If we look more closely at the first few decades during the last century, specifically in the UK and especially the period around and just after the First Great War, there is clearly an increase in the number of cultural references in documentation that we can find about sexuality per se, (an increase which seems greater than that which would have occurred simply because of the fact that it is generally better documented). The effect of an ‘alternative culture’, styles, literature and society norms of the period. in western Europe at least, seems distinct. Increasingly, we find that literature from this period is suffused with the stories of those who have refused to define themselves within the parameters of ‘normalative’ sexuality.
Increasingly too, this built into a cultural milieu, which came to accept that some of the most important artistic work of the period was, in fact, being created by what we now see as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual people. The notion of these groups of people as being ‘sexually deviant’, both legally and in terms of mainstream societal attitudes to them, was increasingly seen, at least in artistic and literary circles, as something that was positively important: integral to their cultural output. Just an inkling of something that might be grasped by those looking, searching, in relation to finding positive role models.
Sometimes though, this has only been recognised with hindsight. In the biography of the traveller and hispanophile Gerald Brenan, (1894-1987) who as a writer saw military service and wrote about France in the First Great War and then later became involved with the rather boyish (Dora) Carrington of the ‘Bloomsbury set’ in the early 1920’s we find that many of Brenan’s views were rooted in the deeply patriarchal society that he grew up in and that his father, in particular, represented for him, I think to some extent he never really grew out of or away from these values, despite his wish to escape this and his subsequently relatively unorthodox (though by no means completely unorthodox) lifestyle and fraternisation with the Bloomsbury set and the Yegen peasantry in southern Spain.
His biographer, Jonathon Gaythorne-Hardy, nevertheless writes of the strong fraternal bond that existed between him and his wartime friend Ralph Partridge, whom, like Gerald, also served and was decorated in the First War. It now seems clear to me, from studying much of his literature and letters, that Brennan repressed and indeed felt repressed by aspects of his sexuality most of his life, though in his autobiographical work he tends to concentrate more on his early problems with impotence. It was only when well into his sixties, Gaythorne-Hardy writes, that he even felt able to discuss more openly what homosexual men actually did (this observation likely comes from conversations both directly and in his letters to Ralph Partridge in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s).
His closest friend when young, Hope Johnson, with whom he shared many aspects of his life and whom we know was at least bisexual, though predominantly homosexual, was certainly ‘in love’ with Gerald when Gerald was in his late teens and early twenties (Hope was around five years older than Gerald) but we also know that Brenan convinced him to repress this aspect of their relationship, or at least the physical side of it, in correspondence that survives. It perhaps goes some way to understanding why Brenan always said he had a ‘lovely war’; (in his letters to Ralph Partridge, during the second war, he again references this feeling, almost attraction); a war where, for the first time, aspects of the highly repressive and rigidly conventional society that he and many other men (and women) like him in the late Victorian & early Edwardian period had grown up with, were of necessity, (to some extent at least) thrown off or at least relaxed.
Arguably, his early life and the periods spent living in the small pueblo of Yegen, in the remote (at the time) Alpajarra´s region of Spanish Andalucia, were attempts to escape the stifling conventional morality of the period. Equally, much of his early life was spent trying to ensure that he met with his parents approval and it must always be remembered that this played a large part in young people’s lives generally, throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as admitting openly to what was then seen as ‘deviant sexuality’ would of course have been a huge scandal, that one’s parents and close family would have to have a share in.
Brenan always aspired to become a poet, although he never really quite achieved this in his life (he became better known for his contemporary and literary histories of Spain and autobiographical material). However, there were certainly gay poets in the period just before the First War producing a lot of work, though such material was usually heavily self censored.
Constantine Cavafy, (1863-1933) the Greek poet, is perhaps the most obvious example and for me personally one of the first poets presenting ‘otherness’ that I became aware of, in my late teens. I managed to buy a book of his collected works at the age of 18 and found some of his work resonated very strongly.
There was a wonderfully gritty reality that I found in them (more especially the erotic poems, it is true) that I felt I could relate too, I could visualise myself having the kind of encounters that he was writing about and relate to him. In particular, even I, understood then what he was saying in poems like ‘Understanding‘ written in 1918:
My younger days, my sensual life-
how clearly I see their meaning now
In the loose living of my early years
the impulses of my poetry were shaped.
the boundaries of my art were plotted
That’s why the regretting was so fickle
And my resolutions to hold back, to change,
lasted two weeks at the most.
