“‘FETCH A TOWEL,’ he called, ‘and come on!’” So begins Cyril and George’s steamy swim in D. H. Lawrence’s first all-male erotic scene, which is found in his debut novel, The White Peacock. And Lawrence didn’t stop there. His fiction would go on to feature a massage in which one man rubs “every speck” of his male friend’s “lower body,” including the “abdomen, the buttocks, [and]the thighs” with oil; a four-paragraph naked wrestling match in which the word “penetrate” appears three times; and a chthonic ritual in which one man blindfolds and binds another from head to toe with belts of black fur while feeling him all over, including in the “loins” and “secret places” while guiding him through the invocation of an Aztec god. Briefly stated, for an ostensibly heterosexual writer, Lawrence sure found a lot of ways to introduce male nudity and intimate male-to-male contact into his fiction! Were he alive today and facilitating a wilderness retreat for men, I’d be the first to “fetch a towel and come on.”
The narrator of The White Peacock is the first of Lawrence’s fictionalized self-portraits. Cyril Beardsall is an artist, and his body recalls a description that Lawrence wrote of himself in a letter when he was 23: “I am thin … my skin is very white and unblemished; soft.” In the eighth chapter of The White Peacock, Cyril and his hunky farmer crush, George, jump into a pond with George’s dog, chase each other, laugh, and end up in each other’s arms: “The sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb.” Men from different social classes going skinny-dipping is one of many parallels between E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), and The White Peacock (1911). (Fans of the former may have wondered how the bourgeois Lucy and her railway clerk swain George would have fared had they not crossed social barriers to marry. The White Peacock provides an answer. Read it and weep.)
That Cyril enjoys naked snuggling with a man comes as no surprise. The only kisses he receives from women are “honorably” transacted in “a most correct manner” under mistletoe at a Christmas dance. On the other hand, the fine physiques of other male characters are of great interest, and are promptly commented upon. Cyril is queer-coded in other ways, obligingly listening to Wagner and collecting Aubrey Beardsley prints. As they climb back on land, Cyril and George compare and joke about each other’s bodies, and Cyril says: “I had to give in, and bow to him, and he took on an indulgent, gentle manner. … [H]e knew how I admired the noble, white fruitfulness of his form.” While George “polished his arm, holding it out straight and solid” and “rubbed his hair into curls,” Cyril watches “the deep muscles of his shoulders” and in his state of distraction forgets to dry himself off. So George takes over, “as if I were … a woman he loved and did not fear. … [T]o get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him. [O]ur love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman.”
In the same 1908 letter in which Lawrence described his own physique and complexion, he also wrote: “The man I have been working with in the hay is the original of my George. … I am very fond of my friend, and he of me. Sometimes, often, he is as gentle as a woman towards me.” This man was Alan Chambers, the brother of Jessie Chambers—the woman who worked so hard to launch Lawrence’s career as a writer, and one of the first women whose kisses moved Lawrence’s heart and “sex fire.”
Cyril’s description of the unsurpassed “perfect love” that he and George shared “for a moment” mirrors what Lawrence said when reminiscing with the writer Compton Mackenzie in the latter’s house on Capri when he was 34: “I believe the nearest I’ve ever come to perfect love was with a young coal miner when I was about sixteen.” Lawrence’s biographers often conflate the coal miner with Alan Chambers. Brenda Maddox, in her D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage explains: “If Mackenzie mistook, for understandable reasons, the word ‘farmer’ for ‘miner,’ the loved one would have been … Alan Chambers.” I’ve found no record of Chambers ever working in a coal mine, but Nottinghamshire had many, so it’s possible that Lawrence’s perfect love and Alan Chambers were in fact the same person. That said, I worry that merging two boyfriends into one could be a way for heterosexist biographers to explain away bisexuality as a one-time sexual experiment.
In the less frequently quoted passage that precedes Law-rence’s revelation of his “perfect love,” Compton Mackenzie, his host on Capri, defines the standard by which Lawrence judged a love to be “perfect”: “What worried him particularly was his inability to attain consummation simultaneously with his wife, which according to him must mean that their marriage was still imperfect in spite of all they had gone through. I insisted that such a happy coincidence was always rare, but he became more and more depressed about what he insisted was the only evidence of a perfect union.”
