Visions of Queer Martyrdom from john Henry Newman to Derek Jarman 9780226250755, 9780226250618

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
1. The Bitter Tears of John Henry Newman
2. William Bennett and the Art of Ritualism
3. Father Ignatius’s “Wonderful . . . Monastery Life”
4. Frederick Rolfe’s Scrapbook
5. Saint Oscar
6. The Private Lives of David and Jonathan
7. Derek Jarman and the Legacy of Queer Martyrdom
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman

Visions of Queer Martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman

DOMINIC JANES

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

D O M I N I C J A N E S is professor at the University of the Arts, London, and a reader in cultural history and visual studies at Birkbeck, University of London. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-25061- 8 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978- 0-226-25075-5 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226250755.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Janes, Dominic, author. Visions of queer martyrdom from John Henry Newman to Derek Jarman / Dominic Janes. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-25061-8 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0226-25075-5 (e-book) 1. Homosexuality—England—Religious aspects. 2. Newman, John Henry, 1801–1890. 3. Bennett, W. C. (William Cox), 1820–1895. 4. Ignatius, Father, O.S.B., 1837–1908.

5. Rolfe, Frederick, 1860–1913.

1854–1900.

7. Jarman, Derek, 1942–1994.

6. Wilde, Oscar, I. Title.

HQ76.3.G7J36 2015 205′.6640942—dc23 2014033250 The writing of this book was supported by a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (grant number AH/I001433/1).

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper).

I sought me a friend long fruitlessly; I sought but one, God gave me three. Now I leave it to Him to bring them me, While I lie in His arms at rest. E . E . B R A D F O R D , “AT R E S T,” T H E N E W C H I VA L R Y ( 19 1 8 )

Contents Acknowledgments ix

1

The Bitter Tears of John Henry Newman 1

2

William Bennett and the Art of Ritualism 30

3

Father Ignatius’s “Wonderful . . . Monastery Life” 67

4

Frederick Rolfe’s Scrapbook 97

5

Saint Oscar 133

6

The Private Lives of David and Jonathan 154

7

Derek Jarman and the Legacy of Queer Martyrdom 182

Bibliography 209

Index 251

Acknowledgments With particular thanks to the following libraries and archives: Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford Berkshire County Record Office, Reading Birkbeck College Library, University of London Bodleian Library, University of Oxford British Film Institute Archive, London British Library, London British Museum, London Cambridge University Library John Rylands Library, University of Manchester Lambeth Palace Library, London Manchester Metropolitan University Library National Archives, London National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London National Portrait Gallery, London Norfolk County Record Office, Norwich Pusey House Library, Oxford Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University Sheffield City Council Archives Tate Gallery, London Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore William Morris Gallery, London

I would further like to thank the following individuals for their invaluable assistance and support in the completion of this project: Colin Alsbury, Alan Beck, Christoix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

pher Cawrse, Matt Cook, Michael Johnston, Richard Kirker, Kenneth Leech, John Lotherington, Tim Morrison, Andrew Rudd, and Sebastian Sandys. For permission to include revised material that had previously been published in an earlier form my thanks go Ashgate in relation to “Queer Walsingham,” in Walsingham in Literature and Culture from the Middle Ages to Modernity, edited by Dominic Janes and Gary Waller (Ashgate: Farnham, 2010), pp. 147– 64; to the Rabbi Myer and Dorothy  Kripke Center  for the Study of Religion and Society at Creighton University in relation to “The ‘Modern Martyrdom’ of Anglo- Catholics in Victorian England,” Journal of Religion and Society 13 (2011); and to Taylor and Francis in relation to “Frederick Rolfe’s Christmas Cards: Popular Culture and the Construction of Queerness in Late Victorian Britain,” Early Popular Visual Culture 10, no. 2 (2012): 105–24, and “William Bennett’s Heresy: Male Same-Sex Desire and the Art of the Eucharist,” Journal of Victorian Culture 17, no. 4 (2012): 413–35. This work was completed during the tenure of a fellowship from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).

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The Bitter Tears of John Henry Newman The Curate of Littlemore had a singular experience. As he was passing by the Church he noticed an old man, very poorly dressed in an old grey coat with the collar turned up, leaning over the lych gate, in floods of tears. He was apparently in great trouble, and his hat was pulled down over his eyes, as if he wished to hide his features. . . . A photograph hung over the Curate’s mantelpiece of the man who had made Littlemore famous by his sojourn there more than twenty years ago. . . . “Was it not Dr. Newman he had the honour of addressing?” he asked, with all the respect and sympathy at his command. “Was there nothing that could be done?” But the old man hardly seemed to understand what was being said to him. “Oh no, no!” he repeated, with the tears streaming down his face. “Oh no, no!”1

This image of John Henry— Cardinal— Newman (1801– 90)  was inserted by Lytton Strachey (1880–1932) in the first section of his extraordinarily successful Eminent Victorians of 1918.2 That book began, in effect, with an account of two Roman Catholic Cardinals, Henry Edward Manning  (1808–1892) and Newman, who had both crossed over from the Church of England. Strachey was a leading member of the Bloomsbury Group who attempted to stress his cultural distance from the religious obsessions of the nineteenth century. Not merely that, but as a man who had various same-sex affairs both when a student at

1. Strachey (1918), pp. 81– 82. 2. Strachey (1918); a useful introduction to Strachey is Rosenbaum (2008), and other key studies include Holroyd (1994), Spurr (1995), and Taddeo (2002).

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Cambridge University and subsequently in London, Strachey was critical of what he saw as the sexual repressions of a previous generation. It is in this light that we can understand his emphasis on Newman, one of the country’s greatest theologians, as an essentially tragic figure. In another telling passage Strachey depicts the cardinal as a precursor of the aesthetes of Oscar Wilde’s generation. “In other times,” we are told, “under other skies, his days would have been more fortunate. He might have helped to . . . chase the delicate truth in the shade of an Athenian palaestra, or . . . have followed quietly in Gray’s footsteps and brought into flower those seeds of inspiration which now lie embedded amid the faded devotion of the Lyra Apostolica.”3 What is being hinted at here is that instead of subliming his homoerotic interests in religious verse and ritual, Newman might have found freer sexual self- expression amid the gymnasia of ancient Athens, or even in the Cambridge of an allegedly similarly inclined Thomas Gray.4 The first open suggestion that Newman and other members of his circle among the Tractarian theologians of early Victorian Oxford were homosexual was made by Geoffrey Faber in his psychoanalytically informed study, Oxford Apostles (1933).5 On 30 June of the year of its publication the volume was picked as The Times’s book of the week, and reviewed as being “really historical” rather than partisan concerning Newman, and as “using psychology to interpret those always emotional and frequently tearful friendships which dominated him and some of his contemporaries.”6 Not surprisingly its sexual claims have been consistently repudiated by Catholic apologists and conservative biographers. So, for example, Ian Ker in his important biography blamed this, in his view, misreading of the cardinal on the proposition that we now live in “an age that has almost lost the concept of affectionate friendship untouched by sexual attraction.”7 What Ker was referring to was Newman’s long and enduring friendship, one so intense that it has been referred to as a love affair, with Ambrose St. John. This began with their first meeting in 1841 and ended with the two being buried together. It has rightly been pointed 3. Strachey (1918), p. 16. Classical Athens and Renaissance Italy were favorite loci for fantasies of homosexual desire during the fi n de siècle; on this see, respectively, Dowling (1994) and Fisher (2008), p. 41, who argues that when the concept of the Renaissance was “introduced in England, the period was imagined as queer terrain.” 4. On Gray see chap. 7 of this book. 5. Note that Continental sexology was not widely received in Britain until the interwar period; see L. Hall (1995) and also Grosskurth (2005) on Havelock Ellis. 6. Anon., “The Oxford Movement” (1933), p. 20. 7. Ker (2009), p. 747.

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

out that the Anglican Church had a minority tradition of clerical celibacy before Newman.8 Moreover, celibacy was a normal pattern of life during a fellowship at an Oxford college, albeit that such a position was often thought of as a stage prior to preferment to a parish which would provide a suitable income with which to sustain a respectable marriage.9 There had, moreover, been a tradition in England since the sixteenth century of two clerics being buried together. Such relationships have been seen as “wholly spiritual” and, as Alan Bray has argued, such a “love was not the less for being so.”10 All this notwithstanding, it is still necessary to account for the pointed and personal attacks made by Charles Kingsley (1819–75) on Newman in the 1860s that resulted in some of his greatest personal experiences of misery. He cried his way through the writing of his Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864, revised 1865) which formed his riposte to Kingsley.11 Thus when Newman appears as a visitor to Littlemore in Strachey’s narrative he is expressing his bitter regrets at the loss of the life of the quasi-monastic Anglican community that he established there in the last years before his conversion to Rome.12 Kingsley, who was to become known as the apostle, so to speak, of “muscular Christianity,” had, in the midst of many other gibes, cast aspersions on what he projected as Newman’s weakness and effeminacy. His insinuations can be contextualized by reference to contemporary lampoons in Punch of Anglo- Catholic ritualist priests, of the type inspired by the example of Newman, as being camp transvestites, such as “sweet thing in Christmas vestments” which appeared in 1866 (see fig. 1.1). Oliver Buckton has suggested that whether or not Newman’s celibacy, friendships, and emotional behavior in the 1830s were “full of dubious sexual import and suggestive of a variety of ‘perversions’—it is clear that they were so, or were becoming so, by the 1860s.”13 It was at this very time that the term “pervert” began to take on connotations of sexual deviance, having previously been employed in anti- Catholic discourse to mean a convert to Rome. It would therefore appear that religion was

8. Young (1996). 9. Vitanza (1986), p. 72; and Walker (2004). 10. Bray (2003a), p. 97. 11. Strachey (1918), p. 75; and Ker (2009), pp. 543– 44. 12. Janes (2014b). 13. Buckton (1992), p. 380. Winyard (2009), pp. 85– 86, argues that concerns over Newman’s behavior also need to be seen in the context of declining aristocratic authority and a rise in concerns with normative gender performance as a mark of status— although that was hardly a new process at this date as explored by King (2008). See also Dorman (1979) and Lankewish (2000). On the history of perversion, Peakman (2009).

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F I G U R E 1 .1 Anon., “Sweet Thing in Christmas Vestments,” Punch 50 (1866), p. 11,

reproduced by permission of Birkbeck College Library.

becoming a site for the construction of concepts of sexual deviance.14 Strachey took his description of the aging Newman on his return visit to Littlemore from a passage by Wilfrid Ward, who was, arguably, Newman’s first major biographer. In Ward’s narrative, however, Newman is not alone but is accompanied by Ambrose St. John.15 His presence was

14. Janes (2014b) and Peschier (2009). This is not to suggest that most converts were not primarily motivated by spiritual and intellectual imperatives; see Allitt (1997), pp. 43– 60. 15. W. Ward (1912), 2, p. 206; see also Pouncey (1991), pp. 101– 3.

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

not omitted in the retelling because Strachey was afraid of the homosexual implications but because it spoiled the image that he wanted to project of Newman as isolated, tortured, and suffering. When I write in this book about visions of queer martyrdom I am not primarily concerned with trying to establish whether or not Newman’s relationship with St. John was sexual or not. Nor am I seeking to construct an argument derived from theology that addresses the compatibility of sainthood and same-sex desire. What I do want to do is to highlight the role played by Christianity in the history of homosexuality in Britain, not just in terms of physical relations but also in terms of identities both embraced and refused. Telling this story involves the exploration of coded expressions of desire as well as of creative blurrings between religious idealism and performances of non-normative gender and sexuality that I refer to as queer. This is, therefore, a study in cultural history and visual culture that explores an aspect of British queer experience that has been under-appreciated and under-researched, partly because it did not lead directly to gay liberation ideals of sexual free expression. What this study is about is the way in which visual images and imaginary visions of suffering in ecclesiastical contexts could be used to develop concepts of male same-sex desire that projected the self as dutiful and penitent rather than shameful. Idealizing the person and body of Christ as an unmarried queer martyr provided both a model and a substitute for same-sex relationships. Yet at the same time communities of priests could develop a sense of shared witness which they could then hope to instill in the next generation, albeit that that desire sometimes became suffused with elements of eroticism. Such men, living in the state of coded secrecy that can be termed the “ecclesiastical closet,” could then, themselves, appear to embody a certain form of sexual deviance for outsiders such as Strachey, who could develop an exaggerated vision of Church life as an intrinsically queer space of camp sorrow.16 Such a cultural construction of Newman as a queer martyr, not only pining for the Church of England, but also for the young men with whom he had once lived at Littlemore, invites reflection on the ways in which the Cardinal has been visually imaged, variously, as a peculiar youth, a handsome young man, or a frail grandee of the Roman Church (see figs. 1.2, 1.3, and 1.4). Such images could, subsequently, come to be used by others as a way of reflecting on and contributing to the construction of their own notions of queer sensibility. Visions offered spaces in which the 16. See also my study of closet visibility, Janes (2015).

5

F I G U R E 1 . 2 Unknown artist, John Henry Newman (1841), etching, © National Portrait

Gallery, London, NPG D5747.

F I G U R E 1 . 3 George Richmond, John Henry Newman (1844), chalk, 41 × 34 cm, © National

Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 1065.

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

F I G U R E 1 . 4 Emmeline Deane, John Henry Newman (1889), oil on canvas, 111.8 × 89.5 cm,

© National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 1022.

imagination could create scenes of queer triumph over adversity, or sad tableaux of sexual failure. Martyrs played an important role in the rise and development of Christianity, notably in the persecutions under the pagan Roman emperors, and the value of martyrdom was an issue of great importance and controversy in nineteenth- century Britain.17 The question of how to treat those who had suffered, especially to the point of death, in witness of Jesus, was disputed between members of the various Christian denominations. Certain English conservatives maintained that not only had Anglicanism arisen through the witness of the Protestant martyrs at the time of the Reformation but that honor should also be given to figures such as Archbishop Laud and King Charles I.18 In the aftermath of the French Revolution a new sympathy awoke in cer-

17. Key works on wider contexts of martyrdom include Bowersock (1995), Boyarin (1999), Cormack (2002), Castelli (2004), Wicker (2006), Middleton (2011), and J. Mitchell (2013). 18. Lacey (2003).

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tain quarters of Protestant Britain for Catholics who had suffered and lost their lives at the hands of radicals who were, or who were seen as, atheists.19 Meanwhile the Church of England came increasingly to be viewed as split between various “parties.” Many of those of the traditionalist “high Church” party found themselves eclipsed in the 1830s by others leading the Oxford Movement for Catholic revivalism. These “Tractarians,” of whom John Henry Newman and Edward Bouverie Pusey were arguably the most important, also wished to revere the example of the saints of both the early Church and of the pre-Reformation Middle Ages. Thus when a Martyrs’ Memorial was completed in Oxford in 1843 to commemorate the lives and deaths of Cranmer, Ridley, and Latimer, it was intended as a riposte to Roman Catholics and Tractarians alike.20 However, the leaders of the Oxford Movement were intent not simply on disputing who should be revered as a martyr but also what role exemplary suffering should play in the life of the ordinary Christian. They wished, above all, to distance themselves from Calvinist notions of penal substitution by which Christ took much of the burden of suffering from the shoulders of a sinful mankind and, instead, emphasized the fellowship with the Lord that worshippers experienced through pain as an act of penitence or as a sacrifice offered up in devotion.21 It was in this spirit that Pusey argued in his sermon on “the value and sacredness of suffering” that “pain, sickness, weariness, distress, languor, agony of mind or body, whether in ourselves or others, is to be treated reverently, seeing in it our Maker’s Hand passing over us, fashioning, by suffering, the imperfect or decayed substance of our souls.”22 Thus, powerful Christian witness could be achieved not only through an exalted death but also through a state of suffering in life. Such statements set their faces against utilitarian notions that worldly pleasure should form the basis for rational decision making and, by contrast, asserted the vital importance of delayed gratification in heaven. Many Protestants, however, felt critical of what they saw as a potentially unhealthy fascination with, and indeed a seeming desire to seek out, sources of suffering. Moreover, because of a misogynistic association with the female state as being peculiarly attuned to pain in the service of men (through, for example, childbirth and domestic service),

19. Janes (2014a). 20. Atherstone (2003), p. 298. 21. Hu (2010), p. 156. 22. Pusey (2002), p. 7 (text originally published 1841).

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

the seeming exaltation of pain as an element of everyday male experience aroused suspicions of effeminacy. Moreover, such male effeminacy came, increasingly, also to be associated with perverse forms of sexual gratification, often because many Tractarians and their “ritualist” and “Anglo- Catholic” successors eschewed marriage despite that fact that it was widely seen as the only decent outlet for sexual desires.23 All of this meant that the state of male Christian suffering that I term “queer martyrdom” came to be established as outside normative roles of gender and sexuality in Victorian England. Queer martyrdom, therefore, came to combine Christian witness with aspects of gender and sexual transgression. It enabled men to live powerfully queer lives that also gave them a route, they believed, to salvation. And if this cultural formation as a whole has not, by contrast, provided a direct path toward gay liberation it can, nevertheless, still be hailed as an example of what Judith Halbertstam—referencing Quentin Crisp’s comment that “if at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style”—has termed the “queer art of failure.”24 Queer tears defied heternormative expectations of manhood in the nineteenth century and continue to do so today.25 Martyrdom is a social formation and requires the witness not just of the martyr but of others who will attest to one. Thus, a crucial place in the history of martyrdom is occupied by the mediated forms, traditionally texts such as hagiographies, which evidenced the acts of persecution and sacrifice. Moreover, the period covered in this book was one in which, as I have argued elsewhere, such witness might be to a range of quasi-religious devotions from nationalism to gender equality.26 Awareness that people were willing to suffer or die for the sake of various forms of Christianity, and indeed for other faiths or even for nonreligious beliefs, bred a tendency to regard martyrdom as being, in itself, a culturally contestable state that could, in due course, be claimed by pressure groups of all kinds including secular ones. Queer martyrdom, therefore, could encompass both attempts to accommodate sexual deviance within the realm of Christian moral witness and the attempted manipulation of Christian imagery of martyrdom in the cause of sexual liberation. No term for same-sex erotic desire is unproblematic. None of those in wide contemporary use (“gay,” “homosexual,” “queer,” for instance) 23. Janes (2014b) and (forthcoming-a). 24. Halberstam (2011), p. 96. 25. Wahrman (2004), p. 38, on the eclipse of the tearful “man of feeling” celebrated by Henry Mackenzie (1771). 26. Janes (2014a).

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were popularly available in the nineteenth century with their current contemporary meanings. The gay-rights activist (if one can dare to talk of such things before World War II) George Ives was behaving in a very advanced manner when he used the word “homosexual” to describe himself in the 1910s and 1920s.27 While the term “gay” can be located to the later twentieth- century struggle to positively recategorize such supposed sexual deviance, the currently most widely used appellation, “homosexual,” developed out of medical (“sexological”) discourse. It was first coined by the Austrian-born Hungarian journalist Károly Mária Kertbeny (born Karl-Maria Benkert) in 1869 and entered English usage along with “heterosexual” with the translation in the 1890s of Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s Pyschopathia Sexualis.28 My use of this term in this study is not meant to imply my collusion with the pathologization of sexual identities, but is simply intended to function as a factual indicator that I want to talk about men whose sexual and emotional desires were primarily, or entirely, toward members of their own sex. I have only employed it when discussing the period during which the term was current. For earlier periods I have preferred to use the word “sodomite.” In addition to the term “homosexual,” employed either as a matter of convenience to locate a person in relation to a category of sexual behavior or in relation to discourses that used that term themselves, I also use the term “queer.” There is no single definition of the word “queer” as used in the recent academic discourse which calls itself “queer theory,” but it is generally employed in the exploration of circumstances in which there is some form of overlap between the cultural politics of transgression and the construction of alternatives to normative sexual identities. Because queerness is, therefore, generally understood to exist in relation to the transgression of categories it necessarily does more work than the terms “homosexual” or “gay.” The main problem with these latter words is that they are largely defi ned negatively in relation to the notion of “not being sexually straight” and operate through the assertion of a new oppositional category; whereas queer can be seen as that which sets itself up against the normative, whatever that might be, including against the imperative to categorize.29 Therefore, “queer” is a useful word to use when addressing situations such as the overlap

27. Cook (2006), p. 202. 28. E. Cohen (1987), p. 801. See also A. Davidson (1987). 29. Bersani (1995), p. 71.

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

of religion and sexual identity in which the appearance of unusual/ strange/queer cultural formations helps to signal that conventional understandings of desire are coming under pressure.30 Historians of male same-sex experience have adopted a range of stances in their attempts to explore chronological specificity while retaining a transhistorical notion of the gay/homosexual/queer. For the pioneering generation of historians the key work was investigating overlooked materials in order to “reveal” rich seams of gay activity in past society that appeared to validate contemporary experience and practice. For instance, in 1977 Randolph Trumbach argued of eighteenth- century London’s “gay scene” that “that sub- culture bears an extraordinary resemblance to those described in the twentiethcentury sociological literature. There are the same meetings in parks, latrines, and bars. There is a similar specialized argot. There are similar forms of effeminacy. There is the same range of age and occupations. There is the same presence of both married and single men. And there is similar evidence that most individuals participated in the sub- culture only to a limited extent.”31 More recent studies in what has been referred to as the “new queer history” over the last decade in Britain have been overtly historicist, and concerned with emphasizing temporal and geographic specificities of cultural practice rather than on discovering a lost gay past.32 Others have returned to an essentialist position by advancing the notion that men with similar erotic desires to those of modern gays were always there but they just left different traces in the record, as in Rictor Norton’s The Myth of the Modern Homosexual (1997).33 My own belief is that if same-sex desire is simply an aspect of being human, its expression and recognition has had a very complex historical trajectory. It is tempting, therefore, if perhaps unwise, to posit a transhistorical fascination for a combination of homoeroticism and martyrdom. Above all, St. Sebastian appears repeatedly as an iconic combination of beautiful, homoerotic suffering that, arguably, results in “the very distillation in art of an emotionally and politically fraught homosexual persona.”34 As Maureen Moran has written in relation to Victorian representations of martyrdom, the “broken body can be viewed as a 30. Cocks (2006b), p. 167. 31. Trumbach (1977), p. 23. 32. Waters (2008), p. 146. 33. Norton (1997). 34. Kaye (1999b), pp. 287 and 298. See also Kaye (1996).

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means to spiritual triumph or a voyeuristic object appealing, at best, to erotic curiosity and, at worst, to perverse and violent desires.”35 The latter approach emerged quite clearly in the 2003 exhibition held at the Kunsthalle Wien, “Sebastian: A Splendid Readiness for Death.” In this show a range of modern and contemporary artists explored the theme of Sebastian as “patron saint of soldiers, of homosexuals, of plague- and AIDS-sufferers. Personified Sebastian: a sado-masochist icon, a death-loving, androgynous dandy, the very embodiment of the exemplary suffering of the artist.”36 The use of the term “saint” to apply to prominent gay men who died of AIDS was widespread in the late twentieth century, including in the scholarly community, as for instance in the case of David Halperin’s Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography (1995). Halperin admired the Frenchman as an exemplary individual and thinker. Above all he saw Foucault as a liberatory figure. Rather than being enmeshed and trapped by power, he writes that the “kind of power Foucault is interested in, then, far from enslaving its objects, constructs them as subjective agents and preserves them in their autonomy, so as to invest them all the more completely.”37 But that is also what Christian saints and martyrs can be understood to have experienced, and it is what gives their actions such significance in relation to the development of regimes for the production of the self. Queer martyrdom, therefore, is a state that can be applied to create a sense of exalted drama around the sufferings and privations of sexual and gender deviants, and it can be employed in personal scripts of the creation of the self or can be imputed to others. Furthermore, queer martyrdom was by no means the sole province of men. Even though the current study is one which explores male experience, the ideas examined here could be applied to certain aspects of the history of lesbianism. To take one quick example, open a copy of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and you will read that Stephen, the invert heroine of the novel, is told that “you were made for a martyr,” because she finds joy in Christlike suffering.38 Inversion was held to be a tragic state in which a man’s soul inhabited a woman’s body, or vice versa, but Hall had used the Passion in a way that, for Maddon, “substitutes a lesbian writer as the martyred messiah of her 35. M. Moran (2004), p. 477. 36. Matt and Fetz (2003), p. 8. 37. Halperin (1995), p. 18. 38. R. Hall (1982), p. 443; Bauer (2003), pp. 29– 30; Vicinus (2001); and Love (2007), pp. 100–128.

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

people.”39 Such examples notwithstanding, the key rationale for leaving the exploration of female same-sex desire to another occasion is that this current study focuses closely on the (in this period) necessarily male role of the priest, and his relation both to Jesus and to his own self and desires. There have been a number of important works on the history of male same-sex desire in modern Britain.40 Recent histories of nineteenthcentury sexual deviance have not tended to focus on Christianity despite its importance in that period such that, as one writer put it, “the Victorians lived with, in, for, and against religion.”41 Nor, in general, have such studies worked to establish connections with the developing realm of the academic study of ecclesiastical images and visual and material culture.42 This current project reads backward and forward between physical images and objects and their mediation via text and through the operation of the visual imagination. By focusing on such issues the current study is intended to complement others which have explored such connections in religious literature, such as Frederick Roden’s Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (2002); for, as Roden admits himself, “the literary critic cannot write history like the historian.”43 My evidential focus is particularly salient to this topic be-

39. Madden (2000), p. 132. Or to give another example, albeit from a male perspective, Strachey’s interests in such imagery are not simply apparent in his treatment of Newman, but can, for instance, be understood as having informed his powerful retelling of the story of Elizabeth the Virgin Queen as a woman whose gender abnormality is seen as both the source of her personal tragedy and her greatness; Strachey (1928), p. 29, discussed by Fassler (1979), p. 238; and Dobson and Watson (2002), p. 222. Note also Strachey’s growing enthusiasm for psychoanalysis: Holroyd (1994), p. 610. For the further queering of Elizabeth by Benjamin Britten in his employment of Strachey’s text as the basis for the opera “Gloriana” (1953), see Brett (2006), p. 211; with Alexander (1986), Banks (1993), and Wiebe (2005). 40. Key recent studies in British queer history include Upchurch (2009), for the period before 1885; Cook (2003), for the period 1885–1914; and Houlbrook (2005), for 1918– 57. Robb (2004) provides an overview with European perspectives. L. Moran (1996) and Cocks (2003) provide important discussion of legal issues and processes; on which see also P. Bartlett (1998), Cocks (2006a), and Gleeson (2007). 41. Vicinus (2001), p. 241. 42. Useful introductions to visual culture studies include Elkins (2005) and Mirzoeff (2009) and, to material culture studies, Tilley (2006) and Hicks and Beaudry (2010). On religious visual and material culture see McDannell (1995), and Morgan (1998) and (2005), as well as the very valuable work foregrounded in the pages of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (established in 2005). 43. Roden (2002), p. 264. Other key discussions of homosexuality and nineteenth- century religion in general and Catholicism in particular are Hilliard (1982); Gibson (1991); Healy (2000); O’Malley (2006) and (2009); and Jones (2011) and (2013), pp. 162– 82. Of these, only O’Malley (2006) is an extended study, rather than an article or a book chapter, but again, this is by a literary scholar. See also Dellamora (1990), p. 167; and Saler (1999), p. 11.

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cause the constraints of the closet limited what could be put down, unambiguously, in words but offered enhanced scope to coded forms of visual expression. Moreover, of all the forms of Christianity practiced in Britain, Catholicism offered some of the richest resources for visual expression including, in particular, many focused on the aesthetic expression of devotion to Jesus and His body. My present book is, therefore, intended to advance this developing field of study by engaging with the challenge of furthering our understanding of the cultural history of religion and male same-sex desire in modern Britain. I aim to achieve this by expanding the archive through discussion of unfamiliar texts, but above all through engagement with the evidences of the visual and material culture of religious display. This approach finds inspiration from a scholarly environment which has seen a rising interest in the ways in which material and visual assemblages can produce queer identities.44 A key concern will not simply be the reading of archival materials, but the exploration of the way in which the archive itself has been shaped and developed as an integral element in the past construction of queer identities. A particular focus for this work of recovery will be in relation to the development of both the subject position of individuals and the construction of alternative/queer families.45 It has been notable that controversy has repeatedly flared when such studies have presented powerfully (homo)sexualized readings of figures hitherto seen as “purely” religious or when they have done the reverse by presenting a theological reading of a writer not normally addressed in such a manner. To take one recent example, Julia Saville’s A Queer Chivalry: The Homoerotic Asceticism of Gerard Manley Hopkins (2000) has run foul of imperatives both inside and outside the academy to build a conceptual firewall between the studies of Christianity and of samesex desire. Thus, one reviewer found that Saville’s quest “for homosexual eroticism just about everywhere throws Hopkins’s poetry seriously out of balance: his sexuality was simply not at the center of his life

44. For example, W. Davis (2001) and C. Reed (2011) on visual culture, and K. Matthews (2002) on material culture. 45. On the rise in interest in the notion of the queer archive in literary and cultural theory, see Ann Cvetkovich (2003) and Halberstam (2005). Such issues in the context of the contemporary arts were the focus of the exhibition, Lost and Found: Queerying the Archive, held at Nikolaj, the Copenhagen Contemporary Art Centre, in 2009 (Danbolt, Rowley, and Wolthers, 2010). On the archive and queer families, see Cook (2006), (2008a), and (2010); and on the current debate on queer families, stimulated by calls for same-sex marriage, see the papers in Bernstein and Reimann (2001), together with Blevins (2005) on connections with theology (2005).

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nor of his poetry. . . . Nor, to my mind, did his sexuality result in a covert drive to self-punishment. In being true to Lacan, Saville is false to Hopkins.”46 Or as another reviewer asked, “have the values of Sade and Swinburne become so dominant in our culture that this could become a popular reading of his [Hopkins’s] poems?”47 Even those who have fully bought into the notion that Christianity and same-sex desire developed in synergy during the late nineteenth century seem strangely perturbed by that fact. As Ellis Hanson said in Decadence and Catholicism (1997) of J.-K. Huysmans: what he “accomplishes is not an opposition between decadent hedonism and Christian redemption, but rather two distinct spiritual moods locked by a decadent style in a strange embrace.”48 Were these moods really so distinct and was this embrace not so much strange as queer? The origins of modern sexual subjectivity in religious notions of sin and heresy have been emphasized, for instance by Mark Jordan, in his comment that “modern sexuality is churched before it is born.”49 When compared with the field of literary research relatively few ecclesiastical historians have, until very recently, been receptive to the project of exploring the role of homosexuals, let alone of cultural queerness, in the modern Church.50 Scholars of medieval history, have, by contrast, carried out a considerable quantity of work on the origins of the sin of sodomy and its relationship to concepts of heresy. They have also begun to construct visions of medieval queerness, notably in relation to devotions directed toward the suffering male body of Christ.51 It is now well understood that the “sodomite” was a product of the Middle Ages, associated with theological drives to purify and unify the Church in the context of the development of the Papacy as a center of authority.52 The term indicated “almost any sexual act or impulse which did not focus on sex exclusively in terms of procreative potential.”53 It was, thus, placed in contradistinction to the reproductive urge so that “to invent sodomy was to invent a pure essence of the erotic without connection to reproduction.”54 Such attacks raised the apparent moral significance

46. Feeney (2003), p. 390. Compare the views of M. Moran (2001a) and (2009). 47. Bump (2002), p. 253. 48. Hanson (1997a), p. 43. See also Aercke (1988). 49. Jordan (2001), p. 181. 50. I use the term “the Church” broadly with reference to participation in any of the myriad Christian denominations. 51. Kruger (2009), and Mills (2001) and (2005). 52. Jordan (1997), p. 1. 53. Burgwinkle (2006), p. 79. 54. Jordan (1997), p. 176.

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of unauthorized sexual acts. This development built upon the status, since later Antiquity, of celibacy as a Christian ideal.55 Because celibacy was held by Catholics to be the highest form of human existence, sex was afforded enormous power and significance and, thus, the potential for extraordinary danger. It could, of course, be argued that it was the very insistence on clerical celibacy, which was another aspect of these campaigns of medieval reform, that displaced clerical life into a space of constant sexual danger and led to the identification of sodomitical acts that moral discourse aimed to avoid. Jordan has gone even further than this by claiming that sodomy is a constitutive element of regimes of ecclesiastical discipline in Roman Catholicism today as it was in the medieval past. As he puts it, “sodomy was and homosexuality is important in Catholic moral theology because it has been intimately connected to the exercise of power in the construction of priestly lives. It was one of the sites where moral regulation could be exercised purely, with a minimum of resistance. In this inner realm of churchly power, regulation could be exercised for regulation’s sake.”56 Medieval viewpoints were, to various degrees, disrupted or reformulated at the Reformation and this helps us to explain why there has been limited study, at least in relation to England, of ecclesiastical standpoints on sexual deviance, as opposed to those espoused by the state, from the sixteenth century onward. One way to understand this is in relation to the redistribution of authority (and thus of historical sources) as a result of the secularization of the repression of same-sex acts which took place at this time. Before 1533 sodomy was a matter for the ecclesiastical courts. However, in the same year that saw the issuance of the first Act of Supremacy, Henry VIII passed into law England’s first secular statute against “buggery” as a temporary enactment in royal statute in 1533–34 prior to its enactment in perpetuity in 1562.57 Although this was rarely enforced, anti-sodomy campaigns were thenceforth in the early modern period typically run by secular associations such as the Society for the Reformation of Manners. However, it should be born in mind that a “strong association between Christian zeal and anti-homosexual sentiment  .  .  . remained part of mainstream [Protestant] English religiosity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” since sodomy remained associated with the

55. Brown (1988). 56. Jordan (2000), p. 82. 57. Moran (2001b), pp. 81– 82.

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old regime of Roman Catholicism and its supposedly ineffective advocacy of priestly celibacy.58 Religious affiliation had, since the Reformation, been a matter not simply of personal choice, but of great political and social significance. As Linda Colley commented in her hugely influential study of the cultural construction of being a Briton, “Protestantism was not just a species of religious belief, anymore than Roman Catholicism was. [For eighteenth- century Britons] Protestantism was a vital part of who they were now, and the frame through which they looked at the past.”59 Protestant surveillance was alert not just for Catholic texts, but also for Catholic display since style played a considerable role in the production of social respectability. In the words of Roy Porter, “In a Protestant nation in an age of critical reason . . . theatricality was widely censured— above all by those of a puritan, reformist, or utilitarian temper— as mindless artifice, magic and mumbo-jumbo, an idolatrous infatuation with tawdry tinsel and specious show.”60 However, aesthetic and religious norms were coming under pressure in nineteenth- century Britain. Not only was the country slowly becoming more tolerant and pluralistic, but the boundaries between Protestant and Catholic traditions were becoming increasingly blurred with the rise of Anglo- Catholicism in the aftermath of the Tractarian Movement of the 1830s. That phenomenon was the subject of my previous book Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840–1860 (2009).61 This was a study of the anxieties surrounding “idolatry” which was, in a narrow sense, the worship of idols, but in a broad sense could mean worship of or devotion to anything that intervened between the believer and God. In early Victorian England there was intense interest in understanding the early Church as an inspiration for contemporary sanctity. A number of Anglicans began to use a much more complex form of ritual involving vestments, candles, and incense. They were opposed by evangelicals and dissenters on the grounds that this represented  the vanguard of Roman Catholicism. The disputed buildings, objects, and artworks were regarded by one side as impure additions to holy worship, and by the other as sacred and beautiful expressions of devotion. In that study I worked through the main disputed practices of Anglo- and Roman Catholics

58. Duffy (2001), p. 340. 59. Colley (2005), p. 330. 60. Porter (2001), p. 273. 61. See also John Reed (1996) and Yates (1999).

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and developed a cultural analysis of the mechanisms of opposition. I argued that the reinterpretation by Protestants of Catholic religiosity as a site of excitement led to the production of texts (such as novels and newspapers) which were sold as commodities. In this way, the challenging bodily “primitiveness” of medieval forms of ritual and material culture was uneasily but excitingly accommodated in the world of Victorian textuality, capitalism, and Protestantism. By the later nineteenth century the spiritual heirs of the Oxford Movement had, therefore, developed forms of devotion with a ritualistic focus, in some cases bordering on obsession, on the highly selfconscious and exact performance of the appearance of liturgical Catholicism, a vision that was inspired as much by medieval texts as by contemporary Roman practice.62 This wing of the Church of England, in common with the Church of Rome, was to come, by the first half of the twentieth century, to be widely associated with deviance from cultural norms, including those of marriage, partly because many of those involved championed clerical celibacy.63 Patrick O’Malley, in Catholicism, Sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (2006), argues that the gothic imagination constructed a cultural space in which Catholicism and its morality were othered as exotic, secretive, and perilously effeminate.64 This was a strategy useful to opponents who could employ it to construct the monsters they desired to combat, and also to those with deviant interests, since they could use it as a basis from which to construct expressions of their (supposedly monstrous) desires.65 Ritualist Anglo- Catholicism was particularly propitious as a site for the development of queerness because of its self-conscious propagation of florid and novel forms of Catholicity within the body of a Protestant denomination.66 While it is clear that many English homosexuals flirted with both Roman and Anglican forms of Catholicism I argue that they did so in the context of distinctively British patterns of fantasy concerning the forms that such religiosity might entail. For instance, Frederick Rolfe’s failure to join the Roman priesthood, as I discuss in chapter 4, had much to do, I would argue, with his ignorance of the realities of 62. Janes (2009b). 63. Janes (2010a). 64. See also Gregg (2001), pp. 21–22. Further work on queerness and gothic includes Haggerty (2004a) and (2006b) and Hanson (2007). 65. Roden (2002). 66. The term “Anglican Catholicism” is preferred by some faith- based writers but I have, in the main, kept to the use of Anglo- Catholicism since this is currently in wider usage outside the Church. Those of a Catholic persuasion in the Church of England in the latter half of the nineteenth century were most commonly referred to at the time as “ritualists.”

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

obedience in that tradition. Fantasies of Mediterranean Catholicism as a site of exoticism can, in particular, be seen as a variant or subset of British Protestant Orientalism, in which the hotter zones of the world were, as proposed by the explorer and scholar Richard Burton, seen as breeding grounds of unusual pleasures and vices.67 All this notwithstanding, it is important to be clear that open sexual expression was not necessarily the aim of those with such views and interests. The goal for many must have been the creative containment of desires that they felt to be sinful. Mark Jordan has, as indicated above, engaged with the contemporary priesthood in a related manner, by arguing that some gays want to be priests “because they are promised an exchange of their anguished identity as outsiders for a respected and powerful identity as an insider. Because they want to remain in the beautiful, queer space of the liturgy. Because they are drawn to the public celebration of suffering that redeems.”68 A more positive spin is given on this by Rémy Bethmont, who has argued for the positive significance of (Anglo-)Catholic sacramental theology that focuses on the perfect body of Christ and its great potential for the justification of embodied queerness when compared with the disembodied heteronormativity fostered by evangelical ideas.69 John Shelton Reed, meanwhile, interprets the connections between nineteenthcentury ritualism and homosexuality as being ones of sublimation.70 It is also important to be aware that overt homosexuality was not initially identified by critics of Anglo- Catholicism and that the complaint was generally one of effeminacy. Nevertheless, a homosexual subculture gradually came to prominence as, for instance, has been explored by Martin Stringer in his article “Of Gin and Lace: Sexuality, Liturgy and Identity among Anglo- Catholics in the Mid-Twentieth Century” (2000).71 A new undergraduate at Oxford was, thus, warned by his cousin in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1946) to “beware of the

67. On homosexuality and the exotic, see Hyam (1990), Boone (1995), R. Clark (1999), D. Kennedy (2000), Aldrich (2003), and Colligan (2003); and, on British Protestant Orientalism, Janes (2014b). Apparently similar developments taking place elsewhere— for instance, in France and the United States—will, in a similar manner, require local contextualization: for example, from United States, the life and work of the painter Thomas Eakins, notably his Crucifixion of 1880 (see Milroy, 1989); and, from France, the monastic fascinations of J.-K. Huysmans, whom Flanagan (1990) has discussed as the “fi rst post-modernist saint.” 68. Jordan (2000), p. 262. 69. Bethmont (2006). 70. John Reed (1996), pp. 221–23. 71. Stringer (2000). See also Hilliard (1982), p. 199; and Gibson (1991).

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Anglo- Catholics—they’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.”72 There is occasional corroboration of overtly sexual life in this subculture in the form of daring autobiographies on the part of members of the laity, if not of the priesthood, such as that of the journalist and politician Tom Driberg (1905–76), who had a powerful sexual drive and also considerable interest in High Church practices. He wrote that “whether functioning as an acolyte in the sanctuary, or practising fellatio in some hotel bedroom or station W. C., I was doing what I most wanted to do at that moment, and doing it with complete sincerity. My only complaint is against the formal teaching, as distinct from the practice, of the Church, which made me think that it was ‘wrong’ to snatch a kiss from a fellow-acolyte behind the sacristy door and so robbed me of a good many chances of enjoyment.”73 This account makes it clear that the subject position of the Church homosexual was not based on unambiguously public self-justification and was, therefore, constrained by the structures of the closet. The current book, therefore, will explore both the opportunities for and the constraints on the display of such combinations of religious and sexual deviance. As Ellis Hanson says of certain of the fin- de-siècle Anglo- and Roman Catholic clergy, in the “priesthood they found a spiritualisation of desire, a rebellion against nature and the instincts, and a polymorphous redistribution of pleasure in the body. In the elaborate stagecraft of ritualism they celebrated the effeminate effusions and subversions of the dandy.”74 In other words, such priests could participate in certain aspects of camp performance, but the price they had to pay, entailing on occasion much suffering, was the renunciation of open sexual selfexpression. Queer martyrdom was, therefore, in origin a cultural form expressed through coded imagery that was aimed at an in-group of fellow travelers. This stance, which made sense in the hostile and homophobic environment of past centuries, seems less compelling in today’s more accepting society. The “closet” has had a bad press. The transfer of the term from a space in which to put clothes into a descriptor of clandestine homosexuality appears to have taken place during the mid-twentieth century in America. The term was employed with frequency by members of the gay liberation movement of the early 1970s and they used it

72. E. Waugh (1946), p. 26. 73. Driberg (1978), p. 48. 74. Hanson (1997a), pp. 7– 8. On dandies and styles of Victorian masculinity, J. Adams (1995), Glick (2001), and Tosh (2005).

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THE BITTER TEARS OF JOHN HENRY NEWMAN

with a negative connotation to indicate coming out as an instrumental act of the erasure of shame that could only come about through selfacknowledgment of sexual difference. A prominent example of this is Laud Humphreys’s Out of the Closets: The Sociology of Homosexual Liberation (1972), which quickly (on p. 5) establishes the Stonewall Riots of June 1969 as a foundational event of coming out onto the streets. The association of being “in” with oppression became a central tenet of belief among such groups and formed the basis of such studies of social progress as Steven Seidman’s Beyond the Closet: The Transformation of Gay and Lesbian Life (2002) in which it is argued that the closet is “about social oppression”; that those in the closet conceal “who they are from those who matter most”; and although some “manage somewhat satisfying work and intimate lives, even under strained circumstances,” the closet is a place of “systematic harm” enforced by “heterosexual domination” [original italics].75 There were, of course, what might be termed closet-like formations before the widespread employment of the term in the era of gay liberation. The origins of the closet as a social structure have been traced by Richard Rambuss to the Reformation which, according to him, was the first period in which sex and religion could be understood as complimentary realms of human experience.76 The closet to which his study refers was the prayer closet—that is to say, a private room in which to search one’s soul and to commune with the deity. In a chapter on the subject of “Christ’s Ganymede,” he explores devotional poetry of the early modern period that positioned the believer in the role of the boy swept up into the skies to satisfy the desires of Zeus. Furthermore, he argues that such “erotic devotion—religion speaking of and as sex— does not suddenly disappear sometime in the seventeenth or the eighteenth century. But it does appear to be increasingly rezoned . . . to the prayer closet . . . a space where the sacred may touch the transgressive, even the profane . . . a structure that still resides at the core of Christianity, though often now as a site of denial and scandal.”77 In Sodome et Gomorrhe (1921–22, published in English as Cities of the Plain and Sodom and Gomorrah), Marcel Proust wrote of the vice of Sodom “flaunting itself, insolent and immune, where its existence is never guessed; numbering its adherents everywhere, among the people, in the army, in the church, in prison, on the throne . . . speaking

75. Seidman (2002), pp. 30– 31. 76. Rambuss (1998), p. 101. 77. Ibid., p. 135.

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CHAPTER ONE

of the vice as of something alien to it.”78 Eve Sedgwick drew attention to this remarkable statement and argued that this assertion had the effect of highlighting the spectacle of the supposedly effeminate men as visibly exhibiting the signs of homosexuality.79 Thus she identified the early twentieth- century construction of what she termed “the spectacle of the closet as the truth of the homosexual” which is the focus of my study Picturing the Closet: Male Secrecy and Homosexual Visibility in Britain.80 We might analogously, therefore, expect to find images of same-sex desire originating from those who saw and imagined Newman as a sexual and gender deviant. Charles Barker, in a fascinating article, “Erotic Martyrdom: Kingsley’s Sexuality beyond Sex” (2002), has made a number of highly suggestive points in relation to this point. To start with, Kingsley and his wife appear to have fetishized Catholicism through the construction of bedroom rituals in which she would dress as a nun and he would punish her. Furthermore, in his fiction, Kingsley does not restrict his metaphor of “eye-wedlock”—that is, of sexualized penetrating glances—to circumstances in which a man looks at a woman. In Westward Ho! (1855) the male narrator has “eye wedlock” with Frank, a character modeled on Charles Mansfield, a fellow undergraduate at Cambridge who was Kingsley’s “first love.”81 If we place such evidence onto the two models of “homosexual” behavior proposed by Randolph Trumbach, Kingsley appears to follow the fi rst model of men who sexually desires women and boys (prevalent prior to 1700), while Newman as presented by Kingsley appears in the role of the despised, effeminate, passive male which, Trumbach argues, first appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century.82 The complex epistemologies of the closet could, therefore, encompass a range of subject positions, from that of married men who felt sexual desire for other men but who refused to admit that fact even to themselves, to those of others who lived essentially asexual lives but who were assumed to be queer simply because of their appearance or even because of their refusal to clarify their own sexual desires as definitively heterosexual.83

78. Proust quoted and discussed in Sedgwick (2008), p. 218. 79. Sedgwick (2008), p. 223. 80. Ibid., p. 231; and Janes (2015). 81. Barker (2002), pp. 479– 80. Compare Paxton (2013) who, however, focuses on marital relations. 82. Trumbach (2007). Compare Richlin (1992), pp. 220–26. 83. Note that De Villiers (2012), p. 3, refers to what he calls the opaque refusal to be clear on the question of sexual identity as being, in itself, a queer strategy.

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The ecclesiastical contexts which I study in this book were not generally congenial to the unambiguous expression of male same-sex eroticism. This helps to explain the importance of coded forms of visual self- expression. But they were, in many cases, hospitable to what might be termed the “open secret” of queerness. Tim Jones has referred to this situation as having produced, by the interwar years, what he terms the “stained glass closet.”84 Freed from the requirement to marry, Catholic clergy were free to pursue aspects of queer self- expression while at the same time they were required to repress others. The resultant state, which I present as a type of queer martyrdom, encompassed suffering, pleasure, and the spiritual possibility of redemption. This tradition also provided material for those outside the Churches who wanted to find new ways to establish homosexuality as the truth of ecclesiastical flamboyance. This aesthetic projection reached something of an apotheosis of camp disturbance in the work of the homosexual writer Ronald Firkbank (1886–1926). Here he describes his alter ego in his novella The Flower beneath the Foot taking a bath: Lying amid the dissolving bath crystals while his man-servant deftly bathed him, he fell into a sort of coma, sweet as a religious trance. Beneath the rhythmic sponge, perfumed with Kiki, he was St. Sebastian, and as the water became cloudier, and crystals evaporated amid the steam, he was Teresa . . . and he would have been, most likely, the Blessed Virgin herself but that the bath grew gradually cold.85

What appears to be, at first sight, nothing more than camp nonsense is in fact radically problematizing notions of the relationship of religiosity to the pleasures and pains of the self. For Firbank, the martyrs of early Christianity, in all their scented stylization, seemed to foreshadow a new queer religion: The forsaken splendour of the vast closed cloisters seemed almost to augur the waning of a cult. . . . It looked as though Mother Church, like Venus or Diana, was making way in due turn for the beliefs that should follow: “and we shall begin again with intolerance, martyrdom and converts,” the Cardinal ruminated, passing before an ancient fresco depicting the eleven thousand virgins, or as many as there was room for.86

84. Jones (2011). 85. The Flower beneath the Foot, in Firbank (1988), p. 536. 86. Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, in Firbank (1988), p. 679.

