E.M. Forster shared his gay novel Maurice among friends. Even though it could not be published in his lifetime, it was a book that had to be written.
He wrote no other novel after A Passage to India but continued to write and pass around gay-themed stories in a similar vein to Maurice, a collection that was published after his death as The Life to Come (out in a new edition from Penguin). These are strange stories, sometimes comic and mostly tragic but the tragedy can be redeemed by rapture. Gay love erupts in the stories, often when a working man appears to crack the carapace of a stolid middle-class Englishman’s social reserve. Sex tends to trigger death, true consummation saved for an afterlife. Christianity is seen as repressing the natural, and the book’s spiritual core is pagan.
Forster’s first ever story, “The Story of a Panic” (published in his The Celestial Omnibus collection in 1911) descended into his head while sitting on a rock in the Italian hills, and he ran down to his hotel to write it out. It involves a young boy, the appearance of Pan, and the arms of an Italian waiter. There was no overt gay sex, though as subtext it was there as the hidden power that kills with its wonderous immensity if released into the world. I’d guess that Forster’s own suppressed sexuality felt like a pagan force inside him.
Once, living in New Mexico, I found my own spirituality presented on a TV screen. People bent to the soil to pick out handfuls of earth, set their hands on bark to connect with the spiritual power of trees. This was me, my crowd, on TV for the first time! Then the camera pulled back, the film was being shown on a stage, and a man stood at the microphone. This is what we are facing, the evangelist told his audience. The film showed pagans, he told them, and they were the scourge of America.
Almost all my short fiction has a gay theme. It often stemmed from time in the mountains, where connecting with nature connects with my own nature. Once I reached up to a tree and cupped a young green chestnut in the palm of my hand, and that simple gesture prompted a story. One story thread, with an overarching title of “The Lovely Life of Arnold”, was my response to learning about the “berdache” tradition in Native American tribes. Since I learned of this way of being that term “berdache” suffers with the weight of French colonial overtones, and instead the term “two-spirit” has come into play, adopted by tribal members who resist its appropriation by non-indigenous peoples. Still, it guides me. In simple terms, a story goes that a bow and arrow is placed one side of a baby boy, a doll the other, the boy who turns to the doll is recognized as gay, and at that fact the family rejoices. They need no other child. A gay child is perfect and makes their family complete.
For my Arnold stories, I imported that sense of a gay child being a blessing rather than a curse to a western family. It’s the opposite of my own story. How does that play out in the character’s life? A classic documentary series Seven Up tracked children born in the same year as me from the age of seven, in seven-year leaps, through their teens and twenties and on. No child in the series came out as gay. Arnold became the flipside version of Seven Up, Arnold’s life viewed in seven-year leaps up to the age of 42.
I thought it a playful story. A tough Texan friend who had been thoroughly out since a child found it frightening and started shaking. A progressive mother said it made her very angry. Subvert the norms and it can upset folk.
I grew up when being gay was illegal. The notion of being non-binary wasn’t available. You were damned or not. The world has moved on, we are now asked to define as cis or non-cis, and I don’t. I don’t wish to accord with anybody’s definition. I’ve always believed in reincarnation and was surprised as teenager to learn others don’t view it as a fact. Like Forster, I expect an afterlife. I have an ungendered soul that is playing out its life through this current body and has found a soulmate in their own current body.
Life finding itself in relationship, positioned against society, thus became the theme of my short fiction. The collection concluded with a retelling of Herman Melville’s Billy Budd. Melville’s tale is homoerotic rather than gay, and the core chapter in which Captain Vere tells the handsome Billy Budd that he is to be hanged is missing from the novella. (It was missing too in the libretto Forster co-wrote for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd.) Budd steps from the meeting and blithely into the noose, calls “God Bless Vere” as the noose tightens around his young throat. Like in Forster, an illicit “gay” relationship finds release in rapturous death.
How come? During the Covid pandemic I settled at a desk facing the North Sea and wrote Captain Vere’s full version of the story, to find out that truth.
These stories weren’t secret – most have been published in literary journals, each publication surprising me as I was more used to rejection. They are now joined together as a gay collection, Lessons from Cruising (out August 6th 2024, UK and USA). Homosexuality is still criminalized in many countries of the world, though the legal threat in the west that crippled much of Forster’s life has gone. These stories are personal, flickers of gay spirit in a world in which that has been derided. I would like to be loved and have sometimes been powerfully disliked. My book is vulnerable to my own fate. I’m buoyed by very kind words for the jacket from two favourite writers who I don’t know personally, Paul Russell and Jay Parini. The book is a strong and tender thing, and I hope it finds its twin spirits.
Such a beautiful piece - and beautiful view of this incarnation. Pagan all the way, O great and wise Pan!
This is a beautiful and moving piece—as is the whole of Lessons from Cruising!