A Uranian among Edwardians

3. An impure hush

While awaiting the millennium, Carpenter lived a life of remarkable openness with George Merrill in a small village called Millthorpe, on the edge of the Peak District near Leeds in the north of England. The couple kept chickens and made their own footwear—the open-toed sandals that were to become the much-parodied signature garb of British libertarian socialists. Writers and political activists made their way to the rural salon that Carpenter and Merrill maintained at Millthorpe. Many of these visitors, like Forster, were homosexual themselves. In the case of others, Carpenter’s tact and charm—in his life as in his writing—made it possible for them to pass over his unusual domestic arrangements. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a Cambridge friend of Carpenter’s, wrote of him in his diary: “he believes and practises the physical relation very frankly. How it is that public opinion hasn’t managed to get him to prison and murder him is a mystery.”

The breath of scandal threatened Carpenter only once, when a local Sheffield demagogue named M.D. O’Brien, author of an earlier sequence of letters to the Yorkshire Post denouncing Carpenter, published a pamphlet excoriating “the socialist prophet of Sodom and Gomorrah Edward Carpenter and his horrible Oscar Wilde gospel”. This cost Carpenter his seat on the rural district council, but that was all. Luck, and goodness, kept him out of the purges of the late nineteenth century in Britain and the routinised legal persecution of homosexuals in the twentieth.

Luck and goodness—and a certain guile. Carpenter was undoubtedly courageous, undaunted by the air of anxiety and silence that surrounded the sex question at the turn of the century (the “impure hush”, he called it). All the same, his choice of words in discussing such matters is always careful, almost bland. His radical vision of sexual relations is sugar-coated. This sweet reasonableness and decorousness of expression (later he himself judged it “a little old-fashioned and demure”) could lull readers into thinking that what they were reading was common sense, while it discreetly endorsed such radical notions as free love, troilism and al fresco sex.

The tortuous publishing history of Love’s Coming of Age—its title a slyly audacious act of wishful thinking—reveals Carpenter’s ingenuity in sidestepping Victorian censorship and infiltrating popular sensibility. There is a notable contrast, in this respect, with the experience of Havelock Ellis, a friend of Carpenter’s from the Fellowship of the New Life (a precursor of the Fabian Society). Ellis’s Sexual Inversion was the subject of a successful prosecution at the Old Bailey in 1898 and—surprisingly—has not been republished in print in Britain to this day.

Love’s Coming of Age began life, like most of its author’s books, in the lecture hall. The first three papers deal respectively with the nature of sexual desire, the social roles of men and women, and the future of marriage. These were published as pamphlets in Manchester in 1894. Carpenter also wrote another pamphlet, “Homogenic Love”, explicitly concerning sexual relations between men. It was based on a fourth lecture that he delivered in Manchester that year. The pamphlet was privately circulated (though the lecture itself was public). Then, in the spring of 1895, the first three of Carpenter’s papers—excluding “Homogenic Love”—were put together, with an additional final chapter, and the book was accepted by the progressive publisher Fisher Unwin.

But 1895 was a fateful year for sexual freedom in England. New laws that brought all homosexual behaviour into the forensic realm had been enacted in the 1880s. The Cleveland Street Affair cast a lurid light on the urban homosexual underworld, increasing public awareness of the phenomenon to a new level. In April 1895, Oscar Wilde was arrested. The boat-trains to Calais filled with well-heeled gentlemen who found they had pressing business on the Continent. Publishers such as Fisher Unwin went running for cover. The publication of Love’s Coming of Age was cancelled, even though it did not actually include “Homogenic Love”, or indeed any direct reference to homosexuality at all.

The book was finally published in Manchester by the Labour Press (in which Carpenter had a financial interest). In the event, the critical reception was strikingly favourable. Reviews commended the delicacy of Carpenter’s treatment of love and sex and contrasted his vision of social evolution with the narrower materialism of other current socialist thought. Even Bernard Shaw, who was suspicious of what he testily called Carpenter’s “sex nonsense” and feared it would hinder public acceptance of socialism, relented. (Later Shaw commented, somewhat cryptically, that what was striking in Carpenter was not homosexuality but rather “the curious absence of heterosex”.)