I could see that he was already, in looking back, realising there had been an underlying pathway his life would take, whether he consciously knew it or not and that efforts to change it were doomed to fail. I saw how he explores the idea that the creativity he has in him is being shaped, moulded, by these desires. It is the very essence of him, his being. We see homosexual writers, playrights, poets return to this theme again and again, in their work. This was an important realisation for me: this thing inside was my very ‘essence‘ and could not, would not, be shaken off lightly.
WH Auden noted as much in his introduction to the 1961 volume The Complete Poems of C.P. Cavafy when he wrote, “Cavafy was a homosexual, and his erotic poems make no attempt to conceal the fact.” Auden added:
“As a witness, Cavafy is exceptionally honest. He neither bowdlerizes nor glamorizes nor giggles. The erotic world he depicts is one of casual pickups and short-lived affairs. Love, there, is rarely more than physical passion … at the same time, he refuses to pretend that his memories of moments of sensual pleasure are unhappy or spoiled by feelings of guilt.”
I’m not entirely sure however, that I agree with Auden here; even the poem above, for example, to me seems to indicate something deeper than lust exists for Cavafy on the sensual plane, although he may not call it ‘love’. In fact he constantly yearns for lost love in many poems, ‘In the Evening’ (1917) for example, where he reads again and again a lovers letter and becomes sad, as he reflects over these lost times.
CM. Bowra, in his essay “Constantine Cavafy and the Greek Past” (published in The Creative Experiment), affirms his belief that Cavafy was an individualist,who did not attempt to boderalise any particular literary convention or thematic style:
“Cavafy used neither Greek nor Western European models. Still less did he owe anything to the East. His manner was his own invention, the reflection of his temperament and his circumstances, guided by a natural instinct for words. Even in his language, he went his own way.”
With no role models available to him (as far as we are aware), Cavafy very much forged his own path. Maybe, I thought, I would need to do the same? Although born in Egypt, one wonders whether his early to mid teen childhood upbringing in Liverpool, England, over a formative seven year period during his youth had anything to do with shaping his direct style. In Alexandria Still: Forster, Durrell, and Cavafy, (link to book preview, Princeton University Press, 1977) Jane Lagoudis Pinchin too, makes the point that:
‘Cavafy’s erotic poems are grittily realistic … lovers meet ‘On the Stair’ of wretched brothels, ‘At the Theatre,’ ‘At the Cafe Door,’ in front of ‘The Windows of the Tobacco Shop’… [They] work in dull offices, or for tailors, ironmongers, or small shopkeepers‘.
Though his work was unpublished throughout his lifetime (he died, aged seventy of cancer in 1933), due to the nature of much of his creative output, it became more widely established after the 1935 publication (in Egypt) of a collection simply entitled ‘Poems‘. (link to all the work in the book Poems, a marvelously readable selection). The writer, EM Forster knew him personally, writing a memoir of him, contained in his book Alexandria. In fact Forster, Arnold Toynbee and TS Eliot were among the earliest promoters of Cavafy in the English-speaking world, immediately before the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939.
Was Cavafy then perhaps the role model I had been hoping to find? Well, yes: perhaps.
The more I delved in my late teens, the more I realised there were in fact other contenders, closer to home, that might act as potential role models. Although they had less impact on me personally, equally and rather better documented in their lifetimes, many of their finest poems spawned by experiences during the Great War (including Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” and “Dulce et Decorum Est”) might not exist, were it not for the pivotal bond between three men, whom it is generally acknowledged, were the era’s finest (First) War poets: Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1987), Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) and Robert Graves (1895-1985). All three have been defined, in hindsight, as being either bisexual or homosexual men. It is more difficult in my opinion, to see however, again in hindsight, how these three- though clearly influential -might have become role models as they, all three in fact, were rather flawed at various times in their lives (this begs the good, indeed important question as to why we might not simply accept them as flawed role models of course, to which I will return later..) but, nevertheless.
