gay history
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Nice sandals!
I never knew Edward Carpenter lived in Guildford just above the station…but here he is in his writing ‘hut’ in the 1920s.
You’d not know that now, and with Guildford not even having a gay bar nowadays his history is pretty much hidden. He died there in 1929.
And sweetly and amazingly not only is his lover George Merill buried with him, the gravestone mentions their 40 years together, how radical is that for 1929?!?
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ca. 1855, [Portrait of Daniel Gilbert and Betson Gordon]
via the Daniel Weber Collection at George Eastman House on Flickr
Victorians had bromance so hard to ascribe a gay context, but this is pretty queer 🙂
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Ol’ Oscar. Did you know he was rumoured to have nothing but a beautiful blue chinese vases with lillies in them in his rooms at Oxford – I think certainly he decorated his room with those, but that rumour made me think of a bare room with nothing but a single vase, Dorian Gray style…where all one needed was art.
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What widens within you Walt Whitman?
I suppose no-one remembers My Robot Friend anymore? I feel old. Not as old as ol’ Walt, but getting there.
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Another picture of Edward Carpenter, probably at his cottage near Sheffield. Dig the sandals! Apparenly he was a big fan of the Rational Dress movement. He also happened to be an early gay activist and socialist practising free love and pacifism and vegetarianism in the late Victorian era and writing and publishing books – before and after Oscar Wilde, although the difference here is he preferred working class blokes, the issue with Oscar was he preferred his peers which caused scandal.
Anyway, Edward was a brave man.
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Sweet picture of Edward Carpenter and George Merrill.