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If queer martyrdom was constrained by its closet nature within Churches that were generally (at least in public) homophobic institutions, it offered a number of key areas of potential as a site of queer selfexpression. Firstly, it repositioned the homosexual as a victim rather than as a dangerous transgressor (although it should be pointed out that the politics of victimhood may trap individuals and groups into their subordinate positions since they cannot transcend those without giving up the coveted status of being a victim).87 And, secondly, dwelling on aestheticized martyrdom could open up the possibility of constructing a perverse erotics of suffering. The terms “sadism” and “masochism” were first coined by Richard von Krafft-Ebing as part of the late nineteenth- century systematization of the medicalized self.88 His writings, themselves inspired by the writings of the Marquis de Sade, popularized the idea that sadism was a form of pathological overmasculinity, whereas masochism, as fictionalized by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, represented excessive expression of the “natural” female impulse to submission or its abnormal appearance in the male.89 This configuration of male abjection as a sexualized state of effeminization is distinctly at odds with what appears to be earlier understandings of male effeminacy as representing asexual enfeeblement. Thus it was only in the early twentieth century that the allegedly perverse combination of effeminacy and asceticism on the part of certain of the Tractarians and ritualists was given an explicitly sexual interpretation, even as the implicit accusations of Kingsley may be regarded as a prefiguration of this tendency. The sense that Catholic suffering was a complex species of pleasure thus played a key role in decadent literature.90 Such viewpoints would, for instance, detect sexual perversion on the occasion when Rev. Frederic W. Farrar, who beat many a small boy during his years as a schoolmaster, dilated at length on the pain of the crucifixion in his The Life of Christ, concluding that “all these physical complications caused an internal excitement and

87. Victimhood has been as an important site of the moral contestation of power relations, on which see Amato (1990) and Fassin and Rechtmann (2009), together with Schneider (1993), p. 387; Otis and Skinner (1996); McLeer (1998); Mardorossian (2002), p. 770; and Buruma (1999), unpaginated. 88. Noyes (1997), p. 6. Sexual excitement arising from pain or unequal power relations is a highly controversial field of study with a very extensive literature including Deleuze (1971), Baumeister (1988), Macnair (1989), Gearhart (1995), Noyes (1997), Phillips (1998), Savran (1998), Stewart (1998), Tobin (2000), Berger (2003), K. Robinson (2003), Cross and Matheson (2006), and A. Moore (2009). I discuss the issues further in relation to religion in Janes (2009a). 89. Bullough (1994), p. 42. 90. See discussion of Oscar Wilde in chap. 5 of the present book.

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anxiety which made the prospect of death itself— of death, the awful unknown enemy, at whose approach man usually shudders most— bear the aspect of a delicious and exquisite release.”91 Several pages earlier, the flagellation, “on which we dare not dwell,” writes Farrar, having dwelt on it for most of a page, is typeset with a large flail penetrating the typography (see fig. 1.5). Whether or not one accepts Mark Jordan’s fascinating view of the interrelations between sado-masochism and modern Church hierarchies, it is certainly clear that the life of the homosexual priest required a level of discipline which would have been much easier to manage on the part of those who could find pleasure in such constraint.92 Moreover, as John Noyes has argued, “masochism is not the love of submissiveness. It is not the pursuit of unpleasure or humiliation. It is a complex set of practices for transforming submissiveness, pain, and unpleasure, into sexual pleasure. But over and above this, it is the appropriation of the technologies that our culture uses in order to perpetuate submissiveness.”93 I think it important to keep such ideas in mind, and I reference their reception by the sexual reformer Edward Carpenter in chapter 5. I have, however, not developed my analysis of queer martyrdom through the lens of medicalized sexology because that was not the basis for the religious tradition.If the resulting behaviors appear to be perverse that may say more about our own viewpoint toward them than it does about the degree of liberation from heteronormative pressures that they provided for their adepts.94 One of the key such pressures was the social imperative to marry and to establish one’s status in the community of other men through the maintenance of a conventional household. Thomas King, in his study of the “queer articulations” that he sees as having characterized “the gendering of men” between 1600 to 1750, argues that in this period an early modern social model, in which status in society depended upon one’s courtship of aristocrats, came to be implicated in sexual deviance. A rising idealization of the autonomous paterfamilias was combined with an increasing degree of separation between the spheres of men and women. From this new perspective a man who groveled before a richer and more powerful male in search of preferment became associated not only with effeminacy in the sense of personal enfeeblement

91. Farrar (1874), vol. 2, p. 404. 92. Jordan (2000). 93. Noyes (1997), p. 12. 94. Halberstam (2011), p. 145.

25

F I G U R E 1 . 5 Frederic W. Farrar, The Life of Christ, illustrated edition (London: Cassell, 1887),

p. 676, copyright British Library Board, all rights reserved, 4808.i.17.

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but also in terms of sexual subservience. Bluntly, to be overly ardent in playing the courtier to an aristocrat lay a man open to suspicion of sodomy.95 In the Roman and Anglican Churches a hierarchy of men abased themselves before Christ the King. The Anglo- Catholic revival of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries legitimated clerical celibacy but also, in the process, removed the alibi of marriage that had spared many priests from suspicion on the grounds of sexual deviance. Those men who felt varieties of same-sex desire could then submit themselves to the adulation of male power and magnificence in ways that hovered queerly between the performance of conventional morality and abject submission to male superiors.96 Queer martyrdom was also a technique for finding redemption from sexual shame in exemplary service and suffering, whether or not that process was eroticized or not; or regardless of whether that technique was employed by an individual or simply identified as having been used, consciously or unconsciously, by another. It was a subject position of great tension, strung out between the need for public witness and the fear of revelation. In his essay on “Camp and the Gay Sensibility” Jack Babuscio discussed the use of melodrama, posing, and stylization as a way of engaging an audience as a strategy employed by the director Rainer Werner Fassbinder, in his film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972, Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant).97 Stylized, ritualized performances enabled Fassbinder to encode queer trauma into a moving drama and much the same could be said of aspects of the liturgy.98 The example and body of Christ as the exemplary martyr could, thus, provide the model for imagining pure forms of homoerotic visual and material expression as I argue in chapter 2.99 The ecstatic visions that the ritualist priest William Bennett experienced during the Mass inspired artists of the later nineteenth century and drew men together into communities of the like-minded, such as those overseen by Joseph Leycester Lyne, as I discuss in chapter 3. Then, in chapter 4, I go in search of search of bricolages of ecclesiastical objects and imagery. Bricolage is a practice that consists of creat-

95. King (2008), pp. xix–xxii, provides an overview of this. 96. Compare the modern case study of this process; Janes (2009a). 97. Babuscio (1993), p. 30. 98. The mainstream audience, crucially, was receptive to martyrdom imagery in general; note the example of General Gordon as discussed by Behrman (1971), Johnson (1982), Seale (1995), and Wolffe (2000). Gordon’s death was, arguably, presented by Strachey (1918) as a queer event. 99. Note the call of Canning (1999), p. 499, for analyses which take the body and the state of embodiment seriously.

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ing new meanings through the novel juxtaposition of ideas, images, or objects. Peter Savastano has argued that gay men, in recent decades have been forced to use eclectic forms of devotional practice involving bricolage because none of the mainstream Churches have effectively catered to their needs.100 It has been argued that textual bricolage goes to the core of the very definition of “homosexuality” through both its formation in a fusion of Latin and Greek elements and in the ways in which Krafft-Ebing contextualized and popularized the term.101 Material and visual bricolage, as for instance in costume, has been extensively studied as a means of sub- and counter- cultural expression.102 I, therefore, present the contents of the scrapbook of Frederick Rolfe as being a resource from which it is possible to reconstruct his use of the imagery of contemporary popular visual culture (including satirical depictions of ritualist priests) to develop his projection of the self as queer. Rolfe’s style and performances become more knowingly staged over time and decreasingly like inadvertent acts of naive camp on the part of one who was not fully in command of the meanings and potential of his styles and actions.103 The closet, as Henry Urbach has pointed out, is a visual metaphor of containment, and as such, it is important to explore the notion that closeted homosexuality operated through ambiguous and coded visual and material acts of expression and concealment.104 While Oscar Wilde greatly relished the artistic possibilities offered by the play of concealment and revelation, the result of his trials in 1895 was public humiliation and suffering. Wilde considered and even employed some aspects of the trope of queer martyrdom in order to try to redeem his experience of abjection. However, as I discuss in chapter 5, Wilde and some of his fellow travelers stepped away from this mode of the construction of the queer self and self-image because of the limitations it placed on open sexual expression. Yet I go on to argue, in chapter 6, that by the interwar years the queer ecclesiastical style of self-sacrifice and service

100. Savastano (2007). 101. Oosterhuis (2000), p. 75. 102. Hebdige (1979), pp. 100–105; and for the use of bricolage in same-sex marriage ceremonies, Stocker (2012). 103. Haggerty (2006b), p. 169. A key piece on queer performativity is Sedgwick (1993) which is directly indebted to Judith Butler’s (1990) classic exposition of the performance of gender and thus of the production of norms as artificial cultural phenomena. Stone (2008) is an example of the application of the notion of queer performativity to Biblical theology. On camp see Bergman (1993), Bredbeck (1994), Meyer (1994), Cleto (1999), Varnell (2000), and Sontag (2004). On the origins of the verb “to camp” in early modern France, see M. Booth (1999) and Zoberman (2008). 104. Urbach (1996).

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to the community had begun to win a degree of acceptance as a practice which could be held to produce discreet “good homosexuals.” In chapter 6 I explain that the image of the love of David and Jonathan was identified at this time as a way of presenting a route for children to grow up both as queer and Christian and even to form private samesex relationships. These forms of the ecclesiastical closet were dismissed at the time of gay liberation as representing structures of oppression. The recent history of male same-sex desire has, as a result, often been written as a narrative of cultural emergence from repression to liberation. In this providential story the success of the gay self is to be measured by the degree of the absence of shame.105 The terrible experience of the gay community in the course of the AIDS epidemic problematized this story of heroic progress through its toxic elaboration of novel forms of suffering and shame. However, the AIDS crisis also presented many gay men with the challenge of rediscovering the ability to cope with extremes of adversity. In my final chapter I present aspects of the life and work of Derek Jarman as testimony to some of the ways in which the older model of queer martyrdom recovered relevance and importance in the 1980s. The forms of religious style that I am exploring in this study offered ways in which to project the sexually deviant as masters of virtuous endurance or conversely, to burlesque that projection as evidence of deviant sexual desire. The resulting subject position, which I term queer martyrdom, appears in a wide variety of contexts. However, it provided a highly ambivalent space for the construction of the self in that it relied on the coded display of sexual tastes and failed to provide an unambiguous public justification for sexual expression. Nevertheless, a considerable proportion of the experience of queer men in history has been of the closet and its boundaries. Therefore, the joys and sorrows of the ecclesiastical closet are not only important as an aspect of history, but reflect formative elements of the subject position of sexual nonconformists in modern society as a whole. 105. Munt (2008) and Bartlett (2009).

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William Bennett and the Art of Ritualism The motivations of those who contemplated becoming priests, or who wanted to take an active role in the running of their church through other forms of parish service, are likely to have been varied and complex. Among those who felt same-sex desire the impetus may have included the wish to be in an environment where they might meet others similar to themselves. But it is also imperative to emphasize the importance of the awareness of sin and shame. Understandings of sexual deviance were inextricably intertwined with notions of evil and moral failure in the mid-nineteenth century. If men who were attracted to other men increasingly found a congenial home in Angloor Roman Catholic churches it is surely because there was something significant to them about the forms of theology practiced there and the styles and models of display associated with Catholicism. No such entrenched process of queer cultural formation seems to have developed in the context of early Victorian evangelicalism, nor in religions in Britain other than Christianity. A crucial factor was that the set of ideas that Boyd Hilton has identified as being so pervasive as to render the period from 1795 to 1865 as the “age of atonement” was being challenged from the 1830s by the sacramental theology championed by the Tractarians.1 This, to put it very broadly, shifted the focus away from an awareness of Christ’s self-sacrifice for 1. Hilton (1988).

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us in putting on human flesh, and toward an adoration of the perfection that He thereby presented. And this presented an optimistic, and, on occasion, an ecstatic vision of the possibility of combined bodily and spiritual perfection. It is, therefore, no accident that the age of the Roman Catholic revival in England, and of the emergence of Anglo- Catholicism, was one that saw a rising concern for religious material and visual culture. Anglican ritualism developed in the context not only of the Tractarian championing of medieval and Laudian liturgical practices and theological understandings, but also of the Gothic Revival in ecclesiastical architecture and design. The Ecclesiological Society provided a focus for debate on such issues and although its membership did not include the inspirational architect A. W. N. Pugin, it shared with him an interest, verging on obsession, with correctness of form. Early Victorian England was a society undergoing massive, and in many places, chaotic, urban development. This brought in its wake social dislocation, crime, and disease. The destabilizing effects of such change also ushered in fears of sin, sedition, and revolution. Religious revival conducted, of course, on appropriate principles, was widely held to act as a corrective to both social destabilization and moral confusion. Great care was taken over liturgical and architectural forms because Protestant opponents incessantly accused Catholicity of being the seat of—rather than the solution to— disorder. “‘Hilda, have you flung your angelic purity into that mass of unspeakable corruption, the Roman Church?’”: this cry from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Marble Faun (1860) is echoed, with varying degrees of histrionic exaggeration, through the corpus of early and mid-Victorian literature.2 Here I explore a case study of the way in which a ritualist priest, William Bennett (1804– 86), sought to bring not just material harmony but an ecstatic experience of transcendent bodily purity to the life of a provincial town. This is not a study of Bennett’s Eucharistic theology as such, but rather an exploration of the significance of his stress on the visual aspects of the liturgy. This argument, I posit, can be used to explain the great interest on the part of artists and writers such as Simeon Solomon and Oscar Wilde in the material forms of Catholic worship as a site of homoerotic potential. Sacramental theology with a focus on the Eucharist led to the development of highly aestheticized forms of liturgy which idealized the body of Christ, and by extension, those of His ministers. By the 1860s and 1870s a number of painters, 2. Hawthorne (2002), p. 284.

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notably Solomon, were producing works expressive of same-sex desire which were inspired by such devotional settings. Meanwhile, writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins had begun to produce works which also mingled homoeroticism and Eucharistic devotion. Therefore, a pattern of stylistic connections was emerging in the second half of the nineteenth century between the various forms of Catholicism and displays of same-sex desire. The devout sodomite would have learned from an early age to fear divine wrath because of the fate of the ancient city of Sodom, the sins of whose inhabitants were read in the nineteenth century as being those of perverse sex. John Martin (1789–1854) was the greatest exponent of such apocalyptic scenes in the art of his day. Fear of the fall of divine judgment on the sinful people of Britain waned sharply during the nineteenth century, yet his final series of works on the Last Judgment, including The Great Day of His Wrath (1851– 53), were a popular sensation. The ultimate fiery horror that shall be visited on the worldly had its painted prefiguration in his Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852) (see fig. 2.1).3 In this painting the sky is formed into a roof of flame that encloses the doomed cities in a fearful cave of fire that is almost like a lurid body cavity into which we, like Lot’s wife, stare in fascination at our peril. 4 Whether or not contemporary viewers of the painting of 1852 felt the terror of staring into a fiery anus, the image of the destruction of the city of Sodom was intended to incite the viewer to reflect on his or her own sinfulness. It might, of course, leave them with the pleasurable self-satisfaction that at least they, and their town, were not in the grip of vices as severe as those that had provoked the Lord to such extreme measures. On the other hand, for those who were more familiar with resisting the sin of Sodom, as it was then understood, such an image must have reminded them not only of the terrible dangers facing them at the Last Judgment, but of the very real and immediate possibilities of disgrace, imprisonment, and even execution (until the repeal of the death penalty for sodomy in 1861) that might face them in this life.

3. Myrone (2011), pp. 116–213. Note that such compositions were starting to be thought oldfashioned at this date; Morden (2010), p. 49. 4. Myrone (2011), fig. 8, p. 68; and fig. 34, p. 80. The peculiar theatricality of these works has been related to the notion that Martin was directly influenced by the design of stage sets. For instance, it has been suggested that his evocation of rocky depth through the “layering of planes” rather than through perspective in Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion (1812) can be related to Philip Jacques de Loutherbourg’s cave-set design for The Wonders of Derbyshire (1778). This may also be worth bearing in mind in relation to the painting of 1852.

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F I G U R E 2 .1 John Martin, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (1852), oil on canvas, 136.3 × 212.3 cm, Laing Art Gallery, © Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums.

The judgment of God upon Sodom was generally understood to have proved the connection between physical transgression and divine wrath. Homosexual sodomy was understood to be an extreme state of moral and physical boundary transgression because it not only violated the expectations of gender, but also because it literally involved bodily insertion into a key locus of physical dirt, the anus. So intense was the public hatred and detestation of sodomy that many of the men who desired sex with other men were likely to have had to struggle against considerable feelings of self-loathing and to seek to counteract such temptations by regimes of mental and physical sanitation. Sacramental theology provided a pathway toward projects of material and spiritual reformation in which even the fallen body of the sodomite might find (in spiritual terms) salvation and (in sociological terms) semiotic cleansing.5 5. Cultural and social anthropology provides a useful alternative approach to studies of purity as a social as opposed to a moral formation; see M. Douglas (1984) and Valeri (1999). W. Miller (1997) applies such ideas in a Western context. Douglas and Isherwood (1996) provide a link between anthropological and sociological approaches to the social meaning of material goods.

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Futhermore, those who feared for their own moral cleanliness could find useful distraction by reinventing themselves as the bringers of spiritual aid to others. Many of the leading Roman and Anglo- Catholic parishes were in newly developed urban slums. These places were often physically filthy, and were typically seen as being morally so as well. Service in the Church could provide a means to the salvation of the soul, but it could also, in the context of work such as the reclamation of street walkers, act to deflect attention from any such ambiguities in relation to the person of the priest himself.6 One such pattern of activity was established in the then slum district west of Victoria Station in central London by William Bennett and continued by his successor, Robert Liddell.7 Penitent prostitutes were offered places in a house containing a small chapel, the stained glass of which showed three scenes in the life of Mary Magdalene.8 Liddell pointed out that just as Christ offered his healing touch to the leper, so there was no instance of “physical or spiritual evil, [that] was so bad, as to be beyond the reach [original emphasis] of His compassion.”9 Prostitutes were “cast out from the sanctity of home . . . condemned by their miserable calling to cry out like the leper of old,—‘Unclean, Unclean!’”10 He continued by saying that “mere separation from evil haunts and practices would not reclaim them—mere seclusion would depress them; and prison-like severity would actually harden them.”11 They must be purified by the physical presence of holiness.12 Ritualist regimes of reclamation, therefore, offered hope to all those who thought of themselves as being in a state of moral and bodily uncleanness. Not only was this a form of religion which was keen to reach out to the unclean in body and mind, but it offered the eventual hope of redemption. In fact, the redemption of the self could come precisely through aiding the redemption of others. The story of Victorian religion and sexuality, therefore, needs to be considered in relation to linkages between dirt, sin and shame.13

6. There is a vast literature on Victorian prostitution. Useful contextualization for the above example is provided by Tait (1842), Wardlaw (1843), J. Miller (1859), List (1861), Walkowitz (1980), and Amanda Anderson (1993). 7. Liddell (1853), pp. 20–23; and (1858), pp. 26–29, discussed in Janes (2007). 8. Liddell (1854a), p. 3. 9. Liddell (1854b), p. 6. 10. Ibid., p. 7. 11. Ibid., p. 11. 12. Ibid., p. 11. 13. P. Gilbert (2007).

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However, it should not be thought that spiritual life offered an easy escape from that shame. As Neil Bartlett has commented, in relation to the Anglican Eucharist in his twentieth- century experience, one is meant to confess one’s sinful unworthiness to God before receiving the Host.14 Such performances can be accused of participating in internalized homophobia. After all, gays have often sought to be proud, but pride to Christians is a sin.15 And yet the humiliation of such acts of confession pales into insignificance in comparison with the horror visited upon those publicly convicted of sodomy who, in the eighteenth century, were often fatally confined to the public pillory, where, pelted with “dung, guts and blood,” their dying bodies were literally transformed into refuse.16 Even as the civil penalties became less severe in the course of the nineteenth century, the numbers of those convicted for acts of gross indecency, and exposed to public shame in court, rose considerably.17 By contrast, religious devotions came to offer a place of comparative safety in which same-sex desire could be purified through arduous self- discipline. If the judgment of British society remained harsh and unbending, the unmarried Christ might yet look down, understand, and forgive.

“See Him, Yea, Even Touch Him.”18 In 1876 Oscar Wilde was staying at the rectory in Bingham in Nottinghamshire. He wrote to his friend William Ward on 17 July, “I never saw such lilies—white and red and golden. Nearly all the family are good artists. . . . [Rev. Robert] Miles père is a very advanced Anglican and a great friend of Newman, Pusey, Manning, Gladstone and all English theologians. He is very clever and charming: I have learned a lot from him.”19 Wilde’s interests in matters theological and aesthetic dated back to his school days. Frank Harris printed extracts from a letter from Edward Sullivan who recalled that when he was attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen, Ireland,

14. N. Bartlett (2009), p. 347. See also Munt (2008). 15. Allen and Oleson (1999). 16. P. Bartlett (1997) and Haggerty (2006a). 17. Harvey (1978). 18. W. Bennett (1851), pp. 89–90. The below material fi rst appeared in earlier form in Janes (2012b). 19. Wilde (1962), p. 17, letter to William Ward.

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Oscar [Wilde] would frequently vary the entertainment by giving us extremely quaint illustrations of holy people in stained- glass attitudes: his power of twisting limbs into weird contortions being very great. . . . It must not be thought, however, that there was any suggestion of irreverence in the exhibition. At one of these gatherings, about the year 1870 [when Wilde was 16], I remember a discussion taking place about an ecclesiastical prosecution that made a considerable stir at the time. Oscar was present, and full of the mysterious nature of the Court of Arches [the Anglican ecclesiastical court of Canterbury]; he told us there was nothing he would like better in after life than to be the hero of such a cause celèbre and to go down to posterity as the defendant in such a case as “Regina versus Wilde”!20

This account might sound like a quaint illustration itself of life in a Victorian public school, but the young Wilde and his friends were, in fact, discussing matters of considerable contemporary concern. Two figures are shown represented in stained glass in the print “‘Pig-Headed’ Ritualism” (1869) (see fig. 2.2).21 They are given a satirical treatment in which they are, if not contorted, at least posed in a manner recalling the “akimbo posture” with arm on hip and hand forward, which was a traditional representational pose of the aristocracy and one that was increasingly associated with falsity, camp, and queerness.22 Similarly mocking representations of saints and other “medieval figures” appeared frequently in cartoons in Punch and were examples of a sustained tradition of critique of the forms of bodily representation advanced by the Pre-Raphaelites and by others interested in medieval art.23 In Robert Hichens’s satire on Wilde and his circle, The Green Carnation (1894), a certain Mrs. Windsor asks Reggie—who represents Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas)—whether one needs to “assume any special posture of body” in order to become a Anglican High Church ritualist.24 Ritualism, as a development of the Oxford (or Tractarian) Movement within the Church of England, advocated the adoption of (supposedly) medieval forms of worship and, by so doing, aimed to reverse many of the liturgical changes made as a result of the Reformation. Adherents of this movement were often referred to informally as “advanced”

20. Edward Sullivan, quoted in F. Harris (1916), vol. 1, p. 25. Harris is not always a reliable source but he is more likely than in certain other places to be trustworthy here since he is quoting a letter. 21. Anon., The Echoes (1869), n. p., plate E. 22. King (1994), reworked in (2008), pp. 41–138. 23. Casteras (1992). 24. Hichens (1894), p. 63.

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F I G U R E 2 . 2 “‘Pig- Headed’ Ritualism,” anon., The Echoes (1869), plate E, © British Library

Board, all rights reserved, 1754.a.48.

Anglicans, or, subsequently, as Anglo- Catholics. The print is an attack on the novel practice of harvest festivals and was inspired by a rumor that at Haydock, Lancashire, in September 1868, a pig’s head had been placed on the altar. This scandalous allegation was apparently so titillating that it was even reported in the New York Times.25 The implication was that the ritualists had transformed Holy Communion from a reverent, somber act of symbolism into a debauched, carnal feast. Opposition to ritualism derived from Protestant anti- Catholic viewpoints that often focused on critique of visual and material expressions of devotion as being idolatrous.26 Scandals and prosecutions concerning ritual innovations were widely reported by the local and national press and appear to have been followed avidly by a number of men who were to emerge as prominent contributors to the gradual emergence of visual and material expressions of homosexuality at the end of

25. Anon., “Extraordinary” (1868), anon., “Foreign News” (1868), and anon., “The UltraRitualists” (1869), p. 159. See the discussion in Janes (2011a). 26. Janes (2009b).

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the nineteenth century. Oscar Wilde seems to have been one such person, as does Frederick Rolfe, famed as the author of the novel Hadrian the Seventh (1904), who carefully pasted hundreds of newspaper cuttings on these topics into a scrapbook when he was a young man, as I discuss in chapter 4. The display of faith through the use of often flamboyant ritual by men who flaunted their unmarried status meant that Catholicism, particularly as a perceived transgression within the Protestant Church of England, became widely associated with deviant gender performance. However, in order to engage with the fact of sincere Christian belief it is important not simply to see such performances as signs of the scandalous secret of same-sex desire, but to appreciate the queer potential of the theological stance of those involved. The ritualist vision of a highly aestheticized and intimate bodily encounter with God in human form can be seen as providing a powerful stimulus to the development of idealized homoerotic visions of the kind that interested Wilde. With that in mind, I present a case study of the links between the liturgical, visual, and material practices of William Bennett, in his parish of Frome, in southwest England. This enables me to explore some of the ways in which religious performances could provide the imaginative spur to artists and others who wished to develop new means of furthering the visual expression of aspects of same-sex desire. Catholicity within the Church of England was regulated by canon law that originated from the time of the split with Rome in the sixteenth century. This meant that the ritualistic revival of medieval forms of worship could be challenged by parishioners in the ecclesiastical courts. The most prominent such case around 1870, and thus the most likely source of Wilde’s admiration and attention, was the prosecution of Bennett for heretical statements concerning the Eucharist.27 This case, Sheppard v. Bennett (1869–72), was swiftly referred to by lawyers as one of the three greatest cases that had come before the Canterbury Court of Arches and then before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in its capacity as final court of appeal in canon law cases.28 The key structuring difference between Protestant and Catholic understandings of the Eucharist was that the former placed emphasis on the symbolic aspects of the ritual, whereas the latter focused on their understanding of it as a sacrament. In practice, members of the 27. Davie (2004) is a concise biographical essay on Bennett. 28. W. Brooke (1872), p. 271.

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Anglican Church during the nineteenth century can be found believing in a range of shades of opinion between these two viewpoints.29 The latter position was, however, peculiarly conducive to opportunities for, or suspicions of, queerness, since it involved the notion of intimate physical contact between the believer (and that, of course, would often mean the male believer) and the perfect body of Christ. Bennett, furthermore, emphasized the visibility of Christ in the Mass. This idea implies the aesthetic apprehension of the body of the perfect man in the course of the service through the actions of the visual imagination—a body that would, after all, enter the lips of the kneeling devotee. A stress on the visual adoration of the host had appeared in the twelfth century. Miri Rubin has written of this cult of Corpus Christi that “at the elevation [when bread became flesh, and wine blood] all senses were called into play. Bells pealed, incense was burnt, hands were clasped, supplications were mouthed.”30 But when the faithful in the nineteenth century were incited to exercise their visual imaginations in this way they did so at a time when the connections between same-sex desire and the aestheticized male body were in a state of rapid development. It will be shown that the visualization of contact with the body of Christ was a concern for certain artists at this time. Appreciation of these phenomena requires taking the spiritual yearnings of men such as Wilde seriously, but also demands a reciprocal process of admitting the potential for the presence of sexual desire within Victorian religious practice. Frome is a small town in northeast Somerset, 13 miles (21 km) south of Bath and 107 miles (172 km) west of London. The population today, at 24,000, is approximately twice what it was in the nineteenth century. At first sight it would appear to have presented a considerable contrast to the parishes in which Bennett had previously worked. Having been educated at Westminster School and Christ Church, Oxford, he was ordained as a deacon in 1828 and as a priest in 1830. He served as a curate at a series of parishes in west London: St. Peter, Vere Street (1828–30); Holy Trinity, Marylebone (1830–33); and All Souls, Langham Place (1833–36). He was then the minister of the Portman Chapel (1836– 40) before being appointed to St. Paul’s, Knightsbridge. This, and a second new church, St. Barnabas’s, Pimlico, for which Bennett was also responsible, were leading foci of ritualist practice in London and

29. For overviews of evangelical and Tractarian/Anglo- Catholic Eucharistic theology see, respectively, Cocksworth (1993) and Härderlin (1965). 30. Rubin (1991), p. 58.

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were at the center of intense protests at the time of the restoration of the Roman Catholic episcopal hierarchy in 1850. Bennett was among those Anglican priests who were widely suspected of Romanizing tendencies, and, in the midst of popular agitation, egged on by the press, he handed in his resignation. His successor was the aforementioned Robert Liddell. In November 1851 the vicarage of Frome in Somerset fell vacant and the living was offered to Bennett by the dowager Marchioness of Bath, acting on behalf of her son who was a minor. She knew Bennett from his time at the Portman Chapel, where she had been a prominent member of the congregation. His arrival was certainly not peaceful, nor was it locally, or indeed nationally, unopposed.31 Frome had a substantial nonconformist community and its parish church was filled with traditional box pews for local families which were arranged about the pulpit. This was the typical arrangement for the Anglican Protestant style of worship that centered on the reading of the sermon rather than on Holy Communion. These pews even occupied part of the chancel which, at least, had been recently renovated unlike the remainder of the church which was badly in need of restoration. Bennett’s vision was for the creation of an outstanding liturgical space centered on the performance of the Eucharist at the altar. By the time of the issuance of his Second Pastoral Letter to his parishioners in 1857, we find him busily raising funds for the restoration of the church and churchyard.32 The Eucharist was, therefore, to be raised to a position of central importance in the life of the congregation, representing an abrupt change from the previous practices in which, as he put it, “seeing that the celebration was only once a month, and seeing that sacramental worship with the idea of our Blessed Lord being present in His Holy Eucharist was not much thought of, it followed as a natural consequence that the altar was a secondary affair.”33 The preeminent interpreter of the Tractarian position on the Eucharist was Edward Bouverie Pusey (1800–1882), who adhered to a position of moderate realism, in which the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation was denied, but Christ was understood to be present in the bread and wine of the Mass in a spiritual if not a material form.34 Nevertheless, Pusey based his defense of the “Real Presence” on inten-

31. W. Bennett (1852) and Cruttwell (1852). 32. W. Bennett (1857b). Note that “Froome” is the spelling used customarily by Bennett. 33. W. Bennett (1866), p. 61. 34. B. Douglas (2006), p. 133; and B. Douglas and Lovat (2010), p. 849.

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sive study of the writings of the Fathers of the Church, many of whom evoked the mystery of the Mass as involving ecstatic interaction between Christ and the believer. Thus Pusey quoted Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus in Syria (ca. 393– ca. 457) as saying, “Let him consider how at the sacramental time when we receive the members of the Bridegroom, we kiss and embrace Him, and by our eyes place them in our hearts, and represent as it were a nuptial embrace, and think ourselves to be with Him, and to embrace Him, and to kiss Him.”35 Bennett was a friend of George Anthony Denison, archdeacon of Taunton and vicar of East Brent, near to Frome in Somerset, whose prosecution in 1856 for adherence to the doctrine of the Real Presence only failed due to a technicality.36 But Bennett was remarkable in pushing even beyond this concept toward a position of immoderate realism in which the mystery of the Sacrament was so profound that it enabled Christ to be apprehended sensually as well as spiritually. He based his ideas on those of Pusey, but gave to them a particular emphasis on materiality.37 For instance, he advanced the view that “the Body and Blood of our Blessed Lord, (His Humanity combined with His Divinity,) are to be worshipped.”38 In Bennett’s incarnational theology physical and visual forms are objects of worship precisely because they cannot be separated from the realm of the spiritual, at least in the case of the body of Christ. For him, the body encountered in the Mass is that of the Resurrected Christ.39 It is, thus, physically, as well as spiritually, immaculate. That body has the power to transfigure us, since our prayer is that “our sinful bodies may be made clean by His Body, and our souls washed through His most precious Blood . . . that our sinful bodies may be made clean by His Body. Here are two bodies [all original italics] put together. Observe, not the soul—the mind—the spirit—the intellect—the imagination— or any other spiritual part which may be about us,— but the body.”40 In so saying, I take Bennett to be implying that purification of the soul requires the liquid encounter with the blood of sacrifice; and the purification of the body, likewise, can only come through a physical encounter with Christ. Bennett’s church at Frome was, therefore, remodeled from being a room in which to listen to a sermon, to a place in which to have a 35. Pusey (1855), p. 678; discussed in Marylu Hill (2005), p. 467– 68. 36. W. Bennett (1857a); Denison (1878); and Janes (2009b), pp. 40– 42 and 125–28. 37. Kobialka (1999), p. 167. See also Astell (2006). 38. W. Bennett (1873), p. 7. 39. Ibid., p. 16. 40. Ibid., p. 14.

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bodily encounter with the Lord. It is hardly surprising that the work of the architect Charles Allen, in the opinion of the Victorian medieval scholar John Allen Giles, was not so much to restore the church as to remodel it.41 The church had originally been built between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries, replacing an Anglo-Saxon building.42 What emerged from the campaign of reconstruction, which ran through the 1850s to the early 1860s, was a building that powerfully expressed the notion of sacred space and did so, notably, in relation to the neighboring town houses and shops. The parish church was set at the top of a slope, at the site of a spring, the water of which was led down a medieval conduit along streets which ran down to the river. Bennett restored the watercourse and, as he saw it, also restored to it its original sacred purpose: If you enter by this way, i.e., at the west side of the church-yard, you will pass a fountain, which has long been the property of the church, now set forth by somewhat more architectural beauty than it used to be. It is for the use of the parishioners to draw water. The text which is written there is taken from the Benedicite, or song of the three children, verse 55, “O all ye Fountains, Bless ye the Lord.”43

The moral symbolism of water descending from beneath the church to purify the profane space of the town can be understood by relation, ultimately, to Bennett’s enthusiasm for the doctrine of baptismal regeneration.44 The chief legal case of the period on baptism was precipitated by the evangelical George Gorham. He had been presented to a living in the diocese of Exeter by the Crown, but was refused institution by the bishop of Exeter, Henry Phillpotts, for denying baptismal regeneration as a sacrament and for accepting it only as a symbol. 45 This “Low Church” contention implied that a baby did not understand what was happening during the rite of baptism and so could not be regarded as having been purified in his or her heart. However, the “High Church” position favored by the ritualists was that the sacrament had regenerative power in and of itself independent of conscious volition. The Privy Council, which had acted as the appellate court in ecclesiastical cases since 1832, refused to judge on such a question of faith, but said

41. Quoted in Giles (2000), pp. 532– 33. 42. British Listed Buildings (undated), listing NGR: ST7769747906. 43. W. Bennett (1866), p. 93. 44. W. Bennett (1867b), pp. 9–10. 45. Nockles (1994), pp. 228– 35.

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that there was room for divergence of opinion within the Church.46 To many churchmen at the time it was a matter of particular outrage that a secular court should be judging such matters at all. As Bennett wrote on relations between church and state in relation to this case, “It is an awful thing to see the men of Caesar—as of Caesar—plunge so recklessly, with such utter confusion, into the things of God.”47 So, therefore, for Bennett and those of his theological persuasion, just as the Eucharist provided a sublime material encounter with Christ’s flesh and blood, so baptism was not simply a symbolic act, but represented a vital encounter with spiritually transformative liquid. The medieval parish font had been found hidden in 1846 under rubbish in one of the galleries and placed in St. Andrew’s chapel in the parish church. Bennett had the font moved to the Chapel of St. Nicholas, which now became the baptistery. The firm of Clayton and Bell provided a pavement which showed the seven deadly sins in a ring away from the font and the seven virtues in a ring next to it, because “these are the gifts flowing from the font in the regenerative Grace of the Holy Spirit.”48 As purity flowed down from the church, so the parishioners were to mount penitently to it along what has contentiously been called “the glory of the churchyard” but which is certainly one of Bennett’s most remarkable installations at Frome: the Via Crucis.49 This is a grand processional way, consisting of a series of seven scenes of the Stations of the Cross. These were executed by James Forsyth (1826–1910) on subjects suggested by Bennett.50 Forsyth was a Scot, who moved to Hampstead, near London, and who developed a record of high-profile projects in the Church of England. He worked at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Canterbury Cathedral, and eight other English cathedrals and seems to have specialized in memorials. Much of the work was to others’ designs, but he also did many of his own and he exhibited extensively at the Royal Academy.51 This is Bennett’s own description: From the fountain you ascend by steps up the hill, towards the north porch [see fig.  2.3], but in doing so, according to ancient usage, when churches were built upon the slope of a hill, you are to imagine yourself on the way with our Blessed

46. Lentin (1988), p. 96. 47. W. Bennett (1850), p. 17. 48. W. Bennett (1866), p. 97. 49. Quotation from F. Bennett (1909), p. 186. See also W. Bennett (1866), pp. 93–94. 50. Forsyth (1910), unpaginated, stations of the cross, plates 11–12. 51. Grice (1984).

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F I G U R E 2 . 3 View along the Via Crucis to the north porch, St. John the Baptist, Frome,

Somerset. Photograph by the author.

Lord to Calvary. This way is called sometimes the “Via Dolorosa” (sorrowful way), and sometimes “Via Crucis” (way of the Cross). You go up with the Lord, and trace His path by the sculptures of the left hand side. The first sculpture is— Our Lord condemned by Pilate. The second— Our Lord going forth bearing His Cross. 44

WILLIAM BENNET T AND THE ART OF RITUALISM

The third— Our Lord falling under His Cross, and supported by Simon of Cyrene. The fourth— Our Lord meets the daughters of Jerusalem and His Blessed Mother. The fifth— Our Lord is stripped of His raiment. The sixth— Our Lord is nailed to His Cross. And the whole terminates at the north porch with the seventh— the last scene of the Passion, i.e., our Lord dying on the Cross, with the figures of S. John and the Blessed Mother on either side.52

As Peter Anson pointed out in Fashions in Church Furnishings (2nd ed., 1965), “It needed some courage in the late 1860s ‘to erect a stonecarved outdoor Gothic Revival “Via Crucis.’”53 Ostentatious Catholicity within the Church of England was still very much a spur to rancor and disorder at this date and Bennett’s construction of a processional way was a peculiarly dramatic and public assertion of his beliefs, and one that was not replicated in quite this way elsewhere. It appears that there had been a small, temporary Stations of the Cross set up between 1860 and 1865 in a chapel of the Anglican All Saints Sisters of the Poor (founded 1851) in London. 54 And, in the later 1860s, fourteen Stations of the Cross were installed at St. Peter’s, London Docks.55 Even in Roman Catholic churches the devotion was unusual at this date in England. According to Mary Heimann the devotion of the Stations of the Cross was limited to London in 1851, and even at its peak in 1875 only a fifth of Roman Catholic churches in the diocese of Westminster offered the devotion, and its frequency remained below 3 percent in some dioceses.56 St. Thomas of Canterbury’s Religious Publications Fund did produce a book of instructions in 1859 for the devotion, but the Catholic artist Nathaniel Westlake wrote of the fourteen paintings on slate that he executed in the mid-1860s for the Church of St. Francis, Notting Hill, west London, that they were the “first original series ever completed in this country to my knowledge.”57 Moreover, in all these cases the physical form of the Stations appears to have been a set of panels arranged around the nave. Bennett’s dramatic arrangement of a penitential way outside the church demonstrates his peculiar investment in the importance of the material display of devotion since

52. W. Bennett (1866), pp. 93–94. See texts and images at the Via Crucis website, www.viacrucis .co.uk. 53. Anson (1965), p. 193. 54. Mumm (2001), p. 14; and personal communication with the editor. 55. Yates (1999), p. 95 56. Heimann (1995), pp. 42, 44 and 184– 90. 57. Mosler (1859); and Westlake (1876), “prefatory note,” unpaginated.

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his penitents were required to mount a slope that was intended to be physically as well as spiritually strenuous. The penitent was thus enabled to gaze upon life-size representations of Jesus Christ as He walked on earth, and was then called to stare up at the North Porch where He was depicted crucified. Above this, the eye finds itself directed by the line of the spire toward the sky. The material world has, thus, been articulated to enable the penitent to walk in the footsteps of the suffering Christ on the way to Heaven. On entering the church, however, one finds oneself in the space in which Jesus comes back down to us through the mystery of the Mass. In his description of the restored church published in 1866, Bennett leads us through the building and stops for a moment of reflection before entering the chancel. Although this had been restored in the 1840s, Bennett purged it of what we see as the evidences of wordliness by removing the floor tiles commemorative of Bishop Thomas Ken, repositioning secular memorials, and replacing the stained glass by William Wailes. The high point of this journey occurred when, standing in front of the new stained-glass by Clayton and Bell, one sees where “in the centre of the window stands the great realization, and fulfilment of all our faith— JESUS CRUCIFIED” [original emphasis] (see fig. 2.4).58 Bennett’s passionate devotional engagement with the image of Christ and the desire for a physical encounter with the Lord had been clear for decades, as witness, for example, the farewell sermon that he preached on 23 March 1851 on leaving his previous parish in London. His text was John 9:4, “I must work the works of Him that sent Me while it is day, the night cometh, when no man can work.” He looked beyond the darkness and tribulations of the present to the rewards of heaven to come where “verily we shall see Him in the dwellings of His thousand saints, amid the myriads of His heavenly hosts—there we shall see Him face to face—hear Him—yea, even touch Him” [my emphasis].59 This yearning for visual and material contact with the Savior was just as strong fifteen years later when he explained what, in his view, a church was for: it was a place where “you are to look for Him [original emphasis]— His very Person.”60 Therefore, it is clear that

58. Bennett (1866), p. 126. John Clayton was introduced to Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1849 and exhibited with him at the Hogarth Club in 1858. Clayton and Alfred Bell became partners in 1855 and their work was heavily praised by the Ecclesiologist over the next few years. Unfortunately the fi rm’s records were destroyed during World War II. See Matthew Harrison (1980), pp. 29– 32; Larkworthy (1984), pp. 8 and 25; and Cheshire (2004), p. 24. 59. W. Bennett (1851), pp. 89–90. 60. W. Bennett (1865), p. 12.

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F I G U R E 2 . 4 Clayton and Bell, central light, east window, chancel, St. John the Baptist,

Frome, Somerset. Photograph by the author.

yearning for the visual and material apprehension of Christ remained crucial to Bennett during the remainder of his career. Such ineffable visions of Christ would occur during performance of the Mass; as Bennett explained when he concluded his account of his rebuilt parish church at Frome by saying, “May it be your lot, dear Christian readers, who are reading these words, as well as mine who write, that when with Christ you have suffered awhile [having mounted the Via Crucis], you may with him be perfected. Receiving Him in His most precious Body and Blood from this Altar, may you with Him ascend in His Glory and reign with the Saints Trium47

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phant.”61 This was not merely a conventional wish for salvation; it was an imaginative anticipation of a visual and material event: a literal and sensual encounter with Christ. Bennett understood the Mass to be a prefiguration of this encounter, as he explained in the first edition of his A Plea for Toleration in the Church of England, in a Letter to the Rev. E. B. Pusey (1867), in which he wrote in defense of “the doctrine of the Incarnation, and depending on that, the real, actual, and visible [my emphasis] Presence of our Lord upon the Altars of our Churches.”62 The doctrine of the Real Presence was controversial enough, but no one in the contemporary Anglican Church had previously advanced the idea that Christ was not simply present, but also visible in the Eucharist. Apologists for Bennett rushed forward to suggest that he had simply made a careless mistake as a result of enthusiasm, but on reading the full text it is quite clear that he meant exactly what he said. For he argued further that “if there is no demonstration there is nothing to show; and conversely, if there is anything felt and believed very deeply in the soul, and especially on any point affecting salvation, it will somehow [my emphasis] make itself seen.”63 Bennett’s theology appears to have been more emphatic than it was rigorous; however, the key point is that his stance can be seen as an invitation to imagine the visual appearance of Christ as an ideal man. It was this text that brought Bennett the prosecution for heresy in 1869. The case was advanced in the name of a parishioner, Mr. Sheppard, but was instigated and bankrolled by the evangelical Church Association.64 The case focused on Bennett’s embrace and extension of the doctrine of the Real Presence in his pamphlet of 1867. Bennett dropped the reference to visuality in the third edition of his tract, under pressure from Pusey, but it is clear that the previous wording reflected his sincere beliefs.65 Despite the removal of reference to the visibility of Christ in the Eucharist (and of reference to the adoration of consecrated elements), the trial for heresy was pursued. Robert Phillimore, the judge in the court of first instance, stressed that such a notion must be utterly condemned in the strongest terms, since “whatever figurative language may be found in the sermons of Eastern Fathers before controversy arose on the subject, I have not been able to find that such a doctrine has ever been maintained in the dogmatic teaching 61. W. Bennett (1866), p. 128. 62. W. Bennett (1867a), pp. 2– 3. 63. Ibid., p. 3. 64. F. Bennett (1909), p. 218. 65. See Blakeney (1872), p. 5.

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of our own or of any other branch of the Church.”66 However, he duly gave judgment in the Court of Arches on 23 July 1870 that the textual changes, “however ungraciously made,” were enough to secure Bennett’s acquittal.67 This decision was upheld on 8 June 1872 by the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Bennett refused to accept the validity of civil authority over the Church and so he was not represented at these hearings and did not attend. It is, therefore, quite clear that the decision cannot, on whatever grounds, be expected to have altered his opinions. He continued to believe in the vital nature of close encounters with Christ in the Mass that were both spiritual and sensual. Bennett’s trial can be seen to have been a matter of public concern because of the continuing controversy over the status of Catholicism in the Church of England. This case was an important factor in the passing of the anti-ritualist Public Worship Regulation Act (1874), which I discuss further in chapter 4 and which was intended, by its advocate, the Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, to boost his popularity.68 But why did the youthful Wilde wish to be the defendant in such a case? Was this simply a matter of defending Catholicity, or can we relate this to issues of sexual preference and identity? From the rise of the Tractarian Movement in the 1830s, those who opposed the development of doctrines within the Church of England such as the Real Presence of—as opposed to the merely symbolic reference to— Christ in the Mass, frequently resorted to the ecclesiastical courts in attempts to challenge such beliefs and halt the ritualistic innovations that enacted them in the liturgy. The motivation for legal actions of this type (and the Bennett case was simply one of the most prominent of many which contested all manner of aspects of ritual practice) was to stop the advance of the pro- Catholic party within the Church of England which was accused of being but a step toward conversion to what was projected by opponents as the fearful error of Roman Catholicism. However, attacks on the extension of the doctrine of the Real Presence related to a further set of anxieties that focused on the potential for improper influence over the bodies of parishioners. Because most Protestant clergy were married it was believed that their sexual energies would be channeled, in a proper fashion, toward their wives. However, the championing of priestly celibacy by many Anglo- Catholic priests, in imitation of their Roman counterparts, led to concerns that

66. Phillimore (1870), pp. 23–24. 67. Ibid., p. 135. 68. Bentley (1978), Graber (1993), and Janes (2011b).

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those who were unable to remain chaste might prey upon members of their congregation.69 Much concern was focused on the institution of the confessional in which intimate sins were to be discussed with the priest in private. This practice, hitherto exceptional in the Church of England, was strongly advocated by many ritualists such as Bennett. The sacramental theology of such men may have been understood by them as representing a way of transcending carnal desires and of replacing them with an ideal and pure counterpart (the adoration of the body of Christ) but, for those with different theological concerns, such beliefs rather suggested a dangerous fascination with material bodies. Bearing in mind that ritualists were widely held to represent a Romanizing tendency within the Church of England it might be expected that sexual suspicions concerning Anglo- and Roman Catholic clergy would have been identical. However, it was in connection with the former that there most clearly began to emerge concerns over inappropriate same-sex desire. For example, in the same book of satirical images that contained “‘Pig-Headed’ Ritualism” we find a print entitled “NextDoor Neighbours,” which compares the Roman and Anglo- Catholic methods of confession and penance. The Roman priest is depicted as harsh and intimidating toward a lady parishioner who seems in danger of falling under his dominating sway. However, his Anglican counterpart is show differently, as a flirt and a gossip.70 Both forms of presentation could have related to positions of dangerous intimacy between the priests and the women; however, the latter is distinctive in implying clerical effeminacy. It is important to stress that the Roman Catholic Church in England was, relatively speaking, poor and had long been used to forms of worship that were kept comparatively simple so as not to arouse anti- Catholic prejudice. Moreover, an ongoing sense of hostility toward flamboyant liturgical displays, in the form, for instance, of rich and elaborately decorated vestments, was rooted in attempts to resist the imposition of Italian models of devotion in the aftermath of the reestablishment of the episcopal hierarchy in 1850. Thus, it was in the Church of England that the most spectacular displays of Catholic innovation were to be found. These were attacked by Protestant opinion as corrupt forms of display that were doubly fake in that they were alleged to be theatrical imitations of what was, in its original Roman form, itself a pose of moral probity that concealed a state of abject sin.

69. Janes (2009b), pp. 149– 55. 70. Anon, The Echoes (1869), plate D and accompanying verse, “Next-Door Neighbours,” unpaginated.

