#Queer Cambridge | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

catullus0525 · 11 months ago

Text

Chapter 1: Dim And Remote The Joys Of Saints I See (1869-1895) -- Part II

The trouble was not of conscience alone. Over the next years of his life, Robbie came to realise the hefty price he shall pay for being unapologetically homosexual in an intensely homophobic society.

By the accounts of those who knew him, Robbie was a short, delicate, and somewhat feminine-looking boy in his youth. Arthur Humphreys, a London bookseller who had known Robbie since the 1880s, remembered him as a ‘pathetically pale’, ’very delicate looking’ youth who sported flowery ‘Liberty’ ties and had ‘a tendency to be aesthetic in his dress’. Alfred Douglas, who had known him since the early 1890s, described him as an ‘attractive’ but ‘rather pathetic-looking little creature’ resembling ‘a kitten’. Rupert Croft-Cooke, who had probably heard much about Ross from Douglas, wrote that ‘Robert Baldwin Ross was an amusing little queen’ and ‘an invert’, who liked ‘older men of intelligence and social position’ and ‘looked for soldiers to play male to him’. And Neil McKenna went as far as saying that ‘[t]his slender, attractive and impulsive boy was a beacon for men who were attracted to younger men or boys and who often wanted to anally penetrate them.’. We may thus reasonably presume that Robbie’s refusal to adhere to the masculine norms of the day made him easy target for bullying, which was compounded by the fact that he never deliberately concealed his sexuality. Indeed, Richard Ellmann briefly mentioned that even before he got into university, Robbie had been ‘beaten for reading Wilde’s poems’, which were already considered effeminate if not homosexual.

In 1888, Robbie got into King’s College, University of Cambridge to study History. He was unabashedly progressive in a College known to be ardently conservative in his time, and he was not afraid of voicing controversial opinions. For instance, in support of King’s recent changes in admissions procedure to admit non-Etonians, Robbie wrote:

…however much the lovers of Eton, and those whose conservative prejudices are something more than mere sentiment, may regret the admission of non-Etonians into the place, we believe it was the salvation of the college, for in these advanced days an exclusively Etonian college is impossible for Cambridge. The change naturally brought evil with good, and among those who battered at the doors for admission under the new regulations, there came some of the most undesirable Undergraduates that could well be imagined. Not only long-haired, but the short-haired and the no-haired came — the purely social and the socially pure.

Already estranged from most of his Eton-educated peers by the fact that he had not attended a public school, Robbie’s opinionated nature, and most likely also his visibly queer outlook, infuriated the public school boys at King’s, who were determined to teach him a lesson by violence. Six months after he got into Cambridge, in one freezing evening, Robbie was dragged from the dining hall all the way to the college lawn, manhandled by six students, and ducked into the icy cold college fountain.. This, as Maureen Borland pointed out, could ‘well have resulted in the victim dying of pneumonia’ in Victorian times. The College was entirely unsympathetic towards Robbie: the six assailants were granted the honour to dine with a Tutor right after they left Robbie brutalised and shivering on the college lawn; and adding insult to injury, three days after the incident, the College decided that both the assailants and the assaulted had been guilty of breaking College rules, so no further action was to be taken.

The bullying and the miscarriage of justice left Robbie severely traumatised. According to Oscar Browning, then the Fellow for History at King’s, Robbie suffered ‘a violent brain attack’ as the result of ‘outrage preying on his mind’. This was likely an euphemistic under-statement given the Victorian attitude towards mental illness. By some accounts, Robbie was suicidal after the incident and had to be brought home from university. Though he returned to Cambridge two months later and managed to wrangle a reluctant apology out of his assailants through persistent effort, he never fully recovered from the traumatising incident and had recurrent episodes of measles, pneumonia, and mental breakdowns afterwards. Moreover, perhaps realising that he would forever remain an outcast in an institutionally homophobic college, eventually Robbie decided to drop out of Cambridge. The decision could hardly have been an easy one, for, prior to the incident, Robbie had enjoyed Cambridge a great deal.

