WILLIAMKUHN 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, thework 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 Why Lord Byron Still Matters ARTMEMO so profoundly bleak that I thought of Brokeback Mountain, another movie that depends on a final scene for its impact to really be felt. Brokeback Mountaindoes not resemble Haigh’s movie at first glance. Its realism is grounded in a very concrete place and time, with real people herding real livestock. But at bottom they are both the same story: a love between men that cannot be. And, like Brokeback Mountain, All of Us Strangers seemed to me to move as slow as molasses. There is a heavy pace to both movies; the mills of tragedy grind exceedingly slow. How Adam can be in bed with a dead Harry, their bodies carefully arranged in parallel poses, sleeping peacefully, cannot be explained. But it has its effect. The reviewer for The Guardian said she could feel her chair vibrating with the sobbing of her fellow critics in her row of seats. In that respect, Haigh has succeeded. For all the superb cinematography, the eroticism, and the mystery, this movie is, the more one thinks about it, an amazingly bleak look at gay life. The dream of meeting our parents again, of being able to have a discussion about the things that wounded us as children growing up, of reassuring them that things are better for gay people now, is, like the dream of having Paul Mescal knock on your door, pleasant to imagine. But what a vision the movie offers. And yet, despite the ending—the slowness, the darkness, the portrayal of human isolation—there is something bracing, something stinging, about Haigh’s film. It stings you back into feeling, into life—even when you have reached an age when most of the people in your past are, in fact, ghosts. 22 TheG&LR ALL OF US STRANGERS Directed by Andrew Haigh Searchlight Pictures
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