QUEER CAMBRIDGE
An Alternative History
by Simon Goldhill
Cambridge University Press
304 pages, $29.95
“THIS IS A BOOK about a staircase and the men who lived on it.” Thus Simon Goldhill begins his alternative history of Cambridge University. The staircase is located in the Gibbs Building, a beautiful 18th-century structure where the teachers and students of King’s College have lived and learned together for centuries. We have all seen movies set in England’s famous universities but may not have noticed that the buildings do not have hallways; instead, rooms are located off staircases, each with its own entranceway identified by a letter. Goldhill, a professor of Greek literature and culture and fellow of King’s, has rooms on E staircase. When he discovered that rooms on G and H had been occupied from the 1880s to the early 1960s by generations of gay men, many of whom lived consequential lives, he saw an alternative way to approach the history of homosexuality.
Queer Cambridge offers a contrast to the many histories of this period that focus on men living in large cities: lonely, solitary men having furtive sexual encounters, always in danger of exposure, their secret gathering places full of strangers. At King’s, Goldhill discovered the opposite: a community of men who desired men that flourished through decades of legal and social restrictions on homosexuality. They came together in a single place and formed relationships maintained through the rest of their lives.
These young gay men ended up in this place because a subtle network operated in the prep schools they attended. At exclusive schools like Eton, they were taught by gay teachers who steered them to the college they themselves had attended. Each year, as new students arrived, they learned the traditions and stories of the community on G and H, which they in turn would pass on. These men supported each other as they struggled to understand their sexuality and the possible ways to live their lives. As attitudes toward homosexuality changed, their self-understanding did too. None of this would matter much if these men were unknown figures lost to history. But the staircases happened to be shared by many men who became leading figures in the political, social, and cultural life of 20th-century England.
A warning to readers: the figures discussed in this book were all privileged, white males from middle-class or wealthy families that sent them to elite schools. The relationships they formed at King’s, some of them sexual, were often between students and teachers. Goldhill describes a pattern of older dons desiring a “beautiful boy,” who over time became a don desiring his students. He acknowledges that today we would call these men predators, but he’s firm in the belief that most of these intergenerational relationships were beneficial to young men seeking to understand their sexuality and themselves.
Another warning: many of the men who populate Queer Cambridge are not exactly household names. A good number spent their lives at King’s College, first as students, then as teachers, scholars, and administrators. Even the recognizable names—Rupert Brooke (poetry), Dadie Rylands (theater), Edward J. Dent (music), Roger Fry (art)—are now known primarily by specialists in their fields. Two exceptions are E. M. Forster, who remains broadly famous for his novels and their film adaptations, and John Maynard Keynes, whose approach to economic policy is still widely known as “Keynesian economics.”
Goldhill is an entertaining writer. His history moves briskly, sometimes too briskly as names reappear at a dizzying pace, as if to demonstrate the complicated networks that connected the members of this relatively small world. He frequently pauses his narrative to insert parenthetical comments that are very funny. One of the early figures in this history is A. C. Benson, a prolific writer who was repulsed by sexual acts but filled his diaries with details of the romantic intrigues he saw going on around him. Of the 180 volumes of Benson’s diaries, Goldhill observes: “I am, it seems, the only person alive to have read through all of them.”
Queer Cambridge is divided into four sections dealing with the “Discovery,” the “Politics,” the “Art,” and the “Burial” of homosexuality. It begins in the Victorian era, when the men in this community were seeking words to describe the desire they felt for each other. They wrote endlessly: letters, diaries, memoirs, autobiographies. Initially, they relied on coded language and references to ancient Greece when mentioning the love that dare not speak its name. At various times, “urning,” “uranian,” and “invert” were used as terms of self-identification. By the 1920s, the clinical term “homosexual” became the most common, and polite, way to identify a person who experienced same-sex desire.
Goldhill makes a convincing case that the values of “tolerance, acceptance, generosity, and serious critique” that members of this community learned at Cambridge instilled in them aspirations to better the world. Those who rose to high positions in public life had roles in the founding of social welfare programs in England and the formation of the League of Nations. The experience of living outside social norms gave those who made careers in literature, music, art, and theater the vision to imagine “a world otherwise”—different from the oppressive one that they knew. They helped usher out the cultural propriety of the Victorian era and introduce modernity to England.
The chapter “The Burial of Homosexuality” has the most resonance for our lives today. By “burial,” Goldhill means several things. One is the repression that descended on gay men and women after World War II, something that happened in the United States as well as England. People who could be fairly open about their sexuality before the war were forced back into the closet in the 1950s, when the accusation of homosexuality could ruin a career and end a life, as in the case of gay cryptologist and computer pioneer Alan Turing after he left the protective walls of Cambridge.
Another burial was the fate of the word “homosexual,” which was gradually replaced by a more fluid language that embraces the word “queer” and the many permutations of “LGBT+.” The men at King’s College in the late 1880s had to invent their own words to name the desire they felt for other men. We now have words that describe a whole range of sexual attractions and gender identities, but in schools and workplaces we are increasingly forbidden to use these words. Queer Cambridge demonstrates how language and identity are intertwined in queer history. The erasure of words is tantamount to the erasure of people.
Daniel Burr, who lives in Covington, Kentucky, is a frequent contributor to these pages.
