If D. H. Lawrence is Too Uptight for Your Tastes . . .

How should we feel about the appearance of an Edward Carpenter biography? If we are Martin Pugh, delighted. But is this wise?

Carpenter was gay before gay was chic (the late 1800's), for which he is to be applauded on the grounds of extraordinary courage if nothing else, but, as this passage from Neil McKenna's biography of Wilde should make clear, a hero and his folly are not soon parted:

John Addington Symonds firmly believed that love and sex between men could and would undermine the rigid class system that prevailed. A lord sleeping with a labourer meant that both could break free from the "cataract-blinded" destiny of their class... "The blending of Social Strata in masculine love seems to me one of its most pronounced and socially hopeful features," Symonds wrote to Edward Carpenter. "Where it appears, it abolishes class distinctions." Edward Carpenter agreed.

Gerald Early once reduced James Baldwin's platform to "the idea that if people (white, principally) were free to make love randomly across both sexual and racial lines they would be cured of their pathological behavior (racism and sexual repression)," and I haven't been able to read Baldwin since. Carpenter and Symonds on the virtues of masculine love have the same effect on my ability to read post-Stonewall gay-lib with a straight face.

The Victorian flurry of interest in homosexuality has been reduced to the Wilde trial in the twenty-first century telling of it, which is a shame: they were blunter about their dreams of class hermaphrodism then, which makes it easier to see the ways in which hermaphrodism of every kind was their ultimate goal. Unrestrained eros annihilates distinctions; that's why we should be afraid of it.

If I were writing a book about Victorian queer theory, I'd put Carpenter opposite Marc-André Raffalovich, whose theory of "uranism" Wikipedia summarizes this way: "While a heterosexual's destiny is to marry and start a family, a homosexual's duty is to overcome and transcend his desires with artistic pursuits and spiritual and even mystical friendships." Because, after all, can't every cultural controversy be retold as Catholicism vs. pantheism?