... having been breathed out

[S]uddenly observed in the extreme distance, dressed in white satin and pearls and thickly powdered and completely haggard… Miss [Ethel] Sands! que diable allait-elle faire dans cette galère? — buggering Karin, I suppose, — the incorrigible old Sapphist —

—Lytton Strachey to Henry Lamb, 4 February 1913

I just thought this was an interesting citation re: historical language usage around sex; I wouldn’t have thought “buggering” would be used to apply to two women, especially since Strachey often used the term pretty explicitly (“the love of a catamite for a bugger,” for example, in September 1908). But it seems also to have occasionally stretched to mean something like “non-hetero sex”? It’s almost a kind of unexpected gesture of queer solidarity coming from Lytton, who often fell into the “ewwwwwwwwww, girls!” thought pattern when women came up.

Is everything quite impossible? The world is too intolerably confused. I understand nothing. I see too many points and too few. I wander eternally between Duncan and Virginia and Sicilian prostitutes and chastity and resignation and the wildest hopes and despair. I’m dreadfully afraid that I may do something mad for one minute and ruin my life, but it’s just as likely that I shall never do anything at all. The only consolation—and the true one—is that whatever may happen or not happen in this frantic universe we shall always have been ourselves.

—Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, 5 February 1909

Everything under the cut excerpted from Matt Cook's London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, though as I’ve mentioned before, this book ought really to be called London and the Culture of Male Homosexuality, 1885-1914; as women are mentioned once in the introduction and then promptly forgotten.

However! This (relatively) short passage gives a GREAT and thought-provoking overview of some of the social currents at work in late-Victorian legislation against male homosexual practices, while also complicating certain notions about why given Acts were historically important, and what they might “mean."

Some of my most intriguing take-aways, in case you don’t want to read the whole thing (these also roughly correspond with the sections I bolded under the cut):

• You can see legislators really struggling to differentiate—or, even to know whether they wanted to differentiate—their aversions to sodomy specifically from their aversions to male-male desire in general. The laws against sodomy were of incredibly long standing (1533!), and had continued to be reaffirmed throughout the intervening centuries; but starting in 1861 there was a simultaneous broadening of punishable acts and a narrowing of applicable gender (and even species, since sodomy could be committed with beasts) to specify man-on-man incidents. At the same time, the other punishable acts were all couched in such vague terms ("unnatural offences”; “indecent assault”; and my favorite, “attempted sodomy”) that they give the distinct impression of a group of people who felt very nervous and threatened about something, but were not sure what that something might be.



• Relatedly, Cook’s discussion of the 1885 Labouchere Amendment is fascinating because, as he points out, it shifted the focus from unwanted advances (‘any indecent assault upon any male person’ as per the 1861 law) to consensual sexual practices between men. A huge and obviously disturbing shift, even if a largely symbolic one. It also reaffirmed that these laws applied even to acts committed in private. Given the Victorian obsession with the separation of public and private spheres, this is a pretty big deal, even if, as Cook points out, the “in public or private” language wasn’t strictly necessary—if something is illegal, it’s illegal everywhere.



• The turn of the 20th century is such an interesting period with regard to shifting conceptions of “homosexual acts” (the paradigm on the way out) versus “homosexual people” (the paradigm on the way in, though of course that’s only obvious in hindsight); and Cook’s discussion of the 1898 Amendment to the Vagrancy Act has all kinds of repercussions for that shift. The Amendment officially enabled police profiling based on suspects’ non-sexual behaviour, and on their being in the “wrong place at the wrong time”; it essentially criminalised seeming like the kind of person who would commit sexual acts with other men, rather than actually committing those acts.To say it was the first time police had operated in a similar way would obviously be absurd (and indeed Cook outlines an 1870 case of two male cross-dressers arrested—though later acquitted—for soliciting). But the 1898 Amendment makes it official legal practice, which is both horrifying and fascinating. I was especially interested in Cook’s suggestion that the 1898 Amendment was actually further-reaching than the more famous Labouchere Amendment, for exactly the reasons outlined above.

In any case, Cook’s full excerpt below the cut! I highly recommend the whole thing; it also features some nitty-gritty details on sentencing, etc., which the writers among you might find useful.

( COOK’S TEXT (all bolding added): )

Aliens with ambiguous gender were far more perplexing to immigration officials [than same-sex-attracted aliens], but again the public charge clause [deportation of those likely to become a burden on the state] figured centrally in the government’s resolution of these cases. Consider, for instance, the case in 1912 of Hungarian Verona Sogan. Sogan arrived in New York dressed in female attire, but medical examiners contended that Sogan was, in fact, a malformed male. She had come from Hungary to meet her mother and stepfather, who “called for the alien as his stepdaughter and said the alien’s name [was] ‘Mary.’” Sogan was initially diagnosed with “hypospadias” and “arrested sexual development, which affects ability to earn a living.” The alien appealed the decision of exclusion, shrewdly maintaining that, if sent back to Hungary, “it [would] be extremely difficult… to start my life over again as a male among the people where I have thus far lived as a female.” Immigration officials promptly dressed Sogan in male clothing and subjected her to a barrage of questions. When asked why she wore female attire, she answered, “I was baptized as a girl and was always supposed to be a girl, wore girl’s clothes and did ladies’ work.” As if looking for another clue to Sogan’s true sex, the inspector asked Sogan if she was accustomed to sleeping with the male or female members of the family. “I always slept alone,” she cryptically replied.