After dropping out of Cambridge, Robbie made the monumental decision to come out to his family. It was an unbelievably courageous act in 1889, only four years after the notorious ‘Labouchere Amendment’ made all homosexual acts punishable by up to two years of imprisonment and hard labour, on top of the already draconian (though unenforceable) Offences against the Person Act 1861 which punished sodomy by life imprisonment. Few in his time were as brave. As Neil McKenna wrote, Robbie was one of the extremely few late-Victorian men who were open with their families about their sexuality since a young age and made no ‘prolonged attempts to divert his passions towards women’ Indeed, as we shall see later on, Robbie never considered marrying to conceal his homosexuality and probably tried to dissuade his homosexual friends from doing so. However, McKenna’s claim that there was no doubt or self-recrimination but only ‘joyous acceptance’ on Robbie’s parts went a bit too far: as a young adult made suicidal by violent homophobia, it was highly unlikely that he did not struggles before coming out to his family.

We would never know what was going on in Robbie’s mind back then. Was he trying to explain to his family his decision to drop out of Cambridge? Was he crying out for understanding and support? Was he defying a hostile world full of harsh prejudices? Or was he simply sick and tired of concealing himself? As with many other parts of his story, we could only guess.

Nor do we know exactly how his family reacted. Biographers had different ideas: Bogle did not record any significant reaction and merely said matter-of-factly that his family found him a job in Edinburgh not long after he left Cambridge; Borland wrote that his family was ‘distressed’ and tried to ‘force him to change his mode of life’ by throwing him out; and Fryer claimed that his brother Aleck and his mother were not judgemental about his sexuality, though his younger sister Lizzie was vehemently against it. I believe Borland’s theory is more credible. For one, his brother Aleck wrote to Oscar Browning saying that: ‘He [Robbie] must leave home…my present idea is to leave him to his own devices. I think it would be much better for him if he had to make his own plans and carry them out himself.’ These euphemistic words hardly belie the harshness of the deed: though Robbie later proved himself capable of ‘making his own plans and carrying them out’, it hardly justified his family’s decision to banish him to Edinburgh at a time when he was distressed, vulnerable, and desperately in need of care. Secondly, the cold and puritan Edinburgh hardly suited Robbie’s constitution, and the job Aleck found him was a minor editorial position with a bunch of ‘sports-loving, hard-drinking, nationalistic young men’ whom Robbie probably did not find pleasant. It is therefore highly unlikely that Robbie willingly took up the job. Thus it is reasonable to postulate that after being bullied out of Cambridge, Robbie was thrown out by his otherwise loving family for his sexuality and left to fight the battles of life without support.

We could only imagine how difficult it must have been: he was a teenager on the cusp of adulthood, had his education disrupted, wronged by the world, cast aside by his own family, and left stranded in an unfamiliar city. His health suffered, and he became so unwell that he had to be brought back to London after just a year. Yet, from his humble lodging in Rutland Square, Robbie was still writing to his former supervisor at Cambridge voicing his indignation and articulating his longing for justice. This stubborn tenacity never left him in his subsequent years.

With his tenacity and his nascent genius for friendship, Robbie survived the harsh ordeal and made his first friends in literary London over the next couple of years. Foremost in his connections was, of course, Oscar Wilde, which shall be the focus of the next section. Through Oscar, Robbie connected with other ‘disciples’ of Wilde and became part of the 1890 group —— that group of liberal and libertine queer young men wearing green carnations and setting the fashion of the age —— who included Reggie Turner, Max Beerbohm, and of course, Alfred Douglas. According to Max, the group found Robbie ‘cozy and useful’.

Following Wilde, Robbie befriended More Adey at around 1890, an Oxonian expelled from Keble College for his conversion to Catholicism. Adey was eleven years older than Robbie and shared much of his artistic taste. In 1891 they collaborated on a new edition of Melmoth the Wanderer by Charles Maturin (Oscar Wilde’s great uncle) and referred to themselves as two halves of the same person. In that same year they began cohabiting and would lived together for the next fifteen years. Nobody can conclusively ascertain the nature of their relationship, some maintained that they were but platonic roommates who never shared a bed, whilst others believed that some form of long-term romantic relationship must have sustained their prolonged cohabitation. The only account of their interaction comes from Siegfried Sassoon, who knew Ross and Adey later in their lives. According to Sassoon, Adey was a kind but slightly unkempt and reclusive man with ‘lustreless dark eyes’ and a beard which looked ‘a bit moth-eaten'. After spending so long living with Robbie, the two men began resembling each other in their habits and mannerisms. He also had a ‘customary chair’ in Robbie’s flat even after they ceased to live together, and would shuffle into Robbie’s conversations late at night to ramble about the failures of the British government in his chair with no awareness that ‘two o’clock in the morning was the wrong hour’, whilst Robbie would tolerate his quirks and sit up with him regardless of the hour.