Sassoon, the eldest of the three, came from an upper middle class background, his father a part of the wealthy Baghdadi Jewish merchant family, enlisted in the British Army in August 1914, Wilfred Owen, who was from a less affluent working class family, also enlisted in October 1915. The writer Laura Bateman has explored the meeting of Sassoon & Owen in an article entitled ‘Sassoon and Owen: A meeting that changed the course of literature’, indeed the meeting itself became a part of the basis of the tremendous trilogy of books by Pat Barker (The Regeneration Trilogy (link to an analysis of the trilogy Regenerational Haunting with previews) published between 1991-1994). It is hard not to be profoundly moved, when Barker introduces this meeting into the narrative, in chapter three.
During active service, both men endured traumatic experiences, but whilst Owen became neurasthenic (shell shocked), Sassoon became exceptionally disillusioned with the conduct of the war. He was in the same battalion as Robert Graves, the 3rd Royal Welsh Fusiliers and though eight years his senior, they shared digs together in Liverpool (again!) during January 1917, whilst awaiting further action in France. He was strongly influenced by Graves’ war poetry as well, already published as Over the Brazier and Fairies and Fusiliers (link to whole text, quite a risque, daring title for the time). In ‘Goodbye to All That’, Sassoon, in later correspondence, remarked upon the “heavy sexual elements” within it, an observation supported by the sentimental nature of much of the surviving correspondence between the two men, although Graves was to later assert that ‘he never loved Sassoon in the same fashion that Sassoon loved him’ (Graves). Barker in ‘Regeneration’ has Sassoon as very much accepting his sexuality in a way that Owen and Graves seemed to find more difficult (though for differing reasons). She has him talk to the therapist at Craiglochhart about it, though it is still ‘encoded’, to some extent, as such conversations would most likely have been then; she notes how Sassoon was influenced by letters and a meeting with Edward Carpenter and his book ‘The Intermediate Sex’ (link to book preview) though has the therapist suggest this is not necessarily a very helpful definition of sexuality.
We know from archive correspondence, that in his first letter to Carpenter (dated 27th July 1911), Sassoon writes about how his mind has been opened since reading Carpenter’s works and it has helped him realise his own (homo)sexuality. In fact he had read Carpenter’s 1908 book ‘The Intermediate Sex’ in 1910 and his letters to Carpenter call him both “the leader and the prophet”.
“What ideas I had about homosexuality were absolutely prejudicial and I was in such a groove that I couldn’t allow myself to be what I wished to be… the intense attraction I felt for my own sex was almost a subconscious thing and my antipathies for women a mystery to me..
Again, we have this notion that his sexuality was almost a ‘given’, something ‘innate’; feelings similar to those that Cavafy was exploring in his work around a decade or so earlier and indeed at that time also.
“I cannot say what it [The Intermediate Sex] has done for me. I am a different being and have a definite aim in life and something to lean on.”
He is clearly full of admiration for the Sheffield socialist and signs off his first letter to Carpenter with a motto: “Strength to perform and pride to suffer without sign.” Strong stuff. Sassoon came from a wealthy family but his eyes were opened by Carpenter’s socialist idealism, which he later put into practice, at least to some extent, in his own life.
Here we very clearly have Carpenter acting as a ‘role model’ for Sassoon as early as 1911. I find it now, immensely sad that this was not something I came across earlier in my life and almost shocking that Sassoon was able to write this at this time, whilst I would find nothing of this value sixty to seventy years later. Sassoon thus comes as close as anyone perhaps to the role model I never quite had.
Through Sassoon, Graves also became a friend of Wilfred Owen, they being very much closer in age. In 1960, he recollected that ‘he often used to send me poems from France, in late 1917, through until his death in 1918’. Though Graves was at least bisexual, in fact he called himself a “pseudo-homosexual, in his autobiography, the tendency having been inflicted on him by his public school education at Charterhouse, as for every one person born homosexual, he felt at last ten others became homosexual due to their public school upbringing. Today, it might be argued that in fact the experience just brought out the always latent potential homosexuality in nearly everyone, in such an environment. Equally, it usefully served to distance himself from such difficult subject matter in that period, as a married man.
He also developed a close bond with (the nine years older) George Mallory, the climber lost on Everest in June 1924, who became a role model or perhaps more accurately, a mentor to him. George Mallory, like Gerald Brenan was a fringe member of the Bloomsbury set, who also wrote a cache of quite flirtatious letters to Lynton Strachey, discussing the beauty of Rupert Brooks amongst others. We know from letters that Strachey was certainly very taken by Mallory’s dark, handsome good looks.
