Homosexuality Between the Wars

When Encounter Columnist and Social Critic Goronwy Rees attended Oxford in the 1920s, he was definitely not one of the boys. "I was regarded as eccentric," he recalls, "because I was not homosexual." In the years since, he has been astonished that the widespread practice has hardly ever been mentioned in print. Nor did he himself have anything to say on the subject until the publication of a new biography of Cambridge Biographer Lytton Strachey gave him an opportunity. In a review of the book in the current Encounter, he gives high-level English homosexuality between the wars its first startling airing.

Other accounts have been written of Strachey, author of Eminent Victorians, but all of them, says Rees, have omitted his sexual preference-- an ardent, lifelong homosexuality. The 1,229-page, two-volume biography by Michael Holroyd is long enough--and honest enough--to include much of Strachey's hitherto unpublished correspondence with John Maynard Keynes, a contemporary of his at Cambridge. The letters consist mostly of outpourings of enthusiasm for comely young men, for whose favors Strachey and Keynes strenuously competed. "It was a kind of intricate ballet of the affections," writes Rees, "in which Keynes, ruthless, serpentine and slightly Mephistophelean, invariably comes off best."

Underground Doctrine. Strachey and Keynes were leaders of the Cambridge contingent of that select literary circle, the Bloomsbury group. Its members' intellectual attainments were beyond dispute, but a central preoccupation, suggests Rees, was homosexuality. Nor was it confined to this group. At both Oxford and Cambridge in the period between the World Wars, writes Rees, "homosexuality, among undergraduates and dons with pretensions to culture and a taste for the arts, was at once a fashion, a doctrine and a way of life." It also reached well beyond the university. Since Oxford and Cambridge produced the governing classes of Britain, the whole social fabric was deeply dyed with a homosexual sensibility.

Unlike France, thinks Rees, England has lacked a novelist of the stature of Proust to make the homme-femme a credible figure in English society. Nor does he expect a rash of revelations to follow his disclosure. "This is a frightfully sensitive subject," he says, "and those people who are most able to say are the least likely to do so." Rees insists he is not mounting an attack on homosexuality as such. "I want simply to know how important it was and what influence it did have." He is moderately encouraged by the fact that the form the current revolt of youth is taking is not homosexuality but drug addiction. And they are not trying to hide it--"a small but positive advance."

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