. 

In the 1890s, gay men in Britain were more likely than at any previous time to encounter cultural justifications for their feelings and wants. There were Oscar Wilde’s nudging and winking stories The Portrait of Mr. W.H. 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. 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. 

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). 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. 

And had Wilde not sensationally met his nemesis, the great wave of homophobia that swept over Britain in 1895 would never have been. Wilde had sunk into a “gulf of obscenity”, Henry James remarked, “over which the ghoulish public hangs and gloats”. The newspapers pronounced on the unique horror of Wilde’s crimes, the judge declared it the worst case he had ever tried, and a crowd gathered to jeer and spit at Wilde on the platform at Clapham Junction. There was a moral panic – Wilde was seen as a symptom of a degenerate culture, and taken to encapsulate in his own disgraced, corrupted person the essential qualities of the homosexual. Carpenter’s book Homogenic Love was rejected by his publisher, and Symonds and Ellis’s book, though finally published, after Symonds’s death, in 1897, was found indecent by a judge and destroyed by legal order. 

If Wilde hadn’t been arrested, what might have happened differently? Born in 1854, Wilde’s health was irreparably damaged by prison, and he died aged 46 in 1900; he could otherwise have lived well into the 20th century. (His only grandson, Merlin Holland, is alive today, and aged just 77.) It seems probable that he would have continued to tease the British establishment, yet what was needed was less art, and more politics – less suggestion, and more argument. If there had been no Wilde trial, might Carpenter’s commitment to the homosexual cause have been taken up by his fellow socialists in the Labour Party? (His well-known relationship with Merrill did little to affect his reputation – when Carpenter died in 1929, the prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, paid public tribute, along with several members of the Cabinet.)

Yet it’s hard to imagine a Labour Party that famously owed more to Methodism than to Marx – and was in the early years of the 20th century still seeking to seem electable – managing to make gay rights a campaign pledge. The Liberal Party would have been a slightly better bet. One of its MPs, Richard Haldane, exerted his influence to make Wilde’s time in prison more bearable; the Liberals had a history of expanding personal liberties, and a respect for the fruits of rational debate. Yet the prospect of debate may have been precisely the problem. George Bernard Shaw, who knew Wilde, believed that a fear of being thought to be gay turned the typical Englishman into a cowardly hypocrite, “professing in public and in print views which have not the slightest resemblance to those which he expresses in private conversation with educated and thoughtful men”. The last thing the Liberal governments from 1905 were about to do – dealing with social and financial reform, a battle with the House of Lords, a commitment to give Home Rule to Ireland, and the encroach of world war – was to start a debate that no one in Britain wanted to have.

What if the real turning point was not Wilde’s arrest in 1895, but the death of Symonds, aged 52, two years earlier? Of the leaders of Britain’s early “gay rights” movement, only Symonds was single-mindedly committed to the cause: Carpenter had a wide range of interests and pursuits, while Ellis was bold in thought but pathologically shy. In his final years, by contrast, Symonds became increasingly forthright, worrying his friends and family by his willingness to publicly make his case. He believed his happiness, creativity and health had been severely injured by secrecy and repression; he was determined to change social attitudes and the law. Confronted with the spectacle of Wilde in the witness box, insisting with feigned outrage that he was innocent of any illicit sexual desire, might Symonds have decided that the only thing that could preserve the cause he believed in so desperately, was the full “coming out” of a distinguished homosexual? That only a public testimony of a life lived honourably in the shadow of the law could force the public to consider whether that law was just? 

These are the counterfactual questions that underlie my novel, The New Life, which is inspired by the experiences of Symonds and Ellis as they worked on their revolutionary book. Thinking over the history of the fight for the homosexual cause in Britain, I have come to the conclusion that the only thing that could possibly have brought progress about earlier was a martyr. There was one of course, but he did not dare speak his name: the problem for gay rights was that it got Oscar Wilde, and not John Addington Symonds.

‘The New Life’ by Tom Crewe is published on Thursday by Chatto & Windus at £16.99