Then, in 1892, Robbie befriended Aubrey Beardsley through Aymer Vallance, a family friend. Robbie was dazzled by the ‘strange and fascinating originality’ of Beardsley and delighted in the subversive elements in his artistic designs. He later celebrated Beardsley’s decadent artistic style by comparing how he shocked the English public to how Juvenal’s satirised Roman society. Aubrey, in return, delighted in Robbie’s company, and over the next couple of years he frequently invited Robbie to lunch with him at very short notices when he needed artistic and personal advice.

Meanwhile, Mrs Ellen Beardsley, Aubrey’s mother, also took a great liking to Robbie as a reliable anchor in her son’s turbulent life. This was to become a lasting friendship. Though Robbie was twenty-three years her junior, his mature temperament and naturally caring disposition made him a trusted personal friend to her. Ellen often confided with Robbie the difficulties she had with her son’s turbulent mood and unstable health in great details. Upon occasions, she even relied on Robbie for advice on parenting: notably, in September 1893 Ellen entreated Robbie to ‘bring Aubrey to his senses’ and ‘shame him into proper behaviour’. In return, Robbie was to assist Ellen and care for Aubrey till the end of the latter’s life.

In that same year, Robbie befriended Edmund Gosse, who was twenty years his senior and ‘a great arbiter at the Savile as well as within literary London’. Gosse found Robbie very charming, and Robbie soon became a favourite with every member of the Gosse family. Through Gosse, Robbie made connections with many artists at different stages of their career, amongst whom counted Joseph and Elizabeth Pennell, R.A.M. Stevenson, Henry Harland, and D.S. MacColl, to name a few. Moreover, Gosse was to become some sort of life-long father figure to Robbie. In particular, during Oscar’s trial and imprisonment, Gosse was to be one of the few reliable shoulders Robbie could cry on, which for him was possibly a lifeline out of despair.

These friends of Robbie’s did not always mingle well with the Wilde circle. Chiefly amongst which was the animosity between Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. Despite Wilde’s claim that he ‘invented’ Aubrey Beardsley, it was Ross who introduced Beardsley to Wilde and persuaded the latter to commission the famous illustrations for Salomé from Beardsley. However, despite their shared aestheticism and mutual artistic appreciation, they did not get along. According to Harris, the disagreement was chiefly artistic: in conversations with Beardsley Oscar showed ‘a touch of patronage, the superiority of the senior, […] and often praised him ineptly’, whereas Beardsley spoke of Oscar as a ‘showman’, who knew way more about literature than about art. Consequently their later-immortalised collaboration on Salomé was hardly collaborative at the time: Aubrey’s caricatures got on Oscar’s nerves, whilst Oscar trivialised Aubrey’s art as ‘the naughty scribbles a precocious schoolboy makes in the margins of his copybooks’. In the end, the relationship between Oscar, Aubrey, and the publisher of Salomé became rather strained, and the illustrations were sent back for re-working multiple times, much to Aubrey’s displeasure. However, their artistic differences probably had something to do with their respective sexualities as well. Despite his aesthetic appearances Aubrey was, for all we know, not interested in Uranian culture and disapproved of Oscar’s openness about his sex life. He once complained to Trelawny Backhouse that Oscar had bragged to him about having had ‘love affairs and resultant copulations’ with five boys in one night and had 'kissed each one of them in every part of their bodies’ including the dirtiest parts, which gave him ‘nausea like an emetic’. Later, Beardsley described both Wilde and Douglas to Robbie as ‘really very dreadful people’. Such personal disgust most likely animated their professional fights.

