Frontis portrait of Edward Carpenter from Towards Democracy: Complete Edition in Four Parts; London: Swan Sonnenschein & Co. Limited / Manchester: S. Clarke, 1907

After visiting Walt Whitman, English Socialist Edward Carpenter concluded that the Poet “was before all a lover of the Male.”[1]

For Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, Carpenter's Ioläus “opened up for me soul windows.”[2] And a peek into The Intermediate Sex was for liberationist Harry Hay an “earthshaking revelation.”[3]

In Love's Coming of Age (1896) Carpenter wrote, “Love is . . . its own justification.”[4] However various its “combinations,” “only in the most exceptional cases, if at all, may public institutions venture to interfere with” it.[5]

Sources

1. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 365.

2. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic, 1994), 284.

3. Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston: Alyson, 1990), 27.

4. Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1911), 155.

5. Carpenter, 155.