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This means that the development of associations between AngloCatholicism and eroticized same-sex desire depended on both the attitudes of proponents such as Bennett and of their enemies. Bennett’s incarnational theology was, as has been seen, based ultimately on medieval Catholic traditions which employed ecstatic and eroticized imagery of bodily encounters with Christ in religious devotion. Richard Rambuss, in his book Closet Devotions (1998), has shown how such practices were preserved in early modern Protestantism in the private space of the “prayer closet,” as described in the previous chapter.71 Anglican ritualists such as Bennett sought to bring such experiences back into the public realm where, of course, they were open to reinscription with associations of sexual deviance. Those who were tempted by same-sex desires might have been attracted to lead such forms of worship as a way to save themselves from sin, but with the result that the further development of such devotions would be left in their hands. Anglo- Catholicism could, thus, emerge as a site of cultural queerness and sexual indeterminacy. The contestation of traditional gender roles played a significant part in the development of the visual arts in Victorian Britain, as can be seen from many of the works of the Pre-Raphaelites. I now examine two key examples of such engagement with visual depiction of the bodily encounter with Christ with the aim of exploring the way in which contemporary artists can be seen to have understood and expressed ecstatic Eucharistic encounters as a site of alternative bodily expression and gender performance. Thus, whether or not the (Anglo-) Catholic Eucharist originally had such resonances, it is important to emphasize that both religious opponents and certain contemporary artists treated it as though it could and did. It is also important to stress that many Victorian painters came from the same background as those who participated directly in the Tractarian Movement and its ritualist aftermath. As Jason Edwards reminds us, the Pre-Raphaelites “imagined themselves as a quasi-familial or quasi-religious brotherhood, as did Burne-Jones and Morris during their undergraduate days at Oxford, when they toyed with the idea of founding a celibate religious order, the Order of Sir Galahad.”72 Moreover, as Elizabeth Prettejohn has argued, many of these men shared “strong bonds of affection” which, in her view, amounted to more than “romantic friendship.”73

71. Rambuss (1998), p. 135. 72. Edwards (2007), pp. 2– 3. 73. Prettejohn (2000), p. 38.

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F I G U R E 2 . 5 Edward Burne- Jones, The Merciful Knight (1863), watercolor, 101.4 × 58.6 cm, © Birmingham Museums, 1973P84.

Some Pre-Raphaelite paintings explored aspects of gender performance, such as displays of male weakness, or female strength, in ways which implied some connection between Catholic devotion and samesex affection. An example of this is Edward Burne-Jones’s (1883–98) watercolor The Merciful Knight (1863– 64), which was one of the painter’s most important early works (see fig. 2.5).74 The artist’s widow, Georgiana Burne-Jones, wrote that this painting “seemed to sum up and seal the ten years that had passed since Edward first went to Oxford.”75 It 74. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, accession no. 1973P84. 75. Burne-Jones (1993), vol. 1, p. 262.

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was Burne-Jones’s own favorite among his early works. In 1894, he attempted to borrow it in order to allow him to paint a larger version in oils. The subject is taken from the life of the Florentine knight St. John Gualberto (founder of the Vallombrosan Order) who was miraculously embraced by a wooden figure of Christ while he was praying at a wayside shrine after forgiving the murder of a kinsman. This obscure legend was unlikely to have been familiar to a wide audience and BurneJones’s engagement with the story appears to have been inspired by the writings of Kenelm Digby, who converted to Catholicism in 1825, and who produced several volumes of work about Catholic history and legend.76 The composition may well have also been influenced by the fourteenth- century altarpiece in Santa Croce, Florence, by Giovanni del Biondo that Burne-Jones may have seen on his visit to the city in 1859 (although, in that composition, it is the entire crucifi x itself, and not a living figure, that is shown as leaning forward). Burne-Jones’s picture was not enthusiastically received by the critics, who complained about the articulation of the bodies, the sickly appearance of the figures and the “Roman” religious implications of the scene.77 The depiction of an intimate bodily encounter of a man with Jesus was clearly one that made many viewers uneasy. It is important to emphasize, however, that the artist had, if anything, radically toned down the level of intimacy on display. A series of sketches for the work now at the Tate Gallery, London, show him struggling with the question of how to render physical contact between Jesus and the suppliant. One of these shows the knight and Christ in a mouth-tomouth kiss that acts to link their bodies into a single sinuous band (see fig. 2.6).78 Moreover, this sketch further emphasizes the Eucharistic nature of the encounter since Christ is shown bending forward over an altar which was omitted in the final version. This composition can be compared to the forms of material desire for the Savior expressed by Bennett when he said, in his sermon on “The Holy Name,” that, “as we behold Him under the sacred veils, so He beholds us; as we stretch forth our hands to Him, so He is stretched forth to us.”79 Caroline Arscott has argued that the knight in Burne-Jones’s composition is represented as Christlike precisely insofar as he is not shown as conventionally manly. Rather than displaying phallic potency, his armor is like a

76. Péteri (2003), p. 121. 77. Arscott (2008a). 78. Frantzen (2004), p. 134. 79. W. Bennett, quoted in Day (1986), pp. 35– 36.

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F I G U R E 2 . 6 Edward Burne- Jones, sketch for The Merciful Knight (1863), pencil on paper, 25.2

× 15.3 cm, © Tate, London 2012 (accession no. A00083).

second skin whose “openings at knee, neck or wrist, or in the gauntlet are like so many gaping wounds. . . . . In this painting the knight in his armor participates in the interchange between artefact and corporeal existence and is subject to the agonizing piercing that characterises the Christ figure.”80 This image of two physically frail men in an intimate embrace thus evoked an air of enervated effeminacy of the variety that 80. Arscott (2008b), p. 55.

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had been attacked by Charles Kingsley as having implications of sexual perversion (as discussed in chapter 1). The significance of connections between spiritual devotion and erotic expression in the Anglo- Catholic Eucharist have been highlighted in several recent studies on the writings of the Anglo- Catholic poet Christina Rossetti (sister of the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti), notably in the pages of the journal Victorian Poetry on the poem Goblin Market (1859, first published 1860).81 She had come to know Bennett when she had helped to run a school with her mother in Frome.82 Rossetti’s work has been explored in relation to same-sex desire between women but Simeon Solomon (1840–1905) can be interpreted as having explored this theme as part of a project of developing specifically homoerotic forms of visual display. The Mystery of Faith (1870) (see fig. 2.7) is a double study in adoration: as the priest meditates on the glowing Eucharistic wafer which is spiritually the body of Christ, so the viewer stares at the brilliant vestments of the young priest.83 Bennett stated in 1873 that “these two things taken separately cannot be denied. The junction of them which of necessity must take place (the outward part and the inward part) to constitute a Sacrament, contains THE MYSTERY. We cannot separate them in this mystery,— but we call the outward part the form or veil, the inward part the ‘thing signified’” [original italics]. 84 Solomon was not an Anglo- Catholic, rather he was a (at this date nonpracticing) Jew who had, for instance, depicted a beautiful young coreligionist in devotional pose in his painting Carrying the Scrolls of the Law (1867).85 What Solomon’s several pictures on religious themes have in common is not spiritual belief but aesthetic appreciation. The “thing signified” in these works is, above all, same-sex desire. As with The Merciful Knight, critical unease surfaced in relation to

81. D’Amico and Kent (2006); Hu (2008), p. 186; Humphries (2007); and Marylu Hill (2005), p. 470: “The amazing quality of Goblin Market is that it allows the seemingly contradictory forces of sexuality and spirituality to coexist in a mutually beneficial manner. By resisting the impulse to reduce these forces to an either/or configuration, and by letting the imagery of the Eucharist speak for themselves, Rossetti offers a masterful illustration of how the forces of the erotic and the spiritual might be yoked together.” 82. Rossetti (1997), pp. 63– 64, 66– 67, 70–71, and 78. Note that Roden (2002), p. 35, locates Rossetti in the context of same-sex desire in the nineteenth century as an advocate of “the queer single life.” 83. Cruise (2005), p. 131, and (2010), pp. 71–72. Wilde is known to have admired Solomon’s work, having given his drawing “Love among the Schoolboys” (1866) to Lord Alfred Douglas as a present; see Kaylor (2009), p. 219, n. 1. 84. W. Bennett (1873), p. 7. 85. Cruise (2005), pp. 18 and 139. Solomon largely cut his ties with Jewish community in the 1860s; see G. Seymour (1997).

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F I G U R E 2 . 7 Simeon Solomon, Mystery of Faith (1870), watercolor on paper, 50.8 × 38 cm, courtesy National Museums Liverpool, Lady Lever Art Gallery, LL 3997.

bodily wholesomeness as can be seen from The Guardian newspaper’s comment that the priest in The Mystery of Faith is “spiritual rather than strong.”86 This painting needs to be compared with another controversial work, Sacramentum Amoris (1868), which shows an androgynous man holding a monstrance in which sits a winged youth streaming 86. The Guardian, 5 April 1871, p. 421, quoted and discussed in Cruise (2010), p. 81, n 6.

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with light.87 Similar, beautiful, male figures appear in Socrates and His Agathodaemon (ca. 1865) and in The Bride, Bridegroom and Sad Love, a work of the same year (see fig. 2.8). 88 These images can be interpreted with reference to Solomon’s literary work A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1871). In this book, first printed privately, and then issued under the imprint of D. G. Rossetti’s publishers F. S. Ellis, the narrator and his soul journey through a landscape in which they encounter ever more intense visions of love. Finally, they behold the figure of Sacramentum Amoris (the “sacrament of love”) who bears, in a crystal vessel, “the Very Love, the Divine Type of Absolute Beauty, primeval and eternal, compact of the white flame of youth” in the form of a male winged figure.89 Before his disgrace in 1873 as the result of prosecution for an act of indecency with a man in London, Solomon had been an “intimate” in the circle of friends of Dante Rossetti.90 Christina Rossetti mentions meeting Solomon in a letter of 24 February 1862 and she also described his “Deacon,” exhibited at the Royal Academy, in a letter of 20 July 1864, as being a “fine thing.”91 We cannot be sure whether Solomon’s intense attempt to visualize sublime (homoerotic) love in the form a priest staring at a communion wafer was inspired by the trial of Bennett; however, The Mystery of Faith was painted at the same time. Furthermore, Bennett understood the sublime body of Christ as appearing aglow and brilliantly illuminated.92 He made one of his most detailed statements on the visual expression of divine love on 6 August 1869 when he preached on the subject of the Transfiguration on the first anniversary of the reopening of St. Mary’s, Prestbury, Gloucestershire, after its completed restoration. The Transfiguration was the event, as related in the Synoptic Gospels, when Jesus was made radiant, was seen to speak with Moses and Elijah, and was called “son” by a voice from Heaven when He “was transfigured before them: and His face did shine as the sun, and His raiment was white as the light” (Matthew 17:2, King James Version). The spiritual centrality of visuality to Bennett was made very clear when he argued that “visions and revelations of miraculous power have ever formed the way in which Almighty God has communicated His Will to man. . . . [In the New Tes-

87. Janes (2010b), pp. 35– 50; Ferrari (2005), pp. 47– 56; Cruise (2005), p. 131; and (2010), pp. 79– 82. 88. Alison Smith (2001), cat. nos. 79– 80, pp. 156– 57; and Cruise (2005), p. 148. 89. Solomon (1871), p. 36. 90. T. Morgan (1996), p. 64. 91. Rossetti (1997), pp. 157 and 200. 92. On the religious symbolism of light see Janes (1998), pp. 139– 51.

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tament] nothing seems to be done without these miraculous visions.”93 Such visions of Jesus are essential to those in times of trouble who are in despair, for to them “suddenly there comes a light, and the cloud is dispersed, and they see the Son of God; his raiment becomes shining, white as snow; all is clear.”94 He said of the Transfiguration that the Apostles recognised Him, the same face, the same look, the same body. But nevertheless in another sense He was not the same, for over His Humanity there were poured forth rays of divine light, His Garments became “glistening” and “brilliant,” the fashion of His Countenance became glorious so that the Apostles (S. Matthew says) “held down their faces, and were sore afraid.” . . . Even so then in the Blessed Eucharist, the Divinity overshadows the Humanity.  .  .  . I see my Saviour come down from Heaven. . . . I see God, clothed in my flesh; that God in his divinity yet in my flesh.95

This is, of course, traditional language, but the Savior as then imagined coming down from heaven must have appeared in a form influenced by Victorian visual culture. The ensuing fleshly union was that which Pusey had ecstatically evoked when he had preached twenty years earlier on the Eucharist at Oxford University; then, he had written, “shall your soul be irradiated with the light of Divine Wisdom, your mind be enlightened with Divine knowledge, your body be clothed with the glory of God, wherewith ye shall be encompassed.” With the consumption of the communion wafer “ye shall be filled and overflowed with the torrent of His pleasure.”96 Again, we need to think in terms of the possible resonances of such imagery, albeit received from much older traditions, in their nineteenth- century context. Tractarian theology was, thus, centered on the Eucharist understood as a ceremony of supreme perfection and beauty in the face of which the worst sin would burn away (in the person of the contrite penitent). Many forms of Protestantism offered sinners no such secure sense of salvation from sin on earth. Indeed, it was a frequent gibe that the system of Catholic sacraments, when combined with confession and penance, left the sinner, being supposedly purified, free to sin again. The attraction of such a system might seem to be clear to those with

93. W. Bennett (1869), p. 3. 94. Ibid., p. 7. 95. Ibid., pp. 14–15. 96. Pusey (1853), p. 73–74.

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sexual desires that were then deemed inherently sinful. Moreover, the visual depiction of such devotions also offered a potential solution to Solomon’s problem of how to find a way to express homoeroticism which was not tinged with self- disgust. Whitney Davis has highlighted the challenges facing homoerotic visual expression at this date, noting that, while Simeon Solomon “seized the thematic significance of homoerotic inflections in cultural traditions,” his pictures “too easily collapsed back into a distaste  .  .  . for the homoerotic beauty that superficially they seemed to celebrate.”97 Such a collapse, however, is not present in all Solomon’s work and it is not obvious in The Mystery of Faith. It was the Mass, with its, as Wilde put it in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–91), “superb rejection of the evidence of the senses,” that offered the chance of the appearance of pure homoerotic desire precisely because incarnational theology was predicated on the truth of miracles.98 When Bennett asserted the following in his Catechism of Devotion (1876), he was expressing the supreme confidence of one who believed that his stance, if widely perceived to be deviant, was simply beyond question: “Taste is a thing exquisitely depending on individuality of habit and opinion, and varies in different countries. It is a thing entirely outside of argument.”99 It was not so much that Bennett was presenting a theologically coherent argument as that he was inadvertently revealing his intensely passionate desires for a visual and material encounter with Christ’s full and perfect body. This desire is situated precisely on the boundary between religious adoration and a potential homoeroticism. Whether Bennett appreciated this or not others most certainly did. What Solomon lacked, it can be argued, therefore, was not a desire for the Eucharist to be essentially homoerotic, but belief in its ability to act as an unquestionable legitimator of his personal desires. The role of the Eucharist as the astounding site, and sight, of the seemingly impossible helps us to understand the reference to the Mass in the works of such writers as Wilde and Walter Pater. Benjamin Taylor has argued that Pater was, when young, “led to the dubious extreme of aspiring to a Church vocation by the promise of momentary perfections he suspected he could only know in ritual.”100 Pater subsequently 97. W. Davis (1999), pp. 188–216, at 201 and 205. See also Getsy (2007) and the comments of Prettejohn (2007), pp. 98–99. 98. Wilde (2003), p. 128. See also Carroll (2005). 99. W. Bennett (1876), p. ix. 100. B. Taylor (1995), p. 19. Compare Roden (2002), pp. 103– 4, on Eucharistic imagery as a theme in the poetry of the Roman Catholic convert Gerard Manley Hopkins.

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referenced these early longings in his literary art. Thus Matthew Kaiser has recently argued that Pater incorporated the Eucharist into his “mystical-materialist theory of taste,” as in Marius the Epicurean’s deathbed Communion in which his “open, receptive mouth and closed eyes trigger the taste of God.”101 Oscar Wilde, with whom I began this section, was also fascinated by Catholicism. It seems that he too was on the alert, albeit with a dose of ironic amusement, for the potential for the miraculous offered by Catholic sacramentalism. In The Picture of Dorian Gray we read an after- echo of Solomon’s The Mystery of Faith from the pen of a collector of that artist’s works: He loved to kneel down on the cold marble pavement, and watch the priest, in his stiff flowered vestment, slowly, and with white hands, moving aside the veil of the tabernacle, or raising aloft the jewelled lantern-shaped monstrance with that pallid wafer that at times, one would fain think, is indeed the “panis caelestis,” the bread of angels.102

This passage, of course, reflects the fascinated attention of Gray, the evocation of a damned soul.103 It would seem that Wilde too, like Solomon, was not quite able successfully to employ religion as a device to decouple homoerotic desire and disgust, as I go on to discuss in chapter 5. Therefore, Wilde made gothic use of Catholicism in this novel as the location of a combination of beauty and horror. So if Wilde was involved in a project of employing Christian motifs to queer effect, can Bennett, and others like him within the Church, be understood to have been doing the same? Can they be seen as queer theologians bent on the construction of points of ecstatic impossibility that acted to devalue, by contrast, everyday bourgeois values? Or were they simply reviving Catholic traditions and only inadvertently providing inspiration for the early stages of the process of developing forms of homoerotic expression that aimed to transcend normative values and experiences? I argue that Bennett’s actions at Frome mark a point at which queerness can be identified within the ritualist tradition. Pusey’s theology had evoked the possibility of a conjunction of bliss in this world while offering its prospect in the next. He argued, in one of his major sermons, that Jesus Christ will “lift you up above those miserable, maddening, seducing pleasures of sense, and give you

101. Kaiser (2011), pp. 59– 60. 102. Wilde (2003), p. 128. 103. See Keenan (1999) on self- conscious fetishization of religious dress.

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a foretaste of heavenly sweetness, of blissful calm, of spiritual joy, of transporting love, of unearthly delight, in His own ever-blessed, everblessing, Presence.”104 And Pusey provided the basis on which Bennett could make his heretical leap by presenting the Eucharist, a few paragraphs later, as “a heavenly sweetness, the foretaste [my italics] of the eternal, against the destructive sweetness of this world’s pleasures.”105 This means that Pusey has opened up the possibility that the Eucharist can offer what must be seen on his terms as the combination of worldly pleasure and transporting, spiritual love. Bennett’s visual apprehension of the perfect form of Christ in the Mass, therefore, did offer the worshipper the ability to conceive of a perfect same-sex encounter in this world that was sensual, material, and spiritual. And it was also depictable: the Via Crucis leads the devotee to just such an encounter. Its sculptures by Forsyth in a scheme specified by Bennett show events that took place in the Roman Empire and, as such, are inspired stylistically by classical friezes. Admiration for classical images of the ideal male body enabled a situation in which, as Michael Hatt, has argued, the “sculptural nude” was “available for colonisation by homosexuality” at the end of the nineteenth century.106 Clear potential for such colonization is available at Frome. For example, the fifth scene in the Via Crucis shows the stripping of Jesus before his Crucifi xion (see fig. 2.9). This scene is described in the Bible as follows: “There they offered Jesus wine to drink, mixed with gall; but after tasting it, he refused to drink it. When they had crucified him, they divided up his clothes by casting lots.”107 The stripping is, thus, implied rather than described in the Gospels. The iconography at Frome is medieval, having first appeared at Assisi and Alatri in the thirteenth century.108 Forsyth’s version, however, is notable for its interest in the muscular bodies, not just of Christ, but of those who are stripping Him, one of whom, an attractive youth, touches His body gently, and I think one can say, sensuously, as he reaches out to pull down the robe. The passivity of Christ in this composition in the face of such worldly desire, shown here not as maddening but as strangely respectful, even adoring, bears comparison with that of the figure of Sad Love standing on the left in Simeon Solomon’s The Bride, The Bridegroom and Sad Love (1865) (see fig. 2.8). In 1865, Gerard Moultrie (1829– 85), then chaplain at Barrow Gur104. Pusey (1853), p. 68. 105. Ibid., p. 73. 106. Hatt (1999), p. 254. 107. Matthew 27:34– 35, New International Version. Mark 15:23–24 is essentially the same. 108. R. Brooke (2006), p. 291.

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F I G U R E 2 . 8 Simeon Solomon, The Bride, The Bridegroom and Sad Love (1865), drawing in pen, 25 × 19.4 cm, © Victoria and Albert Museum, London (museum no. E.1367–1910).

ney, about twenty miles northwest of Frome in northern Somerset, published a book of Offices for Holy Week and Easter (1865). That he was taken seriously within ritualistic circles can be seen from the fact that two years earlier he had contributed an appendix to the leading ecclesiologist John Mason Neale’s Essays on Liturgiology and Church History. Moultrie’s book of offices contains a series of texts “intended principally for solitary use and meditation by those who would follow their Lord along the Painful Way.”109 We are instructed to imagine Jesus at

109. Moultrie (1865), preface, unpaginated. 62

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that moment “when all thy garments were drawn off thee . . . in this the hour of thy nakedness” (for only after this had happened was an undergarment placed on Christ). We are then led to meditate on the Cross: “Lo, thy Beloved offers himself in his nakedness to thy gaze. With fi xed feet he stands. He claims thy approach. He desires thy free access. He opens wide the arms of his all-embracing love. He shows his

F I G U R E 2 . 9 James Forsyth, Our Lord Is Stripped of His Raiment (ca. 1860), Frome, Somerset.

Photograph by the author.

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open wounds. His head he bends to thy kiss. . . . Touch the Cross with love. Embrace it with the ardour of devotion. Clasp it and kiss it in the tenderness of thy sorrow.” That this was an erotic devotion can be seen from its comparison by Moultrie with the “heavy debt of Adam, who extended his guilty hands to the forbidden wood [of the tree of knowledge]” and with the sublime act of atonement by which the “guilt of [that] ancient lust might be wiped away by the shedding of thy precious blood.”110 Thus, the image of the naked Christ may be embraced and clasped and kissed and loved in an act of lust made pure. Elizabeth Prettejohn has argued that “the radicalism of the ‘homosexual code,’ as it is presented in Solomon’s work, might not be that it mounted a subaltern resistance to the dominant cultural codes of the Victorian world, but rather that it proposed itself as a universal language for religious, aesthetic and sexual content alike.” Moreover, she also raises the possibility that Solomon’s project can be seen as a “a paradigm case rather than a mere version” of Pre-Raphaelite radicalism.111 Much the same could be said of Bennett’s visual program at Frome. His remodeling of the parish church, the installation of the penitential Via Crucis and his regular pattern of literary publication aimed to construct a locus of faith that depended on the ecstatic experience of same-sex love, if not necessarily of erotic desire, on the part of the priest as celebrant in the Mass. Having suffered in this life the shamed sinner was invited by that priest to join in redemptive and ecstatic communion and union with Christ, the ultimate martyr. We do not know if Bennett, who was married (but then so was Wilde), was sexually attracted to other men and we cannot say if the sculptures of his Via Crucis were erotically received. What can be said, however, was that the hope of visions that were both spiritually redemptive and homoerotic was emerging in Victorian England. Some, perhaps many, of those who shared such dreams were in Holy Orders at a time when cultural expressions of religion and eroticism were caught in an intricate, if delicate, embrace. The inspiration for Anglican ritualism lay, primarily, in the practices of the Middle Ages as reimagined in the nineteenth century, but the aesthetic forms of contemporary Roman Catholicism were also a significant influence. In works of Catholic apology such as Daniel Rock’s “Hierurgia,” or Transubstantiation, Invocation of Saints, Relics and Purga110. Ibid., pp. 194– 95. 111. Prettejohn (2007), pp. 72 and 90.

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F I G U R E 2 .1 0 Daniel Rock, “Hierurgia,” or Transubstantiation, Invocation of Saints, Relics and

Purgatory, 2nd ed. (London: C. Dolman, 1851), opposite p. 436, © British Library Board, all rights reserved, 3367.b.1.

tory, 2nd ed. (1851), the priest is shown as extremely handsome and as the counterpart of Christ on the cross (see fig. 2.10).112 With him to assist at his liturgical preparations is a charming young boy (see fig.  2.11). Looking fondly on such scenes, Protestants with same-sex desires might easily fantasize the Roman Church as a queer family in which companionship and delight were available on earth as they shall be in 112. Rock (1851).

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F I G U R E 2 .11 Daniel Rock, “Hierurgia,” or Transubstantiation, Invocation of Saints, Relics and

Purgatory, 2nd ed. (London: C. Dolman, 1851), opposite p. 420, © British Library Board, all rights reserved, 3367.b.1.

heaven. Space for the construction of a fantasized Roman Catholicism in which men could commune with others like themselves, including with attractive youths, was, albeit after great opposition, to be made available in certain parishes and other institutions of the Victorian Church of England.

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Father Ignatius’s “Wonderful . . . Monastery Life” The Hon. “Eddie” Monteith, thirty-five, chief protagonist of the novel The Flower beneath the Foot (1923), and alter ego of its homosexual author Ronald Firbank, cannot decide what to do in life. He is a consummate dilettante and has even flirted with the cloister, having “been on the point of attaching himself, to the terror of his relatives and the amusement of his friends, to a monastery of the Jesuit Order as a likely candidate for the cowl. He had already gone so far as to sit for an artist for his portrait in the habit of a monk, gazing ardently.”1 This, albeit for a photographer, is what Joseph Leycester Lyne (1837–1908) had done sixty years earlier on the occasion of his attempt to found the first community of Benedictine monks within the Church of England. When Arthur Calder-Marshall came to write what remains the most important biography of Lyne he approached his subject as a man interested in the history of sexuality (he had just published a biography of the pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis). However, he fell back on the language of euphemism when describing Lyne as an eccentric enthusiast.2 The picture that he draws of Lyne An earlier version of part of this chapter was published as Janes (2010a). The phrase in the title, “wonderful . . . monastery life,” is attributed to Lyne (1871), p. 147. 1. The Flower beneath the Foot, in Firbank (1988), p. 535. 2. P. Baker (2004).

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is remarkably similar to that of Eddie Montieth. We read that the abbot, “with that delicate physique, that devotion to his mother, that love for his fellow men and sympathy with lonely women, appeared to be the homosexual made holy.”3 A photograph, taken when he was twentyone, is described as showing him with hair “falling in elaborate curls before the ears in a fashion not unlike the women of his day . . . [and shows] an interesting face in its combination of almost girlish delicacy and male determination.”4 Moreover, as we might agree having seen this and later photographs, he was “sartorially not as other [British] men” (see figs. 3.1, 3.2, and 3.3).5 In his biography, Calder-Marshall, if implicitly, associated the Anglican revival of religious orders during the nineteenth century with same-sex desire and androgyny. For instance, his visual analysis of images of Lyne can be compared with his comment on a photograph of Lydia Sellon, one of the leading lights in the Anglican Sisterhood movement of the time, that “if the reader takes the trouble to mask the hair and dress of the photograph, he will see what a handsome man Miss Sellon would have made.”6 I will now consider circumstances in which the images of the monk, oblate, or member of a confraternity came to be compounded of a queer mixture of ascetic discipline and homoerotic pleasure. The life and loves of Lyne provide a case study of this process which is then contextualized through a wider discussion of other male ecclesiastical orders and guilds from the second half of the nineteenth to the first half of the twentieth century. In the process I will be exploring some of the ways in which ecclesiastical same-sex associations of men could act as queer alternatives to the heterosexual family and how these then came to be endowed with distinctive patterns of coded visual and material expression.7 In the mid-nineteenth century popular objections to the persons and activities of the revivers of monastic ideals in the Church of England centered on a distinctive combination of religious and stylistic concerns. For instance, a book reviewer commented in 1864 that we will yield to no one in respect and gratitude for the work which devoted women of all ranks among us are carrying out for the evangelization of our great towns. Even where they have combined in sisterhoods, with rules and costumes and vows 3. Calder-Marshall (1962), p. 160. 4. Ibid., p. 49. 5. Ibid., p. 69. 6. Ibid., p. 64, n. 1. On Sellon, see Thomas Williams (1965). 7. Compare W. Davis (2011) on “queer family romance.”

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F I G U R E 3 .1 Joseph Lyne (ca. 1862– 63), photograph, in Beatrice de Bertouch, The Life of Father Ignatius, O.S.B., the Monk of Llanthony (Methuen: London, 1904), opposite p. 138.

of obedience, causing much local scandal and bitterness, we are glad to acknowledge that they have done good amongst the outcasts and helpless. But the greater prominence given by them to vows and costumes, the more they have aimed at copying the outside of mediaeval patterns, at seeking to put new wine into old bottles, the less healthy has their work been. Miss [Florence] Nightingale and Miss Sel69

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F I G U R E 3 . 2 Mason & Co (Robert Hindry Mason), Joseph Leycester Lyne (Father Ignatius) (ca. 1864), albumen carte- de-visite, 94 × 60 mm image size, © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG x12118.

lon stand out as the representatives of the true and false method of our nineteenthcentury work for unmarried women.8

Protestant suspicion of religious orders was freighted with anti- Catholic prejudices which fi zzed with concerns, derived from the Reformation, that monasteries and nunneries were morally corrupt. Therefore, the work of Sellon, like that of Lyne, was regarded as unhealthy in precise measure as it was presented by them as quasi-medieval. “Unhealthiness,” especially when discussed in relation to the urban life of the poor, suggests a combination of moral and physical trans8. Anon., “T. H.” (1864), pp. 572–74.

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F I G U R E 3 . 3 Samuel Alexander Walker, Joseph Leycester Lyne (Father Ignatius) (1870s),

albumen carte- de-visite, 91 × 58 mm image size, © National Portrait Gallery. London, Ax18302.

gressions. Many of the pioneering enthusiasts for such a revival were implicated in aspects of moral transgression, or were alleged to be so by their opponents. My approach is to ask what this associative aura can tell us if it is considered to be indicative of a connection between same-sex desire and medievalism in Victorian England. In some ways the presence of such connections seems hardly surprising, bearing in mind the particular appeal of life in same-sex communities in which the pressure to marry was removed. But does this mean that the Anglican Benedictine revival, if it was in fact inspired by alternative forms of sexuality, was necessarily little more than a decadent travesty of religion? I contend that such forms of sexuality should be seen as con71

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stitutive factors which help us to explain the origins and development of the revival; and I suggest that same-sex desire is neither incompatible with Christian spiritual development nor with cultural creativity. Rather, the revival can be seen as an act of positive creative expression which sheds light on the ways in which aspects of Victorian medievalism can be situated as queer, countercultural projects. Monasticism, particularly Cistercian monasticism in the twelfth century, has deep associations with same-sex desire; what Robert Mills refers to as “idealized but sensually charged intimacy.”9 Images of the monastery as a locale of sodomitical desire were reinforced at the Reformation. In the aftermath of the passing of the first civil statute on buggery in 1533 visitations to English monasteries and nunneries took place at which inquiry was made into the sexual lives of their inmates. The ensuing revelations were, according to Randolph Trumbach, “used to justify the dissolution of the monasteries” and consolidated an association between monastic life and unnatural vice in the minds of many Protestants.10 A gradual emergence of a degree of grudging toleration for monasticism can be traced prior to 1800.11 Nevertheless, it is notable that sensational associations between monasticism and samesex desire in the eighteenth century continued to surface in works such as Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796).12 Indeed, it is significant that issues of sexual deviance have been associated with some of the leading eighteenth- century British enthusiasts for monastic antiquities. On 4 May 1771, Horace Walpole (1717–97) wrote to his friend, the antiquary, Rev. William Cole, that “Strawberry is almost the last monastery left.”13 Walpole was referring to his extraordinary Gothic Revival villa, Strawberry Hill, which was situated near the Thames upstream from London, and at which he played dilettante host. This was a continuing theme in his letters, such that on 31 August 1777 he could be found writing that “as I have told you before I often wish myself a monk at Cambridge. Writers on government condemn very properly a recluse life as contrary to nature’s interest who loves procreation. But as nature seems not very desirous that we should procreate to threescore years and ten, I think convents very suitable retreats for those whom our Alma Mater does not emphatically call to her Opus 9. A good introduction to the issues is Mills (2007), pp. 11–14, with quotation at p. 11. 10. Trumbach (2007), p. 50. 11. Allchin (1958), pp. 15– 35; see also Young (1996), Tuite (1997), and Fincher (2006). 12. Haggerty (2006b), p. 69; see also Hogle (1997) and Gamer (1999). 13. Walpole (1837), p. 71. On the question of Walpole’s sexual preferences see Haggerty (1986), (2001), and (2006c); and Mowl (1996).

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Magnum.”14 Neither Cole nor Walpole was married nor does this suggest that they were the “marrying kind.” The most sustained argument for Walpole as a proto-homosexual was presented by Timothy Mowl in his Horace Walpole: The Great Outsider (1996). Mowl presents Walpole as having written his pioneering gothic novel The Castle of Otranto (1764) in an anguished state of distraction after William Guthrie’s “outing” of him as being “by nature maleish, by disposition female.”15 Mowl further suggests that by publishing “a rip-roaring, red-blooded romance” Walpole attempted to distract others (and himself) from his own sexual inclinations.16 The controversial nature of this reading of Walpole’s life and character was acknowledged in Pat Roger’s substantial review of Mowl’s book. However, she commented in relation to a key set of letters from Walpole to Lord Lincoln dating from 1739 to 1744 that “it is altogether plausible that Walpole was exclusively homosexual, and he may have had a physical relationship with Lincoln—the letters leave that a real possibility, but no more.”17 However, George Haggerty has argued that these letters cannot be explained away as the evidence of a frustrated friendship since they “hardly suggest frustration; instead, they are full of a lively erotics that is playful and energetic enough to suggest sexual fulfilment.”18 Recent work on Walpole’s interests in antiquarianism and Catholicism has further developed our understanding of some of the ways in which he attempted to use the idea of the monastery as a way of conceptualizing his circle of friends with similar attitudes and sexual tastes.19 Horace Walpole was singled out by Derek Beales in his recent survey of positive British responses to monasticism at the end of the eighteenth century, but he gave pride of place to Edmund Burke’s (1729– 97) role in creating a less anti- Catholic environment, notably through his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and the passages in it supporting French clergy and monks.20 Beales wrote of these sections that “Burke was virtually ‘coming out’ as a sympathizer with Catholicism.  .  .  . He was soon to become active again in working to achieve relief for British and Irish Catholics, in a campaign which (for example)

14. Walpole (1837), p. 164. 15. Mowl (1996), pp. 177– 89. 16. Ibid., p. 186. 17. Rogers (1996), p. 33. 18. Haggerty (2001), p. 242. See also the discussion of A. Williams (2006). 19. Reeve (2013a) and (2013b), with W. Davis (2011). 20. Beales (2005), p. 425.

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legalized the building of Catholic Churches in England and gave the county vote to Irish Catholics. Burke also helped to bring about the surprisingly positive welcome that French priests and monks received in England when they fled from the Revolution.”21 It is interesting that Beales happened upon the term “coming out” to express Burke’s behavior in this work, bearing in mind that just as a maverick scholar shifted the debate on Walpole to consider the possibility of his sexual deviance, so the same thing has taken place in the case of Edmund Burke. The key work for ambivalent desire in the life and work of Burke is by Isaac Kramnick. In The Rage of Edmund Burke: Portrait of an Ambivalent Conservative (1977) Kramnick presents his subject as, in modern terms, a bisexual, who was more passionately attracted to men. Kramnick situates A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) in the context of Burke’s marriage to Jane Nugent in 1756 and his ongoing (merely homosocial, it is assumed) relationship with Will Burke, a friend, with whom he had been living since 1750 and who did not move out six years later.22 For Kramnick the Inquiry was, among other things, a development of Burke’s musings over whether he was to “be the assertive male and thus a fit suitor for Jane,” or “the passive idle female drawn to and dependent on Will’s masculinity?”23 This is further linked into Burke’s parentage and religious heritage such that Kramnick argues that “Will provided Edmund with the mirror of his father (Protestant, masculine, and assertive) and Jane his mother (Catholic, feminine, and passive).”24 All this, and the nature of Burke’s alleged adolescent “intense attachment” with Dick Shackleton has found much wider acceptance among literary scholars than historians who are less impressed by textual “readings” of implicit desire.25 Burke’s Irish origins provided him with a pretext for creative engagement with Catholicism, which is lacking in Walpole’s background; and the case for the queerness, in any sense of the word, of Burke remains unproven.26 Nevertheless, the stance of support for monasticism at this date remained, for many Britons, if not queer in a sexual sense, at least culturally peculiar. 21. Ibid., p. 434. 22. Burke (1998). 23. Kramnick (1977), p. 79. 24. Ibid., p. 80. Note the significance of religion and family relationships for the queerness of eighteenth- century gothic literature as discussed by Townsend (2009). This may have interesting implications for a consideration of Burke’s analysis of the sublime as being, in itself, a gothic literary construction. 25. Kramnick (1977), p. 68. See also O’Donnell (2006). 26. Gibbons (2003); and see also my discussion of Burke in Janes (2015), chap. 3.

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Implicit connections between monasticism and (at least social) deviance continue to appear during the ensuing decades. It was in the aftermath of the Tractarian revival of Catholicity in the Church of England during the 1830s that something approximating an Anglican monastic community was established for the first time in England since the Reformation when, in 1842, John Henry Newman retreated to Littlemore, near Oxford, and lived there in quasi-monastic conditions in the final three years prior to his conversion to Rome. The issue of Newman’s sexuality and gender performance has already been discussed in chapter 1.27 The upshot of such debates is that, whether or not the cultural precursors of nineteenth- century Anglican Benedictinism were possessed of queer sexual desires, the movement toward Anglo- Catholic monasticism was already becoming associated with a wide spectrum of gender deviance by the time that Joseph Leycester Lyne came onto the scene. Lyne, also known as Father Ignatius, is a key figure in Anglican monasticism because, although there had been previous quasi-monastic communities such as Newman’s at Littlemore, it was Lyne who first attempted to found a formally constituted Benedictine religious house for men within the Church of England.28 He was born in 1837 in London, the son of a businessman. He studied theology in Scotland from 1856 to 1858, where he began to show distinct Catholic leanings. He was ordained a deacon by the Bishop of Bath and Wells in 1860 and worked as a curate in Plymouth where he met and received encouragement from Lydia Sellon. Inspired by her he toured monasteries in Belgium and adopted Benedictine dress. On his return he began to call himself Father Ignatius and starting from 1862 began to establish monastic communities—first at Claydon, near Ipswich, and then at Elm Hill near Norwich. The unusual nature of his personality, identified by Calder-Marshall, was not simply the prejudice of that later author, but was widely commented upon in the nineteenth century, with varying degrees of enthusiasm. For instance one George Dawson published a “Phrenological Sketch of Father Ignatius” in 1878 in which he commented, based (supposedly) on Lyne’s head bumps, that he is a natural artist, a tragic artist. . . . He can be as tender as the tenderest woman, he can cut with the keenest of knives. He is too much of an artist and poet to be

27. Faber (1933), pp. 32– 35, discussed in Hilliard (1982), p. 185. 28. Yates (1999), p. 79; and Anson (1964), pp. 51–72 and 220– 42. The key biographies of Lyne are Bertouch (1904), Attwater (1931), and Calder-Marshall (1962).

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satisfied with a cold, unsensuous, unpoetic form of religion and life. Such men love to be surrounded by art. . . . His organ of friendship is very strong, and his love for the young is similar. He is a “friend” and a “father.” He draws people to him by this strong facility, people can’t help liking him as a “friend.”29

Whether there was more that was inverted about his friendship than the commas cannot emerge clearly from such a source, but it can be noted that newspapers were keen to observe that he surrounded himself with attractive young men. Thus a correspondent of the Hereford Times described watching one of Lyne’s monks in the chapel at the community’s final home in the Welsh borders around the time that Lyne admitted in a miniature autobiography that the reason why he became a monk was that he felt that it was the only way to save his soul: I watched the young monk; he was an interesting study for the last decade of this complicated nineteenth century which had produced him. Very grave, peaceful, and happy he looked— a dark, handsome, manly face, quite a gentleman evidently, but so perfectly controlled by the monastic etiquette that it was impossible to form much judgment regarding him, except that he was a monk, and quite unlike us ordinary people, living in another atmosphere, moving on a higher stage than we “secular” folk.30

The same focus on male beauty appeared in a North American paper which commented on a service held when Lyne was on a mission there in 1890: At the moment appointed, a handsome monk entered the hall from the side door; a little later another (say twenty-four years old) in a long graceful robe, with thick black hair and handsome features; in the aisles, with greater modesty and gentleness of demeanour, the private secretary dressed like other men, showed people to their seats. This, too, was a fine looking young man.31

Another article from the Hereford Times can be read either to suggest simple propriety, or else an unusual lack of interest in conventional sexuality on the part of the congregation on the fourth annual pil-

29. Newspaper Cuttings Book, p. 65, Norfolk Country Record Office (hereafter NCRO) MC 2133/8. 30. Undated article, Newspaper Cuttings Book, p. 26, NCRO MC 2133/8; and Lyne (1896), p. 14. 31. Quoted by William Leycester Lyne, Ignatius’s adopted son, typescript, chap. 6, p. 4, NCRO MC 2133/1.

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grimage day after the sighting of the Virgin Mary at the abbey (i.e., 1884): Boys and youths of every class came for a whole day of services— crowding the church and sitting in dozens on the high altar steps, listening breathlessly to the long harangues of the monk preacher. Bright and comely lasses of every station of life, with subdued and pious demeanour . . . for once in a way appearing not to use their charms for the attraction of their fellow pilgrims of the sterner sex.32

It is likely that the media would have been quick to condemn unnatural vice, and so we cannot use such evidence as this to suggest sodomitical goings- on; however, Lyne’s earlier attempts to reestablish the Benedictine monastic life within the Church of England had come to grief precisely because of scandals that were much less ambiguously peculiar. On 8 September 1864 one Mrs. Hase read a letter which had been sent to her fifteen-year- old son by Brother Augustine, choir master of Lyne’s community in Norwich. Augustine wrote that sometimes on Sundays you have sat in your cassock and cotta looking so like an angel that I could have worshipped you . . . what I am now going to say must be a secret to everyone [original emphasis] if you don’t wish me to be troubled. I want you one day (I will tell you the time) to go to Mason’s in St. Giles to have your portrait [i.e., photograph] taken. . . . I will manage you having a cotta and cassock.33

The sexually queer content of this letter was, if tacitly, acknowledged. The son was described in the newspaper report as having been being wooed: “To use an expression used by a companion who accompanied the lad to the monastery, the superior was ‘sweet’ upon him—inviting him to the services, giving him fruit and other presents, and occasionally asking him to tea.” Moreover, in the article “Recent Pranks at the Monastery,” published the following week, it was stated that “the suppression or perversion of natural love and of the proper passions of our being does not root out the powers that the creator has implanted, but misdirects them into corruption and defilement.” Furthermore, it was argued in “‘Augustine,’ Satan and the ‘Norfolk News’” in the same edition that “there is a cozening of boys going on which is most unmanly,

32. Newspaper Cuttings Book, p. 27, NCRO MC 2133/8. 33. Anon., “Ignatius” (1864), p. 5. Compare Cottam (1930), p. 77, for a poem about a “sunkissed print” of a boy chorister. On the eroticization of sacred dress, see Keenan (1999).

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and we may add unnatural.”34 Public meetings were held in London the aim of which was “to brand the Norwich community as a hotbed of unnameable iniquity,” which was code— as in “the love that dare not speak its name”—for sodomy.35 The community was forced to move out, but scandals continued. On 18 February 1869 two ex-monks from the community, the former brothers Stanislaus (James Hughes) and Osmond (George Nobbs) appeared before Marylebone Magistrates Court in a case concerning theft. In the words of Ignatius’s first biographer, Beatrice de Bertouch, one of them made an accusation in the course of the trial, “a terrible one— almost too monstrous to be touched by a woman’s pen. . . . The lives of these two unfortunates, instead of being holy and circumspect, had been mutually such as Christian delicacy is powerless to interpret. . . . [It was alleged that] not only had the Superior been aware of their degeneracy, but that he had condoned and encouraged it, by performing on their behalf, and in his own church, a ceremony which in itself was blasphemy and sacrilege of the most revolting kind.”36 What transpired in court was sufficiently remarkable that it made the national press, receiving space in the Daily Telegraph, the Standard, and the Manchester Guardian, among others. The accused, George Nobbs, who was nineteen at the time of the trial, said that he had been business partners with James Hughes in a shop. Hughes explained that he had gained the capital to open his business from “friends in London who take an interest in me. We have been on the most intimate terms,” to which Nobbs retorted that that was a “rum thing”! Moreover, he argued that he could not be guilty of stealing from Hughes because if I may say so, we are bound together as married; in fact I am his wife.  .  .  . My mother gave me to him (prosecutor) [i.e., Hughes] in the monastery of St. Philip’s, at Norwich. And again Father Ignatius, or as he is now known by the name of Mr Lyne, ratified it. When we took to the ceremony I put a ring on his finger. I gave half a sovereign for the ring.37

On being informed of this accusation Ignatius denied performing any such ceremony and blamed Hughes for seducing and perverting the other, who had been thirteen at the time of the “marriage.”

34. Anon., “Recent Pranks” (1864), p. 5. 35. Bertouch (1904), p. 398. 36. Ibid., p. 430. 37. Anon., “Ex Disciples” (1869), p. 3.

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In the midst of these events, and having received a generous gift from a benefactor, Lyne embarked on his next attempt to found a permanent monastery. He tried to purchase the ruins of the medieval Llanthony Priory in south Wales but being thwarted in this he ended up with a nearby plot of land at Capel-y-ffin in 1869 on which he was to build Llanthony Abbey. He also embarked on a campaign of novel writing to raise both funds for the project and to spread public awareness of his endeavors. The fi rst of these books, Brother Placidius and Why He Became a Monk: A Tale for the Young Men of the Times (1870), reads like a recruiting poster for the homoerotic pleasures on offer at his new Welsh monastery. In this novel, the moment when the protagonist Charles Lyndhurst embarks on the spiritual journey which will transform him into Brother Placidius is described using the conventions, not to say clichés, of the literature of romance. Charles looks across to the monk who has come to preach at his local church. His “calm, black eyes met those of Charles, who crimsoned deeply, and his eyes fell beneath a look, such as he had never met before.”38 The monk preaches, pauses, and “again his piercing glance met Charles’s eye. But now our young friend gazed into the eyes of the monk with intense eagerness. He seemed to be drinking in, with all the longing of a thirsty soul, the strange impressions which were floating from the mind of the speaker, like balm into the aching void of his innermost being.”39 But even this pales in comparison with what goes on in the monastery itself, which extends on the one hand to the pleasures of camp banter and on the other to what might today be classed as pedophilia and sadomasochism. We learn, for instance, that Father Philip pronounces queer as “quare”: “What a ‘quare’ customer you are! Laughed Brother Oswald, bantering the other with his word ‘quare.’ You’re getting quite unlike the old witch you used to be.”40 The word “queer” was not normally employed with a sexual connotation at this date. But it subsequently appears in early twentieth- century Anglo- Catholic contexts as bearing a more unmistakably coded sense of sexual reference, as for instance, in J. G. Forse’s Ceremonial Curiosities and Queer Sights in Foreign Churches: Ecclesiological and Other Notes from the Travel Diaries (1938). In this travelogue the Rev. Forse relates his summer holidays on the Continent during which he regularly discusses his encounters with charming young men and (not so charming) policemen who stop

38. Lyne (1870), p. 15. 39. Ibid., p. 19. 40. Ibid., p. 127.

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to question him when he is out late at night. Thus, on 13 July 1924, he was at La Coruna, northern Spain, and tells us that “here comes a group of little Spanish foot soldiers, very boyish: they have with them one or two of the fine young giants, in naval uniform, from the ‘Linienschiff Braunschweig.’  .  .  . There are a thousand young Germans in uniform parading the streets: and unquestionably they are fine, intelligent looking, muscular specimens.”41 Lyne’s enthusiasm for youths also appears in his second novel, Leonard Morris (1871), which was “not written for old ladies, but for young men.”42 In this effusion, Brother Angelus, fourteen years old, has just taken his vows. Brother Oswald says of this child, “‘we call him “sunbeam”; his bright face and fair curly tonsure are quite a picture of joyous happiness.’” Meanwhile, Angelus himself, getting into the spirit of things, says admiringly of Bernard, another novice, that “‘you smell of heaven; you are so sweet just now, just as if you’d been dipped in the crystal sea before His [Jesus’s] beautiful white throne.’”43 Meanwhile, the brothers are overheard chitchatting about the request of a small boy to be beaten in association with a performance of the Mass: “‘May I have a beating then?’ asked the child. ‘I should like to for dear blessed Jesus’ sake.’ ‘You shall, then, my dear child,’ answered the Abbot.” “And you don’t mean to say that the Reverend Father really did beat the little darling, Brother Oswald?” “Indeed, he did, though, and well too.” “Didn’t the child squall?” “Not a sound, but received the sacrament with almost a rapture. His fair, bright face and sweet blue eyes were upturned to the Host with such delight, but his face was suffused with crimson from the pain.” “And knowing that he was to receive another caning when he left the altar?” “Yes; and he took the second still more bravely.” “Well, upon my word, I never could have believed such a thing possible. It is a wonderful life this monastery life.”* 44

The asterisk refers the wondering reader to a remarkable footnote that asserts that this story is “unvarnished fact” and has “happened at 41. Forse (1938), p. 157. On queer tramping see Bradford (1920), p. 39, “The Vagabond Boy”: “Tramp, tramp, tramp . . . / Give me a lad that I like for a mate, / And a long white road for a home.” 42. Lyne (1871), p. xii. 43. Ibid., p. 154. 44. Ibid., pp. 146– 47.