More Adey likewise disapproved Wilde’s flaunting of his sexuality, but his disapproval was more likely out of caution than disgust. Throughout his life Adey preferred to keep his private life strictly private, and he appeared so sexually aloof that few questioned his sexuality despite his 15-year-long cohabitation with Robbie (who was a ‘known homosexual’). However, like Beardsley, he seemed to have thought of Wilde and Douglas as dangerously corrupting influences on Robbie even if he stopped short of calling them ‘dreadful’. He once confided with a Catholic priest that he hoped to save Robbie from the ‘evil’ of Wilde and Douglas —— presumably meaning promiscuity with men.

But Robbie was hardly untouched canvas. Apart from the many sexual encounters he (probably) had in school and in Europe, from what we know, Robbie did enjoy himself rather liberally in queer London before 1895. Though we could not ascertain the extent of his involvement in Oscar and Bosie’s private ‘evil’, we do know that in Oscar’s ‘Neroian’ years Robbie was often a loyal fawn at his side. The three of them also shared liaisons with beautiful youths, though of those liaisons only bare outlines remain from a scandal in 1893. In that year Robbie fell hard for a young man called Claude Dansey, and after prolonged correspondence they spent a few nights together in Robbie’s London home. Afterwards, as Max Beerbohm whispered to Reggie Turner, Bosie ‘stole’ Claude from Robbie and ‘kept’ him at the Albermarle, leaving Robbie pining sadly for ‘the desire of his soul’. We do not know exactly what happened at the Albermarle —— we only know that many years later the notorious tale-weaver Frank Harris alleged that Oscar Browning had told him that at Albermarle Claude Dansey slept with Bosie, then Oscar, then a woman (most likely a prostitute) paid by Bosie —— but regardless, Claude went back to school three days late. Consequently, the school master Biscoe Wortham interrogated Claude on his whereabouts and intercepted a few letters from Bosie, which led him to discover Claude’s relationships with both Bosie and Robbie. This revelation came as a shock to Wortham, for Robbie had been a family friend. One thing led to another, Wortham then discovered that his elder son also had a brief fling with Robbie a few years back when both were teenagers. Both Wortham and the old Dansey threatened to sue Robbie for indecencies —— for some reason they were apprehensive about bringing up either Douglas or Wilde —— but Oscar Browning managed to dissuade them from prosecution.

In the aftermath of the affair Robbie was once again banished from home, except this time he had to go further than Scotland. His relatives denounced him as the ‘disgrace of the family’, the ‘social outcast’, and the son ‘unfit for society of any kind’. Like many gay men in the eye of the storm in the 1890s, he left his career and life behind for Europe. Bosie likewise went into exile to Egypt. He stayed in a house owned by his elder brother Jack and his wife Minnie, but they hardly spent time with him, so he spent most of his time alone except for attending gatherings of the English Literary Society. As with Oscar Wilde years later, the solitude and the shadows of the scandal left Robbie rather miserable. A reply from Max Beerbohm in 1893 showed that Robbie could not help but catastrophise about his grim future as a social pariah. He briefly made two trips back to London in 1894 but was sent away to North America by his family not long afterwards. Not much is known about him afterwards till 1895.

#history #queer history #victorian #victorian england #oscar wilde #robbie ross #literature #literary history #lgbtq+ history #Cambridge #aubrey beardsley #max beerbohm

1 note · View note

sidneyellwoods · 1 year ago

Text

some i, as a Queer WWI Lit Connossieur would like to add:

Cher Ami and Major Whittlesey by Kathleen Rooney

The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue (dublin during the war)

The Will Darling Adventures series by K.J. Charles (1920s, but protagonist is a WWI veteran)

All the White Spaces (a reach, maybe, but the war is definitely present)

These Old Lies by Larrie Barton

The Last Kiss by Sally Malcolm

The Great War series by Renee Dahlia

While My Heart Beats by Erin McKenzie

nonfiction but its worth checking out:

Soldiers Don't Go Mad by Charles Glass (history about Sassoon and Owen)

Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest (a reach but you will not believe how many upper class british men who served in the first world war were fairly openly queer) (including george mallory)

Queer WWI Literature

This is a very niche and limited category, so I’ve been trying to throw together a list of what I can find out there for anyone else who might also be interested. What follows are all books that contain LGBTQ+ rep of any kind, that also involve the First World War as a central theme.

