More Curious Than Wise
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Like his mentor Bert Wyatt-Brown, author Benjamin E. Wise generally admires my family. A professor of gender and sexuality at the University of Florida, Wise paints Will as what I would call a “good gay” (restricting his amours to unpaid adult men—not too many!—and of course never in public). However, he largely glosses over my uncle’s shocking pederasty, which included foreign sex tourism and the exploitation of African-American boys at home. Wise, who is himself heterosexual, does discuss how, at the age of fifteen, while at the High Church University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, Will lost his religious faith and came out with panache. There, reading Greek texts in that Arcadian setting surrounded by “fauns and satyrs,” he “began to seek historical and philosophical explanation of same-sex desire.” He wanted to view sexual experiences “not as crass and lustful but as honest expressions of a natural desire.” At Harvard Law School Will fell in love with a big, blond Yankee classmate named Harold Bruff (who died in 1911). We are also told of Will’s later connection with the poet Witter Bynner, and through him to W. H. Auden.

Wise justly praises Will for his four volumes of Uranian poetry (published by Yale University Press). However, he downplays Will’s editorship of Yale’s Younger Poets Series from 1925 to 1932, which was the first of its kind in the U.S., later edited by W. H. Auden.

Although he always had close lady friends, Will never married, a fact no biographer can overlook. Nor is it really possible these days to ignore the homosexual elements in Will’s classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee (1941), which became a bestseller, appearing as it did in the wake of Gone With The Wind. To the knowing modern ear, Lanterns comes across as the effusions of a grand old queen coming out to other gays and gambling—successfully—that the straight people reading his book wouldn’t crack the code. Long before that, a poem of Will’s had appeared, slightly altered from the original and attributed to “A. W. Percy,” in a far riskier volume, the anthology Men and Boys (1922). As the title implies, it focused on intergenerational male relationships, which were no more strongly condemned at this time than were same-sex relations between adults, and were often considered more tasteful.

It was one of several straws in the wind. Another was Will’s visits to Taormina, Sicily, where Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden photographed nude Italian boys, often prepubescent boys who were sometimes available sexually for special clients. Even more provocative to contemporary sensibilities is Will’s companion in Italy, the notoriously pedophilic Scottish novelist Norman Douglas. In New York, Douglas’ circle included the dean of Columbia Law School, with whom he shared a summer home, and the pederastic psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan.

As if all this were not sufficiently controversial, Will’s chairmanship of the Red Cross Relief Committee during the Great Flood of 1927 would lead to allegations in which dangerous eddies of race and sex swirl into each other. Wise repeatedly describes the Percys as paternalistic white supremacists. But almost everyone was a racist at this time, before Hitler’s extremism and Eleanor Roosevelt’s liberalism began to discredit racism. Far from taking a merely condescending view of black culture, Will engaged with it seriously, notably through friendships with Harlem Renaissance types, particularly the gay African-American poet Langston Hughes.

Wise trivializes many hours of taped interviews that attest to Will’s sexual relationships with black teenagers, dismissing the words of their surviving close associates in John M. Barry’s Rising Tide (1997) as merely “some anecdotal evidence.” And here’s the thing: those “servants” had all been around twelve or thirteen when Will first had sex with them—successively, Ernest, Fode, and Honey—a detail that Wise totally obscures. A key witness, Millie Commodore, the wife of Fode’s best friend and daughter of the blacks’ strike leader against compulsory labor during the flood, saw these liaisons as benign opportunities for boys’ education and jobs. Far from being cowed by their patron’s power, they flaunted their own. Honey publicly bragged that Will was his whore.

What a tale, if only Wise had taken the bull by the horns!