The inspector then questioned Sogan’s stepfather, a poor woodcutter who had been in the country for six years, how he and Sogan’s mother would dress the girl if she were released to them. “As a girl,” the woodcutter replied. “Did you notice,” the immigration official asked Sogan’s stepfather, perhaps indicating to the woodcutter that he had given the “wrong” answer and highlighting the broader disciplinary effects of the exclusion process, “that since her arrival she has been placed in male attire?” When again questioned about the sex of his “alleged stepdaughter,” the woodcutter replied, “We always considered her a female but every new moon she somehow changes into the other sex.” Asked to explain how it was he knew that the alien had changed sex, the stepfather explained that he knew because, “she always appeared sad at such times.”

—Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America

COULD THIS WHOLE STORY BE ANY MORE FASCINATING?? HOLY SHIT, HER RHETORICAL STRATEGIES AND THOSE OF HER STEPFATHER.

Tragically if unsurprisingly, this case was decided against Sogan and her family: the government declared that she was actually a man, then excluded her from citizenship on the basis that she was unemployable due to effeminacy, and therefore likely to become a public charge and a burden on the state. W O W, check out that logic.

( Whisperspace )

As for Keynes–I can’t help recognising that, in the obvious and proper sense, he is my friend. Yet sometimes, when he says something, the whole thing seems to vanish into air, and I see him across an infinite gulf of indifference. That there should be anyone in the world so utterly devoid of poetry is sufficiently distracting; and, when I reflect that somebody is Maynard, I can’t be surprised at my cracking jokes on him with the Corporal about empty biscuit-boxes, and yet. How well I know that he’d do most things one could think of for me, and his eyes—-!

—Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, 5 December 1906

I…pretty much ship them. Or at least I am ENDLESSLY FASCINATED BY THEIR DYNAMIC in a way that makes my writing fingers itch.

A year and a half after the above letter (21 July 1908) Keynes “steals” away the supposed love of Lytton’s life, Duncan Grant, and Lytton writes to him:

Dear Maynard, I only know that we’ve been friends for too long to stop being friends now. There are some things that I shall try not to think of, and you must do your best to help me in that; and you must believe that I do sympathise and don’t hate you and that if you were here now I should probably kiss you, except that Duncan would be jealous, which would never do!

I mean.

Then two days later Strachey writes to his brother (!) James:

There was an interview last night with Maynard–it went off on the whole as well as could be expected. He wept, and I had an erection, and that was all.

That was all? THAT WAS MOST CERTAINLY NOT ALL. Also, who writes to their own brother about getting erections? Jesus, Lytton.

I’m getting tipsy and maudlin. Maudlin about English frenemy-lovers from the Edwardian era. One more Lytton-related (re)blog and I’ll stop.

In the night, as Swithinbank lay in bed, Keynes sat with him. On the bed, talking, long after lights were out. How often this happened! Perhaps, for all I know, every night. And then, when their talk was ending, Keynes would lie down on the bed, and embrace him and kiss him, and kiss him, and kiss him, again and again; and so they would part at last. I don’t know—the image of our ugly Keynes makes all this rather ridiculous—and rather pathetic too. The vision of the dark room and the white bed and the curious ecstasy there I find attractive—soothing in a strange way.


These last three pages are I suppose unparalleled in the annals of known correspondence. How many persons do they put under criminal imputations? What scandals! What disclosures! And yet Heaven knows there’s nothing abnormal in the whole account. It’s only that I happen, for the first time, very likely, in the world’s history to give the account. And aren’t you touched by it? Poor little Swithinbank could never quite believe that he wasn’t doing something wrong when he let himself be kissed. The brutes! The devils! To such a length have they carried their abominable* perversions of things! There were the best moments of his life.

—Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, 28 February 1905

This little quote encapsulates so much of why I find Strachey compelling. His friend/frenemy Keynes confides in him personal and at-the-time prosecutable reminiscences about Keynes’s time at Eton. Strachey turns around and not only re-tells these stories with great gusto to their mutual friend Leonard Woolf, but goes on to dissect which parts of Keynes’s story (and person!) he finds repellent and which attractive.

But then, just when I’m torn between queasiness and amusement at his cattiness, he comes out with something truly touching and eloquent, and even elegant in its simplicity. “They were the best moments of his life”: yet taboo and, at the time, criminal.

On top of all this, in the midst of his impassioned final paragraph, he footnotes the modifier “abominable” and assures Woolf in the margin: “I really must put it in for the swing of the sentence.”

***

Also, god. INTERESTINGLY, the next year Strachey made an extended stay at a house-party where Swithinbank was also staying. He found Swithinbank overwhelmingly charming (in spite of? because of? this story) which in turn made him reevaluate his ideas about Keynes’s unattractiveness. He then spent the whole, like, fortnight, in a kind of vicarious sexual obsession with the ideas of Keynes, Swithinbank, and Keynes/Swithinbank. Lucky Leonard Woolf, who got to hear all about it!

He’s now quite happy. He reads the speeches of Lysias, and gives muddled accounts of them in his conversation; he occasionally says–‘Strachey–you look unhappy’; and that’s all. He seems to live in a sort of futile complacent dream made up of incorrect Greek derivations, with an undercurrent of frenzied disconnected babble about aesthetics and Plato’s philosophy. […] Perhaps I’m laying it on a bit thick and black– […] but really if you’d heard him at tea just now on the state of mathematics in the Age of Pericles–Well, I believe my irritation is founded on good stolid fact.

—Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf on Alfred Richard Ainsworth, 16 April 1905.

I want to stay here forever. I want to eat nothing but omelettes and café au lait. I want never to go out. I want to dream about copulations in the night, and write about them in the day, or vice versa, or both at the same time. I want to remember everything, and hope for nothing, and I want to die a hundred years hence, with a volume of Voltaire under my pillow, and the ghost of an erection still lingering between the sheets.

—Lytton Strachey, letter to Leonard Woolf, March 1 1906, from Genoa

( Whisperspace )