Titles with an asterisk* are the ones I have personally read, and would be more than happy to talk about/answer any questions about their content/rep!

Written in the 20th Century

Alf, by Bruno Vogel (1929)

Despised and Rejected, by Rose Allatini (pseud. A.T. Fitzroy) (1918)*

Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches, edited by Martin Taylor (1989)

The Memorial, by Christopher Isherwood (1932)

My Father and Myself, by J.R. Ackerley (1968)

The Prisoners of War: A Play in Three Acts, by J.R. Ackerley (1925)*

The Regeneration Trilogy (Regeneration, The Eye in the Door, The Ghost Road), by Pat Barker (1991, 1993, 1995)*

A Scarlet Pansy, by Robert Scully (1932)*

Strange Meeting, by Susan Hill (1976)

Written in the 21st Century

The Absolutist, by John Boyne (2011)

Across Your Dreams, by Jay Lewis Taylor (2016)

Alec, by William di Canzio (2021)

Ashthorne, by April Yates (2022)

Awfully Glad, by Charlie Cochrane (2014)

Bonds of Earth, by G.N. Chevalier (2012)*

The Boy I Love, by Marion Husband (2005)*

The Daughters of Mars, Thomas Keneally (2012)

Eleventh Hour, by Elin Gregory (2016)

The Fallen Snow, by John J. Kelley (2012)

Fighting Proud: The Untold Story of the Gay Men Who Served in Two World Wars, by Stephen Bourne (2017) – (I know I said fiction, but I’m going to leave this one here anyhow)

Flower of Iowa, by Lance Ringel (2014)*

The Great Swindle, by Pierre Lemaitre (2013)*

The Indian Clerk, by David Leavitt (2007)

The Inheritance of Solomon Farthing, by Mary Paulson-Ellis (2019) *

In Memoriam, by Alice Winn (2023)

The Lie, by Helen Dunmore (2014)

The Paying Guests, by Sarah Waters (2014)

A Pride of Poppies, short story collection published by Manifold Press (2015)

Promises Made Under Fire, by Charlie Cochrane (2013)

The Shell House, by Linda Newbery (2002)*

Spectred Isle, by K.J. Charles (2017)

The Stranger’s Child, by Alan Hollinghurst (2011)

The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden (2024)

Whistling in the Dark, by Tamara Allen (2008)*

Wild with All Regrets, by Emma Deards (2023)

The World and All that it Holds, by Aleksandar Hemon (2023)

This is a dynamic list, which I will continue to update whenever I find something new. If you know of anything that isn’t on this list and needs to be, please let me know!

#ive read 16 books this year and 7 are queer wwi lit #a further 9 last year #i just have been reading a lot about the first world war in general lmao #anyways ill be getting to this list #on the last point #john maynard keynes wrote to his friend that cambridge was “full of open and avowed sodomites”

1K notes · View notes

sweeteawrites · 10 months ago

Text

Here's a vignette I wrote in trying to develop one of my stories because I'm completely rewriting it so it's not canon anymore

It's, admittedly, a bit out of character, but he's never physically been somewhere cold before and has only known seasonal allergies. Let smart characters have Idiot moments!! (That don't involve being socially awkward)

Also I don't know why I spelled Arthur like that, I went through a phase where I forgot how to spell it I'm sorry

Frostbite

"Aurther?" He calls, his cheeks red from the crisp air that he's unaccustomed to.

"Hm? Yes?" Said man, looking more comfortable, though still cold, turns his attention to Percival, "What is it?"

Percival watches the ground, pebbles moving past his furlined boots as he tries to gather the words. "Lord Aurther...when did you fall in love with Lady Rosemary?"

"When did I -? What's brought this on?" He asks, taken aback by the sudden question.

Percival shrugs, tugging at the long warm sleeves on his coat. "I don't know. It's unimportant, I apologize."

