Charles Kains Jackson

Charles Kains Jackson born 1857* (d. 1933)

Charles Philip Castle Kains Jackson was an English poet closely associated with the Uranian school.

Beginning in 1888, in addition to a career as a lawyer, he served as editor for the periodical the Artist and Journal of Home Culture, which became something of an official periodical for the movement. In it, he praised such artists as Henry Scott Tuke (to whom he dedicated a sonnet) and Henry Oliver Walker. He also befriended such similar-minded contemporaries as Frederick William Rolfe, Lord Alfred Douglas and John Addington Symonds.

The homosexual and pederastic aspects of the Artist declined after the replacement of Kains Jackson as an editor in 1894. The final issue edited by Kains Jackson included his essay, 'The New Chivalry', an argument for the moral and societal benefits of pederasty and erotic male friendship on the grounds of both Platonism and Social Darwinism. According to Kains Jackson, the New Chivalry would promote 'the youthful masculine ideal' over the Old Chivalry's emphasis on the feminine. Jackson's volumes of poetry include Finibus Cantat Amor (1922) and Lysis (1924).

Kains Jackson was a member of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for homosexuals founded in 1897 by George Ives, which was named after the location of the battle where the Sacred Band of Thebes was finally annihilated in 338 BC. Other members included Samuel Ellworth Cottam, Montague Summers, and John Gambril Nicholson.

*actual birthday unknown

Henry Scott Tuke

Henry Scott Tuke born 12 June 1858 (d. 1929)

In the late 1880s, British artist Henry Scott Tuke became part of a circle of poets and writers who wrote about and discussed the beauty of male youth. Tuke's paintings typically celebrate male beauty, as well as the artist's lifelong love of the sea, swimming, and sailing.

After studying art at the Slade school of Art and in Paris [where he met American painter John Singer Sargent], Tuke met Oscar Wilde in the 1880s and developed connections with the Uranian poets and writers who celebrated the adolescent male.

He wrote a sonnet to youth that was published anonymously in the journal The Artist and also contributed an essay to The Studio, another journal that published Uranian verse and essays.

After returning from Paris moved to Newlyn in Cornwall and eventually Tuke settled in near Falmouth Bay in 1885. He converted his boat into a floating studio and living quarters where he could pose his models and entertain his friends in private. Although he was also an accomplished portraitist with a separate London career - he painted a well-known portrait of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) - most of his works depict young men who swim, dive, and lounge on a boat or on the beach.

Tuke's paintings of nude youths illustrate sensual, rather than sexual, feelings. They are not explicit either in the relationships they describe or in the details of the body.

In his day, he was a successful portrait artist but the subject matter of his other work limited his appeal to 'specialist' collectors, although girl-paintings were in the popular mainstream. Today, he would probably be considered 'suspect', but his beautiful work actually speaks more of beauty, innocence and freshness both of subject and in technique.

Tuke did well enough from his painting to be able to travel abroad, painting in France, Italy and the West Indies. In 1900 a banquet was held in his honour at the Royal Cornwall Polytechnic Society. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in 1914.

He died after a long illness in 1929, in Falmouth. After his death Tuke's reputation faded, and he was largely forgotten until the 1970s, when he was rediscovered by a new generation of openly gay artists and art collectors. He has since become something of a cult figure in gay cultural circles, with lavish editions of his paintings published and his works fetching high prices at auctions.

Edward Perry Warren

Edward Perry Warren born 8 June 1860 (d. 1928)

Edward Perry Warren, known as Ned Warren, was an American art collector, and a writer of works proposing an idealised view of homosexual relationships.

He was one of six children of a wealthy family of Boston, Massachusetts. He was educated at Harvard and later at New College, Oxford where he met John Marshall, with whom he formed a close and long-lasting relationship. The two set up house together at Lewes House, a large residence in Lewes, East Sussex where they became the centre of a circle of like-minded people interested in art and antiquities who ate together in a dining room overlooked by Lucas Cranach's Adam and Eve (now in the Courtauld Institute of Art).

