This article was published in the Journal of Homosexuality (Volume 49, Numbers 3/4 2005) and in the book, Same-Sex Desire and Love in Greco-Roman Antiquity and in the Classical Tradition of the West (edited by Beert Verstraete and Vernon Provencal, 2005). It gives a partial overview of my next book, a work-in-progress, tentatively titled: Male Love in the Shelley-Byron Circle.
    Same-Sex Desire... is now available as a Google Book on the Internet, but with pages missing! — a practice of which I strongly disapprove. In response, I am making the article available here, on my personal web site. It has been revised and expanded slightly; hypertext links and endnotes have been added.


SUMMARY

    This paper discusses two leading English Romantic poets — Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron — and three of their friends, who lived close together in Italy during the first half of 1822. Despite the censorious efforts of family, friends and biographers, ample evidence survives to establish the importance of male love in their lives and works. They were ardent hellenists, whose reference point for male love was the homoerotic ethos of Ancient Greece.


KEYWORDS: Shelley, Byron, Romantics, Plato, Poetry, Homoeroticism, Hellenism








    Male love occupied a place of honor in Ancient Greece, and was at least accepted in Rome and the rest of pagan Europe. This changed radically in the 4th century AD, when Christianity became the state religion of the Roman Empire, bringing with it the Judaic taboo on sex between males (Holiness Code of Leviticus, ca. 500 BC). From this time forward, men who violated this taboo would suffer dishonor, imprisonment, torture and death. Male love became a sin and a crime: sodomy, which was peccatum illud horribile inter Christianos non nominandum (the sin so horrible it must not be named among Christians). (Lauritsen 1998)
    With the Renaissance — the rebirth of classical culture — homoerotic themes begin to appear in the works of Ariosto, Beccadelli, Marlowe, Michelangelo, Poliziano, and Shakespeare. The emancipation of male love came on the historical agenda in the 18th century, as the Enlightenment brought a secular viewpoint to questions of morality and extended free enquiry to the peccatum mutum (the mute or silent sin). In 1791 the French Constituent Assembly introduced legislation which left homosexual acts unpunished (a reform more than two centuries ahead of the United States), and in 1810 the Code Napoléon declared that private consensual acts between adults were not subject to punishment in countries under Napoleonic jurisdiction. (Lauritsen 1998)
    Histories of the early homosexual rights movement usually begin with the writings of Heinrich Hössli (1836) and Carl Heinrich Ulrichs (1864), although underground gay scholarship undoubtedly existed much earlier. This article and my next book will examine two great English Romantic poets, Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron (hereafter Byron), and their circle of friends in Italy: Thomas Medwin (1788-1869), Edward John Trelawny (1792-1881), and Edward Ellerker Williams (1793-1822). My theses are that male love was present in their lives and works, that these men had what may be considered gay consciousness, and that their ardent hellenism comprehended Ancient Greece as a spiritual homeland for male love.
    Before going into their story, a few words about terminology: I shall occasionally use gay as being in some contexts the least awkward and even least anachronistic word, defining a gay man as one who acknowledges homoerotic desire in himself. (Homosexual is unacceptable for linguistic as well as philosophical reasons.)  Although all the men in the Shelley-Byron circle had wives and children, they were nevertheless gay (if we understand that the term encompasses both the bisexual and the exclusively homosexual categories). Rictor Norton (1997) has demonstrated that by Byron's time, the words gay and lesbian were already used and understood in their current, homoerotic sense. [1]
    I'll also use camp, a word that has been discussed often, but seldom well. I define camp as the unique sense of humor — and style and sensibility — of gay men. Camp combines elements of theatricality, irony and hyperbole. At the heart of camp is a mockery of the situation in which we find ourselves — our predicament as gay men in a malevolent culture — and so camp includes a mockery of sex-roles, a mockery of taboos and conventions, a mockery of danger, a mockery of condemnation.
    The term male love, whose linguistic heritage goes back to classical antiquity, comprises sex, love and friendship. In some relationships all three components are present; in others, only one or two.
    The lives of the men in the Shelley-Byron circle have been purged and falsified by their friends, family and biographers, who attempted to destroy every trace of homoeroticism, as well as to fabricate spurious signs of heterosexuality. It is therefore important to recognize and reject two fallacies: 1) assuming that the evidence we now have (letters, manuscripts, etc.) is all there was, and 2) assuming that surviving evidence is representative of what there was.
    In the case of Shelley, the waters have been muddied by a campaign of disinformation waged by his widow, Mary, and his son's wife, Lady Jane Shelley — a campaign described as “the fraudulent and mistaken efforts to turn the romantic, pagan Shelley, as Hogg, Peacock, and Trelawny knew him in the flesh, into a Victorian angel suitable for enshrinement among the gods of respectability and convention.” (Smith 1945)  These two women suppressed and bowdlerized Shelley's writings; destroyed manuscripts, letters and pages from diaries; and defamed the characters of Shelley's friends and his first wife, Harriet. The destruction of evidence, and the manufacture of lies, has been so extensive that, “no definitive biography of Shelley can now be written.” (Smith 1945)
    Not only Shelley's life received this treatment. Byron's memoirs, on which he had lovingly worked for years, were burned after his death. Trelawny's letters also were burned. The final two volumes of Thomas Jefferson Hogg's Life of Shelley disappeared, through the treachery of Lady Shelley. (Seymour) The men in the Shelley-Byron circle who survived long enough to challenge the “Shelley legend” — Medwin and Trelawny (as well as Shelley's friends in England, Hogg and Thomas Love Peacock) — were attacked for having done so, and to this day are treated unfairly by most Shelley and Byron biographers. (Peacock, Holmes, Smith, Massingham, Lovell, Scott 1951, MacCarthy)
    The discerning biographer must take seriously those expressions of homoeroticism that did slip by the censors. Sometimes these expressions were remarkably direct, but more often they were in the form of coded language or hints intended only for the initiated: the “sunetoi” or “esoteric few” or “discerning few” — as Shelley referred to his intended readers. In his 1925 study on Shelley, Edward Carpenter makes this crucial point:


