LORD BYRON died 200 years ago, in 1824, at the age of 36. He succumbed to a fever in Greece, where he was helping to fund the Greek war of independence from Turkey. Today he’s more famous as a poet and a lover than as a fighter. One estimate puts Byron’s renown as a poet second only to that of Shakespeare. As a lover, Byron broke many hearts, both male and female. In the months leading up to his death, Byron had his own heart broken by a young man who didn’t love him back. Through all this, Byron had a fighting spirit that still attracts our attention.
Byron’s life has particularly inspired gay writers who came after him. Benjamin Disraeli, Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville, Henry James, and Tennessee Williams all included tributes to Byron in their work. Byron’s good looks and troubled life story have sometimes been as compelling as what he wrote. Many young men who’ve combined androgyny and an openly sexual appeal have built a following that can be traced back to a Byronic archetype. That would include James Dean, Mick Jagger, Rupert Everett, and Harry Styles.
But how can Byron have anything to say to us now? Childe Harold, the work that made him an overnight celebrity, is a long, difficult poem with archaic language. His masterpiece, Don Juan, is lighter and funnier, but it too requires some patience from a modern reader. The bicentenary of Byron’s death is an opportunity to consider whether a man now so distant from us can still be relevant to us.
Byron probably had sex with other teenage boys and youths from when he was sixteen to about 23. He slept with young women in London and had a passion for other men’s wives. He married once, but it lasted only a year. He fathered children by a maid in his country house, by his wife Annabella, by a female fan who confronted him in London, and possibly by his half-sister Augusta. However, if you dwell on the sexual details, you may miss one of the central ways that he’s more like us than you might think.
The variety of genders, ages, and relationships in Byron’s love life suggests that the words “gay” and “bisexual” are inadequate to describe him. In Britain during the first half of the 19th century, a man who had sex with other men could be hanged as a sodomite. While such punishments were rare, they increased in frequency when Britain was at war, as was the case, with France, in the early years of his life. Rumors that Byron was a sodomite drove him into exile after his marriage broke up. “Queer” may be a better word for him. He possessed something like a nonbinary identity. Both his friends and his critics noticed his effeminacy. Soon after he died, two men close to Byron commented that his face was part male and part female. He was defiant about his differences. He wrote a poem in defense of an ancient Assyrian ruler whose gender ambiguity and sex life were like Byron’s own: Sardanapalus was also a fighter, and woe to anyone who underestimated him. Byron’s bravery in making Sardanapalus the hero of his story is striking.
Child abuse as a boy shaped Byron’s personality. A cousin’s unexpected death led to Byron’s inheriting a title and an estate when he was only ten. A lawyer discovered that a nursemaid had been climbing into Byron’s bed, hitting him, touching him sexually, and bringing other lovers to their shared bedroom. Today we understand that such abuse can have a lasting impact on the adult survivor. The aftereffects can include difficulty settling down to a single partner, control issues, and placing sex at the center of one’s personality. The adult Byron had all these traits. In memoranda that he prepared as an adult, he said his sex life had begun so early that few would believe him if he named the age.
The same nursemaid who abused Byron also read to him from the Bible. The majesty of biblical language fueled Byron’s ambition to achieve a similar mastery of the English language. The fact that the nursemaid was a trusted member of the family who conferred benefits, but only at a cost, complicated matters. The nursemaid was fired, but not immediately. She left with a rich parting gift. Byron remained angry with his mother for having subjected him to the nursemaid for so long.
Byron was born with a deformed right foot and narrowed lower leg. He walked with a limp. He wouldn’t let his wife see the foot on his wedding night or his doctors see it when he was dying. The braver part of him was able to make jokes about the foot in his writing. He told a clergyman who tried to persuade Byron that our bodies would rise to heaven after death: “And our carcasses that are to rise again, are they worth raising? I hope if mine is, that I shall have a better pair of legs than I have moved on these two and twenty years, or I shall be sadly behind in the squeeze into Paradise.”
Similarly, although male-male sexuality was dangerous to mention, let alone in print, Byron returned to the topic frequently. Much of his juvenilia is about the love teenage boys feel for one another. He wrote these poems while attending an all-male boarding school and soon thereafter. Another poem is about a male friend at Cambridge who gave Byron a ring. The autobiographical hero of Byron’s Childe Harold has committed a secret crime, one that almost certainly has a sexual dimension. The only crime that Byron himself had conceivably committed at the time he wrote it was sodomy. His Don Juan refers to same-sex sexuality in the work of the Roman poet Virgil. Several of his works in the original versions had open praise for William Beckford, the best-known sodomite of that era.
Byron was a swimmer. The little brother of one of his close friends remembered Byron and his brother stripping off their clothes and jumping into a swift, tidal river. The current carried them far out to sea before they could swim back to shore. Byron also swam the Tagus in Lisbon and from the Venetian Lido across to the Grand Canal. He was proudest of crossing the Dardanelles Strait, a passage from the Aegean Sea leading toward Istanbul. He was imitating the mythological Leander, who swam the strait nightly to visit his female lover Hero. Christopher Marlowe’s version of this myth has a lusty sea god mistaking Leander for Ganymede, the boy-lover of Zeus. In Western art, Leander is almost always depicted, even in death, as desirable, young, and naked.
Byron’s deformity disappeared in the water, as did prejudice that associated his effeminacy with weakness. In the water, he became an athlete capable of great feats. One of the most famous passages in his work begins: “And I have loved thee Ocean.” It ends with Byron comparing swimming to writing on the page: “as I do here.” The writer, the poet, and the man who understood the appeal of the sea god’s attraction to naked Leander all came together in his notion of himself as a swimmer.
Byron invites us all to think of ourselves in a long history of storytelling that puts same-sex romance at its center. Byron looked to Leander, to Virgil, and to Beckford. Similarly, we may gain strength when we look to him as an ancestor. He encourages us to defy adverse public opinion. Even though he had to pay a price for his defiance, he found ways in his work not only to embrace and express his sexual difference, but also long to outlive his 36 years.
William Kuhn, author of Swimming with Lord Byron, wrote a biography of Benjamin Disraeli called The Politics of Pleasure and a novel titled Mrs Queen Takes the Train.