He spent much time on the Continent of Europe, collecting art works many of which he sold to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. His published works include A Defence of Uranian Love, which proposes a type of same-sex relationship similar to that prevalent in Classical Greece, in which an older man would act as guide as well as lover to younger men.

He is perhaps best known today as the purchaser of the Roman silver drinking vessel known as the Warren Cup, which he did not attempt to sell during his lifetime, because of its explicit depiction of homoerotic scenes. It is now in the British Museum. He also commissioned a version of The Kiss from Auguste Rodin which he offered to the local council in Lewes as a gift — it was rejected as "too big and too nude", but is now in the Tate Gallery.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde born 16 October 1854 (d. 1900)

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish playwright, novelist, poet, short story writer and Freemason. Known for his barbed and clever wit, he was one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London, and one of the greatest celebrities of his day. As the result of a famous trial, he suffered a dramatic downfall and was imprisoned after being convicted of 'gross indecency' for homosexual acts.

Though Wilde's sexual orientation has variously been considered bisexual, homosexual, and pederastic, Wilde himself felt he belonged to a culture of male love inspired by the Greek pederastic tradition. His most significant sexual relationships appear to have been (in chronological order) with (perhaps) Frank Miles, Constance Lloyd (Wilde's wife), Robert Baldwin Ross, and Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde also had numerous sexual encounters with working-class male youths, who were often rent boys.

Biographers generally believe Wilde was introduced to homosexuality in 1885 (the year after his wedding) by the 17-year-old Robert Baldwin Ross. Neil McKenna's biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (2003) theorises that Wilde was aware of his homosexuality much earlier, from the moment of his first kiss with another boy at the age of 16. According to McKenna, after arriving at Oxford in 1874, Wilde tentatively explored his sexuality, discovering that he could feel passionate romantic love for 'fair, slim' choirboys, but was more sexually drawn towards swarthy young rough trade.

By the late 1870s, Wilde was already preoccupied with the philosophy of same-sex love, and had befriended a group of Uranian poets and homosexual law reformers. Wilde also met Walt Whitman in America in 1881, writing to a friend that there was 'no doubt' about the great American poet's sexual orientation — 'I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips,' he boasted. He even lived with the society painter Frank Miles, who was a few years his senior and may have been his lover. However, writes McKenna, he was unhappy with the direction of his sexual and romantic desires, and, hoping that marriage would cure him, he married Constance Lloyd in 1884.

After meeting and falling in love with Lord Alfred Douglas, 'Bosie', in 1891, Wilde and his lover embraced an hedonistic life style, and for a few years they lived together more or less openly in a number of locations. Wilde and some within his upper-class social group also began to speak about homosexual law reform, and their commitment to 'The Cause' was formalised by the founding of a highly secretive organisation called the Order of Chaeronea, of which Wilde was a member.

Bosie's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, became increasingly enraged at his son's involvement with Wilde. He confronted the two publicly several times, and each time Wilde was able to mollify the Marquess. Eventually, the Marquess planned to interrupt the opening night of The Importance of Being Earnest with an insulting delivery of vegetables, but somebody tipped Wilde off and he was barred from entering the theatre.

On February 18, 1895, the Marquess left a calling card at one of Wilde's clubs, the Albemarle. On the back of the card he wrote 'For Oscar Wilde posing as a Somdomite' (a misspelling of 'Sodomite').

Although Wilde's friends advised him to ignore the insult, Lord Alfred later admitted that he egged Wilde on to charge Queensberry with criminal libel. Queensberry was arrested, and in April 1895, the Crown took over the prosecution of the libel case against him. The trial lasted three days. The prosecuting counsel, Edward Clarke, was unaware that Wilde had had liaisons and romantic relationships with other males. Clarke asked Wilde directly whether there was any substance to Queensberry's accusations and Wilde denied that there was. Edward Carson, the barrister who defended Queensberry, hired investigators who were able to locate a number of youths with whom Wilde had been involved, either socially or sexually, such as the 16-year-old Walter Grainger and other newsboys and valets. Most damaging of all, among them were a number of young men who had earned money through prostitution, including one of the main witnesses, Charles Parker.