    During the entire lifetime of Shelley and Byron, males in England, including adolescent boys, were hanged for having sex with each other. Therefore, when we encounter male love in their writings, even expressed obscurely or in hints, we should realize that this took courage. Even camp, or perhaps especially camp, was a form of defiance.
    There is more than enough material on this topic for a large book. The present essay, with limited space, can only tell part of the story, and must do so in broad strokes. It will be structured as follows: the formation of the Shelley-Byron circle; descriptions of the individual men, with particular attention to Shelley; hellenism; and the aftermath of the circle.

    As told by Edward John Trelawny (1858), the story begins in Geneva, late 1819 or early 1820: Trelawny, an ex-sailor, meets Edward Ellerker Williams and Thomas Medwin, lieutenants on half-pay returned from India. Trelawny and Williams are in their late twenties, and Medwin a few years older. At the “pretty villa” where they are living, Medwin often turns conversations to his cousin, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who is living in Italy. From Medwin's descriptions of the “inspired boy, his virtues and his sufferings”, Trelawny and Williams develop a longing to meet him. Without saying so directly, Trelawny manages to convey the impression that three gay men are discussing another gay man.
    A letter from Shelley in 1820 urges Medwin to join him in Italy, “the Paradise of exiles, the retreat of Pariahs”; and Medwin does so. The two cousins, reunited after an absence of many years, collaborate intensely in writing poetry, translating Greek and German, and studying Arabic. Before long they are joined by Williams, together with his common-law wife, Jane — and later by Trelawny. The far more famous poet, Lord Byron, moves his residence to be near Shelley. And so, at the beginning of 1822 the circle of men living close together in Italy comprises Shelley, Byron, Medwin, Williams and Trelawny. What brought them together, and what did they have in common? Biographers have shied away from asking these and other pertinent questions.
    Both Shelley and Byron considered themselves to be in exile. Shelley in particular was homesick, and bitter that he was unable to return to England. Why did they choose Italy? One very good reason might be the disparity between Italian and English sexual legislation: in England sex between males remained punishable by death until 1861, but in Italy it was legal, thanks to the Code Napoléon. In addition, gay men have traditionally gone to Italy for the boys: famous from time immemorial for their beauty, their amiability, and their discretion.


Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

    Percy Bysshe Shelley was born in 1792 to a rich squire in Sussex. In appearance he was tall, slender, good-looking, and youthful.
    In 1925 the gay pioneer Edward Carpenter observed that Shelley's relations with women were unhappy, transitory or “up in the air” — whereas he “certainly attracted the devotion of his men friends ... and was capable of warm and faithful attachment to them.” Carpenter comments that “while the love-interest occupies such a large part of the general field of Shelley's poetry, it occurs almost always in a very diffused and abstract form.” The many female characters in his poetry seem peculiarly epicene and sexless. I would go even further. Although Shelley was a feminist, and seemed to require sisterly female companionship; although he was married twice, and fathered several children; there is little evidence that he was erotically attracted to women. Both of his marriages were unhappy; both came about through the initiative of the women.
    In early October of 1814 Shelley wrote to his friend, Thomas Jefferson Hogg:


This refers to Shelley's wife of three years, Harriet: an intelligent, well-bred, loving, beautiful young woman, who was only 19 years of age at the time. It is hard not to interpret Shelley's effusion as abhorrence of female sexuality in general — and indeed, the sentiment is that of a gay man trapped in a heterosexual marriage.    
    In the summer of 1814 Shelley left Harriet and fled to the Continent with Mary Godwin and her stepsister, Jane (later Claire) Clairmont. Mainstream Shelley biographers have assumed that Shelley was so overwhelmed with love for Mary that he impetuously eloped with her. But if so, why on earth did he take along her stepsister Jane for the trip? An alternative explanation is that Mary, raised in a most radical household, had led Shelley to believe that she (and presumably also Jane) would be sympathetic to and understanding of his homoerotic desires. Mary's own lesbianism manifested itself after the death of Shelley. (Seymour)
    Harriet Shelley died from drowning in late 1816, two years after Shelley abandoned her. Despite Shelley's principled opposition to marriage, and his desire to respect the memory of Harriet, he was then coerced into marriage with Mary Godwin, who threatened suicide. (St. Clair)  Shelley's marriage to Mary, a cold and querulous woman, was not happy; for the last two years of his life he slept on the sofa and spent as little time as possible in her company.
    If Shelley had one great love in his life, it was Thomas Jefferson Hogg, who was expelled from Oxford with him when they were both 18, over a pamphlet they had written together, The Necessity of Atheism. They lived together in London briefly, until they were separated by their families. Nowhere in Shelley's correspondence does one find such passion as in his letters to Hogg:


    As a prank Shelley and Hogg published some poems in 1810, which they had intentionally made ridiculous. The handsomely produced book, entitled Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson: Being Poems found Amongst the Papers of that Noted Female Who Attempted the Life of the King in 1786, was published under the pseudonym of John Fitzvictor. (The real Peg Nicholson, a washerwoman who had attempted to assassinate King George III with a carving knife, was still alive and residing in Bedlam. [2]) In Hogg's account he states, tongue-in-cheek:


    Presumably this refers to the following stanza, from “FRAGMENT: Supposed to be an Epithalamium of Francis Ravaillac and Charlotte Cordé”:


    Death in line 90 is a metaphor for orgasm, and the rhythmic urgency of line 84 clearly conveys the act of fellatio. Though ostensibly heterosexual, the stanza indicates that the two Oxford freshmen were not unfamiliar with cocksucking.

    According to Timothy Webb (p. 2): “Shelley was a translator of extraordinary range and versatility, whose acquaintance with European literature makes most English poets between Dryden and Eliot look provincial.” He had a penchant for translating works with homoerotic content, including elegies of Bion and Moschus and epigrams of Plato. Here is his translation of the Plato epigram, Kissing Agathon:


Shelley was not naïve. He knew quite well that in 19th century Christendom two males could not kiss each other in an amorous context. And so, “Kissing Agathon” was reluctantly changed to “Kissing Helena” in the third revision. (Webb)
    In another epigram Plato expresses love and mourning for the boy Aster, whose name means “star” in Greek. Shelley renders it as follows:


Here he bowdlerized only the title, changing the masculine name Aster to the feminine name Stella.

    During the summer of 1818, when he was 26 years old, Shelley translated Plato's Dialogue on Love, The Banquet (or Symposium). Judged as a work of literature in its own right, it is by far the best translation in the English language. (Plato 2001)
    Shelley had lived with the dialogue for many years. While still a schoolboy at Eton, he was introduced to it by his mentor, Dr. James Lind (“that divine old man”), about whom he always spoke with reverence. Why did Dr. Lind introduce Shelley to this particular dialogue? Perhaps it was to inform his teenaged protégé, by means of the Symposium, that male love is a part of human nature, which had been highly esteemed by the Greeks. The significance of Dr. Lind's tutelage can be gauged through comparison with an event that occurred several decades later. In the 1850s, another English schoolboy, John Addington Symonds, read the Symposium for the first time. Alone in his room at Harrow, he experienced the great epiphany of his life:


    Realizing that a stumbling block for readers would be the fact that male love lies at the heart of the dialogue, Shelley wrote an introductory essay, A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love. It is only the second in English (after an unpublished 1785 essay by Jeremy Bentham) to address male-to-male sexuality. (Crompton 1985)
    The first part of Shelley's essay is an eloquent expression of hellenism. It begins: “The period which intervened between the birth of Pericles and the death of Aristotle, is undoubtedly, whether considered in itself or with reference to the effects which it has produced upon the subsequent destinies of civilised man, the most memorable in the history of the world.” For several pages, he describes the Greek miracle, in the realms of art, poetry, drama, philosophy, and science. (Plato 2001)
    Unfortunately, when Shelley comes to his main topic, he flinches: he maintains untenably that the degraded status of women in Ancient Greece caused the males to turn to each other for sex, and he almost hysterically denies that “disgusting” acts or acts associated with “pain and horror” could have been practised by the Greeks. These references are obviously to anal intercourse: either he was afraid that it would hurt, or he knew from a bad experience that it did. Hinting at his own preference, Shelley, after alluding to the wet dreams of puberty, conceives of orgasms as “the almost involuntary consequences of a state of abandonment in the society of a person of surpassing attractions” — which suggests that Shelley preferred frottage or full-body contact, known in the vernacular as “the Princeton Rub”. (Plato 2001)
    At any rate, Shelley doubted that he could publish either translation or essay in the foreseeable future, though he showed them to his friends. In 1822, just short of his 30th birthday, he was drowned in a boating accident. The translation was not published until 1841, and then in a bowdlerized form. His widow Mary mutilated the text to bring it into conformity with Victorian standards of decency. She changed “men” to “human beings”, “love” to “friendship”, and so on; she truncated the Alcibiades episode. Her travesty was the only version the world would know for almost a century, until essay and translation were finally published in their entirety in 1931. (Ingpen, Notopoulos)