4. Sex on a higher plane

For the fifth edition of Love’s Coming of Age, which appeared in 1906, when he was in his sixties, Carpenter quietly added “The Intermediate Sex”, a chapter based on his “Homogenic Love” pamphlet. Thus it was that the love that dared not speak its name finally, stealthily, gained a public voice in the English-speaking world. By this time Love’s Coming of Age was on its way to becoming a worldwide bestseller. There were 100,000 copies in print, in half a dozen languages. As one edition followed another, it came to serve as the pillow book of choice for the Advanced Couple of the time. Its only rival was Marie Stopes’s Married Love. The two books had a striking feature in common: neither of the authors had ever been married. Married Love was written by woman who, at the time she wrote it, had no sexual experience at all, while Carpenter’s sexual experience was, as far as we know, confined to other men.

For Carpenter the connection between the movement for women’s emancipation and the liberation of homosexual men was self-evident. In his thinking, the two projects were linked at a deep moral level. He was the first to point out what has now become a commonplace: that once the act of sex between men and women has been separated from reproduction by contraceptive technology, the normative moral argument from nature is fatally weakened and the grounds for condemning sexual variation of any kind brought into question.

In Carpenter’s view, though, this did not deliver sexual relations into the realm of moral relativism, it moved them, rather, to a higher plane, where ethical obligations became more stringent. Although he espoused sexual freedom, he was the opposite of a libertine; it was the then-existing state of sex that he considered to be depraved and corrupt, twisted by class relations and the exploitation of women. In common with socialists and anarchists he argued for a more equitable way of distributing the fruits of labour. And he sought, beyond this, a new way of sharing the labouring body itself. Like Walt Whitman (the closest he had to a mentor), he believed that true democracy required a far reaching ethic of comradeship. This necessitated a change not just in the class structure, but in the mode of production of the human heart.

Carpenter–who had six sisters–is properly accorded a place among the righteous males of the women’s movement. But it would also be true to say that he saw women somewhat narrowly, through the lens of his own homosexuality, believing that Uranians had unique access to the secrets of both sexes. Although he stopped short of endorsing the theory that the latter were actually female souls in male bodies–an idea that had been put forward by Ulrichs, the Hanoverian government official who devised the term “Uranian”—Carpenter thought that this affinity with both sexes favoured Uranians for a special role in reconciliation between men and women.

Among men, he argued, Uranians were the analogue of the “new woman”. In “The Intermediate Sex” he anticipates a Uranian movement comparable to the women’s emancipation movement. He argues presciently that changes in relations between the sexes will necessarily be accompanied by changes in relations among members of the same sex. These changes, it may be argued, continue to manifest themselves in the present day.

Unlike A.J. Symonds and other classically-inclined gay writers, Carpenter did not yearn for an Attic idyll, where the model of sexual relations is that between an adult man and a youth. He points out in Ioläus, his historical anthology of same-sex pair bonding, that the ancient Greek refinement of homosexuality—the sexual culture that Symonds and others found so beguiling—excluded women entirely. This classical ideal of homosexuality, he suggests, is doomed to be lop-sided. Carpenter’s vision was not of Greece, but of England; and he yearned not for an ancient past, but for an imagined future.

“Perhaps”, he wrote, “it will only be for a society more fully grown than ours to understand the wealth and variety of affectional possibilities it has within itself.”

It is in the context of this transcendent vision of the future of love that his account of the homoerotic impulse needs to be set. Carpenter’s work on the sex question can also be seen as an apologia for his own life, a way of positioning himself as a norm rather than a deviation. It is a harmonizing vision that contrasts markedly with the celebration of the marginality of the homosexual in the work of contemporaries such as Oscar Wilde or Marcel Proust.

5. The invention of the third sex

The new notion of a homosexual identity that Carpenter developed had its origin in the work of the pioneer Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, and in the then recently-published work of three nineteenth-century German medical researchers: Carl-Otto Westphal, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. Until the mid-nineteenth century, in the moral and legal discourse of Europe and North America, homosexual behaviour had been represented either as a recurrent vice or an episode in a process of hereditary degeneration. The new notion that these nineteenth-century medical investigators introduced was that it might, on the contrary, represent a stable, possibly hereditary, abnormality.

In the expansion of nomenclature that followed this medicalization of homosexual behaviour Ulrich’s Uranism was joined by a more scientific-sounding terms including “sexual inversion”, “homogenic love” and, latterly, “homosexuality”. The expansion of the descriptive vocabulary served to reify the phenomenon in the public imagination. It made it more possible to talk about same-sex sexual relationships. But it left the  field detached, outside any moral system. By embracing the new identity as persons defined by the gender of their object of desire, the soi-disant Uranians—Carpenter among them—endorsed the German sex doctors’ novel classification, accepting the idea that they formed a new category in the existing system of the sexes, the category characterized by Ulrichs, with Platonic fancifulness, as a “third sex”.