Wilde put on a tremendous display of drama in the first day of the trial, parrying Carson's cross-examination on the morals of his published works with witticisms and sarcasm, often breaking the courtroom up with laughter. However, on the second day, Carson's cross-examination was much more damaging: Wilde later admitted to perjuring himself with some of his answers. On the third day, Clarke recommended that Wilde withdraw the prosecution, and the case was dismissed. The authorities were unwilling to let matters rest.

Based on the evidence acquired by Queensberry and Carson, Wilde was arrested on April 6, 1895, at the Cadogan Hotel, London, and charged with 'committing acts of gross indecency with other male persons' under Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Despite pleas by friends to flee the country, Wilde chose to stay and martyr himself for his cause.

Two trials followed. The first trial ended with the jury unable to reach a verdict. The next, and last, trial was presided over by Chief Justice Sir Alfred Wills. On May 25, 1895 Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years' hard labour. He was imprisoned first in Pentonville and then in Wandsworth prison in London, and finally transferred in November to Reading Prison.

Prison was harsh on Wilde's health and after he was released on May 19, 1897 he spent his last three years penniless, in self-imposed exile from society and artistic circles. After his release, he wrote the famous poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Wilde spent his last days in the Hôtel d'Alsace, now known as L'Hôtel, in Paris.

Oscar Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on November 30, 1900.

Wilde is an iconic figure in modern popular culture, both as a wit and as an archetype of gay identity. His trial, imprisonment and death have made him a gay martyr and come to symbolise the inhumane attitudes and treatment with which society has confronted gay people - although it could be argued that his foolish decision to sue the Marquess of Queensberry and his own resulting trial drove an entire generation of increasingly confident homosexual men underground and set the course of gay liberation back by untold decades - but that we shall never know.

Charles Edward Sayle

Charles Edward Sayle born 6 December 1864 (d. 1924)

Charles Edward Sayle was an English Uranian poet and a Cambridge librarian.

He was born the son of Robert and Priscilla Caroline Sayle. In 1889 he went to Cambridge as assistant librarian at St John's College and in 1893 moved to the University Library, where he remained for the rest of his life.

His works include Bertha: a Story of Love (1885), Wicliff: An Historical Drama (1887), Erotidia (1889), Musa Consolatrix (1893), Private Music (1911) and Cambridge Fragments (1913). He also edited an anthology of verse, In Praise of Music (1897).

At one time, his house in Cambridge was a meeting place for a circle of handsome and usually homosexual young men of a literary bent, such as A T (Theo) Bartholomew, who was also a Cambridge librarian, Rupert Brooke, and Geoffrey Keynes, younger brother of John Maynard Keynes.

Sayle died at the age of 59.

Edmund John

Edmund John born 27 November 1883 (d. 1917)

Edmund John was a British poet of the Uranian school whose verses were modelled on the Symbolist poetry of Swinburne and other earlier poets. Much of his work was condemned by critics for being overly decadent and unfashionable.

He fought in the First World War, but was invalided out in 1916. He died at Taormina, in Sicily, a year later.

Lord Alfred Douglas

Lord Alfred Douglas born 22 October 1870 (d. 1945)

Lord Alfred Bruce Douglas was a poet, a translator and a prose writer, best known as the intimate friend and lover of the writer Oscar Wilde. Much of his early poetry was Uranian in theme, though he tended, later in life, to distance himself from both Wilde's influence and his own role as a Uranian poet.