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Llantony Priory.” The point is that Lyne was novelizing the real personnel of his monastery. Bearing that in mind it may be appropriate to point out that at the time of writing Lyne was sharing rooms with a ten-year- old boy, “baby Samuel,” whom he had received eight years earlier from a penniless mother two days before the Augustine scandal broke in Norwich.45 The child was kept dressed in a miniature habit and cowl and was (somehow, perhaps by beatings) kept to a vow of silence and was only allowed to talk to Ignatius and the real-life Brother Sunbeam.46 This child later, unsurprisingly, fled the monastery, and was last heard of running away to sea. Ignatius then adopted another tenyear- old boy who became William Leycester Lyne. Postcards of him (in his monastic garb as Brother David) were sold at the monastery, along with those of Ignatius (see fig. 3.4). Bearing in mind Brother Augustine’s desire to have a photograph of his young love at Norwich in ecclesiastical dress, it is perfectly possible that certain visitors would have bought the postcard of Brother David for other than spiritual reasons. David wrote a detailed account of his upbringing by Ignatius which survives in typescript in the Norfolk County Record Office. When the child first saw the monk his initial thought was that “he had dressed himself in an old lady’s black dress, and that he was bald-headed naturally. Very short time elapsed, however, before I discovered that he was still a young man.”47 There is no hint of any sexual contact in this account. Chatting to Ignatius when he was naked in the bath appears not have held any particular significance for the boy, for instance. He did, however, allude to scandals at the monastery by saying that “Devils in the flesh came amongst us.” And he promised his adoptive father on his deathbed never to leave him until the death struggle was over.48 The intensity of their relationship appears to have been apparent to people long after these events since it was reported in 1937 that a miraculous vision of Ignatius had taken place and that several pilgrims swore to David that Ignatius had appeared to them to have “placed his arms round my neck.”49 In Lyne’s monasteries, therefore, the image of the monk as living a life of self-abnegation and sacrifice was deeply imbued with a range of coded expressions of same-sex desire.

45. Anson (1973), p. 64. 46. Calder-Marshall (1962), p. 109. 47. William Leycester Lyne, “With Brother Ignatius O.S.B,” typescript, ch. 1, p. 1, NCRO MC 2133/1. This account was written ca. 1935, see ch. 8, p. 14. 48. William Leycester Lyne, “With Brother Ignatius O.S.B,” typescript, ch. 4, p. 6; ch. 8, p. 4; and ch. 9, p. 8. NCRO MC 2133/1. 49. Anon, “Vision of Monk Seen” (1937).

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F I G U R E 3 . 4 William Leycester Lyne (Brother David), aged 16, postcard, reproduced by

permission of Norfolk Record Office, MC 2133/6.

The community was funded in three ways: firstly by farming, secondly by fundraising on mission tours, and thirdly through the sale of merchandise such as photographs, pamphlets, and photographs.50 Thus, one of the newspaper- cuttings books in Norwich preserves a sale list of photographs which includes not just pictures of the monastery, but also of the monks and of the acolytes, in both surplices and cassocks.51 Bearing in mind the apparent queerness of some of the merchandise on sale at Llanthony, it is fascinating to note that the end of the earlier Elm Hill monastery was satirized in a Norwich broadsheet as being a fire sale of perverse bric-a-brac (see fig. 3.5). The items 50. Michael (1893). 51. Newspaper Cuttings Book, p. 82, NCRO MC 2133/7.

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F I G U R E 3 . 5 Anon., Sale Extraordinary! (Norwich: R. Cullum, ca. 1866), © British Library Board, all rights reserved, 85/1882.c.2 (260).

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signal quite clearly that a connection was made between falsity (“artificial flowers in abundance (somewhat faded), with Rosaries, Charms, Talismans, etc, suitable for masquerading”), concealment (“a brazen mask, much used by the order”), perverse pleasures (“Bagatelle board and Cat o nine Tails, used by the Monks for their amusement after Vespers”), child rearing by men (“a cradle and pap spoon, used for the Infant Samuel by Bob Littlebelow”), and sodomitical desire (“the original Love Letter, sent by Brother Augustine to the Boy”).52 Very similar, if slightly less overt insinuations appear around this time in the Punch cartoon, “Incense-ibility,” which features chains and perfumed rods on sale in a shop in which a ritualist priest is being offered incense lovelier than Jockey Club perfume which, it should be pointed out, was not a man’s cologne but a scent worn by vulgar women53 (see fig. 3.6). Although there was a wide range of Anglican monastic experiments in the later nineteenth century, Lyne’s was perhaps the most high profile, if only because Lyne himself was assiduous in cultivating media coverage as a means of fundraising.54 His only rival for popular fame was the person whose community took over Llanthony Abbey at Lyne’s death, Benjamin Carlyle (1874–1955), who thought of himself as being a sensible man who was in favor of what he referred to as “religious life without starch.”55 If this statement suggests that he was not particularly austere it hardly prepares us for the visual impact of the monastery that he built on Caldey Island in South Wales where he presided as Father Aelred. This was described by the novelist Rose Macauley as appearing like a fabulous and gorgeous dream, in which medieval monastic splendour was outsoared. Renaissance altars of pink alabaster, hand wrought silver and bronze, candlesticks of silver, ebony and lapis lazuli, a silver and enamel monstrance, many

52. The appearance of a “well- oiled coffi n” in the list might appear to be nothing more than a gothic cliché were it not for the fact that Brother David, among various other furniture, was given a sarcophagus in Ignatius’s will, Newspaper Cuttings Book, p. 77, NCRO MC 2133/7. 53. As Mary Braddon indicated in her novel The Lady’s Mile (1866), p. 159: “No flutter of lace, or rustle of silk, no musical tinkling of bracelets or bangles, or perfume of jockey club attended her entrance . . . but if a connoisseur in the trifles of life had been told to look for the woman whose toilette most successfully combined the extremity of rigid simplicity with the perfection of elegance, he would inevitably have selected the widow.” 54. An interesting comparison can be made in particular with the members of the Society of St. John the Evangelist (established 27 December 1866) whose work in the Oxford slums led to their becoming known, informally, as the “Cowley Fathers.” It is, perhaps, significant that their inspiration was the disciple whom Jesus specially loved (as in John 20:2); see M. Smith (1980). 55. Quoted in A. Baker (n.d.), p. 139.

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F I G U R E 3 . 6 “Incense- ibility,” Punch 51, 29 December 1866, p. 259, reproduced by permission of Birkbeck College Library.

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magnificent sets of vestments, mitres embroidered with pearls and precious stones, gold pectoral crosses and jewelled rings, an abbatial dwelling house of the utmost splendour, kitchens with no expense spared, a smart private yacht lying in the slips, [and] a handsome Daimler to take him to and fro.56

The historian of the Anglican monastic revival, Peter Anson, who had once been a member of the community, alleged concerning the early years of Carlyle’s life when he was working with boys in London’s East End that “at our monthly meetings strange young men and elderly ladies were most conspicuous. Both were attracted far more by the picturesque externals of the monastic life than by any particular striving after Christian perfection.”57 Once established as abbot, Carlyle, we are told, required of his monks frequent embraces and kisses on the mouth. He had his favorites, and went into mourning if they left the community.58 He was not simply an enthusiast for nude bathing, but made it compulsory with the result that “it was a common sight to find the whole community in a state of nature, playing about on the shore of one or other of the bays on a summer afternoon.”59 He was also so enthusiastic about the stories of Frederick Rolfe (the self-styled Baron Corvo who stars in the next chapter) that, “unless a novice could show signs of enjoying Corvo’s subtle humour, it was doubtful if he had a vocation to the contemplative life. A sure test of his ‘Catholicity’ was the ability to laugh at the miraculous fritter of Frat’Agostino or the lilies of Sanluigi.”60 To elucidate, “The Miraculous Fritter of Frat’Agostino” is a piece of camp fluff about a novice tossing a fritter that seems to miraculously disappear but is in fact stuck to his neck and “The Lilies of Sanluigi” is a story with a particularly spectacular display of homoeroticism featuring the eternally eighteen-year- old “Sansebastiano” and his heavenly chum “Sampancrazio”: Sansebsastiano was quite naked: indeed he had nothing about him but his halo and an arrow; for, when the pagans made a target of him, they stripped him of his clothes, and so he came to heaven like that. You may see his picture in the duomo if you do not believe me. But he was so beautiful and muscular, and straight and

56. Rose Macaulay, in Anson (1958), p. 8. 57. Anson (1958), p. 110. On Carlyle and Caldey see also Anson (1940) and Kollar (1995). 58. Anson (1958), p. 125. 59. Ibid., p. 128. 60. Ibid., p. 129.

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strong, and his flesh so white and fine, and his hair like shining gold, that no one thought of him as being naked.61

The major American church architect Ralph Adams Cram, who was presented by Shand-Tucci, his biographer, as “predominantly” homosexual, dedicated one of his books to Carlyle, and declared admiringly that monasteries were a form of “artificial family” (a phrase that ShandTucci glosses as meaning an “alternative family”).62 Bearing all this mind it is not surprising that it is easy to find links between British fin- de-siècle homosexuality and the Anglican monastic revival. For instance, Walter Pater frequented George Nugée’s St.  Austin’s Priory, which was a sort of aesthetic place for day monks established at Wymering, near Portsmouth in 1867 before moving in 1872 to south London. Nugée, it should be pointed out, had been a curate in the Pimlico parish which had developed into a center of florid ritualism under Bennett, as mentioned in the previous chapter.63 The link between decadence, same-sex desire, and Anglican monasticism was made explicit in the prominent Scottish novelist Compton Mackenzie’s novel Sinister Street (1912–14).64 Much of the novel consists of a series of encounters in which Michael, the hero of the novel, has to avoid falling into the clutches of various homosexuals. One such episode takes place in an Anglican monastery at “Clere Abbas,” where Michael encounters a monk, Brother Aloysius, whose hand is “as hot as hell.” He explains that he went into the monastery to try to reform, having been a reprobate on a scale of Dorian Gray enormity whose “mind was debased to such an extent that he could boast of his delight in making the very priest writhe and wince in the Confessional.”65 He says, on meeting the teenage Michael: “You looked at me in Chapel and set me off again.” “I set you off?” stammered Michael. “Yes you with your big girl’s eyes.”66

Intergenerational relationships, notably those of the “Socratic” relation of master and pupil seem to recur with frequency in the mi-

61. Rolfe (1901), p. 357. 62. Shand-Tucci (2005), pp. 7 and 31, discussing Cram (1919), p. 35. 63. Hilliard (1982), p. 193; and Hanson (1997a), p. 180. 64. Further aspects of this novel are discussed in the next chapter. 65. C. Mackenzie (1960), p. 202. 66. Ibid., p. 201. See also H. Booth (2007).

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lieu of the Anglo- Catholic monastery.67 The term that was most widely employed in a positive sense for those possessed of same-sex desire at the end of the nineteenth century was “Uranian” or “urning.” This word was first employed by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs in the 1860s as the basis for establishing a new definition of same-sex desire. Ulrichs was seeking to assert sympathy for beings who, he held, possessed a female spirit in a man’s body (or vice versa).68 The word “Uranian” was applied by Timothy D’Arch Smith in the title of his pioneering study of the remarkable efflorescence of homoerotic verse at the fin de siècle which frequently manifested itself in a passion for boys in ecclesiastical contexts. As he commented, “It is a hardy annual joke that clergymen are attracted to choir-boys, but it is none the less a fact that the Uranians, many of them members of the Church, swooned over their singing boys and acolytes.”69 Thus, when we look at a picture of a “a characteristic group” surrounding Father Ignatius at his monastery we may be seeing a group of men brought together by same-sex desire who have constructed what could be referred to as a queer family centered on the control and adulation of youth (see fig. 3.7). There is a small loose picture in the Norfolk Record Office archive of Lyne materials that shows a naked male dolly positioned in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary.70 There seems to have been a process of idealization taking place in which youths, and even babies, were idolized for their (supposedly) Christlike innocence, which then had to be maintained into adulthood through ascetic discipline. James Kincaid has suggested one way of reading such representations through his notion of “erotic innocence,” notably in the course of his study Child-Loving: The Erotic Child and Victorian Culture (1992). In this book Kincaid explained his view of the joined cultural constructions of the innocent child and the adult pervert as a self-serving fantasy on the part of authors and readers: [In this cultural construction] we are cast as attractive characters entirely free from desire, children are free from sexual attraction or from any desires of their own, and a few— but not too few—sociopathic people are possessed of needs that they then enact in terrible ways. Power has told us that if we rely on this story we cannot go wrong, so long as we repeat it often and loudly enough. Whether we now tell this

67. Roden (2002), p. 227. 68. H. Kennedy (1997). 69. D’Arch Smith (1970), p. 179. 70. Newspaper Cuttings Book, NCRO MC 2133/8.

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F I G U R E 3 . 7 Joseph Lyne as part of a “characteristic group” at Llanthony Abbey, undated

photograph in Beatrice de Bertouch, The Life of Father Ignatius, O.S.B., the Monk of Llanthony (Methuen: London, 1904), opposite p. 594.

tale because we need it for reassurance, because it provides us with easy access to the unthinkable ourselves, or both, there seems no end to our capacity to find in it charm and gladness.71

For Kincaid, inspired by his readings of Dickens, the innocent child is a passive blank: “This purity, this harmlessness is presented as a complete vacancy; the absence of harmfulness amounts, in fact, to nothing at all, a blank image waiting to be formed. As emptiness, the child David [Copperfield, but it could be Brother David] can be variously eroticized by those around him: his kissing mother, his hugging nurse, his beating stepfather and schoolmaster, the adult narrator, and, arguably, the reader. Purity, it turns out, provides just the opening a sexualising tendency requires.”72 The beating of “baby Samuel,” to take just one ex71. Kincaid (1992), p. 361. See also Kincaid (1998). 72. Kincaid (1992), p. 13. See also Ohi (2005).

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ample from monastery life, certainly looks as though it could fit neatly into this paradigm in which the denial of sexual abuse through a focus on the disciplining of the young is in fact nothing more than the refocusing of libidinal energies. This helps us to appreciate the role of homoerotic affect in the monastic context even if those involved believed that their passions were entirely innocent and that the children in question had really been saved from abusive relations outside the monastery. By the 1890s a number of “advanced” young writers were beginning to put their erotic desires for ecclesiastical youths into print in publications such as The Chameleon (1894) which was bankrolled by Lord Alfred Douglas and a group of his friends. Oscar Wilde’s essay “Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young,” which was to haunt him during his trials the following year, appeared in this publication.73 In the same edition there was published a story, “The Priest and the Acolyte,” by John Francis Bloxam, who was then an undergraduate (but who was later to become an Anglican minister). The narrative is of a same-sex love-affair between a priest and a fourteen-year- old blond boy.74 “God gave me my love for him,” says the priest, but knowing that the relationship’s continuation was socially impossible, he poisons the chalice and gives it to the acolyte to drink: “In God’s eyes we are martyrs, and we shall not shrink even from death in this struggle against the idolatrous worship of convention.”75 Since the 1960s immense advances have been made in the understanding of the cultural history of same-sex desire and the role played in it by perceptions of adolescents and of adolescence.76 To some extent the critical tide during the late twentieth century moved away from the practice of “discovering” such desire in nineteenth- century texts and contexts concerning youths and friendship. Historians, notably Jeffrey Richards, have carried out important work which has recovered the persistence of traditions of same-sex affection which were not based upon homoerotic desire but on what he refers to as the “emotional and spiritual tradition of manly 73. Wilde (1894). On the trials see Hyde (1973), Foldy (1997), Stationery Office (2001). Holland (2003), Cocks (2006a), and L. Moran (2008). 74. Bloxam (1907), p. 52. 75. Ibid., p. 63. See also D’Arch Smith (1970), p. 56. 76. Key materials exploring affective aspects of the history and literature of youth, friendship and homosexuality in detail include D’Arch Smith (1970) and Kaplan (2005), p. 104, and passim; and Tamagne (2006), pp. 106–24. Thomas Hughes, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, fi rst published in 1857, has received particular attention— for instance, from Puccio (1995) and M. Martin (2002). See also chap. 6 of the present book.

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love.”77 Nevertheless, the late nineteenth century was a period when such friendships were starting to fall under the suspicion of containing an element of sexual deviance. Thus Carolyn Oulton subtitled a chapter on this topic “The Problem of Male Friendship.” These problems, she tells us, were directly related to imbalances of (potentially sexual) power and issues of effeminization.78 As we have seen, Lyne, for one, evoked just such a problematic erotics in his proselytizing novels. Thus Lyne and Carlyle can be seen as struggling with ways in which to achieve a synthesis between homoerotic pleasures and self- discipline in a life of witness through communal prayer. These same-sex friends might, concealed in their cloisters, hope to avoid the critical public gaze which was fatal to Bloxam’s protagonists.

Guilds of Altar Boys As has been seen, the Roman and Anglo- Catholic same-sex community was one which was heavily implicated in practices redolent, in contemporary terms, with effeminacy, set up in combination with structures of authoritarian control. In other words, if we are going to find “problematic,” indeed “queer,” male friendships during this period, this would be a very good place to look. And while monks, at least at Llanthony, lived in proximity with large numbers of boys, secular Anglo and Roman- Catholic priests were also associated with youth groups—for instance, through the development of ecclesiastical guilds. The rise of Anglo- Catholicism can be seen as bringing forms of social relations previously seen only in the Roman Catholic Church to the heart of the modern English nation. To take one example, guilds of altar servers were a Roman institution that found imitation among elements of the Anglo- Catholic clergy in the first half of the twentieth century. I now go on to explore aspects of ecclesiastical life, such as these guilds, that had their roots in the Victorian Catholic revival and which provide evidence of how its values and cultural forms continued to influence Edwardian and interwar England. Interwar publications demonstrate that such organizations were a focus for homoerotic and youth- centered desires which seem very similar to those that had been developing in late Victorian Anglo- Catholicism. 77. Richards (1987), p. 117. 78. Oulton (2007), pp. 33–70.

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In April 1932 Cardinal Bourne introduced the first edition of the Altar Server. This was the monthly bulletin of the Archconfraternity of St.  Stephen, an organization which had been founded in 1905 by Fr.  Hamilton Macdonald, then chaplain to the Sacred Heart Convent in Hammersmith. Mgr. J. P. Collings was in charge in 1932, and he explained that interested priests might send an application fee in return for which they would receive the guild manual. In addition, “the guild medal to be worn by members after enrolment,” which would be blessed and sprinkled with holy water on admission, could be obtained for a shilling each.79 Currently the guild was established in forty parishes in the archdiocese of Westminster and fifteen outside.80 In November 1932, in his regular piece, “The ABC of Serving,” Mgr. Collings expounded on the subject of the “giving and receiving of the Kiss of Peace after Agnus Dei, at solemn High Mass.” He advocates that the Kiss should not stop with the clergy in hierarchy, but should be extended to each of the servers. This must be rehearsed, to ensure there is no irreverence. It does not involve direct kissing, but rather the laying of hands on shoulders and a slight bow to the right while saying “pax tecum”; “the procedure is then repeated, the last receiver becoming the giver, and so on until the end of the line is reached.”81 What sort of boys might be attracted to the giving and receiving of such stylized kisses? Clues were provided by descriptions of the conversions of such as St. Gabriel of our Lady of Sorrows, born in Assisi in 1838, a very ordinary child who seems to have possessed “all the blemishes of boyhood,” and yet, was transformed: “Gone the dancing pumps—in their place the rough sandals. Gone the glory of his hair! Gone the faultless trouser- crease! His dancing and his love-making, now of another kind.”82 Girls were emphatically part of the sinful world that must be given up since “the biggest distraction” is a girlfriend and devotion to her is “wrong because it is a practical proof that he is loving a creature more than God.”83 Instead of spending time with the young ladies boys must become (spiritually) beautiful; we need to “mould, to shape, to make beautiful, our characters, just as the Greek athletes took great care to keep their bodies fit (and beautiful— a point modern athletes seem to have forgotten).”84 Crichton, the author of these installments of the 79. Anon., front matter (1932), p. 2. 80. Anon., “The Ceremony” (1939), p. 9. 81. Collings (1932), pp. 1–2. 82. Vivian (1934), p. 2. 83. Crichton (1937), p. 6. 84. Crichton (1938), p. 9.

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“discipline of the liturgy,” appears to have been keeping a discerning eye on sportsmen’s bodies as well as on altar boys’ souls. It seems that the world of the interwar Roman Catholic confraternity was more than simply homosocial. And it is no coincidence that the modern Guild Handbook, published in 1986 at a time of increasing acknowledgment that there was a “problem” of gay clergy, goes to great pains to stress that women do play a role (albeit in a servile capacity) since the running of the church includes “the lady who arranges the flowers, not to mention the one who washes the altar cloths. Many different people use their talents to make the Mass a real family celebration—the celebration of God’s family.”85 It is striking that Low Church materials from the 1930s are often openly sexual in a heterosexual vein. For instance, the First Walthamstow Church Magazine, first published in 1938, which was associated with Matthews Memorial Methodist Church in northeast London, is packed with sexual innuendo in the form of “poetry” such as this: There were so many young lovers. WHO? Never mind! But ’twould tax the wisest to find Which girl did each boy Delight or annoy For each day NEW attachments they’s [sic] find The girl’s captain was there— called Joan: Until then she’d always been alone, But she found a boy, Which filled her with joy And in church sits no longer alone.86

Seth Koven has published a fascinating study of “slumming” in which certain upper- and middle- class people would take themselves to the slums, sometimes in order to carry out missionary work, but at other times as a form of voyeuristic tourism.87 One group of slummers were Anglo- Catholic “priests [who] were typically surrounded by boys, often costumed in ceremonial garb” when taking them on “gambols” in the countryside.88 Roman Catholics were, by definition, excluded

85. E. Matthews (1986), p. 8. 86. Anon., “An Echo” (1938), p. 16. 87. Koven (2004), p. 8. 88. Koven (1992), p. 369.

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from the Establishment’s understanding of the essence of Englishness, but the Anglo- Catholic imitation of such practices and interests effectively placed a new potential for queerness at the heart of English life. In 1931 the Anglo- Catholic priest Clive Luget (1883–1952) left London for the quiet country parish of Middleton in Essex. He swiftly instituted a St. Martin’s Guild of youths similar to that which he had started at the church of St. Michael and All Angels, Walthamstow (the last of seven parishes in London at which he had been curate).89 In the same year he published a children’s novel, The Vision of Latton Priory; or, the Prior’s Sacred Stone, the plot of which runs as follows: Luget is going with some boys to the country ruins of Latton Priory on a summer’s day when they are swept up in a vision of the medieval past. It transpires that Rome had sent the then prior a necklace with a special stone in it in thanks for his restoration of the priory. On his death the stone on its chain was placed round the feet of a statue of Our Lady. Its main attribute was that it acted as a test of a pilgrim’s purity, for it would turn from white to red and burn the sinner who touched it. The new prior then formed a Guild of the Sacred Stone, whose members wore replicas which had been touched against the original stone.90 In essence, this guild operated, thus far, in much the same way as the reallife Roman Catholic Archconfraternity of St. Stephen. A number of homoerotic schoolboy clichés are paraded in the novel. For instance, we are introduced to Stephen Horton who, at fourteen, was manly, brilliant, and good at sports but who fell into sin.91 Soon afterward he met Joseph who was eight, the only son of a widowed mother, who was very shy and was bullied by other boys. Stephen saw Joseph in chapel staring at the stone with an expression of “love and holiness”: The young boy’s look quite touched Stephen Horton’s heart, and, as the boy got up from his knees, Stephen beckoned him towards him. As he came close to him he placed his hand on the now trembling boy’s shoulder and said to him. “Joseph will you let me be your friend?” The young boy, with tears of gratitude in his eyes, whispered, “Yes. I should like to be your friend.”92

89. Halliday (2003), p. 23. 90. Luget (1931), p. 21. 91. Ibid., p. 106. 92. Ibid., pp. 110–11.

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Now known as “Stephen’s pet,” it was Joseph who was the salvation of the older boy. Holding the sacred stone, he “put his arm around the neck of his friend, Stephen, and gazed as he did so at Stephen’s red stone. Directly his hand touched the boy’s shoulder he saw his stone turn white again,” and he quietly whispered to his friend, “it is quite safe. The Sacred Stone accepts you. Kiss it and be happy again.”93 It is no surprise to find that Stephen had an “intense love for his little friend Joseph.”94 The novel also has scenes of more violent coded eroticism, as when the ruffians Edmund Daire and Martin Bright went to the tomb of the prior and picked up the Sacred Stone. Edmund “pressed it to his foul lips” which it burned terribly, and he then put his arm around the neck of Martin and forced him down crying, “You too shall kiss it.”95 The oral sexuality of such scenes is further extended to the eroticized person of Christ, for we read that it seemed to us for a moment as if we were in a dream, then we saw all clearly. The place of the Sacred Stone had been taken by the Sacred Host, Christ himself . . . presently we saw each member of the Guild go reverentially up to the altar and receive into his mouth the Sacred Host. . . . If the Sacred Stone refused to accept certain persons, could such ones be fit to take to their lips the Christ himself in Communion?96

All this appears to have built on the developing connections between the Eucharist and same-sex desire as explored in the previous chapter. In much of the above discussion I have been thinking about the degree to which sexual meanings can be read out of religious materials that are not straightforwardly explicit. It is important not to leap to the conclusion that any suggestive allusion can be taken as proof of closeted desires. Is the prior’s glowing stone nothing more than a piece of ecclesiastical bling? Or are such texts as these employing ecclesiastical material culture in ways that strongly imply that it is being sexually fetishized? The ability of Freudian analysis to identify sexual references in all manner of hitherto unsuspected places is well known today, but it was scandalous in early twentieth- century England. In 1914 a review by one Dr. Mercier in the British Medical Journal attempted to stem the

93. Ibid., p. 112. 94. Ibid., p. 113. 95. Ibid., p. 121. 96. Ibid., p. 134. Compare Arditti (2009), p. 165 [fi rst published 1993].

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tide of continental filth. Mercier denounced the way in which “the Freudian finds tongues (talking dirt) in trees, books (on beastliness) in the running brooks, sermons (on sexuality) in stones and filth in everything.”97 The legitimacy of this has ever since been hotly debated. Virginia C. Barry, in her essay “Freud and Symbolism: Or How a Cigar Became More than a Cigar” (2001), argued that a cigar should be seen as a phallic symbol (in Freudian terms as an attempt to assert masculine potency), when it appears in particular contexts. She suggests that a cigar is just a cigar when it is one of a set in a box on a counter, but it is a phallic prop when we find a woman chomping it when dressed in a business suit.98 For her, thinking with the body is crucial: “The body’s interaction with the world is central to the structure of thought and . . . many symbols derive their meanings from the projection of the body onto objects in the world. This is how a cigar comes to be more than a cigar.”99 But did not Freud himself say that “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”? This phrase is widely repeated today but, after an exhaustive survey of the evidence, Alan C. Elms found that there was no evidence that Freud ever said any such thing; rather, that he did not think that human culture was a catalogue of accidents but represented evidence that should be mined in its entirety in order to determine its pyschological significance.100 The communal life of certain British monasteries and confraternities had considerable potential to produce lives which combined same-sex desire with forms of intense self- discipline. Since sodomitical practices, as opposed to eroticized friendships, were held to be sinful it is hardly surprising that erotic affect appears often to have been projected onto aspects of ecclesiastical material and visual culture, such that a papal jewel could be, for instance, seen as standing in for the homoeroticized body of Christ. Shared love for the material aspects of devotion to Jesus could, therefore, lead to eroticized fetishism of images and objects that enabled men who desired sex with men to join in a community of those with similar longings without, necessarily, implicating them in the commission of sin. 97. Quoted and discussed in Pick (2003). Note the connection between fi lth and sex, on which see chap. 2 of the present volume. 98. Barry (2001), p. 64. 99. Ibid., p. 65. 100. Elms (2001), pp. 95–101.

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Frederick Rolfe’s Scrapbook I have discussed the opportunities and limitations offered by membership of religious communities both monastic and lay, but members of congregations or simply aesthetically inclined individuals could also employ the visual and material aspects of ecclesiastical culture in their private lives. Away from the legally regulated sphere of public liturgical practice the objects and images of devotion could be arranged, for instance, in the form of domestic altars centered on aesthetic desires, into new and, potentially, even subversive formations of both spiritual and sexual self-expression. Not only that, but even satires on such aesthetic material self-expression could be harnessed in order to further develop culturally and sexually deviant images of the self. Nevertheless, I will be exploring not only the opportunities for queer self-expression offered by engagement with ecclesiastical style but also the limitations. The central focus here is Frederick Rolfe (1860–1913) whose quest for self- expression took him beyond what was possible within the institutional structures of the Church. Although it was as a Roman Catholic priest that he sought, unsuccessfully, to be ordained, I align him with the Anglican traditions which I have been exploring in the previous chapters because he was a convert and, therefore, can be seen as having participated in the distinctively English Protestant conceptualization of Catholicism as a site of queer subjectivity.1 I now move beyond the authorized ma1. See O’Malley (2009) and as discussed in the fi rst chap. of this book.

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terial culture of institutional religion to look at the meanings that individuals might create in private using ecclesiastical objects via the practices of bricolage that I discussed in my introduction. These can be seen to foreshadow the textual extravagances and curious juxtapositions employed by decadent writers such as Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank. Private devotional practices had long played an important role in popular religiosity. It was widely accepted that religious instruction in the home was the pious duty of the head of the household. At the center of such practice was the Bible and books of guidance were produced which furnished advice on which sections were to be read each day.2 Texts such as these became items expressive not only of Christian devotion but also of family cohesion. An example of this is a large and luxuriously produced volume in the British Library’s collections, The Altar at Home; or Family Communion by F. L. Pearce (ca. 1840). Pearce was a minster at Olean in the state of New York and president of the Western Continental Bible Society. This copy contains the inscribed “Family Register” of John and Louise Oliver, who were married at Christ Church, Blackfriars, in London, on 19 March 1842. There is a list of their children, their marriages, and finally deaths going down to 1911.3 While the focus for devotion lay in the words of the Gospel the book is liberally illustrated with plates including, notably as its frontispiece, Christ Blessing the Bread by T. H. Ellis (see fig. 4.1). Several other images, such as Noah’s sacrifice and Adam’s sacrifice, show sacrificial vessels and, as such, also evoke the rising passion for Eucharistic devotion in Anglican (and Episcopalian) devotion as was discussed in chapter 2. The spread of Catholic-styles of devotion in the early Victorian period was widely opposed due to the persistence of popular antiCatholicism. Many of those Protestants who felt an interest in Catholicism responded to this hostile environment by establishing their own private devotions. For example, William Etty (1787–1849), who was Britain’s preeminent painter of the nude, neglected and even disowned the Methodism of his youth. We find him complaining, in a letter he wrote to his friend Sydney Taylor in 1841, of those “ostentatious Temples the Methodists are building after the Pagan Model, i.e. York and Hull. Lofty unnecessary porticos Ionic columns  .  .  . candelabras of gilded brass, crimson linings in the pews and cushions, or-

2. For instance W. Smith (1817); Temple (1839); anon., “Various Ministers” (1850); anon., “S. R. B.” (1883); Deems (1884); and R. Williams (1910). 3. Pearce (1840), British Library RB.23.b.4248.

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F I G U R E 4 .1 F. L. Pearce, The Altar at Home; or, Family Communion for Every Day throughout

the Year (London: Husk, ca. 1840), frontispiece, © British Library Board, all rights reserved, RB.23.b.4248.

gans.”4 The connection that he made here between classical architecture and pagan temples was the same as was being made at this time by A. W. N. Pugin, whom Etty had met in 1837 when he attended High Mass at the consecration of the chapel at Oscott and with whom, in the opinion of Rosemary Hill, he was a good friend.5 Pugin was, of course, the foremost apologist for (Roman) Catholic styles in art and architecture and for the primacy of gothic over classical forms. Around this time, according to Etty’s biographer, Alexander Gilchrist, the painter set up in his bedroom a dilettante . . . monkish altar: a pure white cloth with beautiful fringe; on it a splendid crucifix [original emphasis]. Above that a drawing of the Entombment by Ra-

4. Quoted in Leonard Robinson (2007), p. 276, and discussed in Janes (2011c). 5. Farr (1958), p. 80; and R. Hill (2009), p. 327.

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phael and figures of Justice and Theology after Raphael on either side. Beneath the crucifix, a silvery butterfly, emblem of the Soul, enriched with a crown of thorns in wrought silver; a Chalice and Sacramental Cup, a row of Catholic Beads and cross; an hour glass, three ancient books (centuries old). On the right, look! and you’ll see a piece of deep black velvet, with border and tassels of gold; on it a cross of richest crimson velvet: lift up the corner and you will see— not what we are, but what we soon shall be.6

The use of the term “dilettante” implies that Etty was not acting out of a serious sense of religious conviction. William Camidge, in 1899, implies the reason behind the painter’s enthusiasm when he wrote that “to the Roman Catholics he [Etty] had decided leanings; he cherished great gratitude to them for having conserved paintings, architecture, music and other fine arts.”7 Gilchrist also emphasized the sensual attractions of Catholicism for Etty, saying that as “an amateur Romanist, like many of his temperament, he now and again attended Mass for the music’s sake.”8 Etty, himself, suggested a material rather than a spiritual motivation for his actions when he said in an undated letter to his brother Walter that “I am not a Catholic, nor probably ever shall be (unless they get their own Cathedrals back again).”9 Gilchrist also tells us that Etty carried on much “elaborate child’s play (by letter) under the assumed characters of ‘Abbot,’ ‘Monk,’ or ‘Hermit.’”10 This recalls the playacting that Sir Francis Dashwood, who had been involved in the founding of the Society of Dilettanti in ca. 1732–33, delighted in practicing through his brotherhood of the knights of St. Francis (also known as the “Medmenham Monks”).11 This “order” was widely suspected of being devoted to the arts, not of St. Francis, but of Venus, and Dashwood actively encouraged such speculations though commissioning erotic paintings such as William Hogarth’s Sir Francis Dashwood at His Devotions (1757), which was hung behind a curtain, but became notorious as a print after Dashwood had it engraved in 1760.12 It is, therefore, hardly surprising that the adjective “dilettante” had

6. Gilchrist (1855), 2, p. 73; and Gaunt and Roe (1943), p. 46– 47; see also anon., review Gilchrist (1855). 7. Camidge (1899), p. 20. 8. Gilchrist (1855), vol. 2, p. 73. 9. Quoted in Leonard Robinson (2007), pp. 273. 10. Gilchrist (1855), 2, p. 25. 11. Kelly (2006), pp. 760 and 780– 83, figures 1, 5, and 6. 12. West (1992), p. 86; and Kelly (2006), p. 779

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come to suggest libidinous and decadent preoccupations by the midnineteenth century. 13 However, unlike Dashwood, Etty was a quiet man, who never married and appears to have been celibate. His quasiCatholic devotions seem to belong to a similarly ambiguous space between devotion, irony, and pleasure as that occupied by the faux Mass that was performed with incense by Horace Walpole at the house of his friend John Chute, or indeed the quasi-monastic sodalities of Fonthill Abbey under William Beckford.14 It would seem that Etty’s altar provided him with some form of satisfaction, be that sensual or otherwise, that he was seemingly not able to gain via the public worship of his time. My aim is certainly not to suggest that those who made domestic or secret Catholic-themed altars in Victorian Britain were always doing so because they were possessed of same-sex desires. However, these practices suggest that English approaches to the material forms of Catholicism could be inspired by a search for personal, deviant self-expression. The display of Catholic forms of devotion which were, at that date, illegal in the Church of England, such as crucifi xes and candles before images, brought out complex and ambivalent responses. For example, two works of John Everett Millais (1829–96), Mariana (1851) and St. Agnes’ Eve (1854), show domestic Catholic altars in situations of moral ambiguity. The first picture shows Mariana from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (ca. 1603), who is living a solitary life, pining for her fiancé who had rejected her. The painting was originally exhibited together with the lines from Tennyson’s poem “Mariana”: “She only said, ‘My life is dreary—he cometh not!’ she said / She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary—I would that I were dead!’” (see fig. 4.2).15 In St. Agnes’ Eve (1854), a nun looks out over a desolate landscape such that her “virginity becomes identified with sterility; the twisted body of the crucified Christ above her personal altar is equated with the gnarled leafless tree in the garden.”16 The message is much the same as that of Charles Allston Collins’s (1828–73) Convent Thoughts (1851), save that here Catholic sexual denial is contrasted with the floral exuberance of summer’s abundance (see fig. 4.3). This painting has sometimes been read as a pro- Catholic 13. Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989, “Dilettante,” http://dictionary.oed.com, accessed 10 April 2010. 14. W. Davis (2011), p. 320; and Reeve (2013a), p. 24; and (2013b), p. 419. See also the discussion of Walpole in the previous chapter together with Fincher (2001). 15. Tennyson, discussed by Demoor (2002), p. 331. 16. Sussman (1980), p. 49. See also Barlow (2005), p. 104.

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F I G U R E 4 . 2 John Everett Millais, Mariana (1851), oil on wood (mahogany), 59.7 × 49.5 cm, © Tate, London 2012 (accession no. T07553).

statement in which the flowers appear as emblems of truth and beauty. However, it is known that Collins’s attitudes to sisterhoods were “at best ambivalent.”17 Moreover, flowers were widely suspected at this date of being, in their fertile allure, inappropriate in contexts of piety.18 The novice in this painting appears anxious at the impending sacrifice of 17. Casteras (1981), p. 173. 18. Janes (2011a).

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F I G U R E 4 . 3 Charles Allston Collins, Convent Thoughts (1851), oil on canvas, 84 × 59 cm, reproduced by permission of the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, WA 1894.10. A273.

her reproductive opportunities when she takes her final vows of celibacy.19 Collins painted Convent Thoughts in the company of Millais when he was working on Mariana. They were staying at the house of Thomas Combe, who was a senior figure at Oxford University Press and 19. Sussman (1980), p. 46; and Fletcher (2003), p. 299.

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a Tractarian.20 It is known that Combe owned two small triptychs and a censor because these came up in a sale of family effects. It is these objects that appear to have been used by Millais in his depiction of Mariana’s altar. If so, this would suggest both contemporary practices of Tractarian domestic altar construction, and the fascinated ambivalence with which Millais viewed them as being emblematic of sexual frustration. John Ruskin, in his letter to The Times of 13 May 1851 on the subject of Pre-Raphaelite paintings, made it abundantly clear that even the level of prurient interest in Catholic forms shown by these painters was, in his view, morally suspect: “I have no acquaintance with any of these artists, and very imperfect sympathy with them. No one who has met with any of my writings will suspect me of daring to encourage them in their Romanist and Tractarian tendencies. I am glad to see that Mr. Millais’s lady in blue [Mariana] is heartily tired of her painted window and idolatrous toilet-table.”21 These paintings left many viewers uneasy precisely because they did not make a clear distinction between whether their subject was essentially devotional, critical, or erotic. Rather, their effect was to evoke a combination of the three to create a sort of alternative, one might almost say, queer, cultural formation in which perverse religiosity was promoted by unusual sexual constraints and vice versa. Denial or absence of the marital state often appears as a tragedy in these works, but such a situation is likely to have been a relief to those possessed of same-sex desire because Catholic traditions of celibacy could excuse them from the otherwise customary physical regimes of heterosexual marriage. In the absence of marital relations there might be more time for material, religious devotions and a greater fervency in such practices. However, as in the case of anti- Catholic images of monks and nuns, the celibate was precisely understood to stand in danger of developing a pathological excess of sexual feelings precisely because of the lack of a suitable sexual partner. The excessive display of devotional objects could, in itself, be read as signaling frustrated, sexual desire. By the end of the nineteenth century that inchoate yearning began to manifest distinctively homoerotic aspects. Compton Mackenzie’s (1883–1972) early twentieth- century novels are particularly useful in exploring this issue, because of their author’s fascinated ambivalence toward the worlds of religion and sexual deviance.22 A particular rich text in this vein is Sinister Street (1913–14) which, as mentioned in the

20. Grieve (1969), p. 295. 21. John Ruskin, The Times, 13 May 1851: 8– 9. 22. Hilliard (1982), p. 203.

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last chapter, recounts the story of the upbringing and young adulthood of Michael Fane during which he encounters a considerable number of characters that are implicitly homosexual. The way in which this is communicated is through innuendo, which often takes the form of reference to suggestive images and religious objects. When Maurice, in E. M. Forster’s novel (which was begun at about the same time), confesses to homosexuality he does so by saying that “‘I’m an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.’” He is not believed because he is manly rather than effeminate.23 After the Wilde trials of 1895 people had a clearer image of what it was thought that a homosexual should look, act, and sound like.24 Just such an “Oscar Wilde” appears in Sinister Street in the form of Mr. Wilmot, whom the reader first meets staring at Michael’s buttocks when the boy was up a step ladder in Elson’s bookshop in Hammersmith. He startles the youth by asking, “What is the book, Hyacinthus?”25 Wilmot then reveals that he is a poet: “I don’t suppose you’ve seen any of my stuff. I don’t publish much. Sometimes I read my poems to Interior people.” Michael looked puzzled. “Interior is my name for the people who understand. So few do. I should say you’d be sympathetic. You look sympathetic. You remind me of those exquisite boys who in scarlet hose run delicately with beakers of wine or stand in groups about the corners of old Florentine pictures.” “Won’t you smoke? These Chian cigarettes in their diaphanous paper of mildest mauve would suit your oddly remote, your curiously shy glance . . . shall I buy you A Rebours, and teach you to live?”26

Wilmot was, significantly, very much a fan of aestheticized Christianity in his youth: “‘The Church! . . . How wonderful! The dim Gothic glooms, the sombre hues of stained glass, the incense-wreathed acolytes, the muttering priests, the bedizened banners and altars and images. Ah, elusive and particoloured vision that once was mine!’”27 In Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), a passion for ecclesiastical bling is presented as another aspect of Dorian’s decadence when we read that “he had a special passion, also, for ecclesiastical vestments, as indeed he had for everything connected with the service of the Church. 23. Forster (2005), p. 138. 24. Rowbotham (2009), p. 203. 25. C. Mackenzie (1960), p. 215; and H. Booth (2007), p. 322. 26. C. Mackenzie (1960), pp. 215–16. 27. C. Mackenzie (1960), p. 219, discussed in H. Booth (1997), p. 61.

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In the long cedar chests that lined the west gallery of his house he had stored away many rare and beautiful specimens of what is really the raiment of the Bride of Christ, who must wear purple and jewels and fine linen that she may hide the pallid macerated body that is worn by the suffering that she seeks for, and wounded by self-inflicted pain.”28 Later, when on holiday in Bournemouth, Michael visits the AngloCatholic Church of St. Bartholemew where he meets the bank clerk Bernard Prout, a thin and eager young man who invites him to sit next to him and share his prayer book. Prout asks Michael if he lives locally and on hearing that he does not says that that is a pity because, “‘we do so want servers—you know— decent-looking servers.’” Michael is swiftly invited back to Prout’s lodgings. “I’ll show you my oratory. Of course, you’ll understand that I’m only in rooms here, but the landlady is a very pleasant woman. She let me plant that passion-flower in the garden. Perhaps you noticed it? The same with this oratory. It was a housemaid’s cupboard, but it was very inconvenient— and there isn’t a housemaid as a matter of fact—so I secured it. Come along.” Mr. Prout led the way on to the landing, at the end of which were two doors. “We can’t both kneel down, unless the door’s open,” said Mr. Prout. “But when I’m alone, I can just shut myself in.” He opened the oratory door as he spoke, and Michael was impressed by the appearance of it. The small window had been covered with a rice-paper design of Jesse’s Rod. “It’s a bit Protty,” whispered Mr. Prout. “But I thought it was better than plain squares of blue and red.” “Much better,” Michael agreed. A ledge nailed beneath the window supported two brass candlesticks and a crucifix. The reredos was an Arundel print of the Last Supper and on corner brackets on either side were statues of the Immaculate Conception and Our Lady of Victories. A miniature thurible hung on a nail and on another nail was a holy-water stoup which Michael at first thought was intended for soap. In front of the altar was a prie- dieu stacked with books of devotion. There were also blessed palms, very dusty, and a small sanctuary lamp suspended from the ceiling. Referring to this, Mr. Prout explained that really it came from the Turkish Exhibition at Earl’s Court, but that he thought it would do as he had carefully exorcized it according to the use of Sarum [i.e.,. the late medieval Roman Catholic rite from Salisbury].29

28. Wilde (2003), p. 142. 29. C. Mackenzie (1960), pp. 175–77. This quote is intended in both its scale and detail to reflect the politics of excess that is intrinsic to such descriptions of queer assemblages.

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Prout’s oratory is, quite literally, in a closet. Moreover, this cramped room is opened to Michael in an act of attempted seduction. In this passage Mackenzie is clearly satirizing practices of queer bricolage on the part of this youth of lower social class and yet he is also fascinated by the sexual significance of this material assemblage. This parody also represents a degree of the opening up of the conceptual space of the closet to the reader as the secret of Prout’s sexuality is revealed, rather than concealed, by this textual exhibition of his private material practices. It is important to understand, however, that what the novelist was doing here was not so much denouncing deviance as exploring and elaborating it. Just as Sinister Street was being published, Mackenzie moved with his wife to Capri where he converted to Catholicism and she embarked on a lesbian affair. This suggests that the religion of the closet, as a way of reformulating spiritual and sexual identity, was not only of interest to homosexuals, and also represented a stage in a wider reconceptualization of the links between material culture and sexuality. The butt of the satire here is not so much the fact of material devotion as the cheapness and vulgarity of its execution. Prout’s devotional practice, in style if not in quality, bears comparison with that displayed, to give one example, in Walter Crane’s painting Love’s Altar (1870) (see fig. 4.4). This shows an androgynous young man worshipping at an altar that is surmounted by a portrait of the woman who was Crane’s fiancée, Mary Frances Andrews.30 The artist wrote a sonnet to accompany the work that was eventually published in Renascene: A Book of Verse (1891): No more I go to worship with the crowd In Christian temples pagan now to me . . . I have a shrine A holiest of holies— Love’s sweet home, On whose white altar lies life’s bread and wine, For thee, though not a Roman devotee, Sweet virgin Mary do I worship thee.31

The painting is a highly aestheticized act of bricolage which mixes classical, medieval, and oriental references with a Renaissance sensibility. 32 The anonymous reviewer in the Art Journal denounced it as show-

30. O’Neill (2010), p. 192, nn. 48– 49. 31. Smith and Hyde (1989), p. 108. 32. Anderson and Wright (1994), pp. 61– 62, no. 16.

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F I G U R E 4 . 4 Walter Crane, Love’s Altar (1870), oil on canvas, 78.0 × 55.5 cm, reproduced by permission of the William Morris Gallery, London.

ing “an altar, which appears to be a rather irreverent parody of those to be seen in Catholic and Ritualistic places of worship: lights, sacramental wine, flowers, altar-piece, breviary &c., are here all burlesqued.”33 I would argue that this is fundamentally a misreading. Crane was not parodying Church practice so much as using it to formulate his own synthesis of spiritualized desire. Furthermore, the visual focus of this painting is the beauty of the worshipper at his devotions; Simeon Solomon, as we saw in chapter 2, had developed this as a key theme in his exploration of same-sex desire (see fig. 2.7). The eclectic religion of aesthetic love was not just depicted but also enacted at the closet altar. For instance, to give another example, 33. Anon., “Old Bond Street” (1870), p. 211.

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Count Stanislaus Eric Stenbock (1860–1895), who was a patron of Solomon and a writer of Uranian verse, decorated his room in his family estate at Kolk in Estonia in “the most aesthetic style, with a lamp burning before a Buddha and an Eros— and his other gods disposed in various places. When he was at Oxford, he and one of his friends . . . used to try a fresh religion every week, and he now has the trophies of each experiment, which he seems to worship with impartiality.”34 Solomon himself described seeing Stenbock in his rooms in London wearing “a magnificent blood red silk robe embroidered in gold and silver. He was swinging a silver censer before an altar covered with lilies, myrtles, lighted candles and a sanctuary lamp burning with scented oil.”35 The visual culture of religious devotion could, therefore, be employed in the exploration of diverse forms of eroticism. Stenbock was not in holy orders, but then neither, despite his best efforts, was “Fr.” Rolfe (who posed as a priest by habitually so abbreviating his first name). That notwithstanding, I will show how Rolfe also made use of bricolage in the arrangement of visual materials in order to construct a personal image of himself as a queer priest. This sheds light on the degree to which combining the material and the visual witness of both spiritual and homoerotic yearnings was possible at this date.36

Photographs and Christmas Cards You have to start by imagining two heavily but cheaply decorated rooms. Evidence of the first survives in the form of a pair of photographs pasted into a large scrapbook—mainly filled with newspaper clippings—which is now in the archives of the Bodleian Library in Oxford.37 Each photograph shows a separate wall of the room, possibly that which the photographer inhabited when he was a master at the Grammar School in Saffron Walden, Essex, from 1880 to 1881. A range of postcards and prints supplements paintings by the photog-

34. Related by Mary Costelloe (the wife of Frank Costelloe, Stenbock’s friend from his time as a student at Oxford University and his business manager), 7 January 1886, in Adlard (1980), p. 19. 35. Quoted in Beckson (2004). On Stenbock see also Adlard (1969). 36. The below material fi rst appeared in earlier form in Janes (2011b) and (2012a). For Rolfe’s visual legacy see Rosenthal (2008). Much of his work bears comparison with that of the leading Uranian photographers of the day such as Wilhelm von Gloeden; see Natter and Weiermair (2000) and Goldman (2006). 37. Ms. Walpole b. 5.

