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Biography: Edward
Carpenter (1844-1929)
| In
1895, the same year that Oscar Wilde was sent to prison
for gross indecency, English socialist Edward Carpenter
privately circulated his first book about
homosexuality. Homogenic Love and its Place in a
Free Society defended love between men as inborn and,
therefore, natural just as Karl Ulrichs' pamphlets had
thirty years before. Carpenter believed that Urnings are
members of a third sex, and that their position as
intermediates between male and female gives them unique
and valuable talents.
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Edward
Carpenter at 43
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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.
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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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George Merrill
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After many years
as Carpenter's partner, George Merrill died in 1928.
Friends believed that Carpenter never recovered from the
loss; he died within a year. At
the time of his death, Carpenter was largely forgotten,
but his books were stocked in many libraries'
"restricted to adults" sections and proved
inspirational to homophiles
like Harry Hay in the 1950s.
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Photo Credits: The photos
of Carpenter and Merrill are adapted from originals in Magnus Hirschfeld's
1930 Geschlechtskunde auf Grunddreissingjährur Forschung und Erfahrung
bearbeit. Stuttgart: Julius Püttman. Courtesy of
Archiv und Bibliothek des Schwulen Museums, Berlin.
© 1999
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved
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