Douglas, universally known as Bosie, was the third son of John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry. His oldest brother, Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig, was also reported to have been homosexual

After a boyhood during which his parents separated, Douglas went up from Winchester to Magdalen College, Oxford, in 1889. He met Oscar Wilde through a mutual friend, critic Lionel Johnson, in early summer, 1891, and they became lovers the following spring. Douglas' beauty was 'like a narcissus - white and gold', as Wilde told Robert Ross.

Most of Douglas' homoerotic poetry was written between 1893 and 1896 and appeared in undergraduate literary journals such as The Spirit Lamp, which he edited, and The Chameleon, or in small-circulation magazines like The Artist. Poems like 'Hymn to Physical Beauty' (with a nod to Shelley), the sonnet 'In an Aegean Port', and most famously 'Two Loves', one of whom concludes the poem by sighing 'I am the Love that dare not speak its name' are typical in their wistful tone.

Some of these poems appeared in a French edition of Douglas' verse in 1896, but most were not republished until the Sonnets and Lyrics of 1935, and then, at least in the sonnet mentioned, with the homosexual content revised out.

In 1895, Douglas' father accused Oscar Wilde of 'posing as a sodomite', whereupon Wilde (at Bosie's urging) sued him for libel. At the trial, Queensberry was found not guilty and a warrant was promptly issued for Wilde's arrest. His first trial resulted in a hung jury, but at the second Wilde was found guilty and sentenced to two years' hard labour.

Although Douglas and Wilde remained close until the latter's death in 1900, the scandal generated a sheaf of spiteful documents. In prison, Wilde wrote a long and bitter epistle later titled De Profundis, accusing Douglas of betraying their friendship. When the full text of De Profundis was made public in 1913, Douglas responded with Oscar Wilde and Myself, repudiating Wilde and his works.

Soon after Wilde's death, Douglas renounced his homosexuality; he married Olive Custance in 1902, and they had a son, Raymond. Douglas converted to Roman Catholicism in 1911, and he and his wife separated two years later. By his own account, Douglas remained celibate thereafter.

From 1907 to 1910, Douglas edited the journal The Academy, assisted by the 'obnoxious' T W H Crosland, who in fact, ghost-wrote most of Oscar Wilde and Myself. Douglas revived The Academy in 1920 and 1921 as Plain English, and the journal had a mild commercial success. Editorially, however, it was non-literary and virulently anti-Semitic, simply a forum for Douglas' considerable collection of bigotries.

Douglas' intemperate expression of his views led to his arrest and conviction for writing and publishing a pamphlet libelling Winston Churchill. He spent six months in Wormwood Scrubs prison. There he turned again to poetry, but his prison writing, a sonnet sequence, was called In Excelsis.

Douglas spent the remaining twenty-one years of his life quietly, living in Hove or Brighton on allowances provided by his mother and wife. He produced his Autobiography during this time, several versions of his collected poems, occasional verse, and in 1940, his most judicious account of his life's central experience, Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up.

He died on March 20, 1945, following a heart attack.

John Gambril Nicholson

John Gambril Nicholson born 6 October 1866 (d. 1931)

John Gambril Francis Nicholson was an English school teacher and Uranian poet. He was also an amateur photographer. He was the quintessential Uranian, forming the centre of that semi-underground world, and frequently writing introductions for and receiving dedications from his peers.

He had a love relationship with the teenage William Alexander (Alec) Melling, who was the dedicatee of Nicholson's collection of Uranian poems, A Chaplet of Southernwood (1896). The title of his collection A Garland of Ladslove (1911) speaks for itself. His first collection Love in Earnest: Sonnets, Ballads, and Lyrics (1892) inspired the title of Timothy d'Arch Smith's definitive study, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English 'Uranian' Poets from 1889 to 1930 (1970).

Nicholson was a member of the Order of Chaeronea, a secret society for homosexuals founded in 1897 by George Ives, which was named after the location of the battle where the Sacred Band of Thebes was finally annihilated in 338 BC.

Other members included Charles Kains Jackson, Samuel Ellworth Cottam and Montague Summers.