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rapher himself, including two of a youth who appears centrally above the mantelpiece in clerical dress and with a halo (where his depiction appears to play the same role as the image of Mary in Crane’s painting) (figs. 4.4 and 4.5) and in everyday informal costume on the other wall.38 The second room is described in a novel, Hadrian the Seventh, written twenty years later by that same man, Frederick Rolfe: To the grey wall above the mantel a large sheet of brown packing paper was tacked. On this background were pinned photographs of the Hermes of Herculaneum, the terra- cotta Sebastian of South Kensington, Donatello’s liparose David and the vivid David of Verrocchio, the wax model of Cellini’s Perseys, an unknown Rugger XV, prized for a single example of the rare feline- human type, and the O.U.D.S. Sebastian of Twelfth Night of 1900. Tucked into the edges of these were Italian picture post- cards presenting Andrea del Sarto’s young St. John, Alessandro Filipepi’s Primavera, a page from an old Salon catalogue showing Friant’s Wrestlers, another from an old Harper’s Magazine showing Boucher’s Runners, a cheap and lovely chromo of an olive-skinned black-haired corn-flower- crowned Pancratius in white on a gold ground, the visiting cards of five literary agents, and a post- card tersely inscribed Verro precipitevolissimevolmente. The mantle-shelf contained stone bottles of ink, pipes, a miniature in a closed morocco case, a caste of Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s seal from Oxford, two pairs of silver spectacles in chagreen cases, four tiny ingots of pure copper, a sponge gum bottle, and an open book with painted covers showing Eros at the knees of Psyche and a mysterious group of divers in the clear of the moon.39

Hadrian the Seventh (1904, written ca. 1901–2) is an astonishing fantasy novel in which one George Arthur Rose becomes pope. The novel begins in the midst of poverty and obscurity in Islington, in London, where Rose lives alone with his cat. We are introduced to him as he sits amid his aesthetic clutter, leafing through a book of newspaper cuttings.40 The mixture of objects and images with Catholic and homoerotic overtones is the same in both rooms, just as the character of Rose was directly based upon that of the author himself. Frederick Rolfe was a painter and photographer, but it is for his novels, particularly Hadrian the Seventh, that he is most famous. He was

38. There was a third image of this unidentified person in half profi le, carrying a taper and called “St. Aloysius”; see Rosenthal (2008), p. 9. 39. Rolfe (1904), p. 8. 40. Ibid., p. 3.

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F I G U R E 4 . 5 Frederick Rolfe, His Room at Saffron Walden (ca. 1880– 81), sepia print, reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Walpole c. 21, folio 21, recto.

initially regarded as an eccentric outlier of the aesthetic movement, but his literary output has come to be recognized as being of particular importance because it lies on the boundaries of romanticism and modernism. The publication of A. J. A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo (1934) brought Rolfe to the attention of a wider public and critical esti-

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mation of him rose through the mid-twentieth century. For instance, he goes unmentioned in the first edition from 1930 of Stuart Gilbert’s classic study of James Joyce’s Ulysses, but in the revised edition, referencing Symons, the author remarks that “had the Fates been kinder, that unhappy genius [Rolfe] might have moved parallel, if on a somewhat lower plane, to Joyce.”41 Rolfe was the eldest of five sons of a dissenting piano manufacturer. He went to school in Camden, in London, became an unattached student at Oxford and then a master at a series of schools. He converted to Roman Catholicism and tried to become a priest. He also claimed, subsequently, to have been given the title of “Baron Corvo” by an elderly lady, the Duchess Sforza Cesarini.42 There were two main reasons why Rolfe failed in his vocation: the first was that he was a very difficult and prickly character who easily made enemies and the second was that he was decidedly queer. Frederick Rolfe’s output, both literary and artistic, is in the tradition of Uranian desire for adolescents that was explored in the previous chapter. For example, his next major novel, Nicholas Crabbe, or, the One and the Many (written 1903– 4, published posthumously in 1958) is also semiautobiographical. It is, in essence, a love affair, between Crabbe (Rolfe) and a frail seventeen-year- old telegraph boy called Kemp whom the older man meets when bathing in the Serpentine Lake in London’s Hyde Park.43 But that story pales in comparison with the erotic descriptions in the so- called Venice letters which Rolfe sent to Charles Masson Fox, an unmarried businessman who lived in Falmouth in Cornwall. Rolfe lived in Venice from 1908 to his death in 1913. In May 1890, having failed in his bid for the priesthood, Rolfe had taken a vow of twenty years of celibacy and although “there is no concrete evidence that that vow was ever broken,” only three weeks after its expiry we find evidence of sexual affairs.44 Rolfe’s first biographer, A. J. A. Symons, describes his hair rising as he read “step by step, of the destruction of a soul . . . only lack of money, it appeared, prevented the writer from enjoying an existence compared with which Nero’s was innocent, praiseworthy and unexciting”!45 Even Robert Aldrich, in his study The

41. S. Gilbert (1955), p. 92. 42. Bradshaw (2009) provides a short but up-to- date life of Rolfe. The two most important full-length biographies are D. Weeks (1971) and Benkovitz (1977). Andrew Eburne (1994 and 2002) has carried out the most detailed recent literary studies of aspects of Rolfe’s textual output. 43. Rolfe (1958), p. 20. 44. Eburne (2002), p. 17. 45. Symons (1966), p. 27.

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Seduction of the Mediterranean (1993) turns a little tight-lipped: “Italy for Corvo is little more than a picturesque bordello. The high-minded view of the Mediterranean, classical and modern, portrayed in English letters since Byron, here begins to fade.”46 Rolfe was attracted to teenagers. He commented that a small boy was like a “lanky uninteresting wafer. Since then, the work of dancing up and down planks with heavy sacks has filled him out, clothed him with the most lovely pads of muscular sweet flesh. . . . Then some great fat slow cow of a girl will just open herself wide, and lie quite still, and drain him dry. First, the rich bloom will go. Then he’ll get hard and hairy. And, by July, he’ll have a moustache . . . and be just the ordinary stevedore found by scores on the quays.”47 Frederick Rolfe did not, in his writings, classify his sexual identity as Uranian or homosexual, or by using any other of the terms available at the time. Nevertheless, his life and works were powerfully transgressive of conventional notions of behavior. Rolfe was living during a period in which novel sexual identities, as well as the notion of sexual identity itself, were being conceptualized.48 However, his creative enterprises, from paintings to novels and scrapbooks, show us some of the ways in which he created and expressed his growing sense of difference. One example of such self- construction appears in the pages of the aforementioned large scrapbook now in the Bodleian Library archives in Oxford. The volume does not show any sign of being an aesthetic object intended for public display or for viewing by friends.49 Rather, it appears to have been a personal archive consisting primarily of newspaper clippings on ecclesiastical issues and material from Rolfe’s work as a school teacher. Several pages of the scrapbook were filled with stories relating to the aftereffects of anti-ritualist legislation passed during the previous decade; this shows Rolfe’s fascination with what was being claimed as a contemporary version of martyrdom. The word “martyr” was widely applied in the later nineteenth century to refer to a number of Anglican clergy who had been prosecuted for performing overtly Catholic liturgical practices. The focal point for such usage occurred when several priests were imprisoned for having flouted the Public Worship

46. Aldrich (1993), p. 93. 47. Letter 7, 11 December 1909, Rolfe (1974), pp. 36– 37. 48. Amanda Anderson (2005). 49. Compare Di Bello (2007), pp. 29– 52, on “nineteenth- century album culture.”

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Regulation Act (hereafter PWRA) (1874) that had been passed in the wake of the legal case against William Bennett discussed in chapter 2. Supporters of this legislation accused their opponents of being fakes in that their “modern martyrdom” consisted of little more than short spells in prison. However, Anglo- Catholics connected acts of contemporary defiance with those of the confessors of the early Church. A quasi-hagiographic body of discourse began to coalesce around key figures such as Rev. Arthur Tooth (1839–1931).50 His father was wealthy and he was an excellent horseman and hunter. He traveled widely, including to Australia, where he appears to have discovered his vocation. He was ordained in 1863, and was appointed to his first entirely independent cure as vicar of St. James’s, Hatcham, in southeast London in 1868. The parish became notorious for Anglo- Catholic exuberance and he was duly summonsed in 1876 under the PWRA (1874) for using proscribed liturgical practices. On 22 January 1877, as a result of his ignoring the decisions of Lord Penzance’s court, he was arrested and taken to London’s Horsemonger Lane Gaol. The thought that the PWRA might create “martyrs” was voiced as early as 8 January of that year in the Pall Mall Gazette.51 The crucial event, however, in terms of media coverage, took place at a meeting of ritualists in Bristol on 23 January when Earl Nelson was shouted at as he argued against disestablishment of the Church of England. He opposed the PWRA but he did not think that the appropriate solution was a legal split between church and state. He appears to have been drowned out by extremist voices, and there were cheers for the “martyr Tooth.”52 This “sound-bite” was reported widely, and mostly sarcastically it has to be said, in the papers, and appears to have been the occasion when the word “martyr” was first widely applied by the popular press to Anglo- Catholic ritualists. Thus, on 27 January it was noted in the Preston Chronicle that “there is a great deal afloat in the papers about the ‘martyr Tooth,’ and to us it is very new-fangled.”53 Meanwhile, it was reported with disgust that “prayers are actually asked of the people, and offered up in several churches.”54 The range of negative church and chapel opinion can be illustrated by comments from Primitive Methodist, Anglican, and Roman Catholic publications. The (Methodist) Christian Ambassador denounced “the ritualistic lep50. Whisenant (2003), pp. 282– 83; and Palmer (2004). 51. Anon., “At Hatcham” (1877), pp. 97– 98. 52. Anon., “General News” (1877), p. 8. 53. Anon., “Stray Notes” (1877), p. 5. 54. Anon., “Monthly” (1877), p. 207.

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rosy  .  .  . the fanatical Mr. Tooth has at length fairly stepped into the line of apostolical succession  .  .  . and in addition to that his friends have solemnly proclaimed him to be a martyr for the truth!” This statement can be compared with the measured comments of the Anglican publication the Churchman’s Shilling Magazine, which said that Tooth was not a martyr but merely a “self-willed albeit doubtless a conscientious man,” and with the sententious comments of the Catholic World which argued that Tooth should convert immediately and have done with it.55 Others simply dismissed the matter as a fringe battle between religious extremists, as when Sir Wilfred Lawson (1829–1906), MP for Carlisle, addressed the liberal electors of West Cumberland at Workington and was reported in The Times as referring to the “martyr Mr Tooth whom he regarded as little more than a lunatic (laughter).”56 Some of the media coverage was sympathetic. The tone of the Liverpool Mercury was solicitous when it informed its readers in detail about Tooth’s prison conditions. It was noted that he was not put in the cell of a “first class misdemeanant” but in the “common part” of the prison, since he was to be treated as a debtor not a criminal. It was asserted that if he had a servant that person could cook and clean for him, although, of course, not live there too. It was reported that he was soon moved to a better cell which was furnished with a table and chairs and a “comfortable feather bed.”57 Such arrangements, which might appear to be the deserved amelioration of conditions for a gentleman unjustly imprisoned, were not viewed in at all the same light by supporters of the PWRA. For instance, the Dundee Courier and Argus opined that the officials have been desirous to make things as comfortable as possible for the modern martyr. . . . If Mr Tooth’s incarceration is a martyrdom, it is so in quite a different degree from that of men and women who were thrown into loathsome dungeons, and received deliverance from them only to be led to torture and the stake. It is rather an abuse of language, and anything but complimentary to the memory of the real martyrs, to describe as martyrdom the exceedingly mild imprisonment which Mr Tooth has elected to undergo.58

Tooth’s questioning of the location of his imprisonment was described in The Times as a “delicate discrimination by a modern martyr 55. Anon., “J. S. W.” (1877), p. 301; anon., “The Month” (1877), p. 105; and anon., “Anglicanism” (1877), p. 139. 56. Anon., “Parliament” (1877), p. 6. 57. Anon., “The Arrest” (1877), p. 7. 58. Anon., “Martyr Tooth” (1877), p. 2.

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F I G U R E 4 . 6 Leslie Ward, “The Christian Martyr,” Vanity Fair, 10 February 1877, p. 86.

between the air of the Kent and Surrey Gaols, and it may remind us that modern manners have softened in some respects the severity of persecutions.”59 Likewise, the Rock’s opinion was that “a well- dressed, well-fed ecclesiastic, holding levées and receiving bouquets of flowers from his lady admirers, and hampers of game from his male friends, is felt to have as little claim to be dubbed martyr [original emphasis] as summer excursionists in first- class carriages to Lourdes have to rank as pilgrims.”60 Likewise the Quarterly Review opined that “Mr. Tooth enjoyed a little martyrdom before resigning” his cure and being set free.61 So depending on who you asked, Tooth was either suffering the agonies of cruel imprisonment or embarking on a life of decadent public spectacle. On 10 February the society cartoonist “spy” [Leslie Ward] presented Tooth as a dandified “modern martyr” in Vanity Fair and a wax model of him was put up in Madame Tussaud’s (see fig. 4.6).62

59. Anon., “Mr Tooth” (1877), p. 9. 60. Quoted in Palmer (1993), p. 134. 61. Anon., “Article IX” (1881), p. 223. 62. Palmer (1993), p. 138.

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There was an element of caricature in these depictions, “a slight exaggeration of peculiarities” in the words of the Morning Post, but these images were not so much demonizing as glamorizing: Tooth had become a celebrity.63 By pasting stories about such events into his scrapbook the young Frederick Rolfe showed how fascinated he was by media celebrity and ritualist deviance as a means of getting attention. And there were other reasons why he was so interested. Tooth was (and remained) unmarried. His appearance was, or at least could be depicted as, dandified. He was known to enjoy some of the finer things in life but combined this with a thin and ascetic appearance. He sought to keep away from the world, and yet was found in the media spotlight. Those who attacked him emphasized the peculiarities of his situation and contrasted him, as has been seen, with the men who were martyred in the time of the early Church. Such men were popularly understood as stoic in the face of imminent death as shown in typical guise in the frontispiece to Emma Dixon’s [writing as Emma Leslie] Out of the Mouth of the Lion (1875) (note the woman swooning upon the manly arm) (see fig. 4.7). The so- called martyrdoms of the etiolated (Prout-shaped) Father Tooth and his fellow travelers, on the other hand, could be viewed as signs of a queer combination of attention-seeking and self-pity. That this is, at least partly, the way in which Rolfe received these events is suggested by some of the other items pasted into the scrapbook, notably the set of Christmas cards which appear to date to about 1881– 83. The cards do not seem to have been positioned in a particular order, but are placed so as to fill up the space available.64 Ann Cvetkovich has argued that “the manipulation of images becomes a form of ownership facilitating the process by which they are collected and installed within personal systems of meaning.”65 Rolfe, by appropriating these commercial images into his personal archive, endowed them with a fresh meaning as a group. These cards, taken as an ensemble, can be read as representing an attempt, like the bricolage of wall decorations described at the beginning of Hadrian the Seventh, to express a unity of spiritual, sexual, and aesthetic expression, which can be seen as a step toward the construction of a non-normative, queer, identity. The greeting card as we know it today originated in the Victorian era. To begin with they were luxury items for the upper and middle

63. Anon., “Vanity Fair” (1878), p. 5. 64. Bodleian Library, Ms. Walpole b. 5, folio 67 r and v. 65. Cvetkovich (1999), p. 498.

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F I G U R E 4 . 7 Emma Dixon [writing as Emma Leslie], Out of the Mouth of the Lion (London:

Religious Tract Society, 1875), frontispiece.

classes and they did not become truly mass-market commodities until the end of the century. Design was taken seriously and the products of the leading publishers were reviewed in the national press.66 Nineteenth- century Christmas cards were overwhelmingly secular in their themes and, notably in the 1880s and 1890s, explored a highly diverse range of subject matter.67 This phenomenon was examined by the art critic Gleeson White in a special Christmas 1894 edition of the Studio of which he was then the editor. He explains that the Christmas card, of which some 200,000 designs had been published in England alone, was “rapidly becoming a recognised subject for collectors.” In his view, the “most notable period of production” was the early 1880s, when large sums were paid to significant artists who contributed their work.68 For him the high point came with the designs of Thomas Crane, brother of the aforementioned painter Walter Crane.69 However, the market demanded more sensational subjects with the result that

66. Higgs (1999), p. 10. 67. Seddon (1980), unpaginated. 68. White (1894), pp. 3– 4. 69. Ibid., p. 8.

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to accompany this prosaic and wholly carnal greeting [i.e., “Happy Christmas”] we find, often enough, tragic sunsets, haunted churchyards, consumptive choir boys, monsters of nightmareland, and pictures of accidents dear to the farce writer, and, in short, the subjects which are in vulgar parlance “weird” and alarming on the one hand, and distinctly uncomfortable on the other. Or to take the opposite extreme: the glory of the transformation scene in a pantomime, the tinselled splendour of stage fairy-land is presented as the haven of our heart’s desire. Houris, mostly scantily attired, are sent to demure stockbrokers; fairies, revelling by moonlight, to grim county magistrates.70

The excesses of modern Christmas card design were also noted, and satirized, in Punch, albeit with the message that they were over- (rather than under-) aesthetic. Old Christmas, “why what do you call all this here modern fad,—sending gimcrack cards by dozens, dauby, glaring, good and bad, nymphs and what not?” . . . New Christmas, “to- day, with Art and Culture’s dainty trifles by the score, we just manage to scrape through the time, confessing it’s a bore.”71

Whether they were well designed or not, a wide range of cards made use of aesthetic imagery which was notable for a mix of medieval themes evoking aspects of Pre-Raphaelitism and motifs evoking the contemporary taste for things oriental in general and Japanese in particular.72 Blue china teapots were a very popular motif in the 1880s and “the peacock feather was a kind of materialized password by which people ‘of the same feather,’ so to say, recognized each other. Under this sign, conversation could be freely ‘utterly utter.’”73 Some of the highest- quality examples of aesthetic cards were produced by the firm of Hildesheimer, such as their design no. 356, “Fair Visions,” which was a set of “exquisite studies of classical heads in profile . . . [with, on the back, an] original musical composition without words suitable for Christmas hymns.”74 The appearance of aesthetic themes in cards increased further in the aftermath of the production of Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical parody of things aesthetic, which premiered in London in April 1881.75

70. Ibid., p. 6. 71. Anon., “The Old” (1881), p. 290. 72. Hillier (1982), p. 78. 73. Higgs (1999), p. 21; and Buday (1954), p. 108. 74. Hildesheimer Christmas and New Year’s Cards, 1880, John Johnson Collection, Bodleian Library, albums 8. 75. C. Williams (2008).

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In 1882 Hildesheimer organized a competition for the best presentation of a set of cards in an album. Blank albums were sent out and prizes were given in two categories depending on whether the competitor bought and employed a standard set of cards or made their own selection.76 A particularly fine competition entry is now in the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at Oxford University. One page is dedicated to the presentation of cards designed by Albert Ludovici which satirized the aesthetic movement. These cards originated from a competition organized by Hildesheimer in 1881, this time for designers rather than customers, at which Ludovici’s card showing a young lady with a teapot was awarded a prize of £25. Entries were exhibited at the Suffolk St. Galleries where they received a sneering review from the Graphic on 13 August: “Everyone seems to ‘go in’ for pictures, good, bad and indifferent, while they ignore the application of art to things of use, as distinct from things of ornament.” It would appear that even designs that satirized aestheticism could be found to be, themselves, decadent.77 The competition was judged by John Everett Millais, Marcus Stone, and G. A. Storey: Where would they stand on these issues? Millais’s painting, around this time, was being positively evaluated for its manly vigor in distinction to Whistlerian lassitude.78 And Millais was, soon after this, to find himself in a fight with the best-selling novelist, Marie Correlli, over whether his sanction of the use of his painting A Child’s World (1885– 86) to advertise soap was a betrayal of the values of art.79 Meanwhile, Storey was an associate of the satirist George du Maurier (they had both been members of the “St John’s Wood Clique,” founded in 1862) whose cartoon “The Six-Mark Teapot,” published in Punch on 30 October 1880, appears to have inspired Ludovici’s composition. All these men were on the fringes of the world of aestheticism and it would appear that it was that very proximity which may have led them to wish to distinguish themselves from its most advanced adepts. Hence, they are likely candidates to endorse designs which, to use Gleeson White’s words, subjected the likes of Oscar Wilde to “mild ridicule.”80 This ten-

76. Notice, “Competition: Christmas card albums,” Seddon Collection, Manchester Metropolitan University, 10/115/1; see Seddon (1992), p. 114. 77. Anon., untitled notice (1881). 78. Barlow (2005), p. 178. 79. Bradley (1995). 80. G. White (1894), p. 32. Wilde’s apparently frivolous claim that “I fi nd it harder and harder every day to live up to my blue china” was in wide circulation by 1876 and by 1881 had become

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dency is also evident from Albert Ludovici’s memoirs which show us that he was a disciple of Whistler but was keen, at least in retrospect, to distance himself from Wilde. For instance, Ludovici describes an occasion in France when Mr. and Mrs. Wilde appeared, bizarrely dressed, and were sneered at by the French. However, “fortunately Oscar was much too concerned at what he took to be a triumphal entry to notice me, and so passed on. Had he only heard some of the remarks it might have upset his little vanity.”81 Four of the twelve cards that Frederick Rolfe pasted into his scrapbook have strongly aesthetic elements such as peacock feathers and blue china; two of the cards have Christian themes and two feature children. One card shows a man who has broken his New Year’s resolution by smoking on the 2nd of January. Two cards suggest some kind of social danger. The first of these reads, “Ye warriors, as each values well his life, u [sic] praise your pointed weapons, though not steel, remember as ye fight in mimic [my emphasis] strife, Achilles had a vulnerable heel” and, as such, seems to allude to some kind of fierce, but artificially performed fight. The second shows a dog called, significantly enough, “Dandy,” sitting on a snowy doorstep: “Hard lot is Dandy’s— at the door to wait, / And watch the radiance flicker from the grate!” All of this fits well with the general understanding of Rolfe as a marginalized aesthete with a degree of paranoia. The two cards which include children (a very common, and normally unremarkable, theme on Victorian cards) acquire a certain resonance in the light of the subsequent evidence for Rolfe’s sexual self-awareness. The final card, and the one I want to focus on, is a satirical design by Alfred Gray showing a curate, thin in the manner of Spy’s caricature of Fr. Tooth, twirling on ice, and scratching out “Merry Christmas” with his skates in the process (figs. 4.6 and 4.8). Alfred Gray produced a wide range of designs satirizing aesthetic subjects which the Athenaeum of February 1882 found “decidedly the most amusing” of those on “our library table.”82 The queerness of this card is apparent when it is compared with the one designed the following year by Gray’s business part-

notorious; see Anne Anderson (2009a), p. 233. However, Deborah Cohen (2006), p. 80, points out that Wilde’s remark, far from being vacuous, was in fact a highly intelligent parody of vulgar commercialism that at the same time evoked new, and perverse, forms of materialism. See also Freedman (1990). 81. Ludovici (1926), p. 80. 82. Anon., “Our Library” (1882), p. 189; see also Heneage (1994), p. 96; and Buday (1954), p. 82.

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F I G U R E 4 . 8 Alfred Gray, Christmas card (ca. 1881), pasted into Frederick Rolfe’s scrapbook,

reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms Walpole b. 5, folio 67, verso.

ner, W. G. Baxter (see fig. 4.9). In the later card a fashionable young clergyman skates on the ice and is admired by several pretty, single women. In the earlier example there are three ladies, but they stand off to one side gossiping about the cleric who seems narcissistically lost in his own pleasure. This aspect of the composition can be compared with another Victorian card in which a couple, in the form of female lions, looks on and gossips as the British lion and unicorn greet each other in the foreground (see fig. 4.10). The implication is that the viewer is meant to think that something “queer,” at least in the sense of peculiar, is going on. A gender problematic is implied by the fact that both Gray’s cleric and the male lion greeting the unicorn are given rather effeminate-looking parasols. The Alfred Gray card is hand- colored and the curate has been given blue (rimmed) spectacles which were associated with aesthetic debilitation. Ruskin is noted as having worn “blue spectacles” when at Oxford as an undergraduate from 1837 to 1840 because of worries about his sight, and John Addington Symonds, when he suffered something

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F I G U R E 4 . 9 W. G. Baxter, Christmas card (1882– 83), reproduced by permission of the Seddon Collection, Manchester Metropolitan University (vol. 14, 173).

F I G U R E 4 .1 0 Robert Dudley, Charles Goodall and Son (ca. 1870–75), reproduced by permission of the Seddon Collection. Manchester Metropolitan University (vol. 24, 9).

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of a breakdown after he was accused of a same-sex passion at Magdalen College, Oxford, is noted to have retreated behind a sunshade and blue spectacles.83 This form of eyewear also appears in the Punch squib “Rinkomaniacs,” in which “The Persevering Curate [original emphasis]— Skates in blue spectacles and a suit of clerical black. Progresses slowly and meekly. Will carry in his right hand (if permitted so to do) a silk umbrella. Tendency to indulge in mild flirtations with ‘not pretty but nice’ girls of a certain or uncertain age.”84 Alfred Gray’s cleric is clearly modeled after this stereotype of woman-shy, aesthetic debilitation, but with the twist that he appears as energetic and having fun in the absence of the ladies. The curate’s body shape and parasol also make him look very like the fashionably slim women in the background to whom he seems so indifferent. The association of clergy, at least of the Angloand Roman- Catholic persuasion, with effeminacy had become strongly established in Victorian Britain as I discussed in chapter 1. A key element of suspicion rested on comparisons between clerical enthusiasm for elaborate vestments and women’s interest in fashion. In 1865 Punch published a piece entitled “Parsons in Petticoats” which alleged that “reverend gentlemen ‘of extreme High Church proclivities’ are very fond of dressing like ladies. They are much addicted to wearing vestments diversified with smart and gay colours, and variously trimmed and embroidered.”85 Furthermore, the distinctively emaciated form of the androgynous ritualist priest played a foundational role in the satirical codes that were applied to aesthetes in the influential pages of Punch. These show a characteristic blurring of associations between physical weakness, care in self-presentation and dubious personal (and sometimes sexual) morality.86 Further light is shed on this issue by a consideration of the textual development of Gilbert and Sullivan’s satire on the aesthetic craze, Patience (1881) from Gilbert’s comic ballad “The Rival Curates” (1867).87 It was suggested in Punch (1882) that aestheticism had originated in a religious reaction against “Charles Kingsley’s Muscular Christianity,” which, “in its crusade against canting and whining religion, in its bold attempt to show that the practice of religion was for men, as well as for women, trampled on the Christian Lily, emblem of perfect purity; and what Athleticism trod underfoot, Aes83. Grosskurth (1964), p. 68; and Dearden (1999), p. 5. 84. Anon., “Rinkomaniacs” (1876), p. 159. 85. Anon., “Parsons” (1865), p. 239. 86. Horrocks (2013) and compare with Schaffer (2000). 87. C. Williams (2008).

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theticism picked up, cherished, and then, taking the sign for the reality, paid to it the extravagant honours of a Pagan devotion.”88 A similar comparison between curates and poets as two sorts of “boudoir pets” appeared in a newspaper piece in 1890 on “effeminate men”: “By some fatal affinity, the clerical garb always manages to attract a large proportion of young men who, as far as masculine attainments are concerned, never seem to get beyond the perambulator and feeding-bottle stage.”89 It is not known whether these cards were received by Rolfe or if he simply bought them himself but, either way, they give us a striking composite picture of a man whose aesthetic and spiritual choices were informed by a distinct and emergent awareness of cultural and sexual difference. Even if the card by Alfred Gray, like those of Ludovici, was intended as a parody of effeminacy and aestheticism, Rolfe’s use of the card suggests that such images could be appropriated and reinscribed within a text of positive self- expression. Frederick Rolfe appears, from the evidence of his scrapbook, as indeed he also does via his thinly fictionalized appearances in his novels, as a master of the construction of queerness through the practice of arranging, and thereby subverting, the products of late Victorian popular culture. Neil Bartlett relates that when he was preparing to write Who Was That Man?: A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (1988) he “bought four big scrapbooks and filled them with whatever texts and images I could find from the London of a hundred years ago . . . to redraw my map of the city, to recognise certain signs, certain words. I began to see this other London as the beginning of my own story—and up till then, like a lot of other men, I’d seen America and 1970 as the start of everything.”90 Thus an archival process developed Bartlett’s awareness of the queer past of his city, and of the relation of that history to his own life story. Analogously, it can suggested that Frederick Rolfe did not so much display his queerness as discover it through his practices of visual accumulation.91 His use of Christmas cards, therefore, is interesting as evidence of the formulation of a subversive subject position, but it is also revealing that something as apparently normative as Christmas

88. Anon., “In Earnest” (1882), p. 12. 89. Anon., “Effeminate Men” (1890), p. 1. Compare this with the assertion made concerning an Anglican by Rev. Richard Glenn (1884), p. 167, that “though so singularly pure-minded, pious, and thoughtful, he was even as a youth anything but an ascetic ‘milksop,’ or an effeminate aesthete, and could be very bright, buoyant, and cheerful even in sports and games.” 90. N. Bartlett (1988), p. xxi. 91. Compare Staiger (2005).

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cards could be used for such a purpose. This means that the contents of Rolfe’s personal archive can tell us new things both about queer desire and about the potential of late Victorian popular visual culture in relation to personal acts of creative subversion. Frederick Rolfe spent most of his life playing creatively with religion. At its worst some of this activity was simply silly, as with the self-invented Order of Sanctissima Sophia for which he busied himself designing cumbrous and peculiar robes.92 But much of his creative work was involved with an intensely valuable attempt to overcome the deeply entrenched boundaries that centuries of Christian tradition had set up between moral purity and openly queer self- expression. Rolfe failed in his, quite sincere, attempt to become a Roman Catholic priest, and attempted to build his own spiritual/erotic landscape. The result, however, was hardly likely to be appreciated by the religious establishment because, as Peter Savastano has argued, to be a sacred/lewd bricoleur is the one quality most likely to most arouse the animus of the hegemonic cultural and religious order. This is most especially so with regard to the Abrahamic traditions with their patriarchal structure and dualistic world view  .  .  . to bring together the sacred and the lewd in a harmonious relationship is a threat and a challenge to the existing binary (and antagonistic) relations between spirit/flesh, pleasure/asceticism, sacred/profane, male/female, and masculine/feminine.93

Those dichotomies were slowly crumbling under the cultural pressures of the nineteenth century which, ironically enough, had partly been generated from within the Church of England, as has been seen in the previous chapters. However, clerical discipline, backed up by state regulation, restricted the degree to which ritualists were able to develop novel forms of deviance. The Roman Catholic Church was, as Rolfe rapidly found out, even less hospitable to local eccentricity during a period when the Papacy was attempting to assert its authority (in the aftermath, for instance, of the declaration of the doctrine of papal infallibility that emerged from the First Vatican Council of 1869–70). The paradoxical result of the public appearance of sexual deviance that had been inspired by controversial styles of Catholic visual display was, therefore, to reinforce the ecclesiastical closet. A gulf slowly opened up, 92. Rosenthal (2008), p. 82, fig. 36. 93. Savastano (2007), p. 21.

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from the end of the nineteenth century, between those who found that institutional Christianity did or did not provide them with adequate opportunity for queer self- expression. I have explored the way in which a Christmas card showing an etiolated curate projected an ambiguous image of gender deviancy that Rolfe made positive use of through, firstly, pasting it in his scrapbook, and, secondly, through juxtaposing it with a range of aesthetic cards. For much of the twentieth century Victorian aestheticism, and even satires of it, was frequently derided, as it was when Ettlinger and Holloway, in their survey of the history of Christmas cards, Compliments of the Season (1947), wrote that the aesthetic movement had been “mocked in a series of cards by A. Ludovici, at least one hopes it is mockery that sets a young lady gazing at a teapot held in her outstretched hand and a young dandy of affected appearance admiring an enormous dahlia [sic: it is a sunflower]. . . . But so great were the absurdities of the time that one can never be quite sure.”94 Yet it has recently been argued that “rather than killing by ridicule, Patience [Gilbert and Sullivan’s aforementioned musical parody of Wilde and the aesthetic movement] really put aestheticism on the map.”95 Or indeed, as Wilde himself wrote in the persona of Lord Henry in The Picture of Dorian Gray, “there is only one thing worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.”96 Much of this satire is now argued to have “functioned to bond together individuals within a social group: it worked as a kind of in-joke, rather than censure.”97 Or to give a further suggestion, Rebecca Mitchell has argued that while satires seemingly pathologized aesthetic dress, their effect was not only to set boundaries to what was acceptable but also to let people know there was an alternative to the mainstream. The effect of this process was to facilitate the emergence of styles influenced by aestheticism as an aspect of mass-market fashion.98 Anne Anderson has recently drawn attention to the “Patience” teapot, designed by James Hadley for the Royal Worcester company. It is in the form of the torso of a male and female placed back-to-back and is inscribed on its base, “Fearful consequences through the laws of Natural Selection and Evolution of living up to one’s teapot.” Her article effectively celebrates this “clearly camp” object—in which the aes94. Ettlinger and Holloway (1947), p. 34. 95. Lambourne (1996), p. 126. 96. Wilde (2003), p. 4. 97. Dian Kriz, discussed in Anne Anderson (2009b), p. 84. 98. R. Mitchell (2010).

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thete, hand on hip, presents his limp wrist to form the spout—arguing that “the purchaser of the aesthetic teapot was destined to be a ‘person of cultivated taste,’ the very socio- economic group which it [supposedly] critiqued.”99 As Dennis Denisoff has discussed, satirists, including artists such as George du Maurier, were implicated in the aesthetic practices that they parodied.100 But can the situation really have been quite so straightforward, particularly bearing in mind that satire’s elaboration of the grotesque is, inherently, an anti-aesthetic enterprise? And is not the effect of the reduction of aesthetic deviance to unthreatening kitsch to limit rather than to facilitate queer expressions of the self? By producing an object or image that was self- consciously ugly, the satirist limits its potential for incorporation in queer bricolage, the aim of which is to construct a beautiful self-image through the assemblage of attractive visual materials.101 To take an admittedly extreme example, a satirical cartoon such as the Illustrated London News’ “Athletics v[ersus]. Aesthetics,” of 17 March 1883, does nothing more than present the aesthete as an ugly freak whose etiolated figure was modeled on that of the ritualist priest (see fig. 4.11).102 It is true that the cartoons of Du Maurier and his imitators “helped make the aesthetic persona so well-known that it became an even greater threat to the heteronormative, masculine image of the artist.”103 And Punch, in particular, did popularize the notion of the aesthetic “persona as sporting signs of sexual deviancy” through such skits as that which had Maudle (based on Wilde) crying out in passion, “how consummately lovely your son is, Mrs Brown” (see fig. 4.12).104 But such satirical activity imposes a negative image of sexual perversion on acts of cultural nonconformity. If we are to view Frederick Rolfe’s Christmas cards as being expressive of his construction of a queer selfidentity, it is important to emphasize that they display the state this process had reached by the time he was in his early twenties. The writings for which he is known were completed later. In those final years Rolfe was, at least partially, to break out from the quasi- ecclesiastical closet by finally abandoning the attempt to pose as a priest and by looking beyond the priestly style of same-sex desire. Ostentatiously self-inscriptive queer martyrdom demands its props 99. Anne Anderson (2009a), pp. 219, 249, and 251. 100. Denisoff (2001), pp. 71–96. 101. Hatt (2007), p. 109. 102. Brock and Curthoys (2000), p. xxii. 103. Denisoff (1999), p. 147. 104. Anne Anderson (2009b), p. 80.

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F I G U R E 4 .11 Henry Stephen Ludlow, “Athletics v. Aesthetics,” Illustrated London News, 17 March 1883: 377, © British Library Board, all rights reserved (p.p.7611).

and scenery. Venice, a city sinking into its lagoon, had been a muchfavored locale for such heroic failure long before Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912).105 In Visconti’s film of the novella, the director’s use of Mahler suggests that “Aschenbach is dying not miserably but 105. Mann (1955), Tanner (1992), and Dann (2002).

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F I G U R E 4 .1 2 George du Maurier, “Maudle on the Choice of a Profession,” Punch 80 (1881), p. 62, reproduced by permission of Birkbeck College Library.

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voluptuously.”106 Rolfe suffered his own “death in Venice” of heart failure, subsequent to pneumonia, in 1913, but this was not before he had ample time to rehearse (and aestheticize) his own demise, as played out, for instance, in the assassination of George Arthur Rose in Hadrian the Seventh.107 It is interesting, however, that the death scene in his last novel, Desire and the Pursuit of the Whole (1909, published posthumously in 1934), is in fact a death and resurrection. One of his sexual contacts at the time, Ermenegildo Vianello, whose physique inspired Rolfe to employ him as a gondolier, was the model for Zildo/a, the hero/ine of the novel.108 There is a photograph attached to the first draft of the novel which may show Vianello.109 Despite the act of selfcensorship in making a he into a she, albeit a she so masculine that she is referred to as a he (!), this book is clearly a queer romance.110 The events of the novel, in which the Rolfe figure is shut out of society and threatened with periodic starvation, faithfully reflected the reality of the last years of the author’s life. Finally, having put out in his boat in a storm in order to save it from being swamped where it was tied up, our hero is rescued and his life saved by being given by a blood transfusion by Zildo in an act that combines medical practice with Eucharistic symbolism.111 By the time he wrote this scene Rolfe was no longer modeling himself on the amusing figure of the emaciated, body- denying curate who sought to avoid public ostracism by keeping his own sexual frustrations and emotional suffering secret. He yearned for a greater audience for his visions of martyrdom deployed as an overtly queer act and lamented the failure of publishers to deliver it to him. One of the last images we have of him shows him posed naked, robustly built and seemingly physically unashamed. It is captioned, in his own hand, “Me, cropped and calling my gondoglieri” [sic] (see fig. 4.13).112 George Arthur Rose, on his way to becoming Pope Hadrian VII, made regular use of dumbbells, as did his creator who was very proud of his physique.113 It would appear that employing more or less sympathetic parodies of 106. Vaget (1980), p. 168. 107. Scoble (2013), p. 338. 108. Benkovitz (1977), p. 253; and Scoble (2013), p. 291. 109. Photograph worked on in pencil, ca. 1912, Bodleian Library, Oxford, ms. Walpole c. 8 fol. 4 verso; see Rosenthal (2008), p. 93. fig. 37. 110. Hanson (1997a), p. 342. 111. Rolfe (1986), p. 296. 112. Rosenthal (2008), p. 102. 113. Rolfe (1904), p. 10.

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F I G U R E 4 .1 3 Frederick Rolfe (ca. 1913), print, Rolfe/Schimmel Papers, Rare Book and

Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

deviance to construct personal queerness offered less opportunities for self-assertion than subverting the images of manly normativity themselves. Rather than continuing to reappropriate images from the ambivalent world of commercial popular culture, Rolfe came to shape his own literary and artistic images so as to suggest, contrary to the views of the Illustrated London News (see fig. 4.9) and its readers, that an aesthete could look like an athlete and that queerness was not just for Christmas and for Christ.

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Saint Oscar The last decade of the nineteenth century was of huge importance in the story of the material and visual culture of same-sex desire because it was at this point, for the first time, that it became possible to write, more or less openly (it not necessarily positively) about the homosexual condition. However, the fact that this did not coincide with a rush of official or popular toleration, let alone understanding or enthusiasm for same-sex eroticism, gave a boost to the ecclesiastical closet and its associated paraphernalia as a place of refuge. Certainly, in the aftermath of the Wilde trials, there was a minor stampede into holy orders both Anglican (such as the aforementioned Bloxam) and Roman (such as John “Dorian” Gray). As with the example of the “ritualist” martyrs discussed in the last chapter, clerical deviance in a climate of increasing tolerance of religious diversity, could increasingly be treated as a matter of camp affectation. The ecclesiastical closet had formed so as to construct a place in which to contain same-sex desire and to display its signs in coded forms decipherable to those in the know. This meant that churches were able to provide a degree of safety and community in a time of rising homophobia. Yet, a closeted life of service to God and the community, however redemptive of personal sin, placed distinct limits on the further development and elaboration of queer self- expression. In the classic model of later twentieth- century gay liberation it was precisely through emergence from this closet interpreted as a place of religiously inspired repression that modern gay subjectivity was achieved. According to this viewpoint the duty of the 133

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closeted homosexual is to “come out” and to emerge as unambiguously gay. However, another way to look at this is to say that modern gay subjectivity was formed out of past queer cultural constructions. Because of the long history of homophobia such cultural constructions of same-sex desire are partly and inherently derived from the experience of repression, secrecy, and shame. The queer martyrdom of the closet in witness to Christ was to come to be paralleled by public witness to victimization on the grounds of sexual choice: On 13th November 1895 I was brought down here [Reading Gaol] from London. From two o’clock till half-past two on that day I had to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for the world to look at. . . . When people saw me they laughed. Each train as it came up swelled the audience. Nothing could exceed their amusement. That was, of course, before they knew who I was. As soon as they had been informed they laughed still more. For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. For a year after that was done to me I wept every day at the same hour.1

There are worse things than humiliation. We know that in other places and at other times crowds of people have been packed onto stations waiting for trains that will take them to their deaths. With the knowledge of the twentieth century’s horrors it is easy to sneer at Oscar Wilde’s fin- de-siècle tears. But what was happening on that cold autumn day was a sort of martyrdom. The overconfident dandy was destroyed by his experience at the hands of British justice. Wilde had fallen foul of Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885 which had been added at the last minute through the intervention of Henry Labouchère: Any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency shall be guilty of a misdemeanour, and being convicted shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.2

Because the act’s key purpose was the regulation of female prostitution it might have been expected that this addition would have received

1. Wilde (1962), pp. 756– 57. 2. Criminal Law Amendment Act 1885, www.swarb.co.uk /acts/1885Criminal _Law_Amend mentAct.shtml, accessed 16 October 2010.

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careful attention, above all because no defi nition of “gross indecency” was provided. But this, as recorded in Hansard was the full extent of the “debate” on the clause: Mr Hopwood said, he did not wish to say anything against the clause; but he would point out that under the law as it stood at the present moment the kind of offence indicated could not be an offence in the case of any person above the age of 13, and in the case of any person under the age of 13 there could be no consent. Sir Henry James said, the clause proposed to restrict the punishment for the offence dealt with to one year’s imprisonment, with or without hard labour. He would move to amend the clause by omitting the word “one,” in the last line of the clause, and substituting the word “two.” Mr Labouchère had no objection to the Amendment. Clause, as amended, agreed to, and added to the Bill.3

Seven weeks after Wilde’s arrest, Lord Alfred (“Bosie”) Douglas, the convict’s lover, wrote to Labouchère to say that “Mr Oscar Wilde is fulfilling another martyrdom.”4 In so doing, Douglas was attempting to present Wilde, a man found guilty of a crime, as a prisoner of conscience. This was a view that Wilde himself belatedly began to embrace after his release. That changed man wrote to the poet and penal reformer George Ives that “I have no doubt that we shall win, but the road is long, and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would be any good.”5 This phrase was employed by Lord Arran when he lauded the passing of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which partially decriminalized same-sex behavior, when he said, “My Lords, Mr. Wilde was right: the road has been long and the martyrdoms many, monstrous and bloody. Today, please God! sees the end of that road.”6 Oscar Wilde’s example of queer martyrdom has helped powerfully to shape and inform the culture of modern homosexuality because he refused to suffer in secret with only God and his friends as witnesses. Yet his life and actions were powerfully formed from Victorian formations in which religion and same-sex desire were interrelated in ways

3. House of Commons debate 6 August 1885, Hansard 300 (1885), cc 1386– 428, hansard .millbanksystems.com/commons/1885/aug /06/consideration#S3V0300P0 _18850806 _HOC _208, accessed 16 October 2010. 4. Quoted in McKenna (2003), p. 533. 5. Wilde (1962), p. 1044; and Houlbrook (2005), p. 241. 6. House of Lords debate 21 July 1967, Hansard 285 (1967), cc. 522– 56, hansard.millbanksystems .com/ lords/1967/jul/21/sexual- offences-no -2 -bill, discussed by Jeffery-Poulter (1991), p. 81.

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that can seem problematic from the secular perspectives of mainstream gay liberation.7 Neil McKenna echoes the general sense of the late Wilde as essentially representing a tragic decline: “Before prison, Oscar had been a joyous pagan, a Greek out of time. Now there were moments when he acted like a penitent Christian. During the first hours of freedom at [the Anglo- Catholic Rev. Stewart] Headlam’s house, he announced on the spur of the moment that he would like to go on a Catholic retreat.”8 I argue that such viewpoints fail to acknowledge the constitutive role of religion in the construction of queerness during the nineteenth century, such that Wilde should not be seen as having failed because he was unduly (and peculiarly) religious. Rather, his time was one in which Catholic performance was reaching its limits as a site for the expression of sexual deviance and I believe that Wilde appreciated both its opportunities and its limitations in this regard. Patrick O’Malley has spoken of “Wilde’s obsession with religion throughout his life.”9 His mother, Speranza, may have baptized Oscar first into the (Protestant) Church of Ireland and again into the Roman Church. While at Oxford he was “immersed in a culture shaped by Tractarian dissidence” and he was, nominally, Anglican through his adult life.10 He closely followed the bitter disputes over the development of Anglo- Catholicism and he witnessed the strenuous legal attempts to halt its rise and to demonize its leaders, as discussed in chapters 2 and 4. This also helps us to understand Wilde’s last major work, his letter to Bosie that we know as De Profundis. Jonathan Dollimore is very down on this text since he sees its concerns as evidence that Wilde was caving in to prescripted roles of submission and self-sacrifice; that he was, in effect, accepting the closeted form of queer martyrdom that I have been describing in the previous chapters with its stress on selfabnegation.11 Nevertheless, it is clear that the stance that Wilde presents in the manuscript is far more complex than this.12 The text is partly addressed to Douglas, partly to posterity, and is notable for including elements of the language of the King James Bible. It can be read as an attempt to sacralize what had just happened. As

7. See, for instance, Sinfield (1994), p. 197. 8. McKenna (2003), p. 581. On Headlam and the “Anglican left,” see Markwell (1977) and Orens (2003). 9. O’Malley (2004), p. 167. Compare Hanson (1997b). 10. Roden (2002), p. 128; and Mounsey (2012), p. 17. 11. Dollimore (1991), p. 95. 12. Guy and Small (2006), p. 57.

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Frederick Roden put it, “Instead of going to heaven, the writer entered hell and must transform it through imagination” into something of beauty.13 This can be regarded as a strategy that attempts to recognize that pain is “the most intense of aesthetic experiences.”14 The text can be understood, therefore, not as a collapse into conventional pieties, but as a further stage of Wildean subversion and of self-invention.15 And is it even really Christian? For Ellis Hanson it was a classical apologia aimed at reasserting the Hellenic model of Wilde as sage and Bosie as pupil. Yet, the text clearly discusses Christianity and indeed makes it central insofar as, for Ellman, Christ appears in De Profundis as a “type of Wilde in the ancient world.”16 It is best to conclude that in this work he was struggling to achieve a synthesis between Hellenic and Christian aesthetic visions.17 It is also likely that Wilde’s fascination with religion in general and Roman Catholicism in general was founded upon his participation in modes of sensationalized Protestant viewing of Catholicism. He was fascinated by the widespread anti- Catholic notion that paganism lived on in modern Catholicism. Moreover, he was well aware that popular anti- Catholic rhetoric presented Catholics as harboring a perverse enthusiasm for pain.18 Patrick O’Malley has argued that it is a “language of fascination, the irresistible attraction to evil that structures the anti- Catholic response to Rome in the latter half of the nineteenth century.”19 It was precisely this gothic mode that Wilde employed with such relish in his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Dorian not only collected vestments, but ones that were abundantly decorated with scenes of aestheticized suffering; orphreys “starred with medallions of many saints and martyrs, among whom was St. Sebastian” and chasubles “figured with representations of the Passion and Crucifi xion of Christ.”20 Wilde commented that “Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me: Dorian is what I would like to be—in other ages perhaps.”21 In other words, when he wrote this, Wilde positioned himself as a victim of evil, the world thought

13. Roden (2002), p. 148. 14. O’Malley (2004), p. 174. 15. Doylen (1999), pp. 548– 49; and Buckler (1989), p. 114. 16. Ellmann (1988), p. 483; see also Babcock (1978) and Ivory (2003). 17. Ross (2013), p. 192. 18. O’Malley (2006), p. 78. 19. Ibid., p. 178. 20. Ibid., p. 179, discussing Wilde (2003), p. 134. 21. Wilde (1962), p. 352.

