NO ONE who saw George Cecil Ives (1867-1950) would have suspected that he was anything remarkable. Always dressed in sober brown, often tweed, suits, his conventional appearance belied both an iron will and a prolific homosexual lifestyle at a time when “gross indecency” was illegal. More importantly, he imagined a world of sexual freedom for “Uranians” and founded a secret society, the Order of Chaeronea, to activate what he called “the Cause.”
I came across George Cecil Ives while looking for material about sports at the turn of the 20th century. Ives was a huge fan of cricket and kept meticulous records for numerous matches in his scrapbooks. He would later become, inadvertently, the first openly gay first-class cricketer when he took to the field himself, not terribly successfully, in 1902. My own interest in cricket is limited at best, but Ives was also a poet and political campaigner. His book Eros’ Throne (1900) is quite remarkable, being full of anger, lust, and outrage at a world that not only condemned his homosexual nature but also endorsed the brutal treatment of those less fortunate than himself. The poetry is almost unique for the period in making no attempt at all to hide his nature and his views. Ives believed that his homosexuality was entirely natural, writing in Eros’ Throne: “strange that tale of sex division./ Borne down the aged flow of tide,/ Nothing bizarre and capricious/ but by nature has been made.” This viewpoint remained as steadfast throughout his life as his love of cricket.
One cricket match in particular looms large in Ives’ story.
By this time, Ives was already heavily involved in the homosexual scene of which Wilde was also a part, and he hoped to recruit Wilde to join his campaign for an end to the oppression of male homosexuals. But due to the secrecy that necessarily shrouded Ives’ fledgling organization, its members names were not committed to paper, so it can’t be confirmed that Wilde was a member. Nevertheless, Ives wrote on October 26th that he felt that “Wilde’s influence” on “the Cause … would be considerable.” He would later be outraged by Wilde’s imprisonment. For the record, it’s estimated that membership in the Order at its peak numbered in the range of two or three hundred of “the Elect.” (The vast majority were gay men, but women were not excluded, and there were a few lesbian members.)
Ives went on to have a brief but passionate affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, and through Douglas he was able to forge many contacts at Oxford and with the leading figures of the age. Whether or not Wilde ever joined “the Cause”—and let us pause again to remark on the fact that he is using this capitalized trigger word to describe what he’s up to—Ives figures prominently in Wilde’s diaries. After all, they moved in the same circles and often had relationships with the same men. In these diaries, Ives can be seen in cafés and clubs, kissing, and debating law with men of talent and influence. He also met with Radclyffe Hall, whom he disliked intensely. It was all a far cry from his humble childhood.
Ives was born in Frankfurt in 1867, the illegitimate son of an English army officer. The identity of his mother is unclear, but he was raised by his paternal grandmother Emma Ives, and there is scarcely a page in his voluminous scrapbooks in which he doesn’t mention or refer to her. She was very much the dominant influence on his early life. It was at her suggestion that he began, while attending Magdalene College, Cambridge, to keep the now famous scrapbooks in which he recorded everything from newspaper cuttings about criminal cases to gossip about his lovers.
It was while at Cambridge that Ives began to campaign for the decriminalization of homosexuality, something which was inherently dangerous at the time. During this period, Ives came to believe passionately that since homosexuals were not accepted by society, they should be allowed to have their own form of society in which they could communicate and express themselves freely. To this end, he founded the Order of Chaeronea in 1897, which he named after the site of the battle fought by the Sacred Band of Thebes, made up entirely of male lovers. Far from being a network used to make romantic or sexual liaisons, which indeed were frowned upon—notwithstanding certain moments of “passionate sensuality”—the Order was seen as essentially an ascetic movement governed by higher principles. Its practical focus was on challenging the social prejudices and legal restrictions they faced as homosexuals. Under Ives’ leadership, they targeted laws that criminalized their sexuality, as well as laws that forbade the use of birth control, criminalized abortion, and demonized those who suffered from syphilis and other sexually transmitted diseases.
For all its straightforward political objectives, the Order was wrapped in a set of rather elaborate, however secretive, rituals and ceremonies. There were passwords and rites of initiation and a complicated seal, as shown. The seal bears the letters amrrhao, a “sign-word” referring to “the seal of the double wreath” (though its literal meaning has apparently never been deciphered). The ring is surrounded by “The Chain,” a reminder of the prohibition on revealing anything about the Order to outsiders. Its manifesto was written by Ives and poetically states:
We believe in the glory of passion. We believe in the inspiration of emotion. We believe in the holiness of love. Now some in the world without have been asking as to our faith, and mostly we find that we have no answer for them. Scoffers there be, to whom we need not reply, and foolish ones to whom our words would convey no meaning. For what are words? Symbols of kindred comprehended conceptions and the like.
Ives was very much an idealist, and this appealed to people who were tired of having no way to express themselves to improve their situation in society. Members included men such as the poets Charles Jackson and John Gambil Nicholson, the reforming priest Samuel Cottam, and the gay rights activist Edward Carpenter, who would become a lifelong friend and political ally.
Always seeking a way to “naturalize” homosexuality, in 1914 Ives founded, along with Carpenter and others, the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology. He initiated correspondence with leading scientists of the day and also conducted his own research. Together, they sought to find a way that homosexuality could be proven as a natural state, arguing that men should not be criminalized for their nature. They turned to studying the classics to help bring wider attention to the fact that homosexuality was, in Ives’ words, an “eternal and historic truth.” In 1926, he published a book titled Græco-Roman View of Youth as a vehicle for advancing this fundamental thesis.
While reforming the laws that criminalized homosexuality was a priority for Ives, he was also deeply involved in campaigning for prison reform. He was appalled by the conditions in which people of both sexes were kept and the minor offenses for which they were condemned. Ives visited prisons all over Europe, writing and lecturing extensively on the subject.
These campaigns, and the organizations that he founded, gave Ives something that he had always craved: a sense of family. Historian Matt Cook suggests that Ives “imaginatively reworked the form of his family to meet the extraordinary demands of his life … asserting both his masculinity and sexual identity” through his development of the Order of Chaeronea, and by financially supporting, at various times, friends and distant family members, thus creating his own unconventional surrogate family. In 1917, he wrote that his household, consisting of his valet Kit and his family, “is my little circle in the world,” and later that through his “brotherhood of men” he had been able to find understanding and take comfort.
Later in life, he was well known and respected as a tireless campaigner for a range of progressive causes. Historian Andrew Lycett proposes that he was the model for the character Raffles, the gentleman thief who was created by Arthur Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law and appears in one of Doyle’s own titles. Ives would not live to see the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain, nor the prison reforms that he fought for so passionately. However, his early advocacy of tolerance for sexual minorities and his efforts to launch a movement for homosexual rights deserve to be recognized as a milestone in LGBT equality that may well have been the first such organized effort in the English-speaking world.
Rebecca Batley is a historian with a special interest in LGBT art and culture.