It may be argued, with hindsight, that this was a conceptual trap, that in allowing this emergent category of persons to be defined solely by the gender of their object of desire, rather than by some more complex and variegated set of affective traits, the gay sensibility came to be ruled by a category mistake. The procrustean system of definitions and personality types thus created is one that we still, to an extent, labour under. In this sense pioneering homosexual intellectuals like Ulrichs and Carpenter unwittingly delivered those who habitually entertain desire for a sexual partner of the same gender into a fixed social identity, one that has become a form of psychiatric bondage, a hall of mirrors. Further fragmentation and subtilization of gender identity and modes of desire is likely to be necessary before there can be an exit from this historical phase.

At the time, though, the alternative was invisibility. The medical investigation of sex certainly made it possible for a wider range of persons to recognize and name their own desires, and the congruent desires of others. Carpenter did not question the notional new category; he celebrated it. But he also endeavoured to place it in a moral context, to remove it entirely from the forensic sphere where it had originated and implant it in a theology of love. He came to see the “third sex” as a stage in a historical process, anticipating its dissolution in a future society where—to use Freud’s not yet current term—polymorphous perversity would reign.

This vision of the past and future of the homoerotic impulse is elaborated in Carpenter’s two other books on the sex question. The essay on homosexuality that was introduced into later editions of Love’s Coming of Age gave birth to a companion volume (as he termed it), The Intermediate Sex. This was concerned exclusively with homosexuality. The Intermediate Sex, in turn, gave rise to a sequel, Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk, in which Carpenter explores the ethnography and prehistory of sexual variation, particularly in military organizations and among the priest­hood.

In the two later books Carpenter extends his vision of Uranians as mediators, not just between men and women, but between the past and the future. They are, he argues, midwives to the new life. In Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk he uncovers a hidden history of visionary inverts: it is priests and seers, he argues, who are the moving force in the past evolution of the body politic. In The Intermediate Sex, such historical figures are revealed as prophetic figures, as secret agents of the future, bringing the new age into being.

6. On the moral superiority of homosexuality

The two books, together with Love’s Coming of Age and the Ioläus anthology, are a careful unfolding of Carpenter’s increasingly radical views on the sex question. In The Intermediate Sex and Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk he finally—in a deceptively commonsense style—puts forward his most controversial notion: that of the potential moral superiority of homosexuality. He argues that homosexual love, removed from the dictates of reproduction, and sometimes perforce from carnality altogether, is—potentially—of a higher order than heterosexuality. Uranians, he argues, can be seen as precursors of a nobler ideal of affection, one that will eventually come to embrace heterosexual relations as well. This audacious inversion of the opprobrium attaching to homosexuality and the learned demonstration that same-sex love relations had their own history together form the central component of a concerted attempt on Carpenter’s part to give moral significance to this newly articulated sexual identity.

It is the social meaning of homosexuality, then, rather than its psychological origin, that interests Carpenter. He takes the homosexual impulse itself as given. In the area of historical and ethnographic research he was a canny populariser of fields of learning that were, at the time, deeply recondite, written in Greek, or German, or swathed in latinisms. But in spirit he remained a moralist rather than a scholar. His books, accordingly, take the form of acts of persuasion rather than analysis. There is little systematic argument, no pro and con, no doubt or cavil, only the gracious unrolling of a beguiling certainty. His radicalism is suffused, as one commentator has put it, with an unabashedly Victorian optimism.

In the self-confidence and charm of his writing it is possible to glimpse something of the attraction of Carpenter the man, of the power of character that E.M. Forster noted—and that drew Forster and so many other visitors to Millthorpe. Reading these books today, in the late twentieth century, it is not so hard to understand Forster’s gratitude, or the warmth of Fenner Brockway’s admiration. This enduring authorial presence in the text may be an additional reason why we are still interested in Carpenter, and why Forster’s obituary for his works has turned out, in the event, to be premature.

If certain of these works are of greater interest to us today than when Forster wrote his valediction, it is because, despite their time-bound rhetoric, they can now be recognized as an important innovation in public discourse: popular writing that sought to bend the specialist knowledge of the Victorian medical investigators to a broader vision of the field of affective relations, a vision of a world in which the boundaries of sex and love would be redefined round a recognition of the ubiquity and constancy of homosexual desire. This was the vision that Carpenter set out to make available—to the public in general and, in particular, to others like himself. His project was an honorable one; his writing opened the way for free discussion of the meaning of sexual variation, a debate that is repeatedly rekindled and expanded in the present. His resolution of the issue may not be one that we can subscribe to in its entirety, but this is not because it has been superseded.