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of him as the fosterer of evil, and in another life, resplendent doomed evil, a Satan, is what he would like to have been. What then are we to make of Wilde’s final years of exile? He had had an awestruck audience with Pope Pius IX in 1877, but it was only when he returned to Rome in 1900 that he became “obsessed with the pope” albeit in association with a powerful sense of irony.22 When he received the Easter blessing he joked to his former lover Robert Ross that “my walking stick showed signs of budding.”23 He was blessed six more times during this stay. In late March he wrote to Ross, “This time I must really become a Catholic, though I fear if I went before the Holy Father with a blossoming rod it would turn at once into an umbrella or something dreadful of that kind. It is absurd to say the age of miracles is past. It has not yet begun” (see fig. 5.1).24 Ross said that he dissuaded Wilde from becoming Catholic for fear of superficiality, but he was responsible for the priest’s administration of baptism and extreme unction on 14 December 1900.25 Ross had asked Wilde if he wanted to see Fr. Cuthbert Dunne, of the Passionist Fathers, at his deathbed. Wilde raised his hand and Ross assumed this meant yes. Ross did not know if he was properly conscious. Ellman says that he was still was not sure whether this was about “faith” or “style”: “The application of sacred oils to his hands and feet may have been a ritualized pardon for his omissions or commissions, or may have been like putting a green carnation in his buttonhole.”26 But a man who could write shortly before his death that “I am not a Catholic: I am simply a violent Papist,” was quite capable of enjoying the state of queer ambiguity offered by the employment of the priestly style of same-sex desire.27 Peter Ackroyd’s novel The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde is in the form of a diary; in this there is a much- extended death scene in which we find an atheist Wilde who thinks that belief in everything is the same as belief in nothing: “My umbrella did not blossom as I had been led to expect, but . . . I realised then that I could not have escaped my destiny, and that it was necessary that I should be destroyed before I was permitted to rise again. . . . But I did not become a Christian. In

22. Roden (2002), p. 154. 23. Quoted in Ellman (1988), p. 541. 24. Wilde (1962), p. 819; compare Hanson (1997a), p. 97, for the blossoming staff as image in Wilde’s stories. 25. Roden (2002), p. 155. 26. Ellman (1988), p. 549. 27. Oscar Wilde, letter to More Adey, 26 April 1900; see Wilde (2000), p. 1184, and Roden (2002), p. 154.

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F I G U R E 5 .1 Oscar Wilde (Spring 1900), possibly by Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas, snapshot

photograph, 8.2 × 6 cm © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG P317.

the face of death I became a pantheist, a polytheist and an atheist all at once. I gather all the gods about me because I believe in none.”28 This is in accordance with what Wilde himself said: “The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made perfect and complete; too complete it may be, for like many or all of those who have placed their Heaven in this earth, I have found in it not merely the beauty of Heaven, but the horror of Hell also.”29 However, it is undeniable that Wilde, if not a Christian, was thinking with Christianity. He was paying Christ a high compliment when he wrote that Jesus was “the true precursor of the romantic movement in life  .  .  . the very basis of his nature was 28. Ackroyd (1983), p. 165. 29. Wilde (1962), p. 468.

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the same as that of the nature of the artist, an intense and flamelike imagination.”30 Widespread unwillingness to think of spirituality and sexuality as overlapping realms has meant that there has been a “tendency to downplay or even erase the significance of religion in Wilde’s life [which] is most evident in analyses that read Wilde first and foremost as a forerunner of modern homosexuality.”31 At the same time such reductive analysis has induced ripostes which seek to reclaim Wilde as a believer. Thus we find studies such as that of Guy Willoughy who takes Wilde’s religiosity as the central element in his work and character.32 Frederick Roden takes a similar line when he argues that “Wilde’s Catholic incarnational theology both sanctified his physical relationships with men and eroticized his relationship with Christ. Hence he is at the forefront of queer Catholic theology.”33 And he adds that if “Wilde’s early Catholicism may be denigrated as ‘aesthetic,’ his later soul-searching is decidedly not.”34 He talks of Wilde as a “queer theologian.”35 As I argued in chapter 2 aestheticism and soul-searching were by no means incompatible realms in the later nineteenth century. Nevertheless, I do believe that Wilde, like Rolfe in his later years, was ultimately interested in religion and religious style as the means to a form of self-actualization that had become dislocated from its achievement through spiritual salvation. He drew back from devotions when they threatened to limit rather than extend his scope for creativity. So is there not something to be said in support of the reservations that Dollimore and others, as noted above, hold in relation toward Wilde’s more extensive late engagement with religion? After all, the deep structure of queer martyrdom that I have identified in this study involved the partial denial of the self through devotion to sexual restraint. I have suggested that this may have been productive of queer forms of masochistic pleasure which, depending on the attitude taken to such forms of sexual expression, can be seen as either the evidences of abject loss of agency or of the production of exciting new forms of deviance. Wilde’s ambivalent engagement with religion can be seen as precisely predicated on the challenging question of the status of eroticized submission as either liberatory or as quite the reverse. 30. Quoted Roden (2002), p. 149. 31. O’Malley (2004), p. 169. 32. Willoughby (1993). 33. Roden (2002), p. 265. 34. Ibid., p. 137. 35. Ibid., p. 125.

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Bearing in mind the reservations concerning the application of psychological categories discussed in chapter 1, what is the evidence for Wilde as a masochist? Ellis Hanson has written of the Scarlet Whore of Rome at this time as a femme fatale. In the arms of this Church, Hanson argues that Wilde wanted fatal salvation from the boring oppression of “bourgeois philistines and sanctimonious puritans.”36 Vicinus has written of the adolescent boy as another form of fin- de-siècle femme fatale.37 Wilde, it can be suggested, enjoyed being made to suffer by his boys since; as he wrote to Bosie, “Pleasure hides love from us but pain reveals it in its essence.”38 The working revisions to De Profundis resulted in a heightened emphasis on aestheticized suffering.39 In relation to all this he could be considered to be in thrall to the masochistic logic of romantic love as an exquisite site of suffering. And it is also true that Wilde was fascinated by St. Sebastian. After prostrating himself before Keats’s tomb in Rome he wrote that “the youngest of the martyrs here is lain, / Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain.” The prose note that went with this poem said that “as I stood by the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido’s St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree and, though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening Heavens.”40 But Wilde was not merely open to the charms of other queer martyrs; by taking the name Sebastian in 1897, he styled himself as a queer martyr.41 He must, as he said, live on as the “Infamous St. Oscar of Oxford, Poet and Martyr.”42 The explicit claim to martyrdom, unless of course it is essentially ironic, implies the absence, or concealment, of personal pleasure (at least in this life) and a claim to self-sacrificial heroism. Not everyone has been impressed by all this. In Tom Stoppard’s play The Invention of Love (1997) it is the closeted Housman with whom the play empathizes rather than Wilde.43 But the most stinging scholarly rebuke to the cult of St. Oscar comes from Melissa Knox who subtitled her study, “A Long

36. Hanson (1997a), p. 136. 37. Vicinus (1994). 38. Quoted in McKenna (2003), p. 532. 39. Guy (2012), p. 434. 40. Wilde (1995), pp. 44– 46, at p. 46. 41. Roden (2002), p. 153. 42. Quoted in McKenna (2003), p. 582. 43. Kaye (2002), p. 348.

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and Lovely Suicide.” The Oscar who emerges from her book is a syphilitic filled with self-hate for having passed the infection onto youths. This disease rotted him but did nothing to change his behavior: “For Wilde, who went back to boys the minute he was out of prison, resurrection was really reerection; that is why he deemed himself unworthy of redemption.”44 Her conclusion is that “all his life Oscar Wilde had planned to straighten out his account with one great act that would gain him redemption or forgiveness. But although he did not receive forgiveness, and indeed his life was not forgivable, we have to forgive him because of all he has given us.”45 But even Knox cottons onto Wilde’s aim at transcendence, even if she thinks he was at best merely posing or at worst self- delusional: “With Reading Gaol behind him, he could see himself as a saint. . . . Wilde’s self-analyses always end up in an attempt to make himself out as a saint rather than a sinner. . . . Like a saint he had been dying for the sins of others, the nameless homosexuals of his age. He deemed this sacrifice Christ-like.”46 Roden has pointed out that not everyone has been as sceptical as Knox and that Oscar Wilde was indeed a (secular) “‘saint’ for [many] twentieth- century readers” whose witness was held to be to the community of the progressive.47 Ellis Hanson, to give one example, thought that Wilde had a genius, not just for dandyism, scandal, and public confession, but also for martyrdom.48 Terry Eagleton in Saint Oscar, projected Wilde as a sort of martyr for Ireland.49 McDiarmid produces a more nuanced argument by suggesting that it is “clear that he did not wish to be a martyr or to die for any cause” but that after his release from prison he began to construct a homosexual cause for which he could be seen to have suffered.50 For her, “this is martyrdom with a difference. Wilde’s hagiographic system, devised in a ludic moment . . . [involved] constructing the gay cathedral, or hinting at such an edifice, to express another kind of collective immortality.”51 This suggests that Wilde flirted with the strange pleasures of the ecclesiastical closet, but he reacted against the limitations that that form of closeted queer martyrdom placed upon the potential for self- development. His suffering 44. Knox (1994), p. 135. 45. Ibid., p. 136. 46. Ibid., p. 131. 47. Roden (2002), p. 127. On the afterlife of Wilde in popular culture see Ertman (2000), Lambourne (2000), Guy and Small (2006), Wood (2007), Bristow (2008), and Kaye (2008). 48. Hanson (1997a), pp. 229–96, at p. 231. 49. Eagleton (1989) and (2004); see also Coakley (1999), Walshe (2005), and Regan (2009). 50. McDiarmid (2001), pp. 449 and 462– 63. 51. Ibid., p. 463.

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in prison was genuine and he found himself unable to transform it into a queer masochistic experience of exquisite pain. Therefore he began to reposition his experience as the basis for a queer sainthood that would be of relevance to the wider project of what would come to be known as gay liberation. I, therefore, stand with Moe Meyer’s positive reading of Oscar’s behavior: If we read Wilde’s containing inscription into discourse and his physical containment behind bars as the successful culmination of his efforts to construct a personal homosexual identity, then a solution to one of history’s most perplexing psychomysteries can be offered. . . . [Instead of fleeing] he simply waited for the State to begin its inscriptory process. He allowed himself to be martyred. For almost fi fteen years he had tried to achieve the construction of a homosexual social identity, and he needed the State to finish the job he had started. Wilde needed the state’s dominance, with its control over signification, in order to complete the project by linking his transgressive reinscription of bourgeois masculinity to sexology’s homosexual type. 52

In this view his queer martyrdom was a crucially constitutive act in the construction of modern homosexuality. It seems to me that De Profundis can be understood, therefore, not as a collapse into conventional pieties but as a further stage of Wildean self-invention.53 The next stages in the appearance of modern, cultural constructions of the homosexual were achieved through a rejection of the ecclesiastical closet. Yet the result was a cultural formation that had evolved partly out of the structures and limitations of the priestly style of same-sex desire.54 The aim of a Wildean disguise was to render one immediately recognizable: contrast this with the frontispiece of one of the most influential ritualist manuals, John Purchas’s Directorium Anglicanum (1858) (see fig. 5.2). This shows the priests facing the altar during the mass, taking what was referred to as the “eastward position.”55 The previous practice in the Church of England since the Reformation had been for the priest to prepare the bread and wine of the Holy Communion when facing the congregation and the older Catholic practice had been widely reviled as an attempt to conceal divine truth from the congregation and to instill a simple act with superstitious mystery. The legality of the

52. Meyer (1994), p. 102. 53. Doylen (1999), pp. 548– 49; and Buckler (1989), p. 114. 54. Mounsey (2012), p. 34. 55. John Reed (1996), pp. 116–18.

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F I G U R E 5 . 2 Frontispiece, John Purchas, Directorium Anglicanum (London: Masters, 1858),

plate 1.

readoption of the eastward position had been hotly disputed in the Anglican Church courts.56 The scene is replete with gorgeous finery, robes, flowers, and ornaments. But for a person bent on the display and elaboration of the self there is one major problem: the very technique of the Catholic Eucharist does literally result in concealment, for we cannot see the faces of these priests. I am using this example as a metaphor for the difficulties faced by those whose self- expression is limited to forms of closet display. I have argued that Roman Catholic practice offered less scope for queer selfexpression, and particularly for public witness of personal suffering, than did what might be termed the secular appropriation and development of such practices. Anglo- Catholicism, being under a less coer56. Adam (2011), pp. 96– 97.

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cive system of doctrinal control than Roman Catholicism, gave greater scope for queer creativity, but there were still limits, policed by the ecclesiastical courts, beyond which one could not legally go in terms of the projection of the self. Queer cultural creativity after Wilde continued to have a relationship to religion, but that relationship was to become increasingly attenuated— so much so that the intensity of Catholicism as a one-time site of queer innovation vanished from the awareness of that large proportion of early homosexual rights activists who increasingly saw Christianity as inherently conservative. The trappings of the Church were reinterpreted as camp indicators of masquerade. Homosexual truth, it was held, was to be found not by layering the body with vestments but by stripping them away. The rise in the importance of the naked male body as a queer signifier calls to mind the classical tradition of heroic Greek statuary, but it can also be viewed as representing a cultural connection with Protestant as opposed to Catholic attitudes to visual display and authenticity. In 1843, on the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’s Catholic attempt to blow up the English Parliament in 1605, Michael Hobart Seymour, one of Britain’s many prominent anti- Catholic preachers, delivered a sermon at St. George’s Church, Southwark, on the subject of The English Communion Contrasted with the Roman Mass. For him, the iconoclastic aspects of the Reformation were no more than an act of moral sanitation and one which brought the Church back to its original beauty: Like those who would restore or renovate some ancient temple, removing the dust that defiled it, the mould that tainted it, the moss that covered it, and yet retaining all that was beautiful and useful; so the Reformers of the Church of England, longing to restore and renovate her in all her original purity, removed all the corruptions that had crept into her doctrines, and all the abuses that had crept into her practice, while they retained all that was scriptural in doctrine, and all that was holy in practice; all that was conducive to the beauty, and all that was essential to the order of her services.57

It was, as we have seen, those very regimes of Catholic ornamentation which had provided one of the key visual languages through which queer sensibilities could begin to be signalled during the nineteenth century. Yet at the same time it was that very ecclesiastical swishiness that laid its exponents open to ridicule. A Punch skit published in 1883 about a House of Lords debate on the issue of opening 57. M. Seymour (1843), p. 376.

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of museums and galleries on Sundays can serve as a reminder of the cutting style of even the lighter satirical critique of aestheticism that was discussed in the previous chapter: “Looks as if it was washing- day, and they had got the clothes out early,” Randolph says, gazing upon the scene from the Gallery. New Archbishop present [Edward White Benson, Archbishop of Canterbury and father of the homosexual novelist E. F. Benson (see fig. 5.3)]. Looks Aesthetic. Got his speech ready. Intended when he came down to deliver it, but so nervous couldn’t get it off. “Pity your Grace should have had all this trouble,” I say (always like to be polite to an Archbishop); “sure great loss to the world so much eloquence, argument, and common sense.” “Don’t think it will be lost,” said his Grace sweetly. “Preaching shortly on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah; shall be able to use up a good many of the passages. His Grace ought to carry a lily or a sunflower [symbols of aestheticism, the latter particularly associated with Wilde].”58

The ecclesiastical closet can never have been an entirely comfortable space to occupy since it offered no techniques other than blank denial with which to confront scurrilous innuendo of this nature. The example of Wilde has showed that, at the end of the nineteenth century, there was a limit beyond which clerical forms constrained rather than enabled further queer self- development. What might be termed proto-gay liberation in the early twentieth century lay in the hands of those who looked to different traditions for inspiration. Most importantly, Seymour’s Protestant reservations found an uncanny echo at the very end of Queen Victoria’s reign in the thought of the pioneering campaigner, Edward Carpenter (1844– 1929) (see fig. 5.4).59 He began his career in the ecclesiastical closet, publishing poems on Uranian themes such as on the beauty of Narcissus in 1873.60 However, in the following year he left the Church of England and began to espouse a political and personal aesthetic of simplicity, hygiene, and authenticity which had direct connections with the styles and positions advocated by past campaigners against Catholic decadence. He embraced the new sexological literature emerging from Germany and moved, in his own writings, from classically 58. Anon., “Essence of Parliament” (1883). Note that Benson’s wife, Mary, had a passionate same-sex relationship with Lucy Tait, the daughter of the former archbishop, who lived in the family home and, with her husband’s knowledge, shared her bed; see Jones (2013), p. 167. 59. For biographies see Delavenay (1971) and Rowbotham (2009). 60. Carpenter (1873).

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F I G U R E 5 . 3 Alexander Bassano, Edward White Benson (1883), half- plate glass negative, © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG x96167.

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F I G U R E 5 . 4 Roger Fry, Edward Carpenter (1894), oil on canvas, 75 × 44 cm, © National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 2447.

inspired admiration of youth, to the advocacy of same-sex intimacy between mature adults.61 Thus, he complained, in 1896, that sex today is “thoroughly unclean. Everywhere it is slimed over with the thought of pleasure. . . . The body is always kept religiously covered [my emphasis], smothered away from the great purifying life of Nature, infected with dirt and disease, and a subject for prurient thought and exaggerated lust such as in its naked state it would never provoke.”62 It would appear that, in this statement, he is applying the old Protestant viewpoint on idolatrous decoration to secular dress and sexual morality. Writing in the aftermath of the Wilde trials, Carpenter’s thought 61. Influenced by Havelock Ellis and John Addington Symonds; see Funke (2013). 62. Carpenter (1896), pp. 15–16.

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signals a sharp reaction against the lush culture of decadence and its aesthetic regime of deviant abundance in favor of a supposedly natural simplicity centered on the body itself rather than (through coded, closeted projection) on fetishized objects such as those explored in chapter 4.63 He wrote that I was once at some large clerical meeting or other, in a private house. Vicars and curates, deans and canons, swarmed. How Christianly sympathetic we all were—so deferent with subdued voices and meekly conjoined fingertips; but O where was the genuine human animal, where the authentic divinity?” This was represented by the arrival of large S. Bernard [dog], who was quite natural, allowed himself to be caressed and complimented, as by right— for he certainly had the most dignified manners of anyone present (including the bishop).64

For Carpenter it was only the dog who accepted caresses that represented a state of nature. Having rejected his career within the Church, he looked back at the institution that he had left and presented it as redolent of androgyny, noting that “in Protestant Britain the curate and the parson quite often appear to belong to some ‘third sex’ which is neither wholly masculine nor wholly feminine!”65 His interests foreshadow a variety of twentieth- century approaches that were to look to diverse religious traditions, including those from Asia, in their attempts to develop a spiritual framework that was compatible with the open display of erotic same-sex desire.66 Carpenter’s stance also foreshadowed two other important elements in the development of queer identities in the twentieth-century. The first of these is the discovery of erotic sensibility in every man (and woman), rather than in only an initiated elite. It was no coincidence that the ailing protagonist of The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole (1909), by the still semi- closeted Frederick Rolfe, was composing a work entitled Towards Aristocracy in implicit refutation of Carpenter’s socialist poem Towards Democracy (1883).67 The second is that Carpenter openly embraced sexual psychology, such that martyrdom could come to be openly

63. Hatt (2013). However, Maltz (2011), p. 420, points out that Carpenter’s calculatedly understated dress, as shown in fig. 5.4, also places him in a tradition of dandyism. 64. Carpenter (1913), p. 234. 65. Carpenter (1914a), p. 56, though because he was in favor of the mingling of the best elements of the genders we should not, however, see this apparently scandalous comment as being essentially critical. 66. Carpenter (2001) and Copley (2006). 67. Gagnier (2000), p. 150. See also Livesey (2004).

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expressed by him as both an act of heroism and as a site of masochistic pleasure. Thus, just before the outbreak of World War I, he published his thoughts on pain and pleasure in the English Review. For Carpenter, inspired by his readings in German sexology, “the pain is the material of which the new pleasure is made.”68 He talks of genital- and bottombeating as pleasurable.69 He has a particularly striking psychic image which may be seen in relation to sodomy in which “pain at one level of consciousness is actually pleasure at another.” This image is of the penetrated man as like an onion; the penetration of the first “sheath” causes pain, but penetration of the second causes pleasure.70 He thought it a question of intensity when one compares the action of birch twigs in a sauna to torture in prison since, he argued, “it is also true to say that one can sometimes pass, with increasing intensity of the excitement, from pleasure to pain, and then through that pain to pleasure again.”71 Moreover, he argues that we should not feel that martyrs who pass into a state of ecstasy or rapture are bizarre when they experience an intoxication of their whole being and, therefore, “the case of the martyr who bathes his hands in the flames, is not really abnormal, but only a salient instance of something quite usual in the order of nature.”72 Thus, for Carpenter, Catholic suffering was simply a subset of the wider possibilities of sexual experience. This was to suggest that the practices of the priestly style of same-sex desire were simply one of many forms that eroticism could take. His choice was to seek the extension of the public expression of sexual identities through the embrace of progressive ideas. In this process what had been denounced and pathologized as a perverse and effeminate desire to be dominated could be reframed as the positive assimilation of the supposedly female virtue of passivity in the creation of an enhanced form of male gender. Thus, in Towards Democracy he wrote: I shall be ground under foot and the common clay, the ploughman shall turn me up with his plough-share among the roots of the twitch in thy sweet-smelling furrow . . . the potter shall mould me running his finger along my whirling edge . . . the bricklayer shall lay me: he shall tap me into place with the handle of his trowel.73

68. Carpenter (1914b), p. 461. 69. Ibid., p. 463. 70. Ibid., pp. 465– 66. 71. Ibid., p. 459. 72. Ibid., p. 459– 60. 73. Carpenter (1883), p. 78. Compare the influence of Whitman, see Mounsey (2012), p. 147, together with Carpenter (1906) and (1924).

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Carpenter thus turned decisively away from the Church as the key site in which to unify erotic and spiritual drives for perfection, as I discussed in chapter 2, and placed his faith in science and socialism instead.74 The visual culture of Catholic, or quasi- Catholic religiosity was, for many interwar writers, no longer seen as a locale of queer creative potential but as representing ideological bankruptcy. The life of the Bloomsbury Group, of whom Strachey was a leading member, was predicated on an attempt to assert a clear, if somewhat misleading, sense of ideological difference from, and superiority to, the Victorians.75 It was in this spirit, as I mentioned at the beginning of this book, that he looked back in his wildly successful Eminent Victorians (1918) on the Oxford Movement and its ritualist aftermath as a space of queer irrationality in which the clergy “followed Newman up to the very point beyond which his conclusions were logical, and, while they intoned, confessed, swung incense, and burned candles with the exhilaration of converts, they yet managed to do so with a subtle nuance which showed that they had nothing to do with Rome.”76 A similar picture of Catholic religiosity recycled as camp pastiche emerges from the writings of Ronald Firbank (1886–1926) who, as has previously been noted, presented the ecclesiastical closet as queer and ideologically decadent.77 In 1907 he had converted to Roman Catholicism, as a result, according to Anthony Powell, of his interest in “the less demanding side of religious life.”78 But his increasing awareness of the realities of serious Catholic devotion may be read from his tendency to satirize the Church, notably from the publication of Valmouth (1919), as being simply another part of hypocritical society.79 Firbank’s evolving prejudices inspired his last completed work, the remarkable novella Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926).80 It does not have anything as bourgeois as a plot, but is made up of a series of tableaux illustrative of the decidedly worldly life of the Church in Seville. Its climatic scene is the extraordinary queer martyrdom of Cardi-

74. See Mounsey (2012), pp. 162– 63, on Carpenter as a precursor of late twentieth- century gay liberation. 75. Joyce (2004). 76. Strachey (1918), p. 40. 77. On Firbank see Benkovitz (1970); Brophy (1973); Kiernan (1990); W. Clark (1993); and Davies, Malcolm and Simons (2004). 78. Benkovitz (1970), p. 79; and Anthony Powell, in Firbank (1988), p. 7. 79. Benkovitz (1970), p. 105. 80. Ibid., p. 276. See also Freeman (2004).

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nal Pirelli as the result of his having chased a boy around his cathedral. At the end, dispossessed of everything but his fabulous mitre, the Primate was nude and elementary as Adam himself. “As you can perfectly see, I have nothing but myself to declare,” he addressed some phantom image in the air. . . . “Only myself.” He had dropped before a painting of Old Dominic Theotocópuli, the Greek, showing the splendour of Christ’s martyrdom. . . . Now that the ache of life, with its fevers, passions, doubts, its routine, vulgarity, and boredom, was over, his serene, unclouded face was a marvelment to behold. Very great distinction and sweetness was visible there, together with much nobility, and love, all magnified and commingled.81

It is notable that at the supreme moment of personal truth Firbank emulates Rolfe and Carpenter by revealing the lusting, failing body beneath the robe, albeit here with the element of travesty taken to an extreme.82 The twentieth- century focus on the nude body as a focus for homoerotic self- expression was prefigured by a cult of Hellenism in the nineteenth century but this has obscured the importance of Christianity as a source for queer self- construction during that same period.83 Those who looked to a “new chivalry” attempted to link styles derived from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages to create a homoeroticized form of heroic manliness.84 The subsequent, later twentieth- century focus on empowerment and the physical body has not been an unmixed blessing. Just as aping a clerical aristocracy excluded those who lacked the requisite cultural resources, so the politics of athleticism has discriminated against the old and the unfit. “Body fascism” is hardly the threat today that its political namesake once was, but its attractions imply the rejection of the ethical component that the queer martyrs of the nineteenth century struggled to accommodate alongside their aesthetic and sexual tastes.85 Despite all that, Victorian traditions of the exaltation of suffering have remained in the background of the awareness of many subsequent gay liberationists, albeit admixed with abject associations 81. Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, in Firbank (1988), p. 697. 82. See Pronger (2002), and also Dutton (1995). 83. Dowling (1994). 84. See Eribon (2004), p. 195; Kains-Jackson (1970); and, for the wider connections between chivalry and manliness, M. Cohen (2005), p. 321. 85. Sontag (1975).

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of the closet as a place of shame.86 The language, values, and styles of queer martyrdom were to be called upon again in the era of AIDS. But before I address that theme in my final chapter, I want to return to lives in the ecclesiastical closet and to acknowledge the positive contribution made by queer service in the twentieth- century Church. 86. J. Martin (2006).

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The Private Lives of David and Jonathan Lives of clerical, sexual secrecy have come under increasing suspicion in recent decades since, even as the taboos surrounding same-sex desire have been in decline, those about the eroticization of children have steadily increased. I focus on an area that is currently highly controversial: the construction of idealized cross-generational and cross- class homosocial and homosexual relations. It is quite clear that inequality was an important feature of the erotic landscape during the first half of the twentieth century, as indeed it had been before, and this must have led to a variety of forms of abuse as well as to positive acts of engagement across otherwise impermeable social barriers.1 Priests did have considerable influence over the young people in their charge and some of them did take advantage of their authority. Perhaps some instances of sexual abuse took place because priests were not happily married or provided with the option of openly enjoying a relationship with a same-sex partner. However, I am not writing a sociological study of sexual relations between men and boys (or girls, since pedophilia simply refers to sexual attraction to children in general); and nor in any sense do I wish to construct an apologia for abusive relationships. But I do need to address the question of why queer ecclesiastical erotics did return insistently, as has 1. See, for example, P. Johnson (2008) for the former and Houlbrook (2005) for the latter in the relation to class divisions.

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been seen in the preceding chapters, to the figure of the boy or young man.2 I will suggest that the combination of the eroticization and idealization of Christian youth was part of a wider pattern in society that stemmed ultimately from fear of adult sexuality and the concomitant production of a fantasy of youth as an Edenic space of pure love. Informed by their classical educations, public school– educated priests were able optimistically to imagine that they could reinvent a form of the ancient Athenian adoration of boys that had been purified through a shared devotion to Christ.3 Those stereotypically thin, ritualist priests were not simply emaciated through fasting—with their androgynous bodies they can be considered as attempting to remain like boys. The eroticization of children was, therefore, accompanied by a fantasy of the self as innocently childlike. The love of David and Jonathan that I now go on to discuss may, therefore, have sometimes acted as cover for abusive relations but I will argue that, at the time, it was primarily understood and intended to create a spiritually idealized channel for energies which, it was believed, might otherwise lead to lives of sin. It is hardly surprising, bearing in mind all of the above, that there was very little open discussion of homosexuality in the early twentiethcentury Church of England. However, this only leaves it more remarkable that it was that organization that could be found at the forefront of progressive opinion in Britain on the subject in the 1950s. These opinions played an important role in setting the Wolfenden Committee on its progressive course, and, in due course, contributed to the passing of the 1967 Act of Parliament that partially decriminalized homosexual sex in England. I suggest that one way in which to make sense of this is to understand it as having evolved from the development of conceptions of the respectability of discretely homosexual lives of service within the Church. Thus the aim of Anglican progressives was to secure the privacy of such men and free them from the fear of prosecution.4 As Stephen Jeffrey-Poulter has written with heavy irony in Peers, Queers and Commons: The Struggle for Gay Law Reform (1991), “Although this sinful and distasteful behavior [i.e., homosexuality] was to be permitted in the sphere of private relations, it was essential to ensure that it was entirely banished from the public area once and for all.”5 This 2. For a key introduction to child sexual abuse in Victorian England, see Jackson (2000). 3. Funke (2013) notes, however, that such notions faced various challenges outside ecclesiastical contexts from the 1880s onward. 4. L. Moran (1996), p. 56. 5. Jeffery-Poulter (1991), p. 81.

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liberal legislation was, therefore, not intended to be liberatory. It was, if anything, the result of the tacit toleration of queer martyrdom as a structure of constraint. Homosexuals were, therefore, invited to swap the pleasures of public self- expression for legal immunity. Those who continued to flaunt their deviance might still face prosecution under a variety of both criminal and canon law provisions. I now explore the coded, closet life of the queer Christian young man as tacitly witnessed and respected for the qualities of self- control, endurance, discretion, and service. Such lives, I will argue, might even encompass supportive long-term relationships so long as these could be publicly viewed as close friendships between innocent, childlike friends. This built on an early modern tradition, studied by Alan Bray, of Christian friends who might, for instance, wish to be buried together. Bray argues, quite correctly, that such instances should not automatically be seen as evidence of homoerotic affection.6 However, it is important to recognize that it was the blurred nature of the boundary between same-sex friendship and erotic relations that cleared a space for the evolution of the ecclesiastical closet into a semi-open secret. I will be talking about the coded expression of such same-sex desire through reference to the Biblical story of David and Jonathan. There is not space in the current chapter to produce a study that brings out the full detail of nuances of change in the employment of this trope from the late nineteenth century to the interwar years. I, therefore, present a range of materials from across this period of time so as to illustrate the deep roots of this queer cultural formation. The evidence I present implies the existence, in certain quarters, of the carefully coded acknowledgment of this form of loving partnership as a positive life choice. Moreover, the materials I present include illustrated children’s books by women. I will suggest that if the cleric as child abuser was not widely recognized until relatively recently there was, in its place, a degree of acknowledgment in the wider community that (junior) clergy and youths might grow up queerly together.

The Mystery of the Farmer’s Boy In 1856 the teenage Simeon Solomon illustrated the Biblical story of David and Jonathan in a series of eight scenes: 6. Bray (2003b). But note the concerns of Traub (2004), p. 347, and compare my discussion of Newman and St. John in chap. 1.

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1. David, the youngest son of Jesse, is summoned to appear before the prophet Samuel (1 Sam. 16:11–12); 2. Samuel anoints David “in the midst of his brethren” (1 Sam. 16:13); 3. David plays the harp to refresh King Saul (1 Sam. 16:23); 4. David is triumphant after his fight with the Philistine Goliath (1 Sam. 17:51); 5. Saul’s son Jonathan meets David (1 Sam. 18:1); 6. Saul is jealous when the women greet David after the victory over the Philistines (1 Sam. 18:1–9); 7. David composes the Psalms (2 Sam. 23:1); 8. David dies and is succeeded by his son Solomon (1 Kings 1:11–39).7

David, therefore, rises from lowly origins to become king. He shows his prowess as a great warrior and poet. And his greatest love affair is with another man. Scenes five and six are particularly striking in that they appear to contrast an admiration for male same-sex affection with a disgust at female nudity that may contain an element of misogyny that projects the former as pure and the latter as degraded (see fig. 6.1). More positively, it is easy to understand the “overwhelming sense of relief and liberation for a middle- class Jewish boy [such as Simeon Solomon] to see his own feelings acted out as an exalted, heroic passion.”8 The style in which he chose to depict this charged narrative was, however, that of the medieval Christian Church in the mode of the contemporary Gothic Revival. The special sort of friendship of which Solomon was dreaming would appear to have been most easily depicted via the styles of Christian visual culture. The trope of the “love of David and Jonathan” appears to have circulated in Anglo- Catholic circles as a model for eroticized same-sex relationships.9 As the status of Platonic love between men became increasingly problematic in the nineteenth century, the Biblical example of the love of David for his best friend was increasingly stressed to emphasize the supposed purity of such alliances. The inspiration for this chapter came from the chance discovery of a copy of a novel by Lucy Laing, David and Jonathan; or, the Mystery of the Farmer’s Boy (1936). The front flap of the dust jacket of this book says: David and Jonathan: These words suggest two persons whose lives are closely linked together, who, in fact, become inseparables . . . the story of the mystery of 7. Cruise (2005), p. 73. 8. G. Seymour (1997), pp. 100–102, with quotation at p. 100. See also Cruise (2005), p. 70, for two other undated images of David and Jonathan by Solomon. 9. On the love of David and Jonathan in the Bible, see Horner (1978) and Harding (2011).

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F I G U R E 6 .1 Saul’s son Jonathan meets David and Saul is jealous when the women greet

David after the victory over the Philistines, detail from Simeon Solomon, Eight Scenes from the Story of David and Jonathan (1856), pencil and gold leaf on paper, support 25.5 × 36.6 cm, © Tate, London 2012 (accession no. T06742).

the farmer’s boy is built, and built so well, as to satisfy the desires of any boy who wants to know all that is said about— David and Jonathan.

This text is wonderfully teasing. What is the nature of this (well-built) mystery? What boy’s desires are to be satisfied? And, above all, what precisely are “inseparables”? The phrase “the love of David and Jonathan” was widely employed in Britain to refer to a state of intense same-sex friendship that was not incompatible with respectable public life. To give an example from the pages of The Times, on 24 June 1931, Major General Sir Percy Cox wrote a note on the passing of Ernest Crawley. Cox and Crawley had met at Harrow School, and the former had gone on to a military career before becoming an underwriter at Lloyds, while the latter had risen to become high commissioner to Iraq from 1920–23. Crawley is celebrated as being modest, good at sports, and having a “great capacity for sympathetic friendship and affection.” Cox wrote that “during our life at Harrow devoted friendship grew up between us, and though in afterlife our careers took very different directions and years often elapsed between our meetings, the David and Jonathan character of 158

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that friendship never altered.”10 The feelings of the youth David, the future king, for Jonathan, son of Saul the then King of Israel, is described in the Bible as being such a love as was “surpassing that of women” (2 Sam. 1:26). The fact that there is no mention of family life in this note, despite the fact that Crawley was married with three children and Cox was married with two children, implies that these men may indeed have felt a stronger bond of love for each other than they did for their wives. However, it is quite clear that such affection was not popularly read as implying homosexuality otherwise it would not, at that date, have found its way into print in this highly respectable context. This “love” can be read as fitting into the pattern of male pair bonding that, according to Jeffrey Richards, writing in Happiest Days: The Public Schools in English Fiction (1988), “for two thousand years . . . was at the heart of the emotional life of the west.”11 He sees the distinction between “manly” friendship and sexual “beastliness” as having become firmly established during the nineteenth century. For instance, he highlights the comparison in Thomas Hughes’s Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857) between the young George Arthur, who is morally supported by the older Tom, and another boy who was the “pet” of a sixth former. This latter child was “one of the miserable little pretty whitehanded, curly-headed boys, petted and pampered by some of the big fellows, who wrote their verses for them, taught them to drink and use bad language and did all they could to spoil them for everything in this world and the next.”12 However, while it is clear that the “pet” is associated with activity that is understood as inherently degraded, it is by no means clear that there is no physical desire present in the case of Tom and George Arthur: all that seems to be clear is that it is not implied that there was any sexual activity between them.13 Moreover, it was widely, if unenthusiastically, acknowledged that boys in British boarding schools sometimes had crushes on each other and might have sex.14 The section on the effects of education in that pioneering study of “inversion” [the then popular medical term for homosexuality] by Ellis and John Addington Symonds fi rst published in 1897 comments that “in England we are very familiar with vague al10. Cox (1931), p. 18. 11. Richards (1988), p. 183. 12. Quoted and discussed in Richards (1988), p. 186. 13. K. Martin (1993), p. 499. 14. Gathorne-Hardy (1977) p. 179; Sinfield (1994); Foldy (1997), pp. 48– 66; and Mack (1941), pp. 126–27.

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lusions to the vices of the public schools. . . . But, so far as I have been able to gather, these allegations have not been submitted to accurate investigation.”15 However, former schoolboys began publishing highly frank accounts of their childhood experiences during the first decades of the twentieth century. For instance, Oscar Wilde’s former lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, stated in his Autobiography of 1929 that “when I was a boy at Winchester [1884– 88] and at Oxford [1889–93] I had many fine friendships, perfectly normal, wholesome, and not in the least sentimental. . . . I had other friendships which were sentimental and passionate, but perfectly pure and innocent. . . . I had others again which were neither pure nor innocent. But if it is to be assumed that I was ‘abnormal’ or ‘degenerate’ or exceptionally wicked, then it must be assumed that at least ninety per cent of my contemporaries at Winchester and Oxford were the same.”16 Perhaps the most outspoken treatment of the subject in fiction was Alec Waugh’s highly controversial The Loom of Youth (1917). In this book Waugh described a passion for a boy called Morcombe: “There began a friendship entirely different from any that Gordon had known before. He did not know what his real sentiments were; he did not attempt to analyse them. He only knew that when he was with Morcombe he was indescribably happy. There was something in him so natural, so unaffected, so sensitive to beauty.”17 But even more startling than the description of this (chaste) romance was the acknowledgment that it was only this Platonic love affair that had saved Gordon from submitting to carnality with others: He saw the faces of those, some big, some small, who had drifted with the stream, and had soon forgotten early resolutions and principles in the conveniently broadminded atmosphere of a certain side of Public School life, he realized how easily he could slip into that life and be engulfed. No one would mind; his position would be the same; no one would think the worse of him. Unless, of course, he was caught. Then probably everyone would round upon him, that was the one unforgivable sin— to be found out. But it was rarely that anyone was caught; and the descent was so easy.18

15. H. Ellis (1897), p. 37. Compare anon., Our Public Schools (1881), p. 44, with the comments of E. Cohen (1987) and Stray (1998), p. 44. 16. A. Douglas (1929), p. 26. Symonds (1984), p. 94, provides a rare, and long unpublished, account of sex in a Victorian public school. 17. Alec Waugh (1917), p. 284; compare Lunn (1913), p. 151, and Auberon Waugh (2011). 18. Alec Waugh (1917), pp. 284– 85. For responses to this book see Browne (1918) and Hood (1919).

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Waugh returned to the topic in Public School Life: Boys, Parents, Masters (1922), in chapters entitled “Morality and the Romantic Friendship” and “The Leaving Age with Regard to Morals.” His position was that most schoolboy relationships, even those involving some degree of sexual expression, were, in our terms, homosocial rather than homosexual and that most boys would grow up to be “normal.” This view, that same-sex attraction was merely a “phase” through which certain boys might pass, helped to defuse moral panic. And it could be believed, moreover, that such youthful enthusiasms, as long as they remained Platonic, might find positive expression as they matured into lifelong manly friendships.19 The apparently obvious normality of Crawley and Cox (assumed to be established, according to the attitudes of the time, by their having married and fathered children) was precisely the reason why they could record such a close friendship without it being read as evidence of sexual turpitude. This, admittedly qualified and limited, degree of tacit acceptance of same-sex relationships at school, including those between an older and a younger boy that did not, or did not simply, focus on sexual expression, helps to explain the prominence of youth as a site for fantasies of homosexual romance. This has been referred to as a “favourite theme” in British Uranian discourse of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.20 It appears most famously in Oscar Wilde’s courtroom defense of “the love that dare not speak its name” in 1895 during the course of which he exalted “such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare.”21 Of course, Wilde, influenced by Socratic Greece, was here defending same-sex love between males of different ages, rather than between two boys of similar ages, such as Cox and Crawley who were born one year apart.22 This implies the potential for the development of what we today might refer to as pedophile tendencies to colonize this cultural formation through reinforcement from the classical tradition. However, by the interwar period there were also homoeroticized representations of the lives of

19. This can also be viewed in the context of the ways in which homosocial bonds were cultivated in schools as an aspect of imperial male self-reliance, on which see Nelson (1998), which is a study of “homodomestic” behavior in British boys’ fiction. 20. R. Jenkins (1980), p. 285. 21. Quoted and discussed in McDiarmid (2001), pp. 453– 54. 22. See Ross (2013), p. 192, on Wilde’s attempted fusion of Hellenic and Christian ideals, but note that Ross views this process as being weighted to the benefit of the former.

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David and Jonathan which presented them as equals, as in one E. L. Baker’s Saul, Jonathan and David: A Poem: O draw a veil, a moment’s time, So sacred is the scene, Two strong young men in glorious prime Through agony have been. Their souls upleap into their eyes What need for them to speak; While each upwelling feeling sighs And breathes upon the cheek. And in one holy hallowed kiss Their deathless love they seal, In sympathy’s eternal bliss Their mutual anguish heal.23

The task of trying to establish the meaning of the phrase “the love of David and Jonathan” in English poetry and prose is a highly challenging one, bearing in mind that debate continues to rage between Biblical scholars over whether the Biblical text itself does, or does not, refer to same-sex eroticism. The pioneering text advocating a sexual dimension to the relationship, Tom Horner’s Jonathan Loved David: Homosexuality in Biblical Times (1978), was highly controversial on first publication and remains so today. However, it may be more profitable to shift approach a little, and to ask not what such a love might mean in general, but what reference to such a love meant in a specific context. In other words, a key task is to look for contextual signs which support a sexualized reading of the term as an act of coded expression. In the same year, 1936, that Lucy Laing’s novel was published, J. M. Barrie’s final play, The Boy David, was given its premier. This work dramatized the Biblical story of King Saul, the young David, and his “friend” Jonathan. The Times’s special correspondent wrote in his review that “a play about the boy David of Biblical history would call for an actor of superb romantic virility.  .  .  . But this is not the play that Sir James Barrie has chosen to write.”24 As in the relationship between Cox and Crawley, it can be suggested that it was precisely because of the indeterminacy— one might almost suggest the queer indeterminacy— of the relationship between David and Jonathan that the nor23. E. Baker (1932), pp. 7– 8. 24. Anon., “Our Special Correspondent” (1936).

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mative masculinity of the hero might have been expected to have been emphasized at all costs. However, it was not to be, because, as with the stage role of Peter Pan, that of David was played by a woman. The last scene of the play takes place on a pastoral hillside. It concludes with David and Jonathan swearing secret devotion to each other: “Jonathan, come into my cave so that I may swear a hidden thing to you.” David then tells Jonathan that he has Goliath’s spear: JONATHAN: When you are a man, David, I will see to it that you carry that spear on your shoulder. DAVID (whispering): Jonathan, I can carry it on my shoulder now! [original emphasis] JONATHAN: Not you! Is that the secret? (David nods) . . . JONATHAN: Show me. DAVID: Some day I will show you.25

Jonathan walks away and the two boys whistle to each other using a call which Barrie had used to a special friend of his youth.26 In the final moments of the play we see David pull the spear up onto his shoulder and stand where the rock is highest. This assumption of Goliath’s phallic potency and manhood (by a boy played by a woman) marks the end of the drama. Mention of the “love of David and Jonathan” appears, often, to have evoked something mysterious. David in Barrie’s play has a secret, as does “the farmer’s boy” as signalled by the subtitle of Laing’s novel. The effect of the discussion of secrets is to invite the reader to imagine that something lies behind the literal meaning of the text and, therefore, behind the literal appearance of the relationship. This in itself may be enough to make this love, and these relationships, queer in the sense of strange, but does it imply that they have anything to do with queerness in terms of sexuality (of the characters, or the writers, or of the intended readers and viewers)? The concept that children’s literature can tell us first and foremost about the ideas and desires of the adult writers who constructed their fantasies of what it was like to be a child, what a child would want and what a child needed to know, has been powerfully advanced by Jacqueline Rose. In The Case of Peter Pan (1984; rev. ed. 1994), she argued that the “innocence” of Peter Pan, who famously never grew old, was 25. Barrie (1938), pp. 158– 59. 26. Brocket and Brocket (1958), p. 416.

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not the real innocence of a child, but an adult attribute placed on a youth and, as such, should be seen as a glaring signal of the ambivalent boundaries between adult and child: “It shows innocence not as a property of childhood but as a portion of adult desire.”27 In her view, J. M. Barrie, in the manner of many of our ritualists, created a series of fantasy spaces in which to act out transgressions of time, role, and dress, without danger or apparent sin. Her insights were powerfully built on by James Kincaid. His focus in his earlier work on Victorian literature, as in his later study Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting (1998), was on issues of pedophilia, but his notions of the constructedness of “childhood” as a space of ambivalent desire also provided the basis upon which he contributed to the wider concerns of the collection of essays Curiouser: On the Queerness of Children (2004).28 Since then, Kathryn Stockton, in her important study The Queer Child (2009), has advanced the notion that the inspiration for the queerness of certain adult constructions of childhood is that children are, themselves, queer insofar as the reality of childhood simply does not fit normative patterns of gender and sexuality since these are only internalized in the course of puberty. Gabrielle Owen has recently linked these developments in the understanding of the child as queer to Rose’s pioneering work, and has reemphasized the significance of Freud’s notion of childhood “polymorphous perversity” from which the (“normal”) adult was understood to develop.29 This body of work has important implications for the reading of both close same-sex relationships in fiction and in “real life” (as in the relationship of Cox and Crawley). The textual trope of the childhood “love of David and Jonathan” can be viewed as a fantasy space of purity, which can be used to evoke, and yet also to contain, queerness. Its appearance can tell us not only about the desires of the adult writer but also about their hopes and fantasies for the queer potential of childhood relationships. The apparent ambiguity of the same-sex relationships in the children’s novels I will now be discussing can, therefore, be regarded not as an obstacle to “proving” the existence of homosexual urges, but as key aspect of the coded display of queerness. They are also presented as case studies toward a project of appreciating the range of possible forms of fulfilment in the closet. The suggestion

27. Rose (1994), p. xii. Note that the god Pan was associated with Uranian desire in the early twentieth century; see Irwin (1961) and Freeman (2005). 28. Bruhm and Hurley (2004). 29. Owen (2010), pp. 258– 59.