    In the fall of 1818 Shelley visited Byron in Venice, renewing their friendship after a hiatus of two years. Delighted with each other's company, they talked nonstop, from three in the afternoon until five the next morning. For days the two of them talked, dined, rode horseback, and travelled in gondolas together. Out of these experiences came Julian and Maddalo, a highly autobiographical and problematic work. There are three main characters in the poem: Julian, Maddalo, and the Maniac. Julian is Shelley, and Count Maddalo is Lord Byron, but who or what is the Maniac? In his introduction to the poem, Shelley writes:


    This is a very great, under-appreciated, and misinterpreted poem. Its deeper meaning can best be appreciated by knowledgeable gay men (the “discerning few”), who can apprehend the coded references, and who can respond to the poem from their own experience. For them it is a beautiful and moving expression of alienation and undeserved suffering. A heterosexual red herring involving a “lady” is thrown in, but the references to her serve no purpose other than mystification; Shelley himself slyly indicates that the “lady” should not be taken seriously.
    At home in Count Maddalo's palazzo in the evening, Maddalo and Julian decide to camp a bit less and have a serious talk about something they find difficult to discuss:


Julian and Maddalo discuss religion and philosophy until late in the night, and the next day they sail to “the island where the madhouse stands” to visit the Maniac, who is known to Maddalo. They listen to his long soliloquy, in which the references to male love, to the unnameable sin (what Lord Alfred Douglas would later term “the love that dare not speak its name”) are clear and unmistakable. The Maniac speaks of having to “wear this mask of falsehood even to those/Who are most dear.” He is bound to silence: “And not to speak my grief — O, not to dare/To give a human voice to my despair.” He refers to “deeds too dreadful for a name”. In the following passage, the Maniac touches on the love that is friendship:


Note “spirit's mate” — a concept, the soul mate, which will be discussed below with regard to the later poem, Epipsychidion.

    The Maniac associates his form of love with the dungeon, shame, and the scaffold:


Shame, which Shelley has capitalized, is a gay code word which surfaced towards the end of the 19th century, most famously in the poems of Lord Alfred Douglas, “Two Loves” and “In Praise of Shame” (McKenna). The “red scaffold” and “our country” can only refer to England, where men and boys were still being hanged for making love to each other. What the maniac personifies, then, is the suffering of gay men, who are unjustly despised and persecuted. He is a literary cousin of Frankenstein's Monster (discussed below).

    The last love of Shelley's life, his inseparable companion for the last one-and-a-half years of their lives, was the handsome and sensitive Edward Ellerker Williams, the same age as himself. Their relationship is charmingly depicted in The Boat on the Serchio, in which “Melchior” and “Lionel” represent Shelley and Williams, and the boat symbolizes their relationship. (Medwin 1847/1913) The playful banter of the two friends, as they prepare for a boating excursion, could be that of a present-day male couple sailing in Provincetown in the summer. It is perhaps the happiest poem that Shelley ever wrote.
    Lionel and Melchior are obviously very fond of and at ease with each other. One line hints that they share a common bed, and in the final stanza Shelley communicates to the “discerning few” that their relationship is sexual. The “death which lovers love” can only mean orgasm, which not coincidentally rhymes with the terminal words in lines 3, 5, and 7. This may be the grandest portrayal of orgasm in literature:


    In 1822 Shelley and Williams died in a boating accident, together with “a smart sailor lad” named Charles Vivian. (Trelawny 1858)  Shortly before this Shelley had written an epitaph expressing his desire to be united with Williams, both in life and after death [3] :



    The late poem Epipsychidion is particularly interesting for some additional lines, which were found and printed in 1903. Never intended for publication, they indicate that disguised male love is a theme of the poem, and that heterosexual red herrings (akin to “Helena” and “Stella”) have been employed. In a letter to his publisher, Charles Ollier, Shelley insisted the poem be published in strict anonymity, in an edition of only 100 copies: “It is to be published simply for the esoteric few.” In the passages below, “friend” and “mistress” are counterparts, meaning male and female lovers respectively. Note Shelley's reference to Shakespeare's sonnets, and his contempt for the “dull intelligence” of those readers who are not among his sunetoi:


    James A. Notopoulos considers the meaning of “epipsychidion” in the context of Shelley's other writings to be “soul of my soul” or “soul mate”. Shelley took the concept from the speech of Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium (Plato 2001), in which lovers are “two incomplete parts of a pristine whole, which, after being separated by Apollo, have been forever seeking their counterpart soul mates.” (Notopoulos pp. 278-81) It should be clear that “spirit's mate” from Julian and Maddalo perfectly fits Shelley's conception of "epipsychidion". I hereby submit that both poems are concerned with the love of males for their male soul mates. [4]

    Powerful expressions of male love are found in the novel Frankenstein, which was published anonymously in 1818. That this was not recognized long ago is due to the absurd belief that Mary Shelley, a hack writer at best, is the author — a belief fostered by Mary and her father, William Godwin, and by feminists who shamelessly tout her as a major writer. Mary did do the clerical work, and perhaps a trivial amount of the writing, but the basic conception, the autobiographical elements, the imagination, and the splendid prose passages are unmistakably the work of Shelley himself. The topic is too large to explore here: suffice it to say that romantic male friendship is a major theme of Frankenstein. (Lauritsen 2007, Rieger, Zimmerman) [5]


Byron (1788-1824)

    Biographers and critics, with very few exceptions, have refused to acknowledge homoeroticism in the life and work of Shelley. This is not the case with Byron, whose sexual proclivities were known in gay circles at least as early as 1821. (Hirschfeld)  A recently published biography by Fiona MacCarthy, the best to date, treats Byron's sexuality candidly and sympathetically. [6] In her Introduction MacCarthy makes two important points: “Our understanding of Byron's bisexuality, an open secret within his own close circle, throws important light on the pattern of his life.” Yes, indeed, it is necessary to acknowledge Byron's homoeroticism in order to understand his life and his work; and yes, of course, those in Byron's circle — especially including Shelley, Trelawny, Medwin and Williams — knew that he was gay (as they themselves were).
    Byron was a bundle of contradictions. A wealthy peer of the Realm, his early childhood was spent in poverty. Shy, pale and effeminate, short and with a strong tendency to become fat, crippled with a foot deformity, he nevertheless became the reigning male sex symbol of the 19th century. To this day the Byronic hero is the archetype of the swaggering male adventurer, with his sardonic and defiant virility. Byron had an abundance of character defects — he could be mean and petty to even his best friends — but he also had charm and a gift for empathy, which gained lasting devotion from those close to him.
    Byron had what may be called “gay consciousness”: he had gay friends from Cambridge, with whom he corresponded using private code words derived from Greek myth and Roman literature (for example, hyacinths, referring to the myth of Apollo and his love for the beautiful youth, Hyacinth). (Crompton 1985)
    Byron was an adept at camp. Accused of carrying off a girl from a convent, he wrote, in an 1819 letter to Richard Belgrave Hoppner: “I should like to know who has been carried off — except poor dear me — I have been more ravished myself than anybody since the Trojan war.” Fiona MacCarthy comments (p. xiii): “Here is Byron as progenitor of a high camp English manner of expression that extends to Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank, Noël Coward.”
    Byron strongly preferred all-male company. From 1816 in Switzerland: “the evenings at Diodati were masculine ones. Shelley came alone, but Byron pacified the ladies by calling occasionally at Shelley's cottage.” (Marchand p. 249)  By 1821, when Byron and the Shelley circle were living in Pisa, there were no longer even token visits to Shelley's residence. Instead, Shelley, Medwin, Williams, and Trelawny visited Byron's palazzo on an almost daily basis for pistol shooting, billiards and conversation. In December Byron began giving weekly stag parties for his small circle of friends, with fine food and wine; often he and his guests “talked over their wine until two or three in the morning.” The ladies were never invited. (Marchand, Medwin 1966)
    Byron's biographers have strained mightily to heterosexualize his life, for example, by overemphasizing his boyhood crush on Mary Chaworth, a girl several years older than he. The time has come to re-evaluate this and other relationships, such as his famous affair with Countess Teresa Guiccioli.
    The young Countess Teresa, or “La Guiccioli” as Byron and his friends affectionately called her, left her husband — the “evil” Count Guiccioli, a man 40 years older than herself — for Byron. Though their affair is always assumed to be sexual, it may not have been. In her old age Teresa commented on Byron's biographers:


Perhaps she was telling the truth. There are subtle indications in her reminiscences of Byron, that she knew he loved other males, and accepted this. (Guiccioli)  Perhaps she was one of those women who are especially attracted to gay men: Teresa was fond of Byron's friends, and they were fond of her. Teresa neither lived in Byron's palazzo in Pisa nor entered it; when he wished to see her, he went to her residence. (Marchand)
    Biographers tend to neglect Teresa's handsome younger brother, Count Pietro Gamba, who was Byron's constant companion for the last four years of his life. On 29 July 1820, Byron wrote Teresa: “I like your little brother very much.” Within two months Pietro had become “Pierino” to Byron, and closer to him than Teresa. (Origo) When Byron departed for Greece in 1823, to fight for Greek independence, he took Pietro with him, but left Teresa behind. A sobbing Pietro was at Byron's bedside when he died in 1824, aged 36. Pietro accompanied Byron's remains back to England, where he wrote an account of the poet's last year. Then Pietro returned to Greece, where he died in 1827, only about 24 years of age. (Marchand, Gamba, Origo, MacCarthy)
    Byron's greatest poem, the very long Don Juan, is a unique mixture of satire, irony, whimsy, insouciance, and other qualities not easily defined. The poem is camp, and as such can be appreciated best by gay men, who know the conventions, rhythms, and language of camp. Double entendres abound. Throughout are hints and sly references to male love, for example (referring to Virgil's Second Eclogue, where the shepherd Corydon expresses his love for his master's darling, Alexis): “But Virgil's songs are pure, except that horrid one / Beginning with ‘Formosum Pastor Corydon’” (Don Juan, Canto I: XLII).
    What critics fail to grasp is that Don Juan is, on one level, a pederastic poem. The eponymous hero, Don Juan, is a teenaged boy, who is the object of erotic desire. He is pursued, but does not pursue. Always others (usually and ostensibly female) take the initiative. The male narrator is clearly in love with him, which is pure narcissism: since Don Juan is partly autobiographical, representing Byron as a boy, the love between narrator and hero is self-love; and to compound the matter, Don Juan is in love with himself: “He, on the other hand, if not in love, / Fell into that no less imperious passion, / Self-love....” (Canto IX: LXVIII).
    After Byron's death, his memoirs were burned by his publisher and literary executor. Testimony concerning the memoirs, from those who claimed to have read them, is so extremely contradictory that we can only speculate as to their contents. In my opinion, they probably dealt with male love, and included a plea for its emancipation.


Medwin (1788-1869) and Trelawny (1792-1881)

    Both Medwin and Trelawny deserve, and in my book will receive, at least a chapter apiece. In brief, Medwin's life was a mess: he was disinherited by his father, and lived the last half of his life in near poverty. Nevertheless, he was a good and prolific writer, a fine classical scholar. His pioneering translations of Aeschylus, Agamemnon in particular, have great dramatic power and beauty of language. Medwin wrote the first biographies of both Byron (1824) and Shelley (1843), discreetly hinting the homoerotic tastes of his subjects. He died in 1869, at the age of 81. (Lovell 1962)
    Trelawny wrote two masterpieces of 19th century English literature: his partly autobiographical novel, Adventures of a Younger Son (1831), in which male love is expressed with passion and candor, and his Recollections of Shelley and Byron (1858), in which he says directly that Shelley and Williams loved each other, and that he loved both of them. When he met and fell in love with Shelley, Trelawny was tall, dark, handsome, and athletic. He kept his looks for the rest of his life. A man who saw him strip for a swim, when he was in his eighties, said he still had a fine, muscular physique. He died in 1881, at the age of 89. His ashes are buried next to Shelley's in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. (Massingham)


Hogg (1792-1862) and Peacock (1785-1866)

    Although outside the Italian Shelley-Byron circle, a few words should be said about Shelley's two best English friends. Thomas Jefferson Hogg was born into a wealthy professional family in 1792. He matriculated at Oxford in 1810, where he soon became Shelley's bosom friend. Though their personalities were complementary, they shared a contempt for superstition and conventional opinion. Hogg's reminiscences of Shelley, written 36 years after his death, are a loving tribute, and include numerous hints as to male love — for example, a decidedly campy episode where a French duke expresses to Hogg his admiration for the “truly charming physiognomy” of the young Shelley, and recommends: “Eau de Luce should be frequently rubbed on his chest by a soft, warm hand.” (Hogg p. 499)
    Thomas Love Peacock was born in 1785. During Shelley's lifetime, Peacock was a good friend; a mentor, especially in Greek literature; and his literary agent. After Shelley's death, Peacock was the executor of his will. Peacock was a close friend of the philosophers John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham. It is interesting that his friends included both the first English writer (Bentham) and the second (Shelley) to discuss sex between males. Peacock is an excellent poet in his own right, judging from his long poem, Rhododaphne, and one of the best satirists in the English language. A passage on “Uranian Love” from Crochet Castle is not only a marvelous specimen of high camp, but a vigorous assault on sexual prudery. [7] (Later in the 19th century Uranian became a favored code word of gay men in England. [d'Arch Smith])
    Good friends of each other, Hogg and Peacock were excellent classical scholars. When Trelawny returned to England, he became friends with both of them. It is significant that Greek references were used for coded communication on gay topics, not only by Byron and his friends (Crompton 1985), but also by Shelley and his friends. In a letter from Hogg to Shelley of 21 May 1820, we note the phrase, noctes atticae (“Attic nights”):