Graves soon married after the war, although his subsequent relationships with women were all generally rather fraught and complex; he went on to father eight children, becoming a hugely prolific writer, publishing his own autobiography ‘Goodbye to all that´in 1929, and also wrote the novel ‘I Claudius’ in 1934. His experiences in the war continued to exercise a powerful influence on him until his death in Majorca, like Gerald Brenan another hispanophile, in 1985. Reading his autobiography however, in my late teens, did not strongly predispose me to think of Graves as a role model though, as if anything it complicated my thoughts and feelings on the matter. Was I in fact also a ‘pseudo homosexual’ who would still grow out of these feelings?
For Sassoon, just a few months later in July 1917, his now infamous letter ‘Finished with War: A Soldier’s Declaration‘ was published in The Times, outlining his anger at the War Office for the “callous complacence” with which they treated the British soldiers. Worried that he would be court marshalled and dishonourably discharged for his views, Graves wrote to the Military Authorities and suggested that in fact Sassoon was suffering from neurasthenia; this rationale was accepted by the authorities and he was sent for treatment to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh, where Owen was also receiving treatment.
Bateman writes:
‘In Sassoon’s diaries, there is a wonderfully vivid description of Owen (who hero-worshipped Sassoon for the truthfulness of his work, and possibly also because there is no getting away from the fact that Sassoon was what we might now call quite a looker..) knocking timidly on the door of Sassoon’s room with a stack of Sassoon’s latest poetry collection, ‘The Old Huntsman‘, to be signed. Sassoon obliges, and what will prove a fateful friendship begins.
Owen was unpublished and unknown at this point; he (had) not written about the war, feeling it to be “too ugly” for the beauty of verse. His doctor, Arthur Brock, and Sassoon in particular encouraged him to try it as a form of therapy, and so the earliest drafts of some of Owen’s most acclaimed work- Dulce et Decorum est, Strange Meeting and his generally accepted masterpiece, Anthem for Doomed Youth– were born.
We know from archive correspondence, that in his first letter to Carpenter (dated 27th July 1911), Sassoon writes how his mind has been opened since reading Carpenter’s works and it has helped him realise his own (homo)sexuality. In fact he had read Carpenter’s 1908 book ‘The Intermediate Sex’ in 1910 and his letters to Carpenter call him both “the leader and the prophet”.
“What ideas I had about homosexuality were absolutely prejudicial and I was in such a groove that I couldn’t allow myself to be what I wished to be… the intense attraction I felt for my own sex was almost a subconscious thing and my antipathies for women a mystery to me..
Again, we have this notion that his sexuality was almost a ‘given’, something ‘innate’; feelings similar to those that Cavafy was exploring in his work around a decade or so earlier (and still indeed in that period also).
“I cannot say what it [The Intermediate Sex] has done for me. I am a different being and have a definite aim in life and something to lean on.”
He is clearly full of admiration for the Sheffield socialist and signs off his first letter to Carpenter with a motto: “Strength to perform and pride to suffer without sign.” Strong stuff. Sassoon came from a wealthy family but his eyes were opened by Carpenter’s socialist idealism, which he later put into practice, at least to some extent, in his own life.
Here we surely have Carpenter acting as a ‘role model’ for Sassoon as early as 1911. I find it now, immensely sad that this was not something I came across earlier in my life and almost shocking that Sassoon was able to write this at this time, whilst I would find nothing of this value as I tried, sixty to seventy years later. Sassoon thus comes as close as anyone to the role model I never quite had, at least in this experiential and experimental period in his life.
Owen was not so fortunate in life. At the very end of August 1918, Owen returned to the front line and was awarded a Military Cross for an offensive he led near the village of Joncourt. However, whilst crossing the Sambre-Oise canal, Owen was killed in action. This was on the 4th November 1918, exactly one week almost to the hour, before the signing of the Armistice which ended the war; he was also promoted to the rank of Lieutenant the day after his death. With great poignancy, his mother received the telegram informing her of his death on the Armistice Day itself, as the church bells in her home in Shrewsbury were ringing out in celebration. His work was mainly published post-humously and his reputation has grown from that.