"No no, it's alright. I don't mind, I just didn't expect such a question from you. Well, I suppose it was about two months after I moved to Vindborne. We became good friends and I knew I had to have her. Why?"

"You fell in love with her before you married her?"

"I did. Have you not?"

"No- I mean, no, I have. Of course I have. I love Maybelle, how could I not?"

"Okay."

And they continue walking, going to talk to people and buy some potatoes, like they promised the girls left at home.

"How many potatoes do we need?" Aurther asks, watching the large selection.

Percival, picking up a russet potato, thinks, then speaks, "One for each person."

"Right." Aurther selects ten.

"Are there ten people eating?"

"Give or take."

"Alright, then."

They pay for the veggies and leave, just in time to see the first falling snow flakes. Percival stops, staring at the snowflakes as they dance to the ground. Everso tenderly, he reaches his hand out, ungloved and the finger tips red as he resists the urge to shiver. One lands on his hand, bigger than the others and he watches it remain on his hand. It stays there as he observes it, then melts into a liquid he can barley feel. He watches the tiny puddle, then rubs his hands together, attempting to bury them in his sleeves, but it's tailored exactly to his size, so he can't.

"Forgive me for stating the obvious, but perhaps you should have worn gloves?" Aurther says, his voice giving away the amusement behind the chiding words.

"Ah- yes, perhaps. I knew it gets colder in the northwest, I just hadn't realized how cold. I imagined snow to feel like a petal from a tree blossom."

"Oh, that's right. You've never seen snow before, you've never had to wear more than a light sweater."

Percival smiles awkwardly, rubbing his hands warm to distract himself. "The way you say it makes it sound shameful. No, I haven't, my family isn't much into traveling."

"Oh, no, don't take shame in it. I just hadn't truly realized how unaccustomed you'd be to this climate, I should have tried more to advise you to dress warmly. We should get home soon, now, however."

"Yes, yes, we should."

Percival keeps playing with his hands, which are now more red than he's ever been before.

"Uh...Lord Aurther?"

"Yes, Percival?" Aurther feels strangely giddy at each opportunity for that name to roll off of his tounge and hang in the air around him. It feels so right, it's almost inappropriate.

"Is it normal for my hands to be so...um...colored? They're pink, and itchy." At his words, he recognizes the similarity to the effects of poison ivy back in Vindborne. "Am I allergic to the cold? That would be an issue, wouldn't it?"

Aurther looks at him and laughs. Before he can recognize the bad idea, he's holding Percival's right hand in both of his gloved ones. He can't help but find his conclusion endearing, but also wishing to warm him up and sweep away his worries. "No, you're not allergic to the cold. This is normal, if you're not covered properly, the itching is just your body trying to preserve its heat, we all get red in the cold. It's your blood rushing to those areas to regulate the temperature. You're fine. But, here." Aurther, to his regret, drops Percival's hand to tug off his black gloves and doesn't ask for permission when he places them over Percival's hands.

Percival, who hasn't spoken since the moment their hands met, simply pushes out a flustered 'thank you.' He feels his face get warmer, but he supposes that that's the energy that was going towards keeping his hands warm turning its attention to the only other exposed area left. He feels significantly less fridid.

Aurther, on his part, feels the air around them get warmer. He assumes that it's an illusion from the feeling that he knows is crawling under his skin.

"Percival?" Aurther says, just before they reach the entrance to his mother's house.

"Yes?"

"About your question from earlier?"

"Oh...," Percival shifts uncomfortably. "Yes?"

"Do you not love her?"

Percival looks around, avoiding where Aurther is standing.

"I... I'm unsure. I think I do."

"That may be something you want to figure out."

"Maybe."

Aurther can't help but hope that the answer is no. Please don't let him be in love with the girl he plans to marry. It's an empty, selfish, hope, yet it pounds at him.

"It's okay if you don't." Is it really? Is it okay to promise a girl marriage if you don't love her? He and Rosemary are a special case, but who's to say if Percival and Maybelle are the same?

"Is it?"

"Yes. Though, it'd be right if you told her so."

"Perhaps."

And they go inside, Percival returning the gloves to Aurther.

0 notes