Ioläus

An Anthology of Friendship

THE degree to which Friendship, in the early history of the world, has been recognized as an institution, and the dignity ascribed to it, are things hardly realized to-day. Yet a very slight examination of the subject shows the important part it has played. In making the following collection I have been much struck by the remarkable manner in which the customs of various races and times illustrate each other, and the way in which they point to a solid and enduring body of human sentiment on the subject.

In Bed

 

 

Edward felt the callused fingers and thought

only of freedom: the gross lot of humanity

 

compacted tightly in the flesh of this one man,

metaphor of life, liberty, throwing aside the

 

bedclothes to reveal the rising cock.  This is no

mystery; this is one touch understood in the

 

damp of another, calling the water of life to

bless this, and every, profane union.  Under-

 

neath, the grit of the sheets irritates sensitive

skin, and Edward mistakes the itching for a-

 

nother clue.  He peruses the sheets like a lesson

in politics, pointing out the stalwart wisdom con-

 

tained in the vegetable slowness of our bodies inter

twining: here  we are prone to see the struggle, sur-

 

vival and animal defeat that we mistake for life.  But

Edward is not convinced.   Opening the book of his

 

heart, he speaks out of  wishes shed like flakes of skin

as we move together: What propels us through the

 

weariness of flesh if not this eternal scratching,

the surface of something we know but dare

 

not dream of knowing? What lurks under the

skin to feel the call of existence in new and

 

strange fashion?  This morning to enter through

the feet of the one that I pass upon and know

 

as the skin carries the blood through

surrounding bodies, to know that this is some

 

one, that this is someone else, that this is momen-

tum in breathing, to be sucked in and feel the call,

 

the pressure on the self: sound, flesh, and the thin

membrane of vibrating mind.  I do not need to see

 

anything else.  I know what democracy is. 

 

Gay History entry about Edward Carpenter

Long before he wrote about homosexuals, Carpenter had been a leader in the Utopian Socialist movement in England and had published many books and pamphlets that opposed the rigid English class system.  Carpenter was born into a well to do family, and he enjoyed a Cambridge education, but he eschewed the trappings of wealth because he believed that the first step toward Utopia, or the "New Life," was the elimination of the class hierarchy.  He craved a life of farming and communal sharing, free from what he called the "smoke nuisance" (pollution) of industrial England.  Carpenter's socialist ideology led him to operate Millthorpe, his farm in the countryside, as a commune where workers had authority and class distinctions were ignored. 
 
Soon after publishing Homogenic Love, Carpenter fell in love with George Merrill, a sometime barkeep and servant.  Merrill moved in with Carpenter, and the two became devoted companions.  Carpenter continued to write prolifically on socialist and homosexual subjects, and even though little of his work was truly original, personal warmth and utopian idealism suffused his prose and won him a loyal audience.  Books like The Intermediate Sex (1908) and Intermediate Types Among Primitive Folk (1914) are remarkably courageous for their time because they defend eroticism between men, and even more so because they make no secret of their author's own proclivities.

 

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