I think, in hindsight, there was plenty to admire about the characters of all three men and particularly the way they were able to express their emotions through their literary work. I would have been happy to understand these experiences in this context, in a positive way, when I was growing up and I think it would have encouraged me to envisage the potential of at least trying different relationships to see what might have worked for me. As it was, I too was to experiment with expressing my emotions in this way, in my early twenties, finding it a useful creative outlet for putting intense feelings to bed, so as to speak, although I cannot claim any kind of great accomplishment in the quality of what I wrote. Nevertheless, I was to wonder, some decades later, at the very start of the nineties, what exactly led me to experiment with verse, as a way of releasing some of the emotions I was experiencing, in the late seventies and decide that it was certainly at least partly a result of having seen others creative writing and poetry, in this early period of my life.
Sassoon in particular, certainly had no qualms in his early life with experimentation. He won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the “Sherston Trilogy’‘ (on the Internet Archive, borrow the whole trilogy) and lived a full and active life, only dying in 1967. He also went on to have, what, on the surface, seems a rich and fulfilling emotional life, having consummated sexual relationships with a number of men, some famous (along with others) including Ivor Novello, the Welsh actor, (his real name being David Davies); Prince Philip of Hesse, a German aristocrat; Beverly Nichols, the English writer and he also had a long term affair with the Hon. Stephen Tennant, (1906-1987), the flamboyant English aristocrat and artist, who also wrote ‘Love in A Cold Climate’ (the inspiration for ‘Brideshead Revisited’).
Tennant, who was a ‘bright young thing’ whom later went about with the infamous (and vehemently homosexual) Noel Coward, amongst others, does at first glance seem a slightly odd choice for Sassoon.However, the connection, the fraternal bond, is there. His brother Lt. Edward Wyndham Tennant (known as Bim or Bimbo by friends and family) was also a war poet and was killed in the Somme aged 19, on the 22 September 1916. It seems likely that Sassoon recognised a kindred spirit in the family line and that both he and Tennant were already highly emotionally involved in what we would now call ‘the backstory’. Both Tennant’s and Sassoon’s personal diaries (only released since 2005) document their passion though quite clearly. Tennant describes in his, how ‘He (Sassoon):
‘..put his mouth over mine crushing it – some kisses seem to draw the very soul out of one’s body – his do mine. I feel all my heart swooning at the touch of his mouth – my soul dies a hundred million deaths when his face is on my face and neck.”
Yes, I think we´ve all been there. It may also be that Sassoon admired the courage in Tennant’s overt flamboyancy. The passionate, and at times fiery romance lasted for a full six years from 1926 to 1932. Of course The Times profusive obituary of him in September 1967, mentioned none of this. A year later, in 1933 Sassoon married, to a much younger wife, Hester Getty, (which of course was mentioned in his obituary) and they had a son, George, together, which he had always wanted. Another example of how difficult it was to untangle the reality in those days. Although I would like to think and say that things worked out well for him, the diaries and Egremont’s lengthy autobiography from 2005, show us that Sassoon was in the end still a somewhat tortured soul, never completely coming to terms with his sexuality. In fact he ended up hating Tennant, divorcing Hester in 1945 and converting to catholicism (as too for example, had ‘Bosie’ before him).
Regarding his intense relationship with Tennant, Philip Hoare, the writer, (who incidentally hung out with exactly the same group of friends as myself at school in Falmouth, back in the early seventies, already a rather fine aesthete. Hoare also edited a catalogue for the Pet Shop Boys in 1996. In researching this book, I noticed there was a remarkable similarity in looks between the young Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys and Stephen Tennant at a similar age. I cannot find anything which would suggest they are related! I did come to wonder whether Neil uses this fact in his song ‘Being Boring’ however, (.. ‘a cache of old photos from the twenties’..) of which more later) wrote an interesting book ‘Serious Pleasures‘ about Tennant in the early nineties. Dickon Edwards reviews the book rather well on Good Reads:
Stephen Tennant was just a flamboyant gay who didn’t really do anything,” says one of the many supporting players in Mr Hoare’s exhaustive doorstopper of a biography..
True, this is the life of a man who essentially is best known for being a striking-looking girlish boy at London parties in the 1920s (as one of the ‘Bright Young Things’), then spending the rest of his life loafing about in his mansion. He was born into wealth and could do whateverhe liked. There was no need to prove himself, no ambition, no drive. He did manage to have some modest success as a painter, but never really advanced past the status of cult figure, at best. There’s just something about Stephen. The ultimate lonely gay aristocrat, so free yet so trapped. This book redeems him, in a way, proving that just being a beautiful boy turned reclusive eccentric is an achievement of sorts’.