Most of Lawrence’s biographers will admit, however reluctantly, that he was attracted to men as well as women, but they seem reluctant to use the word “bisexual.” Lawrence is often presented as a man whose essential heterosexuality is tainted with “homosexual tendencies” or the like. If we had to assign Lawrence to one of the cardinal points of the sexual compass, it would be more plausible to say that he was homosexual with heterosexual tendencies than the reverse. In his 1913 letter to the poet and reviewer Henry Savage, Lawrence wrote that a man “can always get satisfaction from a man, but it is the hardest thing to get one’s soul and body satisfied by a woman.” In the 1919 draft of his essay on Walt Whitman, he wrote: “The last perfect balance is between two men in whom the deepest sensual centres … vibrate in one circuit … as does the circuit between man and woman. … And the port, of egress and ingress, is the fundament, as the vagina is port to the other centre.” Whether women were his main dish with a side helping of men or vice versa, it’s clear that Lawrence’s appetites flowed in more than one direction, and that he acted on both.
Even biographers who concede Lawrence’s bisexuality will often cast doubt on his or any bisexual’s reports of same-sex activity. My favorite examples of this are in Mark Kincaid-Weekes’ monumental D. H. Lawrence: Triumph to Exile (1996), and Frances Wilson’s recent Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence (2021). Kincaid-Weekes appends a footnote to Frieda Lawrence telling Katherine Mansfield, who was bisexual, that she too had known lesbian passion in her youth, flagging Frieda’s story as unlikely given the time that would have passed between the alleged event and its telling, or because Frieda may have just invented it to placate Mansfield, or because it could easily have been “a semi-fictionalized memory … shaped by The Rainbow rather than the other way around.” Kincaid-Weekes does not consider that Frieda Lawrence may have remembered her own memories, understood the difference between fact and fiction, and told Mansfield the truth.
Similarly, in Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, Frances Wilson dismisses Lawrence’s memory of “perfect love” as something he only “allegedly” confided to Compton Mackenzie and calls it “the kind of gossip that people liked to spread about Lawrence.” The only other event from Lawrence’s life that Wilson dismisses as gossip is his later fling with William Henry Hocking, a neighbor of the Lawrences in Cornwall, and another farmer he helped harvest the hay. Early in her book Wilson judges that this relationship couldn’t have happened because, spurred by jealousy, “it was Frieda who started the rumor,” but then—shame on the editor who didn’t catch this—Wilson fails to notice a few chapters later that this is the same affair that Lawrence had with a “young Cornish farmer during the war” that is cited by Frieda to Mabel Luhan as a cause of her ill mood.
When I was growing up, D. H. Lawrence belonged to heterosexuals, specifically to straight men such as my father and his generation, for whom the Internet didn’t exist, and the best porn a straight teenager could get his hands on was a paperback copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover at the drugstore. That left Lawrence in a rarely visited backyard shed of my mind between a dried-up paint can and a stack of useless Playboys. I only knew the queer Lawrence from a videotape of the movie Women in Love, in which the great English actors Alan Bates and Oliver Reed wrestle in the nude in a protracted scene. The “pause” button on our VCR got a workout with the copy that I smuggled home from my teenage video store job.
The most famous scene of man-on-man action in Lawrence’s works is undoubtedly this naked wrestling scene in Women in Love, but it should not be allowed to eclipse the sweet, sexy swim in The White Peacock, the oil-lubed massage of Aaron’s Rod, or the hands-on eldritch intimacy of The Plumed Serpent. The 1969 film adaptation of Women in Love is the main reason for the novel’s notoriety, though as faithful as the movie is to the action and mood of the original, it could not do justice to Lawrence’s language—not without earning an X rating. As Lawrence’s text describes it, Rupert Birkin “seemed to penetrate into Gerald’s more solid, more diffuse bulk”; he “interfused his body through the body of the other”; his “whole physical intelligence interpenetrated into Gerald’s body”; and “his fine sublimated energy entered into the flesh of the fuller man.”
This is the Lawrence that I first met in The White Peacock—the young man who realized early on that he was attracted to both men and women, struggled with a severe case of internalized homophobia, and then slowly, haltingly, began to reconcile his intellect with his sexual feelings. While his death at 46 ended his struggle to resolve his identity before he could fully explore his options, in his short life D. H. Law-rence was able to see his queerness from a more elevated and even a mythic perspective that would not have been possible for any of his contemporaries.
Andrew White, based in Philadelphia, works in libraries, museums, and sometimes at the zoo. Now and then he publishes a short story.
