Hidden, the intimate lives of gay men past and present by Clinton Elliott

G: From Gajdusek to Gunn

Gorton, the great-grandson of the Rhode Island heresiarch Samuel Gorton, was a married Baptist minister in New London, Connecticut.

He was in court in 1726 for attempted sodomy, but charges were dropped.  In 1756 he was charged with “unchaste behavior with his fellow men when in bed with them” and was dismissed from his ministry at the General Meeting of Baptist Churches in 1757.  The secular court in which the charge had been brought allowed the church to try him.  He confessed, and returned to his pastorate where he was welcomed.

Edmund Gosse

1849-1928

The British literary critic and quintessential man of letters was a friend and correspondent of all the literary lights of his day: Swinburne, Stevenson, James, Gide.  He was strictly closeted but had been observed poring over pictures of Eugen Sandow, a much photographed bodybuilder, during Browning’s funeral in Westminster Abbey in 1889.

J. A Symonds tried to sound him out as to any Uranian tendencies he might harbor and was at first rebuffed.  But when in 1899 Symonds sent him a copy of A Problem in Greek Ethics (1883) he received the following reply:

“I know of all you speak of- the solitude, the rebellion, the despair…. Years ago I wanted to write you about all this, and withdrew through cowardice.  I have had a very fortunate life, but there has been this obstinate twist in it!  I have reached a quieter time- some beginnings of that Sophoclean period when the wild beast dies.  He is not dead, but tamer; I understand him and the trick of his claws.”

The obstinate twist included love affairs- perhaps not fully consummated- with a school friend John Blaikie and a handsome young sculptor William Hamo Thornycroft.

When Gide published Corydon in 1924 confessing his homosexuality, Gosse wrote him: “No doubt, in fifty years, this particular subject will cease to surprise anyone, and how many people in the past might wish to have lived in 1974.”  With more accurate foresight he might have written 2014.

Despite his intimacy with Symonds- perhaps because of it- Gosse, on becoming Symonds’ literary executor on the death of Horatio Brown in 1926, threw all of Symond’s letters, diaries, and papers on a bonfire in the garden of the London Library.  Symonds’ memoir was spared on condition it not be opened for fifty years.

Lord Ronald Gower 

1845-1916

Visitors to Stratford on Avon will have seen and perhaps admired Gower’s five life-size statues of Shakespeare and four of his characters which stand next to the theater.  One of these is Prince Hal.  Many have noticed his breeches, bulging with princely pride. The sculptor was the youngest son of the Duke of Sutherland, the Member of Parliament for Sutherland (1867-1874), and the uncle and intimate friend of the Marquess of Lorne, later Duke of Argyll, Queen Victoria’s son-in-law.

Gower was a close friend of Oscar Wilde whom he had met at Oxford. He was said to have been the model for the decadent Lord Henry Wotton in Dorian Gray.  After an active and comparatively open homosexual life in London where he employed the services of a “stunning” valet, he retired to his house in Penshurst, Kent, with his lover Frank Hird whom he adopted as his son.

The Prince of Wales had accused Gower of being a member of a group of men noted for their “unnatural practices.”  This was certainly true.  Such a group was involved in the theft of the Irish Crown Jewels, of which the prince, now King Edward VII, was particularly fond.  Argyll and the disreputable Frank Shackleton, perhaps one of the thieves, were visiting Gower at Penshurst in July   1907 when the theft was discovered.