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is that interwar patterns built upon those of the Victorian and Edwardian periods, but this could clearly bear book-length treatment in order to explore the full nuances of such developments over time. A feature of this literature is that women play an important role as authors. A further avenue for future research would, thus, be to explore the role of women, for instance, as sympathetic mothers of gay children, in the production of literature with queer themes. The first author I will be discussing could certainly benefit from renewed scholarly scrutiny. Evelyn Everett- Green (1856–1932) was the daughter of Methodist parents. Her mother, Mary Anne Everett Green, was one of the foremost Victorian women historians, and her father, George Pycock Green, was an artist. She was a leading exponent of stories for girls and completed something in the order of 350  novels. Everett- Green’s Fast Friends; or, David and Jonathan (1882) is set on the mean streets of London town. The older boy, Jonathan, lives with his mother, the Widow Greyling, while David, the younger boy, only finds love within his family from Dolly, the daughter of his aunt. David makes a poor living on the streets from selling “images” and is rescued from destitution by Jonathan. By the end of the novel, “David had taken up his abode altogether with the Greylings. He shared Jonathan’s bed, and helped the widow with the cleaning work.”30 After the  widow’s death Dolly, David, and Jonathan go to live together by the seaside: “Two fine strapping lads share that home, and are learning the mysteries of a fisherman’s life, and David and Jonathan are still fast friends.”31 The novel does not contain any examples of happy heterosexual relationships, but while it does seem to suggest that two men and a woman might share a home as adults it hardly does so in a manner that explicitly evokes same-sex eroticism. However, in 1883, one year after the publication of this book, Everett- Green moved out of London with Catherine Mainwaring Sladen, with whom she would live for the rest of her life, first in Surrey, then in Madeira.32 If, as seems quite possible, this was a lesbian relationship, then the characters of David and Jonathan, who move out of London to live together, can be interpreted as having been inspired by her own romantic hopes. She could be seen as a precursor of Mary Renault and other lesbian writers whose work focused on male homosocial and homosexual experience. Seen in

30. Everett- Green (1882), p. 122. 31. Ibid., p. 128. 32. Sutherland (2009), p. 217.

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F I G U R E 6 . 2 Frontispiece, Evelyn Everett- Green (Anon., “H. F. E.”), Fast Friends; or, David and

Jonathan (London: SPCK, 1882).

this perspective, the illustration serving as the frontispiece of the book could be read as a queer family, with the image taking the position of a baby (see fig. 6.2). Clearly the cultural conditions of the late nineteenth century were not the same as those of the interwar period, but I have included this example to show that the roots of queer valences of the love of David and Jonathan can be detected in children’s fiction during the high Victorian period that has been the focus of the preceding chapters of this book. Lucy Laing’s novel, David and Jonathan; or, the Mystery of the Farmer’s Boy (1936), presents a different challenge, because, in contrast to Everett- Green, little is known of the author. Laing lived and wrote 166

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in the suburban environment of Woking in Surrey and is essentially forgotten today, yet she wrote a series of successful novels and short stories for children over a forty-year period, most of which had a strong Christian theme. Because no archival materials concerning her appear to be extant, the attitudes of Laing, like those of many lesser-known writers, have to be elucidated through analysis of her publications. It is important to stress that the overt moral content of her novels is that of Christian respectability, as was the case with Everett- Green. However, the shared stress on religious virtues led both of these authors to promote a distinctly less assertive set of models for masculine behavior than could be found in much of children’s literature of the time (and since).33 For example, the figure of the “farmer’s boy” appears in a number of interwar children’s books and he is usually presented as a miniature imitator of manly virility. Although it was for younger children, The Farmer’s Boy (1925) by Jack Orr (who, having trained in Scotland, became head of the College of Commercial Art in London) provides a striking example of what Laing does not do. This book essentially provides a training for a boy in how to manage property, to court a wife, and to discipline children. Each section repeats verses about how the boy used to keep control of his master’s animals, using a variety of phallic props such as sticks and pitchforks, until the last verse concludes, “when I was a farmer, a farmer’s boy, I used to keep my master’s CHILDREN; with a Shouting here, and a Pouting there, and here a Shout, and there a Pout.” This is illustrated by a picture of the boy standing over a crying girl, the leg of whose doll he has just sawed off. The lyric ending each page, “my pretty lass, will you come to the banks of the Aire O?,” appears illustrated by a courting scene between a young man and woman on the inside cover.34 This may be an extreme example of the genre, but it illustrates a normative pattern of male aggression and mastery in boy’s literature of its era.35 In Laing’s 1936 novel we find a very different set of role models and behaviors. Its subject is the (on the face of it Platonic) relationship between John Grier (the farmer’s boy) and a young curate, David Keith. The boy has a mystery, which concerns his birth, while the curate bears a “secret burden” which eventually is revealed to be a dangerous illness that abates when abroad: “I am not very strong, John. How I wish I

33. Mallan (2002). 34. Orr (1925), pp. 2– 3 and 22–23. 35. Hillman (1974).

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had a body and a constitution like yours,” says David.36 It is significant that one of the village women comments that “I shouldn’t wonder but what he’s tooberkler,” since tuberculosis bears a strangely ambivalent cultural resonance. The disease was often depicted in Victorian novels using the langauge of sentimental tragedy and, as a result, has been described by Roy Porter as “that most romantic of maladies.”37 Moreover, sufferers of the disease were, according to Susan Sontag, conceptualized as being “both passionate and repressed” in a manner that was sexually alluring.38 The first love of David’s life was Christ. He tells the initially wary John, “You have obviously got a wrong impression of what it is to be converted. It alters everything for the better—not the worse. Oh, the joy, the comfort of having a Friend [i.e., Jesus] that sticketh closer than a brother! It takes the sting out of lonely lives, I can tell you.”39 Until he met John the curate had not had much luck with proselytizing the local youths: “The lads were the biggest problem. He tried to win them in a dozen different ways, but they rejected all advances.”40 But everything changed when David and John discovered a shared passion: music. This might have seemed quite appropriate since King David was famous for his harp; however, musicianship in England had an association with feminine accomplishments, so that, for instance, the Rev. George Bampfield in his fin- de-siècle novel How They Made a Man of Johnny contrasted the eponymous hero, a manly ordinand, with a “delicate lad, unfit for study or hard work, but able to do what he pleased with the paint brush, and [who could] bring delightful music out of any instrument that came into his hands.”41 Bearing this in mind it is hardly surprising that “musical,” like “queer,” developed a secondary slang reference to homosexuality.42 David lured John to a secret dawn meeting by playing Massenet’s “Meditation” from Thaïs (first performed 1894): “His little ruse had succeeded. John Grier had been caught!”43 This piece of music was a popular salon piece, but it is worth noting that the opera from which it comes was a work of fin- de-siècle decadence in which Thaïs is a courtesan who converts and, thereby, swaps her fate with that of a monk who

36. Laing (1936), p. 45. 37. Ibid., p. 35; and Porter (1998), p. 1050. 38. Sontag (1991), pp. 26– 40. 39. Laing (1936), p. 23. 40. Ibid., p. 37. 41. Bampfield (n.d.), p. 110. 42. Hubbs (2000), p. 390. 43. Laing (1936), p. 15.

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loses his soul through infatuation with her. Her embrace of Christianity is expressed through lush music which implies that she is not giving up enjoyment, but finding a higher form of pleasure. As Clair Rowden puts it in her study of the opera, Thaïs “passes easily from the physical to the spiritual manifestation of universal desire as if, having exhausted the pleasures of the flesh, wealth and glory, it was the promise of new and greater pleasures that attracted her.” Moreover, she argues that the violin melody of the meditation represents the distillation of Thaïs’s “own ecstatic voice” by expressing an essence which cannot be summed up in words.44 In the light of this analysis, David, by playing this violin part, can be understood as expressing through music a passion that cannot otherwise be openly expressed (at least not by a character in a 1930s novel for children). The emotional significance of the violin lessons in the novel is signalled by the illustration of this scene in the frontispiece (see fig. 6.3). In after life, John looked back on that violin lesson as the first really happy time he ever remembered. To feel a violin beneath his chin, to feel the bow between his fingers. Oh the thrill of it! To his dying day he would never forget. “I feel almost as excited as you do,” David said, when the lesson was over and they were preparing to go. “It strikes me that I am going to get a good deal of satisfaction out of my part of the bargain [to teach John the violin in return for help in the parish].”45

If this were an adult novel which dealt openly with desire, it would be easy to imagine that the violin lesson would be replaced by a scene of lovemaking. At whatever level we choose to read this demonstrative “friendship” it is quite clear, from the ensuing pages, that the relationship flourishes apace— so much so that the novel finishes with the two staging a sort of marriage, in which David is miraculously cured of his illness, and John becomes Jonathan, prior to their sailing together for New Zealand: “God had spared your life for some purpose, and He has given you back to me. What would all this good fortune have been worth to me, without you?” “You love me as much as that John?” John smiled. “Yes, as much as that.”

44. Rowden (2004), pp. 233– 34. 45. Laing (1936), p. 31.

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F I G U R E 6 . 3 Frontispiece, Lucy Laing, David and Jonathan; or, the Mystery of the Farmer’s Boy

(London: Pickering and Inglis, 1936).

“Then, since it is mutual, I am going to suggest adding a bit to your name for the future,— Jonathan. David and Jonathan! How’s that?” John tried to speak, but emotion checked his words, And so they clasped hands and sealed the bargain.46

These are the last lines of the novel, and it is tempting to compare them to the clichéd ending of a 1930s film in which the couple, fi nally united, moves together into a kiss which we do not see as the screen fades into “The End.” Evelyn Everett- Green’s long-term relationship was with a woman, 46. Ibid., pp. 94– 95.

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whereas Lucy Laing was conventionally married. This supports the supposition that Everett- Green was a lesbian and Laing was heterosexual. However, the case for literary queerness does not depend on the discovery of the “truth” of the writer’s sexual identity. As Oliver Buckton has argued of Robert Louis Stevenson’s rather more famous children’s stories, the case for “queer” readings of Stevenson’s texts does not depend on biographical evidence of his homosexuality. One can explore the representations of same-sex relationships and currents of homoerotic affect in Stevenson’s work without assuming, or seeking to prove, that he was actively homosexual in life. Given the legal and cultural hostility toward homosexuality in late-Victorian society, it is likely that such homoerotic representations are buried in narratives whose official or explicit focus lies elsewhere.47

Moreover, androgynous boys who evoked feminine allure could function as a locus of the erotic for people whom society would have regarded as being sexually “normal.” Martha Vicinus has, notably, discussed the figure of the adolescent boy as a “handsome liminal character [who] could absorb and reflect a variety of sexual desires and emotional needs.”48 In Laing’s first published novel, Surly Joe’s Secret (1906), the frontispiece, like that of David and Jonathan, shows a man and a boy, in this case a very pretty, young boy who stares at the reader while the man appears to be looking at the boy’s crotch, as must the reader (see fig. 6.4). This boy is also called David: “What a queer man you are,” said David to Surly Joe, the gravedigger. “Don’t you like little boys?”49 We soon learn that Joe also thought that David was a “queer young’un.”50 Queer, of course, at this time, was commonly used to mean peculiar; however, the text of Surly Joe’s Secret makes it clear that desire of some sort is an element of the man’s gaze: The child thrust two small hands into the pockets of his knickers, and with legs wide apart looked up archly. “I think you try to seem cross and disagreeable,” he said, “but you aren’t a bit really.” A smile, actually a smile, flitted over Joe’s face. 51 47. Buckton (2007), p. 9. 48. Vicinus (1994), p. 91. 49. Laing (1906), pp. 17–18. 50. Ibid., p. 29. 51. Ibid., p. 19.

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F I G U R E 6 . 4 E. Travers- Pope, frontispiece, Lucy Laing, Surly Joe’s Secret (London: Sunday School Union, 1906), © British Library Board, all rights reserved, 04410.g.67.

Joe’s heart was warmed because “no one had taken so much interest in him for twenty years. Yes, he wished he had not been so harsh, for after all he found he had a heart somewhere— a possession he had long thought dead— and that it was going out to that little unknown boy.”52 This warmth had appeared after he had recovered from an intense shock. For when he first beheld David peering down he had almost fainted because what he saw was “a face with Molly’s eyes.”53 Joe’s secret was that he had loved Molly, who had left him, and, although 52. Ibid., p. 22. 53. Ibid., p. 15.

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he does not know it yet, David was Molly’s child.54 The appearance of Molly, as of Dolly in Everett- Green’s David and Jonathan, acts to defuse the danger of the reader’s apprehension of overt sexual desire between the two males. Secrets and gender confusions pepper this early novel as they do Laing’s David and Jonathan. There is also a further thematic connection because the boy David in the earlier novel is for Joe not just a “queer young’un” but such a one as would “make a good parson.”55 And indeed he grows up to be the Rev. David Graham, who may represent a prototype of the Rev. David Keith who becomes emotionally involved with the boy John in the later book. It is important to emphasize that the novels I have been discussing need to be considered not simply as literary constructs but in relation to real children. My copies of both Everett- Green and Laing’s David and Jonathan have bookplates at the front showing that they were presented at Sunday School (to C. Owen in 1888 at Prestwick and Harry Curwood in 1942 at Carshalton, respectively). The remarkable thing about these books is that they present the Biblical affection of David for Jonathan as being a model for companionate friendship that lasts beyond youth. This is not, therefore, the same phenomenon as those “romantic friendships” that Pugh and Wallace described as being a cultural construction of same-sex attachment prevalent in nineteenth and earlytwentieth century England and America, [that] afforded men and women a culturally sanctioned opportunity to participate in deep emotional relationships between members of the same sex with the expectation that these relationships were passing phases in a trajectory towards marriage.56

Neither Everett- Green nor Laing’s versions map a Crawley and Cox trajectory toward heterosexual marriage in any way. Indeed, Laing’s model seems, by implication, to replace it with some sort of same-sex union. The implication seems to be that the “love of David and Jonathan” was a lifelong bond that surpassed conventional relations. Furthermore, in certain cases, it might even replace the need for marriage. One way in which to understand these novels as being more than self-serving fantasies of their authors is to situate them in relation to Kathryn Stockton’s question, “Where do children go, to whom do they

54. Ibid., p. 63. 55. Ibid., p. 29. 56. Pugh and Wallace (2006), p. 273.

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turn when they cannot relate to their presumptive peers?”57 The “love of David and Jonathan” may be understood as a provision supported within certain Christian circles that allowed some children to grow up to become respectably queer but not publicly homosexual.58 This model did not suggest the corruption of vulnerable youths by much older men, but rather the nurturing of those who were intrinsically queer by those who were equally so. While the Bible appeared to condemn behaviors such as whatever was practiced at Sodom, it appeared to support a specific sort of intense love between two men. Because these novels do not describe the afterlives of David and Jonathan the reader is invited to ignore the thought of any possible sexual expression of that love that might take place in the distant cottage by the sea, or the ultimate remoteness of New Zealand. This cultural variant of the love of “David and Jonathan” is based upon a fantasy—that of a pure, Christian boy who finds uncorrupted love from someone like himself. By advancing this as an ideal these writers were rejecting both the impetus to virilize Christian boyhood (which was fraught with the danger of bringing “adult” sexuality into the supposedly pure space of youth) and to condemn male gentleness and compassion. This ideal can be seen as providing a way in which boys of such a disposition could avoid being labeled as “sissies.” The rise of the term “sissy” during the interwar years has been explored by Julia Grant. She argues in her article “A ‘Real Boy’ and Not a Sissy” that while “many nineteenth- century educators decried competition in little boys, discouraged fighting, and valorized the boy who turned the other cheek,” twentieth- century educators and scientists increasingly discouraged such behavior as effeminizing: “Boys coined the term sissy and used it to identify those boys who failed to meet the requisites of masculinity.”59 Thus Jack Orr’s The Farmer’s Boy was intent on the formation of “real boys” and, by extension, “real men,” while Lucy Laing’s farmer’s boy can be read as a figure intended to establish an alternative “sideways” space for those who might otherwise be oppressively labeled as “sissies” by those involved in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has referred to as the “war on effeminate boys.”60 Cox lauded Crawley’s sporting prowess and, thereby, proclaimed to the world that this was not the suspect passion of “sissies.” By contrast, Laing’s em-

57. Stockton (2009), p. 52. 58. Bruhm and Hurley (2004). 59. Grant (2004), p. 845; see also Nelson (1991) and Sedgwick (2004). 60. Sedgwick (2004).

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ployment of music rather than sport as the shared enthusiasm between the boys can be read as the covert signal that the young reader was intended to understand that there were loving and lovable children who have secrets that can only be understood by their own kind. Queer alternatives to family life were peculiarly facilitated in Anglo- and Roman Catholic contexts in which priests did not marry, and were placed in positions of authority over boys. Many parishes were staffed by teams of priests (several curates were often necessary in order to cope with the pressure of multiple services and of parish charity work). And these men often lived together communally. A focus on images of unmarried men and adolescents appears, from the viewpoint of the present day, to raise the specter (and thus, indeed, the gothic discourse) of pedophilia and child abuse.61 Uranian verse can certainly be analyzed as representing a set of excuses for dangerous sexual desires. So that when, for instance, the Rev. Edwin Emmanuel Bradford (1860–1944) wrote in The New Chivalry (1918) that “our yearning tenderness for boys like these / Has more in it of Christ than Socrates,” we may read this to mean not that his love was pure rather than lecherous but that he was simply evoking what Brian Taylor has referred to as a “divine sanction” to appease his sense of guilt.62 But contemporary wariness of such literature should not stop us from seeking to understand it as a complex phenomenon that was produced by a specific set of historical and cultural circumstances.63 Uranian verse pulls together many of the key themes of queer martyrdom that have been explored in this book. To start with it was powerfully shaped by the same university that had produced the Tractarian Movement and had overseen the intellectual development of Oscar Wilde after his time at Trinity College, Dublin. Some of the most outspoken works of homoeroticism of their century were produced by current or former Oxford undergraduates in the early 1890s; for instance, The Chameleon (1894), in which the editor, the aforementioned John Francis Bloxam, included not only his “The Priest and the Acolyte,” but also Lord Alfred Douglas on the love that dared not speak its name and a variety of other paeans to male youth. Many of these men kept in touch with each other. Thus two other former students of Exeter College, Oxford, Samuel Elsworth Cottam and E. E. Bradford—who, like Bloxam, became priests—went on to serve together as curates at

61. Hanson (1997a), p. 298. 62. Bradford discussed in B. Taylor (1976), pp. 104– 6. 63. Mader (2005), p. 411.

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St. George’s Anglican Church in Paris.64 It is strongly implied in the poetry they published later in life that they were lovers for at least part of this time. Cottam, writing at Wootton in Oxfordshire, dedicated some of his verses to Bradford who by then was vicar of Nordelph in Norfolk. One of these was “Narcissus” who was feted as “a celibate in who great beauty dwelt.”65 Meanwhile Bradford had dedicated one of his earlier books of verse Passing the Love of Women (1913) to Cottam, his “lifelong friend.” Bradford not only produced among the largest corpus of Uranian verse of the period but also one that is exemplary of many of the themes that I have been exploring. For example, the misogynistic implications of the love of David and Jonathan that he hymns can be understood as a defensive response to the widespread popular revulsion toward samesex eroticism. This, admittedly, does not make the denigration of women’s mental and physical abilities in the prologue to The Tree of Knowledge (1925) any more attractive.66 And when in “The Call” (1918) Bradford has Eros, the son of Urania, shout “‘Turn away from the wench with her powder and paint, / And follow the Boy who is fair as a Saint’” he is setting himself at a clear distance from socialist homosexual reformers such as Edward Carpenter by (partially) disguising his sexual radicalism through the use of the commonplaces of conservative patriarchy.67 It is in fact a strongly lingering sense of sex as dangerous and unclean that leads to a determined insistence on the purificatory effect of queer ecclesiastical privations. Thus only love “when purged with prayer and abstinence, / From carnal stains of sex and sense, / should soar unchecked.”68 The sinful body, in these fantasies, is all but eclipsed as when in “The Turning Point” a boy visits the narrator of the poem in the moonbeams like some disembodied saint and their souls become one.69 Only occasionally does a more frank assertion of embodied desires surface, notably in the series of prose essays that Bradford collected together as Stories of Life at Our Great Public Schools (1908), as when Steevie admires another boy before a boxing match: “When his shirt was unbuttoned at the throat, and his sleeves rolled up above the

64. Matthew Harrison (2005), pp. 51– 53. 65. Cottam (1960), p. 69. 66. Bradford (1923), p. vii. 67. Bradford (1918), p. 5. Compare Simeon Solomon’s depiction of shameless women in his Eight Scenes from the Story of David and Jonathan (1856) (fig. 6.1). 68. Bradford (1913), p. 18. 69. Ibid., p. 68.

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elbows, as they soon were, Steevie could catch a glimpse of his deep broad chest, and see the muscles ripple all over his firm round arms at every movement.”70 There are also sporadic appearances of progressive attitudes toward sexual development as evidenced by the comment in a piece for children, “Paddy Maloy,” that the boy was “as pretty as pretty can be” but young though he was he was not interested in girls and it was “too late to change at his age.”71 And the implications of “Free Love” (1914) are decidedly radical: “A lover of lads can do like me— / Make love to a hundred equally / And still love one the best.”72 But what I think is particularly notable, and it is something that problematizes a straightforward dismissal of this verse as being nothing more than pedophile fantasy, is the complexity of Bradford’s use of the terms “child,” “boy,” “man,” “friend” and “lover.” Thus, in “Boy Friends” (1908), Bradford wrote that a youngster ceases to be a child and becomes a boy when he has his first “friend” at boarding school.73 He repeatedly states that youthful, carefree loves do not last but rather yield to something better and enduring: “Sweet trance will wake to sweeter truth, / And lover yield to lifelong friend.”74 Or, as he wrote in a piece dedicated to Cottam, “O happy he / Who ’mid a hundred lovers, / Ere Fancy flee / One Faithful Friend discovers!”75 The aim of boy love is the spiritual friendship of a lifelong mate.76 But Bradford’s universe of exquisite suffering cannot encompass the realistic possibility of lifelong sexual relations (which he indicated variouslzy by the terms “love,” “fancy,” and “folly”), for “when mind encounters mind, mere folly’s over, / And friendship’s birth foretells the death of Love.”77 Only Christ can offer complete satisfaction, “for we discover / In the end, / God is our Lover / and our Friend!”78 These attitudes are encapsulated in “At Rest” (1918): I dreamed of a life where muscle and brains Were to win me wealth and worldly gains: God gave me another more worth my pains . . .

70. Bradford (1908b), p. 191. 71. Bradford (1908a), p. 111. 72. Bradford (1914), p. 43. 73. Bradford (1908a), p. 125. 74. Bradford (1913), p. 19. 75. Ibid., pp. 20–21. 76. Bradford (1918), p. 67. 77. Bradford (1913), p. 53. 78. Ibid., p. 26.

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I sought me a friend long fruitlessly; I sought but one, God gave me three. Now I leave it to Him to bring them me, While I lie in His arms at rest.79

Yet Bradford was not peacefully at rest in the arms of his Lord as indicated by another poem published in the same year, “Failure at Forty.”80 Insistent fantasies of youth were reflections of the painful realities of adulthood. Death in the trenches in “The Romance of Youth” (1920) becomes emblematic of the dutiful self-sacrifice of the aging homosexual as “calm, resigned / He marches tow’rd the night, and leaves the dawn / behind.”81 Even before the war when he was still dedicating work to Cottam he senses that even the strongest youthful amour would struggle to survive in the face of public prejudice and suspicion: “When boyhood’s visions flee, / There fled a cloud of fear and doubt / Around my friend and me.”82 Yet he continued to dream of something more than this; of a world that offered same-sex marriage, as, for instance, in “Partners for Life” in which he wrote that “the boys then made their vows, and clasping / hands, / They kissed each other on the lips, and prayed / That God would never loose their loving bands.”83 What consoles him in his loneliness was faith and fantasy. He tells himself that boyhood may end, but that the “Boy Ideal” lives on within the man, or more precisely within the unmarried man.84 It is an ideal that he glimpses when he peeps at a boy praying by his bedside and says, echoing the visual fantasies of Simeon Solomon, that “I think I can descry / Bright gaudy wings around his shapely shoulders!”85 And, echoing Joseph Leycester Lyne, he dreams in Ralph Rawdon: A Story in Verse (1922) of establishing “a novel monastery” where “we live like one great family.”86 And there sexual frolics can resume away from the disapproving public gaze: “To keep untainted from the world / Fled men of old long sainted. / Now monks retire with humbler aim— / To keep the world untainted!”87 Unlike a few Uranians, notably the poet and artist Ralph Chubb, Bradford did not attempt to set up homoerotic 79. Bradford (1918), p. 124. 80. Ibid., p. 142. 81. Bradford (1920), p. 1. 82. Bradford (1908a), p. 28. 83. Bradford (1929), pp. 64 and 81. 84. Bradford (1920), p. 2; and (1923), p. 75. 85. Ibid., p. 31. 86. Bradford (1922), p. 94. 87. Ibid., p. 91.

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mysticism as an alternative cult to Christianity but remained in that queer and Anglican space of desire in constraint.88 The materials that I have been exploring do not enable us to address questions of sexual practice, but they do help us to think about patterns of Uranian desire that were tacitly appreciated by others, including women who, themselves, appreciated the eroticizability of the figure of the boy.89 We might want to think, with James Kincaid, that the idolization of childhood innocence is in itself evidence of sexual desire; but we might also want to bear in mind the concept, advanced by Catherine Robson in her study Men in Wonderland: The Lost Girlhood of the Victorian Gentleman (2001), that such men as Lewis Carroll looked to recapture their own innocence through the image of purity that they projected onto children.90 Timothy D’Arch Smith, in his study of Uranian verse commented on related patterns of same-sex idealization, saying that “the bloom of young boys ‘en fleur’ which the Uranians celebrated was mostly a fantasy. The ideal boy consonant with their fantasies’ requirements was well nigh untraceable in actuality. . . . It was only in dreams and visions that the essence of boyhood could be met.”91 Real-life Davids and Jonathans, such as Cottam and Bradford, appear mostly to have bonded from the melancholy distance of their country parishes through their shared admiration for an ideal that they treasured in their memories and imaginations. As Bradford wrote, “Boyhood I worship rather than the boy . . . boy, as boy, is not so inly dear / As man, my fellow-worshipper and peer.”92 The production of narratives that provided a rationale for growing up queerly in the Church did not, thus, provide license for public witness of overt samesex desire and partnership. This helps us to appreciate that the space available for queer self- expression was powerfully constrained. Above all, the value of such lives was understood to rest not on self- expression but on meritorious service to the community.93 To give just one concluding example from World War II, the ethic of redemptive queer self-sacrifice was explored in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944). At the center of the film

88. Rahman (1991). 89. Greer (2003) is a recent equivalent of this. 90. Kincaid (1992) and (1998). 91. D’Arch Smith (1970), p. 174. 92. Bradford (1920), p. 12. 93. See Francis (2006) for a discussion of the way in which the ethic of service appears to have acted, in a similar fashion, socially to redeem queer artists such as Cecil Beaton who contributed to the war effort between 1939 and 1945.

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F I G U R E 6 . 5 Colpeper haloed, in A Canterbury Tale, dir. Michael Powell and Emeric

Pressburger (1944), © ITV Global Entertainment.

is the mystery of the “glueman,” a criminal who puts glue on the hair of local girls to stop them going out with soldiers. This turns out to be Colpeper, a squire, justice of the peace and a bachelor who lives with his mother and who is played by Eric Portman. He is “queer in the sense that he is not strongly or definitively coded as either conventionally homosexual or heterosexual.”94 The arch humor present in the film was, according to Alexander Doty, even more pronounced in earlier drafts of the script. Yet there are still lots of camp puns as, for instance, when the organist of Canterbury Cathedral asks, “Do I look like a charwoman?”95 In the end Colpeper is not demonized; far from it, since he is compared to a saint, or, indeed, to Christ, being shown in one scene as haloed against the lantern light during a lecture he is giving on the medieval pilgrims to Canterbury (see fig. 6.5). The only other character in the film who is shown with a transient halo, this time one derived from a light at a station, is also notable for being both without a partner of the opposite sex and for being a musician: this is the English soldier, Peter Gibbs, who is played by Dennis Price. Both 94. Doty (2006), p. 47. 95. Ibid., p. 55.

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Price and Portman were homosexual.96 Set in a landscape of “perverse pastoralism” the film implies that the sexual nonconformist can redeem himself by self-restraint and sacrifice in service to the nation.97 Queer martyrdom could therefore gain a wider audience, notably at times when, as in World War II, the public-service ethic of the private individual was necessary for the safety of the nation. In this form of conservative Christian heroism the good homosexual was rewarded for actual (or at least apparent) sexual abstinence by taking on the heroic mantle of Christlike suffering the burden of which he could share with his fellows in the Church. The admixed eroticism and innocence of the interwar ecclesiastical closet was, thus, not simply an unfortunate backdrop to gay liberation but deserves appreciation in its own right as a significant phase in British queer history. 96. Tony Williams (2004), p. 160. 97. Pugh (2009).

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Derek Jarman and the Legacy of Queer Martyrdom In this book I have examined a British cultural tradition that centered on an iconic image of Christ as an unmarried, suffering, beautiful, queer martyr. Those who wished to purge their own sinful desires and live eternally with Him could seek idealized visions of His eroticizable body in the Mass as the reward for a life of arduous devotion, as I discussed in chapter 2. Men with such tastes might band together in communities of the like-minded, as I explored in chapter 3. Others, who appreciated the homoerotic potential of such worship but who could not cope with the limits of lives in the Christian closet and who yearned for a wider public witness of sexual preferences rather than of self- denial, moved to alternative forms of self- definition, as was seen in chapters 4 and 5. Such people could then use queer aspects of ecclesiastical style as elements of camp or pastiche. Others remained within the space of the Churches and established a discrete niche within English society, as seen in the previous chapter, sustained by their own visions of queer pain and delight. I have argued that this last phenomenon helps to explain the role of the postwar Anglican Church in being instrumental in helping to bring about the partial decriminalization of homosexual relations in England in 1967. The official position that has emerged in recent decades in the Church of England, as “something of an ortho182

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doxy,” is to accept “homosexual persons” but not “homosexual acts.”1 It must be admitted that this is a considerable advance on the prewar situation. The response of Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, to the private request on the part of Dr. R. D. Reid, a disgraced headmaster, for leadership from the Church on the issue of homosexuality, was to say in 1938 that he was not willing to change the “policy of concealment.”2 What Tim Jones has referred to as the “stained-glass closet” was not, however, shattered by the developments of the postwar period.3 The model of queer martyrdom can be argued to have influenced developing notions of the private (that is, closeted) homosexual who, as the potential victim of blackmail, was held in the 1950s by the Church of England’s Moral Welfare Council and the Wolfenden Committee to be unfairly victimized under the law. A particularly important role in this process was played by the liberal theologian Derrick Sherwin Bailey, central lecturer for the Council, whose progressive views on open discussion of homosexuality were out of step with those held by many in the Church. Nevertheless, he contributed to and edited the official Anglican submission to Wolfenden in 1956.4 All this notwithstanding, the growing public awareness of homosexuality meant that “behind that translucent coloured glass of the ecclesiastical closet doors the ‘invert’ was increasingly perceptible. Well furnished with incense and elaborate vestments, the inhabitants of the church’s closet could be as camp as they liked as long as they remained chastely celibate or at least avoided scandal.”5 Despite the efforts of radical individuals such as Peter Elers (1930– 86), the first leader of the Gay Christian Movement, to look to the model of gay liberation established at the end of the 1960s as a model for a more assertive “out” form of Christian life, constituencies of men with same-sex erotic interests have often become split by the secular progress of gay liberation from an “out” vanguard of development whose sense of superiority depends partly on their amused disdain for their “in” counterparts in the Church.6 This situation did a great deal to sunder the twentiethcentury movement for gay liberation from its complex cultural roots. It also weakened the aesthetic resources of gay men by reducing com-

1. Hunt (2005), pp. 262– 64. 2. Jones (2011), p. 132. 3. Jones (2011). 4. Carey (1988), pp. 95– 98; Jordan (2011), pp. 51– 58; Jones (2011), p. 146; and (2013), pp. 176– 82. 5. Jones (2011), p. 152. 6. Gill (1998), pp. 112– 31; and Burns (2013).

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plex artistic traditions to camp masquerades and it also reinforced the position of those who wished to pull Christianity away from creative engagement with diversity of all kinds.7 Finally, it acted to entrench the ecclesiastical closet because its inhabitants came to fear that if they came out as gay not only would they appear as hypocrites to their presumably hostile congregations, but they would also feel under pressure to abandon a faith that others would see as a sign not of their ethical commitment but of their abject submission to convention. The sundering of gay and faith-based agendas, while never complete, has also acted to promote the suspicion in some quarters of academic projects which combine the study of sexuality and religion.8 This, of course, is to generalize about the complex trajectories of gay liberation which has gone through phases of left-wing countercultural opposition followed, in the twenty-first century, by increasingly assimilationist moves.9 It has been, to a substantial degree, a success, insofar as Britons are no longer living in what Patrick Higgins has branded the “heterosexual dictatorship” of the postwar period.10 It seems ironic, therefore, that it is at this very time that strong elements in the Church of England, alongside others in the Church of Rome and in many other Christian denominations, have stood against the liberalization of rules concerning gay clergy. By clinging on to the old model of private queer martyrdom in the closet, these churches are preventing their priests from engaging with a changed society. In my opinion the Churches and the gay community have a great deal to offer each other in terms of the mingling of ethical and aesthetic stances.11 This requires the recognition that queer martyrdom has been, and continues to be, a constitutive element of both aspects of modern Christianity in Britain and of forms of same-sex desire. I now turn to one of Britain’s most important queer filmmakers, Derek Jarman (1942–1994). In his life and work Jarman consistently acted as a witness to both queer ecstasy and painful exclusion from the life of the nation. His death through AIDS was commemorated at the time as a martyrdom that was outstandingly queer in that it mingled personal tragedy, Christian imagery, and camp pastiche. I have cho-

7. Greenberg and Bystryn (1982), Angela Smith (1999), and Ribas (2004). 8. Schippert (1999) and Krondorfer (2007). 9. This is clearly a huge field but key works include J. Weeks (1977), Cruikshank (1992), Anne Smith (1994), Nicholl (2001), Shepard (2001), and Lucy Robinson (2007). 10. Higgins (1996). 11. On the controversial value of queer mourning see Crimp (1989), Dollimore (1998), Nunokawa (1991), and Watney (1996); and, on “gay men as keepers of culture,” Fellows (2004).

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sen to end with him because he was an exponent of the process that I have just been advocating in which secular and Christian viewpoints engage creatively with each other and the past is treated as a resource for coping with the challenges of the present. In my own book I have, likewise, sought to be inspired by Carolyn Dinshaw’s analogous call in her important work, Getting Medieval (1999), for “partial, affective connection, for community, for even a touch across time.”12 The reason for this lies in my underlying motivation for writing on this topic. Firstly, and most importantly I have been intent on creating a set of historically contextualized case studies on the theme of queer Catholic-style homoeroticism to explore how this cultural formation has evolved over time. But, secondly, I also wish to contribute to ongoing debate on the issue of tensions between various forms of institutional Christianity and the progress of gay civil rights. This means that I wish to engage the reader in an affective process of imagining the various degrees or absences of self- empowerment that were experienced by men who wished to love and have sex with other men both in the present and in the past. A particular form of suffering that many queers have experienced is exclusion and exile from the communities that should have embraced them. It was that sense of loss that lends immense power to the sorrow of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” composed in 1750 by Thomas Gray (1716–71). He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (’twas all he wished) a friend. No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode, (There they alike in trembling hope repose) The bosom of his Father and his God.13

Gray’s wish for a love in heaven that could not be found on this earth is now widely understood to have been derived from the death of Richard West in 1742 which delivered the poet to years of deep depression. George Haggerty has seen the extent of this grief as evidence not so much of clinical illness but of a queer refusal to accept the consola-

12. Dinshaw (1999), p. 21. 13. Gray (2012), lines 122–28.

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tions offered by family and the prospects of marriage.14 The English grave was, for Gray, a sort of closet, which should not be disturbed.15 Gray’s melancholy is now seen as deriving substantially from “his sexuality, bound by the particular constraints of eighteenth- century England, [which] was to influence some of his most important poems, enriching their profound commentary on human suffering and helping to create their haunting, elusive flavour.”16 That Gray’s feelings for West were not simply homosocial has been asserted on the grounds that such friends did not “speak of dreaming of the other, did not mention physical contact . . . did not attempt to compare their friendship to that of famous lovers; and did not use language like ‘half my soul.’ They did not use the rhetoric of romantic love.”17 Gray’s churchyard is set in a landscape of bucolic English repose.18 The tradition of elegiac verse derived a certain homoerotic element from its origins in antiquity where it was often employed to lament the deaths of beautiful, young shepherd boys. In early modern English literature the elegiac mode frequently displayed a “latent homoerotic tone and a blurring of the line between friendship and love.”19 Works such as Milton’s Lycidas (1638), Shelley’s Adonais (1821), and Tennyson’s In Memoriam (1850) attempted to express same-sex desire in the context of a society that was, rightly or wrongly, increasingly prone to consider the exchange of such sentiments between (living) men as evidence of “unnatural” lust. Yet despite the intensity of the emotions displayed in such works, it can be argued that they employ the evocation of suffering as a conservative strategy insofar as “the ideology of the elegy form itself carves out a space for male-male desire even as it tries to reinscribe that desire within hegemonic cultural practice.”20 Furthermore, not everyone will agree that witness before God provides full compensation for prohibition on open witness before the community. Yet we may still reach across the centuries to empathize with Gray’s dilemma, just as we may reach out to those of more recent decades who have struggled to achieve a balance between a respect for sexual

14. Haggerty (2004b), p. 390; but see also Haggerty (1999), pp. 113– 35; and Sacks (1985), pp. 8–9. 15. Compare with Milton’s Lycidas, see Boehrer (2002). 16. Bentman (1992), p. 203. 17. Baird (2004); and Bentman (1992), pp. 203, n. 1, 205 and 217. 18. On Englishness and landscape see Matless (1998), Berberich (2006), and Burden and Kohl (2006); and see also Sharp (1995) on romantic communities. 19. Guy-Bray (2002). 20. Haggerty (2004b), p. 388; and Nunokawa (1991), p. 435.

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privacy and public witness of the sexual self.21 For the queer martyr, in imitation of Christ, was ultimately saying, Take me back into your heart.

O Sebastian! The repressive political climate of the 1980s could furnish a variety of case studies to illustrate the persistence of many of the cultural tropes that I have been exploring in this book, but I will end with the fate of one particularly prominent artist. It took a long battle to get permission for Derek Jarman to be buried where he wished in Old Romney churchyard in Kent, where his remains now lie under a yew tree (see fig. 7.1).22 Jarman was not only an important filmmaker, and a participant in the struggle for gay liberation, but one who took up the project of attempting to engage in detail with the rich cultural resources of the Western religious and cultural heritage in projects of queer selfconstruction.23 Yet those in the parish who objected to his burial in consecrated ground are likely to have felt disgust at his political views and sexual practices. Moreover, they could see him as a blasphemer; he had, after all, been proclaimed as a gay “saint” by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in a ceremony at Dungeness in Kent in 1991 (see fig. 7.2). The Sisters had been founded in 1979 in San Francisco and, in 1983, held their first AIDS candlelight vigil.24 The London order was founded by “Australian Sisters/missionaries” in 1990.25 Their style can be seen from the book of postcards Get the Rubber Habit! (1994), featuring Sister Frigidity of the Nocturnal Emission wearing a wimple and leather jacket, Mother Mandragora who could pass as a real nun, and many others.26 On Sunday, 22 September 1991, Jarman noted in his diary—with some degree of irony, it should be said—that “in spite of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence’s warnings not to let it go to my head, I had to take it seriously. I am, after all, the first Kentish saint

21. On queer aracadias, see Fone (1983), Parkins (1996), and Toíbín (1999). Compare Shuttleton (2000), p. 131, on Firbank’s “artificial pastoral” in Valmouth (1919) and D. Adams (2004). 22. Jarman (2001), p. 383. 23. Important works on Jarman include Watney (1994), Lippard (1996), O’Pray (1996a) and (1996b), Porton (1996), Wollen (1996), Peake (1999), Moor (2000), Pencak (2002), Dillon (2004), Wymer (2005), and Richardson (2009). In addition, Pearl (2004) and Griffiths (2006) are useful in placing Jarman’s work in the context of British queer cinema overall. Cook (1996) is a rare contribution in that it focuses on Jarman’s textual rather than visual work. 24. Glenn (2003). 25. Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence (2008); and Jordan (2011), pp. 182– 84. 26. Doran (1994), inside front cover.

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F I G U R E 7.1 Derek Jarman’s grave is marked by a gray slab on the right under the yew tree, St. Clement’s Church, Old Romney, Kent, photograph by Ian Dunster (2007), reproduced under license, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0.

since Queer Thomas of Canterbury who was murdered by his boyfriend, Henry, in 1170.”27 The canonization was performed on the beach. There was a procession, the singing of the hymn “Amazing Pride,” and Jarman was crowned with a halo woven from film as Saint Derek of Dungeness of the Order of Celluloid Knights.28 The service was led by Mother Brigid, Sister Immaculate Deception, and Sister Immaculata Worksurface. As they processed they intoned: We condemn conformity With a conscious irony. Dressed in habits, black and white, Bando stiff and wimple tight. Nothing but the face is shown, Funny freedom, convent clone.29

Great lengths were gone through to create a queer material space. In particular, the new saint wore the gold cape of the queer king in Ed-

27. Jarman (2001), p. 52. 28. Jarman (1993), p. 131. 29. Personal communication with Alan Beck.

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F I G U R E 7. 2 Derek Jarman’s sainting, Dungeness, Kent (1991), by permission of Alan Beck.

ward II (1991).30 This event was “what Jarman would often refer to as the happiest day of his life,” even though he had been unsure about being the center of such intense attention.31 Pictures of the service were the last to go into his albums. The event also inspired a series of afterechoes, among them a set of poems by Jeremy Reed, one of which is entitled “Sainthood”: Sainthood’s conferred by heavy rain It’s like the red rose swallowed by Genet, Found in a ruined cemetery.32

30. Peake (1999), p. 485. 31. Ibid., p. 484. 32. Jeremy Reed (2007), p. 39.

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Jarman’s journals are, in their final parts, a description of suffering and a sort of self-hagiography, something of which Jarman was himself aware when he wrote of himself on 24 July 1991 as “St. Derek of Dungeness, a hermit in the wilderness of illness.”33 When he died in 1994 shrines were set up to his memory in Soho, prefiguring the extraordinary explosion of popular devotion that was to take place in 1997 at the death of “Saint Diana.”34 Jarman was nervous and ambivalent about the sainting precisely because it sailed close to glib gay reappropriation of Catholic forms as masquerade. Jarman took Christianity seriously, being by turns fascinated and repelled by it. He noted that at the age of twenty- one: “I could have made a good monk and had no problems being celibate. Quite a few of my friends thought I would take orders.”35 He attested that “I have always been a recluse.”36 And he commented late in life that “celibacy can be very radical, especially same-sex celibacy.”37 He says that he was fascinated by religion as a student and that “I studied church history to see why the church cannot look life in the face. I had to come to terms with that tradition or fight it.”38 In an interview with Rosemary Hartill which screened on channel 4 in 1990, Jarman said he would like to be in a community of faith but that there were none suitable for him. He asserted that the sin of Sodom was that of inhospitality and it was this of which the contemporary Churches were guilty.39 He admired Christ, “Dear Jesus, innocent begetter of an evil and corrupt tradition.”40 And many of his films— Sebastiane, Jubilee, The Angelic Conversation, Caravaggio, War Requiem, and The Garden— contained Christlike figures.41 He said of his own ascetic and aesthetic medievalism: For years the Middle Ages have formed the paradise of my imagination, the archaic half-smile on the Apostle’s lips at Chartres, the blisse that unlocks.

33. Jarman (1991), p. 307. The title of the volume of the last diary entries, At Your Own Risk: A Saint’s Testament, was contributed by Keith [a.k.a. Kevin] Collins, his lover; see Jarman (1993), p. 30. 34. For newspaper obituaries of Jarman compare Tookey (1994), “How Can They Turn This Man into a Saint?,” with Garfield (1994), “Gay Icon Whose Courage Was Awesome” and McCabe (1994). On Diana see Maitland (1998), Spurlin (1999), Valentine and Butler (1999), T. Walter (1999), and Stuart (2000). 35. Jarman (1996), p. 46. 36. Jarman (1993), p. 113. 37. Wymer (2005), p. 39; and Jarman (1993), p. 31. 38. Jarman (1993), p. 36. 39. Carr (1998), p. 10. 40. Jarman (1991), p. 102. 41. Wymer (2005), p. 136; and Sexton (1991).

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It is not William Morris’s Journeyman Eden, but something subterranean, like the seaweed and the coral that floats in the arcades of a jewelled reliquary.42

As early as his student days his room at 64 Priory Road, West Hampstead, was medievaled, complete with “ecclesiastical-looking candles” in an after- echo of the practices of bricolage that I discussed in chapter 4.43 And it has been argued that even his more well-known passion for the Renaissance, “when examined closely . . . looks at times more like an extension of medievalism.”44 In a recent publication on Jarman’s sketchbooks the pop singer Neil Tennant described what he termed the “weirdly ecclesiastical” and “medieval” methods of their writing and illustration.45 Jarman had a fascination with producing books as beautiful objects, and during one of his many periods in hospital he commented on 27 November 1992 that “my room is a monastic cell. . . . I am illuminating my book on colour.”46 This self-presentation as an ascetic was accepted by several of those who came to interview him in his last months. Suzi Feay, writing in the Independent about meeting Jarman shortly before his death, described him as “looking like a very elderly Chinaman in his long robe and tall hat. . . . I clasped his hand, which was dry as paper and hot with beatitute.”47 Another interviewer, Simon Garfield, noted that Jarman lived in a “tiny, sparse flat” that, like his hospital room, appeared to visitors like a monastic cell.48 All this fascination with asceticism makes Jarman’s choice of martyrdom in the early Church more comprehensible as the subject for his first well-known film, Sebastiane (1977) (the title is in Latin and means “O Sebastian!”). Michael O’Pray has seen Sebastian as a precursor of a Jarmanesque type: in his view “this self-tortured masochist is a precursor of the self- destructive, passive, ambivalent, homosexual ‘heroes’ of much of his later cinema,” of whom Edward II is perhaps the prime example and also, if the symbolism of the gold cape worn at his sainting is born in mind, of Jarman himself. 49 In the director’s own words, however, Sebastian was not a heroic martyr, but a “doolally Christian who refused a good fuck, [and] gets the arrows he deserved. Can one 42. Jarman (1991), p. 207. 43. Peake (1999), p. 109. 44. Wymer (2005), p. 7, with Hawkes (1996) and J. Ellis (1999). 45. Tennant, “Commentary,” in Farthing and Webb-Ingall (2013), pp. 202– 4. 46. Jarman (2001), p. 266. 47. Feay (1996). 48. Garfield (1993). 49. O’Pray (1996a), p. 84.

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feel sorry for this Latin closet case? Stigmata Seb who sports his wounds on a thousand altars like a debutante.”50 Perhaps this is what Jarman feared he might have become like if he had entered the Church? The first scene of the film takes place in the year 303 when the emperor Diocletian (reigned 284–305) was celebrating twenty years on the throne. On 25 December Sebastian was participating in the festival of the birth of the sun while the “gilded and decadent court looks on” composed of “decadent and bored courtiers.”51 Jarman’s notes make clear his debt to nineteenth- century art when he comments that the ensuing executions at Diocletian’s palace are to be “mounted like a play in front of a backdrop of [Jean-Léon] Gerome’s painting of the coliseum” [he is probably referring to The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer (1863– 83) (see fig. 7.3)]. Identical twins, tied to pillars, will be singing in a “state of ecstasy” and Sebastian will be in “decadent ceremonial armour.” Sebastian is stripped of his rank as a punishment for refusing to execute Christians and he is sent to a remote army unit. Dreaming of escape from his new situation, he fantasizes about being in the arms of the sun god, Phoebus Apollo, whose “beauty is enhanced by his anger. It is his anger which is divine. His punishments are like Christ’s promise . . . he takes me in his arms and caresses my bleeding body.” A further artistic influence is revealed when Jarman notes that another of the soldiers, Justin, has “1000 wounds on his body like the Isenheim altarpiece” (by Matthias Grünewald [1506–1515]).52 When it comes to Sebastian’s execution, Jarman writes that “one of the arrows goes through Sebastian’s neck. It is sexual and ecstatic for Sebastian. He has a hardon. It is the culmination of all his desires. Max, the sergeant, helps Justin who can hardly stand up, aim the last arrow. Justin makes a giant effort and sends the arrow through Sebastian’s heart. Sebastian is in a state of orgasm.”53 The eroticism of this was meant to be plain to see. As Jarman noted, “the arrows which pierce the passive adolescent are as overt a symbol as any Freudian could wish for and the erotic abandon with which Sebastian enjoys his death underlines the situation.”54 Much of the information for the film was derived from Dom Sylvester Houédard (who referred to himself as “dsh”) (1924–1992), a Roman Catholic monk who became involved in the gay liberation movement in the 1970s. Jarman first used Houédard as a source for information in 50. Jarman (1993), p. 83. 51. BFI Archive, Jarman archive (hereafter BFI/J) box 2, item 1. 52. BFI/J box 3, item 1. 53. BFI/J box 3, item 1. 54. BFI/J box 3, item 2b.

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F I G U R E 7. 3 Jean- Léon Gérôme, The Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer (1863– 83), oil on canvas, 87.9 × 150.1 cm, © The Walters Art Museum, 37.113.

relation to his work as a set designer on Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971). On 12 February 1973 Jarman sent a postcard of boys to dsh at Prinknash Abbey saying that he was writing a script and asking for sourcebooks in order that he might “embroider the little that is known about Sebastian and Diocletian.” The response from Houédard explained that Diocletion only turned anti- Christian in 302 when some of their faith were accused of disrupting pagan divination at the palace.55 Jarman wrote to dsh shortly afterward to say that I’ve been searching my brain to do ancient Rome cheaply and finally landed with the idea of using the old studios for an orgy ancient Roman style chez Diocletian with Sebastian in attendance at which [Gabriele] D’Annunzio style he refuses to martyr young martyrs for guests’ entertainment.  .  .  . I thought I’d see the whole thing through gossip columnists’ eyes in Latin with a discreet United Nations English voice over explaining the scene.  .  .  . D. in imperial pavilion giving party to celebrate his return from Nicomedia introduced by Diana Vreeland type Voguish reporter. . . . Diocletian 75 slim going strong etc.56

55. John Rylands Library, Dom Sylvester Houédard archive (hereafter JRL/DSH) acc 1 box 28 fi le 1, dsh 730214. 56. JRL/DSH acc 1 box 28 fi le 2, dsh 750815 and BFI/J 2, box 26, item 4 dsh to Jarman, 750815. Concerning the overlaps between decadence, satire, Englishness, same-sex desire, and empire,

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dsh replied that he was worried that Jarman was inventing too much, bearing in mind that “there are so many kinky and visually interesting things in both legen[d] and history it would a pity almost not to use them.” He drew Jarman’s particular attention to a link with England by pointing out Pope Caius who “is in the earlier part of Sebastian’s life & who gives him the title of FIDEI DEFENSOR—later given to Henry VIII & stuck to by all his successors.”57 It was from dsh that Jarman learned that Diocletian defeated the Persians and, supposedly, introduced their characteristically hieratic behavior to the late Roman court. The emperor Constantine (reigned 324–37), who converted the empire to Christianity, imported this luxurious style into the Church; purple cloth, the diadem, ceremonial slippers and incense, “all exactly as at high mass now (or at least until the recent changes) [i.e., the liberalizing Second Vatican Council (1962– 65)].”58 dsh was particularly delighted with late Roman imperial nomenclature, advising that “for a good review of diocletianic titles and honorifics see chapter 17 in gibbon: e.g., Yr Sincerity Yr Gravity Yr Excellency Yr Eminence Yr Sublime & Wonderful Magnitude (so Ronald Firbank).”59 dsh informed Jarman that “the emperor lived in a sacred palace. Issued sacred edicts. When he went hunting he infl icted sacred wounds . . . the curtains before the throne parted like the clouds revealing the light of the sun to reveal the monarch amid clouds of incense & surrounded by torches (i.e., candles?) . . . Augustus and Marcus Aurelius would not have recognised themselves in the role of the quasi divine autocrat whose image Diocletian and his Christian successors presented.”60 Sebastiane was featured on the covers of Films and Filmmaking for November 1976 and of Time Out, the London events magazine, for the week of 5–11 November 1976. The film opened in three UK cities to considerable controversy. The Daily Star alleged that Latin dialogue had been used to enable the use of foul language and that it was a “tasteless essay in homosexual-sexploitation” which should be banned.61

see Vance (1999) and (2004), S. Ward (2001), and Wyke (2001). Many Roman emperors were associated in the twentieth century with decadence, notably Nero; see Elsner and Masters (1994). 57. JRL/DSH acc 1 box 28 fi le 2, dsh 750815 and BFI/J 2, box 26, item 4 dsh to Jarman, 750815. 58. JRL/DSH acc 1 box 28 fi le 2, dsh 750815 and BFI/J 2, box 26, item 4 dsh to Jarman, 750815. 59. JRL/DSH acc 1 box 28 folder 4, 750902. 60. BFI/J 2, box 26, item 4. 61. P. Hill (1982), p. 2.

