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John Addington Symonds was such a defender of “sexual
aberrations” that Algernon Swinburne, a respected English intellectual,
nicknamed the famous writer “Soddington Symonds” in a twist on the
word sodomy. Yet Symonds, who co-authored the first English book about
homosexuality, was wracked with guilt about his own sexual tastes.
In 1840, Symonds was born in Clifton, England, to wealthy
physician Dr. John Symonds, a pious man who taught his son to adhere to
strict Puritan morality. When Symonds was 13, his father enrolled him at
Harrow, a prestigious English boarding school, and the boy experienced a
crisis. “It was the moral state of the school,” he wrote in his
memoirs. “Here and there one could not avoid seeing acts of onanism,
mutual masturbation, the sport of naked boys in bed together. They filled
me with disgust and loathing.” Even worse, Symonds learned that Charles
Vaughan, Harrow’s headmaster, had a sexual relationship with a pupil.
Symonds’ moralism put him in a tough spot. He was sexually
attracted to other boys and even became romantically involved with a
choirboy, Willie Dyer, but his moral restraint kept the relationship
chaste. Symonds’ romance with Willie continued even after he graduated
from Harrow and matriculated at Oxford, where he became enthralled with
the classics. Ancient Greek literature especially interested Symonds
because Greek pederasty seemed to validate his feelings for Willie.
Symonds, who aspired to a literary career, wrote many poems about the
“love of the Ancients.” When discussing his poetry with another
student, he told his friend about Vaughan’s relationship with his pupil.
His friend convinced Symonds to tell his father. When he did, Dr. Symonds
wrote Vaughan, threatening to ruin him. Vaughan resigned, and never
re-entered public life.
At the height of the Vaughan affair, Symonds confessed his
feelings for Willie to his father. Dr. Symonds told him to end the
relationship. Symonds complied, fearing for his career. Hoping to overcome
his sexual desires, Symonds married Catherine North in 1864, but his plan
failed. After four years of marriage, Symonds, now teaching literature,
fell in love with a 19-year-old student. The relationship did not last,
but his first experience of male-male sex so far surpassed anything he had
ever experienced with Catherine that he asked her to forego sex. Catherine
was hurt, but she agreed.
Symonds’ academic career ended abruptly in 1871. His
physician told him that a nagging cough was caused by an advanced case of
tuberculosis and recommended the standard treatment: clear mountain air.
Symonds moved his family to Davos, a Swiss village where he began writing
what amounted to more than 35 volumes on history and literature. The work
he most enjoyed was not his critically acclaimed seven-volume study of the
Italian Renaissance, but poetry one biographer has called “execrable.”
Awful or not, the poems Symonds wrote gave him a forum in which he
celebrated male-male sex and tried to justify his own sexual inclinations.
When Symonds’ health permitted, he traveled to Venice, his
favorite city. There he met Angelo Fusato, a handsome gondolier, and hired
him as a servant. The two developed a sexual relationship that lasted the
rest of Symonds’ life. The relationship fulfilled Symonds’ dream of a
romance with a man, but he still struggled with Puritan guilt. He read
everything he could find about what he called his “abnormality,”
especially medical literature and the work of German scholar Karl Ulrichs.
Both Ulrichs and the doctors wrote that this “abnormality” was a
result of inborn effeminacy.
Symonds also found solace in Walt Whitman’s poetry. He
liked Whitman’s portraits of manly comradeship better than the
effeminacy Ulrichs and the doctors wrote about. Beginning in 1871, Symonds
exchanged many letters with the American poet, but he only hinted at his
true interest in Whitman’s work. In 1890, he finally asked Whitman if
the love of comrades entailed “physical intimacies.” On August 19,
1890, Whitman wrote back that Symonds’ “morbid inferences” were
“damnable.” Whitman scholars have never quite explained why the poet,
a man who had romances with several men, erupted so furiously, but Symonds
was crushed.
Without Whitman’s support, Symonds turned to Ulrichs when
he wrote one of the first and boldest defenses of male love in
19th-century England. In 1891, Symonds privately printed “A Problem in
Modern Ethics.” He argued that “abnormal inclinations” are inborn
and unchangeable and that laws against male-male sex are therefore unjust.
Now convinced that scientific arguments were the best justification for
“abnormality,” Symonds approached a physician named Havelock Ellis and
asked him to collaborate on a book. The result was Sexual Inversion, the
first book-length study of homosexuality published in England.
Symonds died in 1893 attended to by Angelo. Sexual Inversion
was still incomplete, but when its first editions appeared, his name was
on the title page. Anxious to preserve Symonds’ literary reputation, his
literary executor asked Ellis to remove it. Ellis complied, and Symonds’
contribution was forgotten until 1964 when a biographer retold his story.
Wik Wikholm produces http://gayhistory.com, an introduction to
modern gay history. He can be reached on the site’s discussion boards,
or by e-mail at wik@gayhistory.com. For more Past Out, visit www.planetout.com.
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