This is almost certainly related to the phrase, the Attic Mode, which Jeremy Bentham and his friends secretly used to refer to male love. (Crompton 2003)  Peacock was a personal friend of Bentham, and Hogg was an intimate and life-long friend of a Bentham protégé and bachelor, Walter Coulson. (Scott 1951)  In addition, Hogg and Peacock may have used Athenian as a gay code word. (Scott 1943)
    In their correspondence Hogg and Shelley used the words, philautia and philautian, both in Greek characters and transliterated, as code words for something. (Hogg pp. 224, 241) Etymologically, philautian can mean both self-lover and lover of his own kind; it is a synonym of sorts for homophile, the preferred word of the gay movement from 1950 to 1969. In addition, it probably relates to John Lyly's novel, Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit (1579), which portrays the romantic male friendship of Euphues and Philautus.


Hellenism of the Circle

    All of the men in the Shelley-Byron circle were ardent hellenists. In addition to the translations, essay, and covert language already discussed, Shelley's hellenism was expressed in many of his poems, most notably Hellas. The preface to Hellas contains the familiar passage:


    Hellenism also pervades Byron's poetry, most memorably the paean to Ancient Greece in Canto II of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which contains the famous line: “Where'er we tread 'tis haunted, holy ground.” Byron spent the last year of his life attempting to aid the Greeks in their fight for independence. He did what he could, though his grisly death in Greece, at the age of 36, came not from combat, but from a combination of excessive dieting, alcoholism, laxatives and medical treatment, which consisted of bleedings. (MacCarthy) Trelawny also fought, and was seriously wounded, in the Greek war.


Aftermath

    The Shelley-Byron circle in Italy lasted for only half a year, before it was blown apart by the deaths of Shelley and Williams, the departure of Byron and Trelawny to fight for Greek independence, and the death of Byron.
    Male love was an important part of their lives and work. They had a serious concern for justice. In the many hours they spent together, they surely must have discussed male love and its emancipation. Could the circle have been a gay think-tank? If so, they would have been forerunners of Heinrich Hössli, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, John Addington Symonds, Sir Richard Burton, Edward Carpenter, the Gemeinschaft der Eigenen (the Community of Self-Owners/Homophiles/Autonomous Men), the Wissenschaftlich-humanitäre Komitee (Scientific Humanitarian Committee), and the homophile and gay liberation movements of the 20th century.
    No doubt much was lost, through the destruction of letters, manuscripts, etc. But some of their efforts may have gone into a Uranian underground, to surface later in the works of others. I now believe that the Shelley-Byron circle, directly or indirectly, was behind Don Leon, the first published work in English to argue for abolishing sodomy laws. At any rate, it is now time, as the 21st century begins, to cast off the blinders of theological prejudice and academic correctness; it is time to read the surviving work of these men boldly, to allow their muffled voices finally to be heard.



Notes

1. I do not wish to put labels on the men in the Shelley-Byron circle. When I say they were gay, this means that they were aware of their homoerotic desires and accepted them, but this does not imply that they were in any way abnormal or “queer”. These men were indeed exceptional — for intelligence, creativity and courage — but not because they experienced male love. My considered opinion, based on a half century of study and experience, is that human males are erotically attracted to each other — and almost all males, not just a minority. This is a phylogenetic characteristic of our species, a product of evolution. If some men seem to lack this affinity, this is a defect on their part, or the result of psycho-social conditioning, or both.
 
2. Bedlam is abbreviation and popular name for St. Mary Bethlehem Hospital, the world's oldest lunatic asylum. This was a priory in the 13th century, then became a hospital in 1330; it began admitting the mentally ill in 1403. Until modern times the conditions there were appallingly bad. In the 18th century, spectators paid admission to view and torment the inmates, who were treated as freaks in a carnival side show.

3. For a brief article on this topic, “Shelley's Ashes”, click here.

4. For more on Epipsychidion, including my annotated version of the final lines, click here.

5. To see my Frankenstein Pages click here.

6. To read my review of Fiona MacCarthy's biography of Byron click here.

7. To read this excerpt from Crochet Castle click here.





References

Don Leon: A Poem by Lord Byron ... and Leon to Annabella: An epistle from Lord Byron to Lady Byron. (ca. 1934). London: The Fortune Press. [Probably written in the 1830s, first known publication 1866.]