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The Sunday Telegraph patronized it as an “embarrassing frolic.”62 The Evening Standard, in its editorial of 29 November, denied that it was porn, but thought it was a horror movie and compared it with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). The liberal intelligentsia were, however, generally supportive. The Guardian regarded it as a study of sexuality in which homosexuality happened to be the form employed.63 The interpenetration of power and eroticism, most widely referred to as sado-masochism, plays a major role in Jarman’s films, such that it has been commented by Niall Richardson that “the male masochist dominates [sic] Jarman’s cinema.”64 One of the most spectacular examples of this is the relationship between Sebastian and the officer Severus who ensures that the former had the death he had “always subconsciously desired.”65 Jarman’s biographer, Tony Peake, has talked about the issue of traces of enthusiasm for SM in Jarman, relating how he was brought to orgasm at school by being held down and tickled with a feather duster.66 More to the point, Jarman wrote on the subject of sexual expression in the 1970s that “the whole sexual act at that stage seemed to be very violent and have that element of violation in it. I quite liked that . . . we were performing this act as a sort of revenge.”67 In the BFI Jarman archives there in an undated “treatment” which defines masochism, sadism, and sacrifice. Associated pictures, including one of a man with a wooden board that pinions his hands set between two Christs, remind one both of the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe and the arrangement of a Francis Bacon triptych.68 Critics who have a problem with SM have found these interests disconcerting. Michael Perriam, for instance, was relieved to be able to conclude in reference to both SM and drag in The Garden (1990) that the “combination in the changing frame of the exotic gives them a queer edge and perhaps deconservativises them.” These expressions were, in his view, based on oppressive mainstream cultural formations but Jarman’s aesthetic bricolage queered them by means of the novel juxtaposition of subject matter. Hence, he

62. Castell (1976), n.p. 63. Malcolm (1976), p. 6. This had also been the view of one of the members of the then British Board of Film Censors; see British Board of Film Classification archive, HB 37 A0001 55 317, classification report, 6 September 1976. 64. Richardson (2009), p. 101. 65. Peake (1999), p. 216. 66. Ibid., p. 53. 67. Jarman, quoted in Peake (1999), p. 282. 68. BFI archive Jarman 2 box 61.

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F I G U R E 7. 4 Sacrifice of Isaac, War Requiem, dir. Derek Jarman (1989).

evolved a form of engagement with power and sex that was not just the same old “closety exoticisim of the St. Sebastian syndrome.”69 Jarman was, as should now be clear, both fascinated and appalled by homoerotic suffering. This appears very clearly in his movie version of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1989) with its exploration of sacrifice and male bonding.70 In a particularly powerful scene he presents the sacrifice of Isaac in which Abraham is dressed as a Christian priest, giving the gesture of benediction with a hand dripping in his son’s blood, and thus, implicitly, condemning the many Christian ministers who supported the call to arms in 1914 (see fig. 7.4). When the script was published Jarman wrote that “in my heart I dedicate my film of War Requiem to all those cast out, like myself from Christendom. To my friends who are dying in a moral climate created by a church with no compassion.”71 This was, of course, the time of the AIDS crisis, an experience that was likened by Jarman to the trenches.72 Yet he was far too intelligent simply to single out organized religion as a scapegoat for the ills of the gay community. Individual gay men had played some role in bringing about the contemporary catastrophe.73 In a section excised from the published text of Last of England (1987) Jarman mused 69. Perriam (2000), p. 123. 70. Frantzen (2004), pp. 237– 38. See also Gomez (1996) and J. Ellis (1997). 71. Jarman (1989), p. 35. 72. Peake (1999), p. 414. On modern memory, queerness, and World War I, see Fussell (1975), Chauncey (1985), M. Taylor (1989), Caesar (1993), Hoare (1997), Kaye (1999a), Cole (2001) and (2003), L. Smith (2001), Das (2002), and Koureas (2007). On links between World War I and medievalism, see Goebel (2007). 73. Note the intense debates in the gay community concerning the ethics of “safer” and “risky” sex, on which see Haselden (1991), Jarman (1993), and Gauthier and Forsyth (1999).

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on whether he had wished the illness on himself: “Why,” he asked, “this obnoxious hankering after martyrdom?”74 In seeking to answer that question Jarman looked to Christianity as a source with which to think through not only the opportunities but also the limitations of the gay (and indeed human) condition. One result of this self-interrogation was a film, The Garden (1990), which has been viewed as a work of queer theology.75 According to Stephen Carr this film “connects traditional Christian imagery with a particular form of religious life— one in which linear time is replaced by non-linear, in which the figure of the male Christ is balanced with a female wisdom figure, in which the figure of the Father is absent and in which ideals of healing articulate the notion of atonement.”76 Carr defends this film against accusations of travesty or satire. Nor is it, in his view, the result of Jarman having traded in his queer radicalism for traditional pieties. Rather, for Carr, it represented a creative attempt to form new positions of subjectivity and community in a time of crisis.77 A further strong defense of the work comes from Gerard Loughlin, who sees Jarman as having presented himself as a suffering visionary.78 It has further been argued that Jarman’s is a prophetic vision that is aesthetic, ascetic, and proudly deviant all at once in that it centers on the garden he made in the shingle of Dungeness which brought forth beauty and pleasure in adverse conditions.79 And just as he reinvented all manner of cast- off and washed-up objects as sculptures in that garden so he engaged with the cultural heritage of queer martyrdom in order to be able to respond creatively to oppression and impending death. Jarman’s home in Dungeness was next door to a nuclear power plant which he was yet able to find a thing of beauty. On 8 April 1990 Jarman compared the power station to a “great ocean liner moored in the firmament ablaze with light: white, yellow, ruby. . . . On these awesome nights, reduced to silence, I walk around the Ness.”80 In The Garden the landscape at one point lights up in flames, as if inspired by the nuclear sublime, in an after- echo of the destruction of Sodom—a destruction

74. Jarman, quoted in Peake (1999), p. 395. 75. Note the role of his own garden at Dungeness which has been described as a “queer garden” that was a “monument to fragility and defiance” by McKay (2011), p. 145; see also A. Harris (2009), p. 233. 76. Carr (1998), p. 25; see also Jarman (1995) and Perriam (2000). 77. Carr (1998). p. 9. 78. Loughlin (2004), p. 270–73. 79. Sborgi (2007), p. 493. 80. Jarman (1991), p. 52. He constructed quite a different sort of nuclear family in Dungeness from that advocated by social conservatives; see Thomas (1993).

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F I G U R E 7. 5 Burning fields, The Garden, dir. Derek Jarman (1990).

that is yet softened and transmuted into the beauty of the scarlet of sunset (see fig. 7.5).81 Nor are the forces of destruction allowed to mar or erase the greater beauty of the murdered gay couple at the end of the film as they lie together lit by a gentle blue light (see fig. 7.6).82 These two men are shown alive once more at the end of the movie and as participating in a harmonious ritual of community. Thus, as Matt Cook argued in his article on “Saint Derek of Dungeness” (2008), Jarman succeeded in “building a distinctively queer sense of the mythological and sacred in the drive to preserve a sense of self, community, and belonging” by means of his “profound affective relationship with the past.”83 I have been arguing that the cultural fields of Christianity and same-sex desire/queerness/homosexuality had a deeply intertwined trajectory in Victorian and twentieth- century England. Even after the evolution of gay liberation, Christianity, for better or worse, remained

81. Lovatt (2002). 82. Note the importance of the use of beauty to contest the ugly “spectacle” of AIDS as constructed in the media, on which see the key works of Watney (1987), (1996), and (1997), together with Watney and Gupta (1986), Gilman (1987), Seidman (1988), D. Miller (1989), Sontag (1991) and (2003), Winkler (1994), Herek and Capitano (1999), Griffi n (2000), and Lippard and Johnson (2006). Ayres (2003) makes for an interesting comparison through its discussion of Foucault, AIDS, and asceticism. 83. Cook (2008b), pp. 297– 98.

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F I G U R E 7. 6 Dead lovers, The Garden, dir. Derek Jarman (1990).

a vital constitutive element in the queer culture of Britain at the end of the twentieth century. The subject position of Victorian ecclesiastical queerness was one rooted in eroticized shame and suffering. Yet the various subject positions of queer martyrdom that I have identified, limited though they were, provided their own powerful insights into the human condition, just as the experience of both gay oppression and liberation contain much that could inform those fighting to make sense of Jesus’s message in all its complexity. Jarman’s work in engaging with this aspect of his country’s cultural heritage can be compared not only with that of Wilde, but also with that of the Tractarians, such as Newman, who were trying to give a comprehensive historical depth to contemporary thought and culture through a project of reaching out across the centuries of Christian suffering and witness.

Legacy When British society as a whole has, at last, become much more accepting of diverse sexual identities and practices, many Christians, notably including many Roman Catholics and Anglicans/Episcopalians, have become emphatically and publicly hostile. Among modern Church people opinion ranges vastly on this issue from those who advance homosexuality as a unique route to the transcendent to those who regard 199

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it as objectively disordered and any resulting physical expression as a grave sin.84 Others argue that a focus on sexuality badly impacts world mission, or distracts from it at the very least.85 Stephen Hunt has argued that “perhaps no other debate, apart from women’s ordination, has divided the Christian community as much as that of gay rights.”86 The election of Cardinal Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI in 2005 created a new storm within Roman Catholicism, since this pope was intent on surpassing his predecessor in reinforcing traditional morality at a time when enormously damaging revelations were continuing to emerge concerning long-standing child abuse by priests. One of the results of this was a set of new rules for the psychological assessment of candidates for the Catholic priesthood. In 2005 the Congregation for Catholic Education Instruction issued guidelines which explained that “whilst profoundly respecting the persons in question, [we] cannot admit to the seminary or to holy orders those who practice homosexuality, present deep-seated homosexual tendencies or support the so- called ‘gay culture.’” The only exception would appear to be those whose tendencies were “only the expression of a transitory problem”—in other words, men who were (supposedly) going through a phase.87 Issues in Human Sexuality had been issued by the Church of England in 1991 as an influential, but nonbinding, “Lambeth resolution.” This said that monogamous same-sex relationships were acceptable for the laity but not for the clergy; however, in 1998, a resolution of the Lambeth Conference of bishops of the worldwide Anglican Communion was passed that declared that “all homosexual practice is incompatible with scripture.” Then, in 2002, archbishop Rowan Williams initially supported the candidacy of Jeffrey John (who was celibate but had a same-sex partner) for the position of bishop of Reading, but then retracted his endorsement in the face of conservative attacks. Meanwhile, the previous year, the openly gay priest Gene Robinson had become bishop of New Hampshire in the American Episcopal Church and had faced denunciation by evangelicals, notably those from parts of Africa. In 2010 John was considered for the position of bishop of Southwark, but again his candidacy was blocked. Stephen Bates has argued that the reason for the fierce opposition is that 84. Roden (2001), p. 262. 85. W. Jenkins (2004). 86. Hunt (2002), p. 1. 87. Quoted and discussed in Songy (2007), p. 239. For a detailed critique of Roman Catholic attitudes to homosexuality, see G. Moore (2003).

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the evangelical community sees homosexuality as the last great taboo and has determined to fight it tooth and nail. If they give way now, the whole authority of the Bible, on which they base their belief, must crumble, just as their ancestors thought it would disintegrate if slavery was deemed un- Christian or women were ordained or divorce was permitted or shellfish was eaten. It is an issue they have chosen. It has not been thrust upon them . . . they see it as a useful way to unite their constituency.88

This passage helps to explain the focus on this issue even though Christ says nothing about same-sex, erotic desire and there is only a “smattering of mentions” of such issues in the Bible.89 William Sachs’s study Homosexuality and the Crisis of Anglicanism (2009) provides evidence of the limits to understandings of such issues even among some liberal constituencies. His analysis focuses on the structures of the worldwide Anglican Communion which he sees, quite rightly, as having been put under strain by the issue of homosexuality. His aim is to focus on the stability of the Church, rather than on the issue of sexual diversity itself and, as such, the experiences of gay men and women are not at the center of his analysis. Some significant historical issues are skated over, such that Anglo- Catholicism is discussed over only two pages in total. He finds that evidence for associations between Catholicity and homosexuality are “circumstantial,” but he concedes that “gay life found an Anglican niche.” He does comment that, “like the literary circles in which gay men sought refuge, Anglo- Catholic circles offered space for alternative lifestyles, and became the basis of a new sense of Anglican comprehension,” but continues by saying that “this was ironic because theologically Anglo- Catholicism gave strong emphasis to holiness through its sacramental emphasis.” He thereby strongly implies that “alternative lifestyles” are antithetical to sacramental holiness. Moreover, his analysis of literary refuges is clearly not based on extensive knowledge of these bearing in mind his comment that Oscar Wilde “has been identified with a late nineteenth- century group which became known as the ‘Aesthetic and Decadent’ movement. . . . I am indebted to Mignon Turner for calling my attention to Wilde’s identification with the movement.”90 Now I am not for a moment questioning the depth of Sachs’s expertise on the administrative structures of Anglicanism, but the presence of such cultural lacunae in

88. Bates (2004), p. 302. 89. Ibid., p. 6. 90. Sachs (2009), pp. 183– 84, and quotation at 183, footnote 13.

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his book suggests that detailed knowledge of same-sex cultures is not always deemed essential when compiling a major contemporary study on Anglicanism and homosexuality. It is too late to project same-sex desire and queer culture as external— or of only limited relevance—to the world of Christian faith. Views that Christian homosexuals are only a tiny minority have been openly questioned in the press which reported, for instance, that Gene Robinson had allegedly claimed that the Church of England would “come close to shutting down if it was forced to manage without gay clergy.”91 One reason for the crisis in Anglicanism, repeated with various degrees of emphasis in other churches, is that what is at stake is not just the position of queerness in the Church, but the queerness of the Church. Christ, unlike Mohammed, did not marry and produce children. Gays have, on occasion, even claimed Jesus as homosexual, most notoriously so in the poem, “The Love that Dares to Speak its Name” by James Kirkup, which was published in Gay News in June 1976. I knew he’d had it off with other men– With Herod’s guards, with Pontius Pilate, With John the Baptist, with Paul of Tarsus, With foxy Judas, a great kisser, with The rest of all the twelve, together and apart. He loved all men, body, soul and spirit— even me.92

The publication of these verses drew England’s last successful prosecution for blasphemous libel, which was carried out by the veteran purity campaigner Mary Whitehouse. This case, Whitehouse v. Lemon and Gay News Ltd, went to the House of Lords and then to the European Court of Human Rights. Denis Lemon, the editor of the magazine, was given a nine-month suspended prison sentence and a £500 fine.93 The way in which Anglicanism has been increasingly associated in English literature with deviant sexuality can be seen by comparing, for instance, the modest allusions of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell (1958) with the work of Michael Arditti, who has been credited as being one of the very few contemporary British novelists to put Christian (and Jewish) matters at the “very heart” of his fiction.94 Arditti’s The Celibate

91. Gledhill (2007). 92. Kirkup (1976), p. 26; and Travis (2000), p. 259. 93. N. Walter (1977), pp. 9–16; and L. Moran (2001a). 94. See Grimshaw (2004), Roden (2009), and Stanford (2011).

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(1993), describes how, in the age of AIDS—“which might well be considered the supreme sadomasochistic fantasy”—a previously closeted ordinand discovers sex and “degradation” in London. Thus, when two lovers piss on him his response is that “the manner and the form of my degradation felt utterly right.”95 In one scene a male prostitute’s bed is described as looking “like a high altar decked out in its Easter colours, with its crisp white sheets and covers.”96 Elsewhere explicit comparison is made between eating the host and ingesting semen as acts of the consumption of virility.97 The ordinand finds a lover who is into the openly homoerotic poetry of Thom Gunn and who “finds my faith a constant amusement. He sees Catholic ritual as the epitome of the homosexual sensibility and me as something from the pages of his favorite novelist: Ronald Firbank. . . . As I’d never heard of him, I couldn’t tell whether to feel flattered. . . . I realised that the only two [poems] I knew by heart were [Gerard Manley Hopkins’s] The Wreck of the Deutschland and [Thomas] Gray’s Elegy.”98 Arditti explored similar ground in his later novel Easter (2000), which was widely acclaimed and won a number of book awards. This contains various scenes which implicate Christianity and perverse desire, notably through the character of Alfred, an archdeacon, who in one scene is described as climaxing with a cry of “‘it is finished’” when hot wax from altar candles is poured over his cock when he is tied to a crucifi x!99 Increasing numbers of theologians in Britain and the United States, meanwhile, at least those employed in the most liberal institutions, have started to come out about the role of religion in the development of their queer identities and practices—witness Donald Boisvert’s statement that “the Catholic Church made it possible and necessary for me to want to be with other men, to love them, to model myself on them, to touch them, and, of course, to touch myself, though that was the source of much lingering and soul- deadening guilt.”100 This current book is not intended as a piece of queer theology, but I do want to bear in mind Gerard Loughlin’s comments in the introduction to his book Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body (2007), that

95. Arditti (2009), pp. 113 and 147. 96. Ibid., p. 108. 97. Ibid., p. 165; see also Kear (1997) on “eating the other: imaging the fantasy of incorporation.” 98. Arditti (2009), p. 152. These are all works with queer undertones. On Gray see also chap. 1 of this present book. 99. Arditti (2000), p. 338. 100. Boisvert (2005), p. 24.

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“theology is a queer thing. It has always been a queer thing. It is a very strange thing indeed, especially for anyone living in the modern West of the twenty-first century. For theology runs counter to a world given over to material consumption, that understands itself as ‘accidental,’ without any meaning other than that which it gives to itself.”101 Thus, in a society dominated by capitalist production and consumer choice, the rival attractions of devotion are constantly threatened with the specters of marginality and deviance. To use a camp analogy, as one of novelistic creations of the English writer and closeted homosexual E. F. Benson (son of the former archbishop of Canterbury who appeared in chapter 5) put it, “Bertie told me he was going for a tour of churches in Northern Italy—a sudden rage for churches is always suspicious.”102 The fiction that queerness and Christianity are antithetical realms, or indeed that these are issues that only affect particular, small cadres of Catholics, can no longer be sustained. In 1999 a small book was published to commemorate the history of Holy Cross, Cromer Street, which is a small church with a strong Anglo- Catholic tradition that had been consecrated in 1888 in what was then a slum and which is now close to the British Library. In this volume the radical Anglican socialist Kenneth Leech wrote the following: The growth of Anglican Catholicism and the growth of a male homosexual subculture in Britain occurred at the same time. The closet and the sacristy were historically coincident. And for a long time, many Anglican Catholic parishes provided a way in which gay people were able to be themselves in an oblique way. It was a kind of therapeutic community in an age of secrecy. However, since the gay liberation movements of the 1970s and the spread of greater honesty about sexual identity, the Anglican Catholic movement, which had once been a place of safety, has become a zone of untruth and denial. So it is all too common to find Anglican Catholic priests and spokespersons in the forefront of hostility to homosexuality while following a closet homosexual lifestyle themselves.103

Much of the potential for the cultural queerness of Roman and, in particular as I have argued, Anglican Catholicism lay in their minority and almost countercultural status in Protestant Britain. This meant that they could be constructed as exotic and sensational by both en-

101. Loughlin (2007), p. 7. 102. Benson (1933), p. 37. 103. Leech (1999), p. 115; see also Leech (1988); and Pickering (2008), pp. 184-206.

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thusiasts and detractors.104 I do not want to participate in that tradition by intimating that the ritualist traditions that I have been exploring were always, essentially, and necessarily queer. My underlying contention is that these forms of Christianity did foster a degree of queer self- expression but have since been scapegoated by opponents in order to conceal the fact that the “zone of untruth and denial” extends out to include huge numbers of closeted members of myriad Christian denominations. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has indicated, closeted AngloCatholic queerness was and is but one species of Christian silence.105 Queer martyrdom and gay liberation might appear to be separate phenomena but, to a certain degree, the latter was born out of the former. It is important, after all, to remember that members of the Church of England played an important role in the movement for homosexual law reform. Indeed the subject position of queer martyrdom can be seen as a precursor of the attempts by gay liberationists to argue for the moral rightness of same-sex desire. In terms of cultural analysis, queer devotion to God, particularly as incarnated in Jesus Christ, may bear comparison with gay adoration of film stars and other gay icons. Daniel Harris has argued that “gay diva worship is a cult that requires the blind faith of credulous fans who are content to kowtow and genuflect and never even to think of peaking behind the curtains. Camp is what happens when the curtain is lifted.”106 In just this way, queer religious performances can threaten, in contemporary society, to slide into parody. The pains, pleasures, and displays of the ecclesiastical closet seem harder to comprehend when the laws no longer make it expedient for those in all walks of life to “hold homosexuality poised at the brink of public visibility.”107 The ritualistic paraphernalia of worship then cease to bear the energy of forbidden lusts offered up in acts of redeeming sacrifice and become limply fetishistic eccentricities.108 And dreams of finding a state of queer beauty in the supposed innocent androgyny of childhood are left abjectly reframed as spaces of pedophile scandal.109 And yet is there also not something limited and closed-minded about the stances of those gay rights activists who have advocated the abrupt dismissal of ecclesiastical camp? Might their hostility be rooted in the cold-shouldering of aspects of culture that do not appear to fit their 104. J. Davis (2001), pp. 113–14. 105. MacCulloch (2013). 106. D. Harris (1996), p. 189. 107. Sinfield (1991), p. 58. 108. McCuskey (1999), p. 394. 109. Segal (2001).

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secular paradigms?110 By contrast I advocate looking to the history of religious visual culture and performance as a source of queer potential and, thereby, finding creative means of remembering and engaging with a Christian past that is composed of fellowship as well as exclusion and of acknowledgment as well as denial.111 Late in his illness Derek Jarman revisited his pioneering gay film of 1976 which, on its release, had been widely condemned as gay pornography: 10 November 1992, dreaming of my film Sebastiane on my green bomber [i.e., sedative] last night. . . . Sex cut across the reading in all the viewers’ eyes: they saw a naked, handsome man, they did not see him as a spirit. No character in my films is more than a spirit, Ariel, they are not flesh and blood by any imagination.112

My aim, in this book, has been to participate in a project analogous to Jarman’s which is predicated on “excavating the queerness buried within English cultural history” and to envision its spirit.113 I wish to laud positive expressions of queer creativity where they have existed within Catholic traditions in this country since the nineteenth century. Such activity involved the moral equivalent of what David Trotter has referred to in the realms of art and fiction as “cooking with mud”—that is, making positive use of what had been dismissed as dirt and sin.114 By juxtaposing marginalized sexual positions with the notion of an aestheticized divinity, queer theologians and sympathetic artists were not seeking to degrade the notion of the ideal but rather to exalt what had for so long been seen as a state of ugliness and impurity. In May 1888 Oscar Wilde published a book of children’s tales which included “The Selfish Giant.”115 In this story a giant builds a wall to keep a group of children from playing in his beautiful garden which is, thenceforth, plunged into barren winter. He only relents after forgiving a small boy who had broken in and the garden blossoms anew. Many years later the child returns bearing the stigmata and tells the giant, “You let me play once in your garden, to- day you shall come with me

110. Flinn (1995). 111. Note the advantages of a recuperative approach to the queer past as suggested in Love (2007) and Castiglia and Reed (2012). 112. Jarman (2001), p. 255; see also Moor (2000). 113. Lawrence (1997), p. 246. 114. Trotter (2000). 115. On Wilde’s “fairy stories” see Goodenough (1999) and Duffy (2001).

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to my garden, which is Paradise.”116 This is a reference to the statement of Jesus on the cross to a thief crucified beside him who had asked for his blessing (Luke 23:43). Wilde’s story is trying to teach the reader that the creation of a visually and morally beautiful world requires endurance, remembrance, and forgiveness. 116. Wilde (2010), p. 88.

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249

Index abjection, 24, 28 Abraham, 196 Act of Supremacy, 16 Adam, 98 aestheticism, 87, 97, 105–11, 119– 31, 137, 140, 146, 201 AIDS, 12, 29, 153, 184, 187, 196, 203; and the media, 198n82 akimbo, 36 Alatri, 61 Allen, Charles, 42 All Saints Sisters of the Poor, 45 altar servers, 91–93, 106 Andrews, Mary Frances, 107 androgyny, 12, 56, 68, 107, 124, 149, 155, 171, 205 Anglo- Catholicism: incarnational theology and, 30– 66; introduction to, 16–18; monasticism and, 67– 96 (see also Tractarian Movement) anus, 32– 33 Apollo, 192 Archconfraternity of St. Stephen, 92, 94 archives, queer, 14 Arditti, Michael, Celibate, 202– 3; Easter, 203 Arran, Lord. See Gore, Arthur asceticism, 24, 68, 88, 190, 198n82; and appearance, 117, 125n89, 191 Assisi, 61, 92 atonement, doctrine of, 30, 64, 197 Augustus, emperor of Rome, 194

Bacon, Francis, 195 Bailey, Derrick Sherwin, 183 Bampfield, George, How They Made a Man of Johnny, 168 baptismal regeneration, doctrine of, 42 Barrie, James Matthew, 162– 64; Boy David, 162– 63; Peter Pan, 163 Bassano, Alexander, Edward White Benson, 147 Bath, Wiltshire, 39 Baxter, William Giles, 122, 123 Becket, St. Thomas, 188 Benedict XVI, Pope, 200 Benedictine order, Anglican, 67, 71, 75, 77. See also monasticism Benkert, Karl-Maria, 10 Bennett, William J. E, 27, 31, 34, 38– 49, 55– 61, 64, 87, 114 Benson, Edward Frederic, 146, 204 Benson, Edward White, 146, 147, 204 Benson, Mary, 146n58 Bingham, Nottinghamshire, 35 blackmail, 183 Bloomsbury Group, 1, 151 Bloxam, John Francis, 90–91, 133, 175; Priest and the Acolyte, 90, 175 Bourne, Francis, 92 Bournemouth, 106 Braddon, Mary, 84n53 Bradford, Edwin Emmanuel, 175– 78; New Chivalry, 175; Passing the Love of Women, 176; Ralph

251

INDEX

Bradford, Edwin Emmanuel (continued) Rawdon, 178; Stories of Life, 176; Tree of Knowledge, 176 bricolage, 28, 107, 126, 195 Britten, Benjamin, 13n39; War Requiem, 196 Burke, Edmund, 73–74; Philosophical Inquiry, 74; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 73 Burne-Jones, Edward, 51– 54; Merciful Knight, 52, 54 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 52 Burton, Richard, 19 Caldey Abbey, Pembrokshire, 84, 86 Calvinism, 8 Cambridge, University of, 2, 72 Camidge, William, 100 camp, 5, 23, 27–28, 36, 145, 184, 204– 5 Canterbury Cathedral, 43, 180 Capri, 107 Carlyle, Benjamin, 84, 86, 91 Carpenter, Edward, 25, 146, 148, 149– 52, 176; Towards Democracy, 149 Carroll, Lewis, 179 Catholicism, Anglican. See Anglo- Catholicism Catholicism, Roman. See Roman Catholicism celibacy, 3, 18, 27, 51, 101, 104, 176, 183, 190, 200, 202 Charles I, king of England, 7 childhood, 160, 164, 173–74, 179, 205 Christ, Jesus: in art, 46, 47, 52, 53, 54, 63, 99, 101, 190, 197; body of, 15, 19, 31, 39– 43, 48– 49, 55, 57, 59, 61, 64, 95; as queer martyr, 5, 35, 182, 187 Christmas cards, 117–25 Chubb, Ralph, 178 Church Association, 48 Church of Ireland, 136 Chute, John, 101 classicism, 136– 37, 143, 152, 155, 161 Claydon, Suffolk, 75 Clayton and Bell (company), 43, 46, 47 closet: coming out of, 21; defi nition of, 20– 21; ecclesiastical, 5, 20–23, 28–29, 126, 142– 43, 146, 156, 182– 83, 204 Cole, William, 72 Collings, J. P., 92

252

Collins, Charles Alston, 101– 3, Convent Thoughts, 102 Combe, Thomas, 103– 4 confessional, 50, 87 Congregation for Catholic Education Instruction, 200 Corelli, Marie, 120 corporal punishment, 80, 89 Corpus Christi, 39 Corvo, Baron. See Rolfe, Frederick Cottam, Samuel Elsworth, 175 Court of Arches, Canterbury, 36, 38, 49 Cox, Percy, 158 Cram, Ralph Adams, 87 Crane, Thomas, 118 Crane, Walter, 107, Love’s Altar, 108 Cranmer, Thomas, 8 Crawley, Ernest, 158 Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885), 133 Crisp, Quentin, 9 cross- dressing, 3, 4, 124 Crucifi xion, of Christ, 12, 24, 207; in art, 19n67, 45– 46, 47, 53, 101, 137 D’Annunzio, Gabriele, 193 dandyism, 12, 20, 121, 127, 134, 142, 149n63 Dashwood, Francis, 100–101 David, king of Israel, 157, 158, 159– 63 David and Jonathan, love of, 29, 254– 81 Dawson, George, 75 Deane, Emmeline, John Henry Newman, 7 decadence, 15, 24, 98, 101, 105, 116, 120, 151, 168, 192, 201 Del Biondo, Giovanni, 53 De Loutherbourg, Philip Jacques, 32n4 Denison, George Anthony, 41 De Sade, Marquis, 15, 24 Diana, princess of Wales. See Spencer, Diana Dickens, Charles, 89 Digby, Kenelm, 53 Diocletian, emperor of Rome, 192– 94 Disraeli, Benjamin, 49 diva, worship of, 205 Dixon, Emma, 117, 118 Douglas, Alfred, 36, 55n83, 90, 135– 36, 139, 160, 175; Autobiography, 160; Oscar Wilde, 139 Dudley, Robert, 123

INDEX

Du Maurier, George, 120, 128, 130; Maudle on the Choice of a Profession, 130 Dungeness, Kent, 187– 88, 189, 190, 197– 98; power station, 197 Dunne, Cuthbert, 139 Eakins, Thomas, 19n67 effeminacy, 3, 9, 11, 18–25, 50, 54, 91, 105, 124–25, 150, 174 Elers, Peter, 183 El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), 152 Elijah, 57 Elizabeth I, queen of England, 13n39 Ellis, Havelock, 67, 159– 60 Ellis, T. H., Christ Blessing the Bread, 98, 99 Elm Hill, Norfolk, 75, 82 Episcopal Church (American), 98, 199–200 Etty, William, 98–100 Eucharist, 27, 31– 32, 35– 61, 95, 98, 99, 131, 143, 144, 145 European Court of Human Rights, 203 Everett- Green, Evelyn, 167, 170–71, Fast Friends, 165, 166, 173 Exeter, 42 Faber, Geoffrey, Oxford Apostles, 2 failure, 7, 9, 129, 178 Falmouth, Cornwall, 112 Families, queer, 14, 65, 68, 87– 88, 165, 166, 175, 178, 197n80 Farrar, Frederic W., Life of Christ, 24, 26 Fassbinder, Rainer Werner, Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant, 27 Father Ignatius. See Lyne, Joseph Leycester Fawkes, Guy, 145 fetishism, 22, 60n103, 95– 96, 149, 205 Firbank, Ronald, 23, 67, 151– 52, 194, 203; Cardinal Pirelli, 151– 52; Flower beneath the Foot, 23, 67 Forster, Edward Morgan, 105 Forsyth, James, 43, 61– 63; Our Lord is Stripped of His Raiment, 61, 63 Foucault, Michel, 12, 198n82 Fox, Charles Masson, 112 French Revolution. See Revolution, French Freud, Sigmund, 95–96, 164. See also psychoanalysis friendship, same-sex, 2– 3, 51, 73, 76, 90– 91, 94–96, 156–73, 177–78, 185– 86

Frome, Somerset, 38– 49, 55, 60– 64 Fry, Roger, Edward Carpenter, 148 Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, St., 92 Ganymede, 21 gay: Christian Movement, 183; defi nition of, 10; liberation, 5, 21, 184, 192 Genoa, 141 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, Christian Martyrs’ Last Prayer, 192, 193 Gibbon, Edward, 194 Gilchrist, Alexander, 99–100 Gladstone, William, 35 Goliath, 163 Goodall, Charles and Son (company), 123 Gordon, Charles George, 27n98 Gore, Arthur, 135 Gorham, George, 42 Gothic: architectural style, 31, 45, 72, 99, 105, 157; literary genre, 18, 60, 73, 74n24, 84n52, 137, 175 Gray, Alfred, 121, 122, 125 Gray, John, 133 Gray, Thomas, 2, 185– 86, 203; “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” 185– 86, 203 Green, George Pycock, 165 Green, Mary Anne Everett, 165 Grünewald, Matthias, 192 Gualberto, St. John, 53 Guild of the Sacred Stone, 94– 95 Guthrie, William, 73 Hadley, James, 127 Hall, Radclyffe, Well of Loneliness, 12 Harris, Frank, 35– 36 Harrow School, 158 harvest festival, 37 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, Marble Faun, 31 Haydock, Lancashire, 37 Headlam, Stewart, 136 healing, 34, 197 Hellenism. See classicism Henry II, king of England, 188 Henry VIII, king of England, 16 heresy, 15, 48 heteronormativity, 19, 25, 128 Hichens, Robert, Green Carnation, 36 Hildesheimer (company), 119 HIV. See AIDS

253

INDEX

Hogarth, William, Sir Francis Dashwood, 100 Holy Communion. See Eucharist Holy Cross, Cromer St., London, church of, 204 homophobia, 10, 16, 28, 35, 133– 34, Christian, 199–202 homosociality, 74, 93, 154, 161, 165, 186 Hooper, Tobe, dir., The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 195 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 14, 31; “Wreck of the Deutschland,” 203 Houédard, Sylvester, 192– 94 Housman, Alfred Edward, 141 Hughes, Thomas, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, 90n76, 159 Hull, 98 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 15, 19n67 ice skating, 121, 122, 123, 124 idolatry, 17–18, 27, 37, 90, 104, 148 impurity, 31, 148, 206 incarnation, doctrine of, 41, 48, 51, 59, 140 incense, 17, 39, 84, 85, 101, 105, 151, 183, 194 Ipswich, 74 Isaac, 196 Ives, George, 10, 135 Jarman, Derek, 29, 184, 187–99, 206; Angelic Conversation, 190; burial place of, 187, 188; Caravaggio, 190; Edward II, 188– 89; Garden, 190, 195, 197, 198, 199; Jubilee, 190; Last of England, 196; sainting of, 187– 89; Sebastiane, 190–95, 204; War Requiem, 190, 196 Jesus. See Christ, Jesus John, Jeffrey, 200 Joyce, James, 112 Jonathan, son of Saul, 157, 158, 159– 63 Judaism, 55, 202 Keats, John, 141 Ken, Thomas, 46 Kertbeny, Károly Mária, 10 Kingsley, Charles, 3, 22, 24, 124; Westward Ho!, 22 Kirkup, James, “Love that Dares,” 202 kiss, same-sex, 64, 86, 92, 95, 162, 178, 202 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 10, 24, 28; Psychopathia Sexualis, 10

254

Labouchère, Henry, 133 Lacan, Jacques, 15 Laing, Lucy: David and Jonathan, 157, 163, 166–71; Surly Joe’s Secret, 171, 172, 173 Last Judgment, 31 Latimer, Hugh, 8 Laud, William, 7, 31 Lawson, Wilfred, 115 Leech, Kenneth, 204 lesbianism, 12–13, 55, 107, 146n58, 165, 170 Leslie, Emma. See Dixon, Emma Lewis, Matthew, Monk, 72 liberation, gay. See under gay Liddell, Robert, 34– 35, 40 Lincoln, Lord. See Pelham- Clinton, Henry Littlemore, Oxfordshire, 1, 3, 4, 74 Llanthony Abbey, Monmouthshire, 79, 82, 84, 89, 91 London: ecclesiastical life in, 34, 39, 45– 46, 86, 93–94; in fiction, 110, 112, 165, 203; queer life in, 11, 57, 78, 87, 109, 125 Lot, wife of, 31 Ludlow, Henry Stephen, Athletics v. Aesthetics, 128, 129 Ludovici, Albert, 120–21, 125, 127 Luget, Clive, Vision of Latton Priory, 94–96 Lyne, Joseph Leycester, 27, 68, 69, 70, 71, 75– 84, 88, 89, 91, 178; Brother Placidius, 79; Leonard Morris, 80– 81 Lyne, William Leycester, 81, 82 Macdonald, Hamilton, 92 Mackenzie, Compton, Sinister Street, 87– 88, 104–7 Madame Tussaud’s, London, 116 Madeira, island of, 165 Mahler, Gustav, 129 Mann, Thomas, Death in Venice, 129 Manning, Henry Edward, 1, 35 Mansfield, Charles, 22 Mapplethorpe, Robert, 195 Marcus Aurelius, emperor of Rome, 194 marriage, same-sex, 78 Martin, John, 31– 33; Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, 33; Great Day of His Wrath, 32 martyrdom: of Anglo- Catholics, 113–15, 116, 117, 133; Christ and, 64, 182, 187; defi nitions of, 7–9; Protestant, 7– 8;

INDEX

queer, 5, 9, 12, 20, 23, 27, 134– 46, 142– 43, 182, 184, 205; and sadomasochism, 149– 50 Mary Magdalene, St., 34 Mary, Virgin, 9, 23, 77, 94 masculinity, 9, 20n74, 24, 74, 96, 131, 143, 149, 163, 167, 174 masochism, 8, 24–25, 141, 150– 51, 191, 195 Mass. See Eucharist Massenet, Jules, Thaïs, 168– 69 masturbation, 203 Matthews Memorial Methodist Church, Walthamstow, London, 94 Medievalism, 71–72, 190–91, 196n72 Medmenham monks, 100 Methodist Church, 93, 98 Michelangelo, 161 Middle Ages, 15–16, 18, 64, 72, 152, 158, 185, 190 Middleton, Essex, 94 Miles, Robert, 35 Millais, John Everett, 100–104, 107, 120; Child’s World, 120; Mariana, 101, 102, 103– 4; St. Agnes’ Eve, 101 Milton, John, Lycidas, 186 misogyny, 8, 157, 176 monasticism, 3, 67– 68, 69, 70, 71, 72–91, 100, 104, 168, 178, 190–92. See also Lyne, Joseph Leycester Morris, William, 51 Moses, 57 Moultrie, Gerald, 61– 62 Murdoch, Iris, Bell, 202 Muscular Christianity, 3, 124 muscularity, 131– 32 music, queer, 168, 170 Neale, John Mason, 62 new chivalry, 152 Newman, John Henry, 1– 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 13n39, 22, 35, 75, 151, 199; Apologia pro Vita Sua, 3; Lyra Apostolica, 2 New Zealand, 169 Nightingale, Florence, 70 Noah, 98 Norwich, 74, 76–77, 81– 83 nudity, 132, 152 Nugée, George, 87 Order of Sanctissima Sophia, 126 Orientalism, 19n67, 119

Orr, Jack, 166, 174; Farmer’s Boy, 166 Oscott, West Midlands, 99 Oxford, city of, 84n54; Martyrs’ Memorial, 8; Movement (see Tractarian Movement); University of, 2– 3, 19, 39, 51– 52, 58, 109, 122, 124, 136, 160, 175 papacy, 15, 126, 138, 200 Passion. See Crucifi xion, of Christ Pater, Walter, 59, 87 Patience (operetta), 119, 124, 127 Pearce, F. L., Altar at Home, 98, 99 pedophilia, 79, 88– 89, 112–13, 154– 55, 161, 164, 174–75, 205 Pelham- Clinton, Henry, 73 penal substitution, doctrine of, 8 penetration, 22, 25, 150, 192 Penzance, Lord, 114 Performances: gendered, 3n13, 5, 38, 51– 52, 75; queer, 20, 28n103, 35, 51, 75, 205– 6 perversion, 3, 24 phallicism, 53, 96, 163, 167 Phillimore, Robert, 48 Phillpotts, Henry, 42 phrenology, 75 pillory, 35 Pius IX, Pope, 138 Plymouth, 75 Portman Chapel, London, 39– 40 Portman, Eric, 180 Powell, Michael and Emeric Pressburger, dir., A Canterbury Tale, 179, 180 Pre-Raphaelites, 36, 51– 52, 55, 64, 104, 119. See also Solomon, Simeon Price, Dennis, 180 Prinknash, Abbey, Gloucestershire, 193 Prison, 114–16, 133, 142 Privy Council, Judicial Committee of, 38, 42 prostitution, 34, 203 Proust, Marcel, Remembrance of Things Past, 21–22 psychoanalysis, 2, 74, 95–96, 159– 61, 164, 192. See also Freud, Sigmund Public Worship Regulation Act (1874), 49, 113–14 Pugin, Augustus W. N., 31, 99 Punch, 3, 4, 36, 84, 85, 124, 128, 130, 145– 46 Purchas, John, Directorium Anglicanum, 143, 144

255

INDEX

purity: anthropological concept of, 33; moral concept of, 31, 89, 94, 124, 126, 145, 157, 164, 179, 202 Pusey, Edward Bouverie, 8, 35, 40– 41, 48, 58, 60– 61 Raphael, 100 Reading, Berkshire, 133 Real Presence, doctrine of, 40– 41, 48– 49 Reformation, 7– 8, 16–17, 21, 33, 36, 70, 72, 75, 143, 145 Reid, R. D., 183 Renaissance, 84, 107– 8, 191 Reni, Guido, 141 Revolution, French, 7, 73 Richmond, George, John Henry Newman, 6 Ridley, Nicholas, 8 ritualism. See Anglo- Catholicism Rock, Daniel, 64, 65, 66 Rolfe, Frederick, 18, 28, 38, 86– 87, 97, 109– 13, 117– 32, 140, 149, 152; Desire and Pursuit of the Whole, 131, 149; Hadrian VII, 38, 110, 117, 131; His Room at Saffron Walden, 111; Nicholas Crabbe, 112 Roman Catholicism, 1, 16–17, 45, 64, 65, 66, 91–94, 97, 99, 100, 106, 126, 145, 151, 192, 200 Rome, city of, 138, 141, 193 Ross, Robert, 139 Rossetti, Christina, 55, 57; Goblin Market, 55 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 55 Royal Academy, 43, 57 Royal Worcester (company), 127 Ruskin, John, 104, 122 Russell, Ken, dir., Devils, 193 Sacher-Masoch, Leopold von, 24 sadism, 24–25, 195 sadomasochism, 12, 24–27, 79, 195, 203 Saffron Walden, Essex, 109 saints, queer, 142, 187– 89, 198 San Francisco, 187 Santa Croce, Florence, church of, 53 satire, 36, 97, 107– 8, 127– 31, 197n56 Saul, king of Israel, 157, 158, 159, 162 scapegoat, 196, 205 schools, public, 155, 159– 61, 176–77 sculpture, 43– 44, 61, 63, 64, 145 Sebastian, St., 11–12, 23, 86, 110, 137, 141, 187–96, 206 Sellon, Lydia, 68–70, 75

256

Seville, 151 sex, anal, 150; oral, 20; safer, 196n73. See also masturbation; sodomy Sexual Offences Act (1967), 134, 155 Seymour, Michael Hobart, 145– 46 Shackleton, Richard, 74 Shakespeare, William, 101, 161; Measure for Measure, 101 shame, 5, 21, 27, 29– 30, 34– 35, 64, 131, 134, 153, 199 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, Adonais, 186 Sheppard v. Bennett (1869–72), 38 silence, 205 sissies, 174 Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, 187 Sladen, Catherine Mainwaring, 165 slumming, 93 SM. See sadomasochism Society for the Reformation of Manners, 16 Society of Dilettanti, 100 Society of St. John the Evangelist, Oxford, 84n54 Sodom, city of, 31, 32, 146, 197 sodomites, 10, 15, 20, 32– 33 sodomy, 15–16, 27, 32– 33, 72, 78; criminal offence of, 16, 32, 35, 72; defi nition of, 15; sin of, 15–16, 32– 33 Solomon, Simeon, 31, 55– 59, 61, 108–9, 178; Bride, the Bridegroom and Sad Love, 61, 62; Carrying the Scrolls of the Law, 55; Love among the School Boys, 55n83; Mystery of Faith, 55– 57, 59, 60; Sacramentum Amoris, 56– 57; Socrates and His Agathodaemon, 57; Story of David and Jonathan, 157, 158; Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, 57 spectacles, 122–23 Spencer, Diana, 23, 190 St. Austin’s Priory, Wymering and London, 87 St. Barnabas, Pimlico, church of, 39 St. Clement’s, Old Romney, church of, 187, 188 St. Francis, Notting Hill, church of, 45 St. George, Paris, church of, 176 St. George, Southwark, church of, 145 St. John, Ambrose, 2, 4, 5 St. John’s Wood Clique, 120 St. John the Baptist, Frome, church of, 41– 43, 44, 45– 46, 47, 61– 62, 63 St. Martin’s Guild, 94

INDEX

St. Michael and All Angels, Walthamstow, church of, 94 St. Paul, Knightsbridge, church of, 39 St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, 43 St. Peter, London Docks, church of, 45 Stations of the Cross, 43– 45 Stenbock, Stanislaus Eric, 108 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 171 Stone, Marcus, 120 Storey, George Adolphus, 120 Strachey, Giles Lytton, 1– 5, Eminent Victorians, 1, 13n39, 151 Strawberry Hill, London, 72 stripping (of Christ), 61, 62, 63 Sullivan, Edward, 35 Sunday school, 173 Symonds, John Addington, 122, 159– 60 Symons, Alphonse J. A., Quest for Corvo, 111–12 syphilis, 142 Tait, Lucy, 146n58 Taunton, Somerset, 41 Taylor, Sydney, 98 tears, queer, 1, 9, 27, 94, 134 Tennyson, Alfred, 101; In Memoriam, 186 Teresa, St., 23 Theodoret, bishop of Cyrrhus, 41 theology, queer, 60– 61, 140, 197, 203– 4 Tooth, Arthur, 114–15, 116, 117, 121 Tractarian Movement, 2, 8– 9, 17, 24, 30– 31, 36, 40, 58, 75, 104 Transfiguration (of Christ), 57– 58 transubstantiation, doctrine of, 40 transvestism. See cross- dressing Travers-Pope, Edmund, “Don’t You Like Little Boys?,” 172 Trinity College, Dublin, 175 tuberculosis, 168 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich, 88 Uranians, 88–90, 146, 161, 175–79; verse, 175–79 Vallombrosan Order, 53 Venice, 112–13, 129– 31, 132 Venus, 23

vestments, ecclesiastical, 3, 4, 50, 55, 85– 86, 105– 6, 124, 137 Vianello, Ermenegildo, 131 Via Crucis, church of St. John the Baptist, Frome, 43, 44, 45– 47, 61– 62, 63, 64 victim, status of, 24, 134 Victoria, queen of England, 146 Virgin Mary. See Mary, Virgin Visconti, Luchino, 129 voyeurism, 12 Vreeland, Diana, 193 Wailes, William, 46 Walpole, Horace, 72–73, 101; Castle of Otranto, 73 Walter, Thomas, 118 Ward, Leslie, Christian Martyr, 116 Ward, Wilfrid, 4 Ward, William, 35 Waugh, Alec, Loom of Youth, 160 Waugh, Evelyn, Brideshead Revisited, 19 waxworks. See Madame Tussaud’s, London West, Richard, 185– 86 Westlake, Nathaniel, 45 Westminster School, 39 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 120 White, Gleeson, 118–20 Whitehouse v. Lemon and Gay News Ltd, 202 Whitehouse, Mary, 202 Wilde, Oscar, 2, 31, 39, 90, 106, 114, 120, 125–28, 130, 133– 38, 139, 140– 53, 160– 61, 175, 201; childhood of, 35– 36; De Profundis, 136, 137, 143; Dorian Gray, 59– 60, 105, 127, 137; and Roman Catholicism, 138– 40; “Selfish Giant,” 206–7; trials of, 28, 105, 133, 143 Wilde, Speranza, 136 Williams, Rowan, 200 Winchester College, 160 Wolfenden Committee, 155, 183 World War I, 150, 178, 196n72 World War II, 10, 179 York, 98 Zeus, 21

257