The Fraternity of the Estranged by Brian Anderson

Author:Brian Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
Published: 2018-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

Such was the government’s concern that the Wilde trials had opened the public’s eyes to the homosexual underworld, that there was an unsuccessful attempt to criminalise the publication of details of such depravity, lest they should encourage individuals to imitate the crime. But press freedom prevailed.401

For Carpenter to publish an unequivocal defence of homosexuality at such a time was more than daring, it was perilous. A respectable, and respected, individual now dared to write openly on the subject, with little encoding and with an intimacy that was not tantalizing. “No word or hint of impropriety ever sullied his page… The mystery, perhaps, lay in his tact, his charm and his cunning use of words”.402 His task was a daunting one: to reveal its full psychological and emotional dimensions, showing the homosexual to be an otherwise normal person and not a simple perpetrator of aberrant sexual acts.

His earlier pamphlets were aimed at freeing women from the bondage of the Victorian hearth and marriage bed. He now turned to attack the harsh legal and social edicts against same-sex love. He did not ask simply for tolerance for such a love, a plea that would become a central concern of sexual liberationists in the following century. He sought public recognition of the homosexual impulse as a natural, stable variant of human sexuality. As such, the pamphlet was, he later recalled, “among the first attempts in this country to deal at all publicly” with the issue of homosexuality.403

Running to over fifty pages, it was couched in everyday language and, unlike Symonds’s restricted monographs, was aimed at the educated reader, not the medical and legal professions. But because the subject, as he said, was surrounded by “anathemas and execrations”, he was well aware that the pamphlet would almost certainly be deemed obscene were it to come to the attention of the authorities. It was not sold but “sent round pretty freely to those who I thought would be interested in the subject or able to contribute views or information upon it”.404 Three months later the Oscar Wilde scandal broke.

With Symonds’s Greek Problem clearly in mind, the pamphlet opens with a short historical survey of such attachments to be found in widely different cultures. This is tactical: to give the reader “some idea of the place and position in the world of the particular sentiment”. 405 It sets an uplifting tone and prepares the ground for a discussion of the social function and value of what he calls “the homogenic attachment”. A passing reference to its “healthiness” anticipates the strong attack to come on the idea of homosexuality as morbid.

He utilises important arguments from his Sex-Love pamphlet, especially his definition of love as, firstly, a search for union. Whatever a person’s sexual orientation, all individuals have a need to love and to be loved. Individuals for whom such ties can only be found with a person of the same sex should not be denied the fulfilment of this need. Without “a close affectional tie of some kind his life is not complete, his powers are crippled, and his energies are inadequately spent”.

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