Byron, George Gordon (Lord). (1970). Poetical Works. (F. Page. Ed.). Oxford & New York: Oxford UP.

Carpenter, Edward and Barnefield, George. (1925). The Psychology of the Poet Shelley. London: George Allen & Unwin.

Crompton, Louis. (1985). Byron and Greek Love: Homophobia in 19th Century England. Berkeley: U of California P.

____, (2003). Homosexuality & Civilization. Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University.

Gamba, Count Peter (Pietro). (1825). A Narrative of Lord Byron's Last Journey to Greece. London: John Murray.

Guiccioli, Countess Teresa. (1868). My Recollections of Lord Byron and Those of Eye-Witnesses of his Life. (H. E. H. Jerningham, Trans.) Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, & Co. and London: Richard Bentley.

Hirschfeld, Magnus. (1914). Die Homosexualität des Mannes und des Weibes. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Reprint 1984. English trans. 2000 by Michael A. Lombardi-Nash, Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books.

Hogg, Thomas Jefferson. (1858). The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: George Routledge & Sons and New York: E.P. Dutton. Originally published London 1858. Reprint 1906 with Introduction by Edward Dowden.

Holmes, Richard. (1974). Shelley: The Pursuit, 1974. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co.

Ingpen, Roger (editor). (1931). Plato's Banquet, Translated from the Greek ... Printed for private circulation MCMXXXI, One Hundred copies Only. Plaistow, London: The Curwen Press.

Lauritsen, John. (1998). A Freethinker's Primer of Male Love. Provincetown, MA: Pagan Press. To visit the Pagan Press Booklist click here.

Lauritsen, John. (2007). The Man Who Wrote Frankenstein. Dorchester, MA: Pagan Press. To visit my Frankenstein Pages click here.

Lovell, Ernest J., Jr. (1962). Captain Medwin: Friend of Byron and Shelley. Austin, Texas: U of Texas P.

MacCarthy, Fiona. (2002). Byron: Life and Legend. London: John Murray and New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Marchand, Leslie A. (1970). Byron: A Portrait. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

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McKenna, Neil. (2003). The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. London: Century.

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____, (1913). The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley (H.B. Forman, Ed.). London: Humphrey Milford. [Expanded edition of original work published in 1847.]

Norton, Rictor. (1997). The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, London & Washington: Cassell.

Notopoulos, James A. (1949). The Platonism of Shelley. Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP.

Origo, Iris. (1949). The Last Attachment: The Story of Byron and Teresa Guiccioli. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Peacock, Thomas Love. (1858-1860). Memoirs of Percy Bysshe Shelley. First published in Fraser's Magazine, June 1858 and January 1860. Repr. 1970 in Howard Mills (Ed.) Thomas Love Peacock: Memoirs of Shelley and other Essays and Reviews. New York: New York UP.

Plato. (2001). The Banquet. (P.B. Shelley, Trans., J. Lauritsen, Ed., Foreword). Provincetown, MA: Pagan Press.

Scott, Walter Sidney (Editor). (1943). The Athenians: Being Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson Hogg and his Friends Thomas Love Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Others. London: Golden Cockerel Press.

Scott, Winifred. (1951). Jefferson Hogg: Shelley's Biographer. London: Jonathan Cape.

Seymour, Miranda. (2000). Mary Shelley. London: John Murray.

Rieger, James (Ed.). (1974). Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft [falsely attributed to]. Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus: The 1818 Text. Chicago: U of Chicago P.

Shelley, Percy Bysshe. (1964). The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. (F.L. Jones, Ed.). Oxford: Clarendon Press.

____, (1970). Poetical Works, edited by Thomas Hutchinson; a new edition, corrected by G.M. Matthews. London: Oxford UP.

Smith, Robert Metcalf. (1945). The Shelley Legend. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons.

Smith, Timothy d'Arch. (1970). Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

St. Clair, William. (1989) The Godwins and the Shelleys: The biography of a family, New York: Wm. Norton.

Symonds, John Addington. (1878). Shelley. London. (1968 reprint of an 1887 London edition, New York: AMS Press.)

____, (1984) The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: The Secret Homosexual Life of a Leading Nineteenth-Century Man of Letters. (P. Grosskurth, Ed.). New York: Random House.

Trelawny, Edward John. (1831). Adventures of a Younger Son. London: H. Colburn and R. Bentley. Repr. 1890, E. Garnett, Ed. and Introduction, London: T. Fisher Unwin.

____, (1858). Recollections of Shelley and Byron. London: Moxon. Repr. 2000 with Introduction by David Crane, New York: Carroll & Graf, 2000.

Webb, Timothy. (1976). The violet in the crucible: Shelley and translation, 1976. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Zimmerman, Phyllis. (1998). Shelley's Fiction, Los Angeles: Darami Press.





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