I think Dickon Edwards is being a little harsh here. Tennant did have notable success as a writer and artist in his lifetime, his wealth however allowed him the freedom to have a lot more leisure time than most of us ever have in our lives.
Returning to Sassoons life however, with regard to his homosexuality, although it had consistently featured as a major theme in his plans for a prose book in the early 1920s, it was eventually never discussed in either the ‘Sherston’ memoirs he wrote between 1928-36 or his later trilogy of autobiographies, penned between 1938-45, the latter written well after his period of homosexual relationships had finished. This rather tarnishes his status as a potential role model, especially in his later years, at least for me personally, as there is a feeling that he was not being true to himself in recounting this early period. True, this must be set against the likely restrictions set by the publishers of such material in this period and the effect that such revelations might have had on his status at the time in society, both personally and in respect of his literary reputation. You will have your own opinions as to whether such omissions in these works were acceptable.
And yet…and yet, a recently discovered unpublished late poem from 1964, three years before his death, shows us Sassoon talking to his ‘intellect and intuition’:
Capricious indecisive intellect,
Now that our busy work is left behind
Despite your claim to be the march of mind
Your rulings have not won my whole respect.
and ends:
Love is the law of life, and love we must
Our first and final purpose to pursue. This seems to tie up love: love for ones parents or keepers as we grow up and a divine love for God, as we near the end. And yet my sense is that it is also imbued with a secondary meaning, as if to say how he has (finally)realised on reflection how important it is to find love per se, how we must go forwards with our heart, our soul, rather than purely our intellect and explore ‘love’ where we find its form comes to rest in our lives. Was he perhaps trying to finally reconcile these two parts of his life, as he approached death?
Whilst discussing the notion of flawed stories, it is probably also worth pointing out that just because someone defined as ‘homosexual’ in this period does not, should not, make them immediate candidates for potential role models. Take for example the case of Henry ‘Chips’ Channon. whose diaries are in the process of being re-published as I write this, Simon Heffer having just edited the first tranche of, now, unexpurgated material, covering the period from 1918-1938. Although Channon (later Sir Henry Channon) who was the Tory MP for Southend West from 1935-50, was avowedly homosexual for most of his life, it turns out that he held some abysmal views on many subjects: he was racist, sexist, prejudiced, selfish and, if he wasn’t gay himself, would no doubt have been homophobic too. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) said of the early phase of Channon’s life in the 1920’s ‘adoring London society, privilege, rank, and wealth, he became an energetic, implacable, but endearing social climber’. After becoming married , into the wealthy Guinness family in 19 33, they divorced in 1936 and he begun a series of affairs with other men including, (like Sassoon) the actor and composer, Ivor Novello* and the playright Terence Rattigan. His diaries in fact are quite well written and incisive in their own way. However, Nancy Mitford, who had rather a way with words like Channon, said of the diaries:
‘You can’t think how vile & spiteful & silly it is. One always thought Chips was rather a dear, but he was black inside, how sinister‘!
He was initially an appeaser in the Second World War, being quite a fan of the Nazis (although this was not an unusual trait amongst many of British upper classes in the thirties). He met Goering and wrote that ‘his merry eyes twinkled’, was impressed by Joseph Goebbels and when attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics, wrote ‘how one felt one was in the presence of some semi divine creature’.. ‘secretly I am pro-german and prefer even the Nazis to the French’. Clearly as a homosexual man he was not the best role model material. It is important to see the whole picture in making an assessment, though this too has often been obscured for reasons other than the subjects sexuality.
Interestingly, Ivor Novello, could also have been a candidate as a role model; he had primarily one partner his whole life, the actor Robert ‘Bobbie’ Andrews but they had an open relationship in the latter part of it and until Novello died in 1951. His last success was the rather fitting musical ‘Gays the Word’ starring Cicily Courtneidge. A rather famous London based bookshop would go on to take the name in later years. In fact (though it shouldn’t be surprising) the more you look at source material, the more evidence of a thriving homosexual culture in the early part of the twentieth century you find now. It is perhaps more surprising that so much was covered up of this culture; that quite so much remained unknown to me, as I grew up, feeling both alone and confused.
