HIGH GEAR/OCTOBER 1977

SEX AND CLASS DISTINCTION AMONG ENGLAND'S GAY ELITE

By Mitchell Menegu

A phenomenon of gay life in England is the attraction of the upper class and the intelligentsia to the working class. The more one reads in English fiction and biographical writings, the more striking this circumstance becomes.

represent an intellectual elite. The public school students are isolated from the rest of society just at the age during which their sexual interests surface and develop. This in itself promotes homosexual activity as the outlet for the demands of the budding libido.

Another aspect of public school life that is particularly One widely acknowledged relevant to the phenomenon unaspect of English life is the exder examination is the hierartent to which the nature of the chical structure of the schools. English public schools have The masters are in a class fostered homoerotic behavior in remote in station from that of the the students. In the first place, students. Their administration of the public schools enroll only corporal punishment is often male students. Usually members cited as an impetus toward the of the upper class socially and masochism that seems to be the moneyed class especially widespread in uppereconomically, they tend also to class English society. Among

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the students themselves, those in upper forms have--and frequently wield enthusiastically -authority over those in the forms beneath them; the pattern resembles those in American military academies. it is rare in fiction or biography to find a homosexual relationship developing between two boys in the same form, but it is common to find an older student taking a younger one as a sex partner; these relationships seem parallel to those that are a common aspect of prison life. For many public school students, these homoerotic relationships do indeed seem to be a "phase," but for those who are set in the pattern of homosexual relationships, the nature of their

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adult relationships seems, in general, to differ from those that they practiced in school.

The infamous relationship between Oscar Wilde and his adored "Bosie," Lord Alfred Douglas, fits the pattern of such adult relationships only in terms of the wide age difference between the two men. In general, members of the social and intellectual elite were friends but not lovers. They might compare sexual experiences, but they tended not to engage in them together. The young working class men who testified against Wilde were most commonly the sexual partners of all members of his class.

It is almost a taboo similar to that against incest that keeps the members of the elite from becoming lovers. Among the famous Bloomsbury Group of figures important in English artistic and intellectual life beginning just before World War i are such widely recognized gay men as E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes; all evidence, however, suggests that relationships among members of this group were purely intellectual and social, seldom if ever sexual.

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late Victorian era of wealthy homosexuals seeking attachments to recruits in Her Majesty's Horse Guards and showing their appreciation through their generosity.

Ackerley, in defining his own "ideal friend," pictures someone very similar to the type that Isherwood went to Germany to seek. The outstanding fictional example of this phenomenon is the relationship that develops in E.M. Forster's Maurice.

Curiously, one of the important influences on this English phenomenon is American. Walt Whitman, in his writings and in his life, celebrated the attractions of men who work with their hands. His thinking was developed in England by Edward Carpenter (who had twice come to America to visit the poet), a writer whose works were to influence succeeding generations of English intellectual gay men.

One major cause of this curious aspect of English gay life is undoubtedly the social and intellectual inbreeding in products of the British public schools and universities. Just as biological inbreeding tends to emphasize strengths and weaknesses, social and intellectual inbreeding produces extreme results. In England, the educational system has produced a stream of productive intellectuals. The adjective "effete," however, is particularly applicable to this group in terms of their social life and psychological development. To revitalize the barren soil of their emotional lives, they sought the power to be found in men whose lives and personalities seemed to them more basic, more elemental, and therefore more vital.

A similar situation occurred in the group that formed at Oxford in the twenties. Prominent in this group were Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender. Although Isherwood acknowledges a sexual relationship with Auden at the university, it was their common artistic and intellectual interests that sustained the friendship that lasted until Auden's death.

Isherwood, in Christopher and His Kind, remarks specifically on the tendency of members of his social and intellectual class to center their sexual interests on members of the working class; Isherwood, in fact, specifies a non-English member of the working class. Earlier evidences of the sexual desirability of working class youths to English homosexual men of the upper class are detailed in The Cleveland Street Scandal, which concerns a notorious Victorian house of male prostitution. J.R. Ackerley, in My Father and Myself, discusses the practice in the

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It is interesting to note that both Auden and Isherwood, after they had emigrated to America, developed relationships with men who approached, if not equalled, their artistic and intellectual powers (although Isherwood's relationship, again, involves a marked age difference).

Although what I have been discussing seems particularly English, a similar pattern, though less well developed in actual practice, can be observed in the attraction many American gays find in such earthy types as ranch hands and truck drivers. Nevertheless, the promise of equality inherent in American democracy tends to minimize the need to go outside one's social circle to find sexual and emotional and intellectual gratification. The apparent division of those types of satisfaction among classes may be another explanation for the maintenance of class distinctions in England at the same time that those in the upper class look beneath them for fulfillment.