Here's piece of history for readers who like the 'degrees of Kevin Bacon' type diversions.
Edward Carpenter (1844 - 1929), the celebrated visionary reformer, socialist, poet, and what we would now call gay rights activist, lived for most of his life in my home city in the North of England. (Wikipedia has it that he lived in a 'gay community' here, which would be spendid, but it's not true. His remote cottage is pictured above.) There are council buildings bearing his name, and a statue in one of our parks. While his pose on the plinth may not exactly resemble a teapot, it seems camper the more you look at it.
During the brief period three decades ago when the red flag fluttered over our Town Hall, a revival of interest in Carpenter was encouraged by the city council, which celebrated his contributions to socialism, trades unionism, and the emancipation women, while neglecting his pioneering and immensely brave gay rights activism. I doubt that many in people this city familiar with Carpenter would be aware that he was a shirt-lifter.
He lived as an openly gay man at a time when to do so could bring upon you the fate of Wilde or Parnell. Carpenter got away with it because of his innate discretion, his personal magnetism, and the great respect he commanded among educated workers, and progressive circles in Victorian and Edwardian England and abroad. He was very well connected, much admired, and something of a guru.
In the 1890s he published, at his own expense, a widely circulated pamphlet on homosexuality, Homogenic Love. A quote from it gives a flavour of Carpenter,
I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.
When the sage was in his eighties, he was paid homage in my home town by a wealthy young American admirer, Chester Alan Arthur III, who was at the time collecting material for a work on homosexuality among the Fenian Brotherhood. Carpenter was of course a massive fan of Walt Whitman, as was his visitor. Carpenter had visited Whitman in 1877, and he mentioned to Chester Alan Arthur III that while there he had enjoyed some sack action with the great American poet and visionary. The octagenerian Carpenter then gave the much impressed Chester Alan Arthur III the best blowjob of his life, which he recalled forty years later to the poet Allen Ginsburg.
At last his hand was moving between my legs and his tongue was in my belly-button. And then when he was tickling my fundament just behind the balls and I could not hold it any longer, his mouth closed just over the head of my penis and I could feel my young vitality flowing into his old age.
Now the links emerge. Chester Alan Arthur III in later life became the sometime lover and sugar daddy of Neal Cassady, model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, seminal novel of the Beat Generation. So there's only two degrees of separation between Carpenter and the Beats.
There's more. Neal Cassady was also the driver of the Merry Pranksters schoolbus, (destination: 'Furthur'), which toured the US in the 60s distrubuting free LSD, and inciting what came to be called 'happenings'. A little history would be interesting here.
By the end of the 1960s the ranks of LSD enthusiasts had become divided into two camps. Both shared the notion that LSD might change the world for the better, but they were divided about how to do it. The positions could be identified with the names of Timothy Leary and Ken Keysey. Broadly speaking, the Leary strategy was to proceed by turing on and creating an enlightened elite of the best and brightest, whose influence would permeate society. Keysey and the Merry Pranksters wanted to give acid to an many people as possible, and see what happened.
On this side of the Atlantic at least the divisions were clearly discernable, Leary followers were Hippies, while the Keysey tribe called themselves Freaks. Freaks took The Fugs version of Leary's 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out' seriously, were full-time unemployed drug fiends, lived in chaotic affinity groups, and favoured the overthrow and non-replacement of the State. Hippies were much more media friendly.
I was an early admirer of Keysey and the Merry Pranksters, and soon took up freakery. There was an abrupt change of syle, I cut my hair short, abandoning bright flowing finery, bangles beads and bells, in favour of a look that suggested I might be on my way to work - both as a cunning camoflage and to distance myself from hippies. Because my local circle of freaks included people who had blown their crusts long before taking LSD, or were just plain weird, the ranks were predominantly working class. Some even managed a few days tripping in the steelworks, or down the pit.
The purpose of this digression is to show the global threads running through this city that link Carpenter, Walt Whitman, Kerouac, Cassady, the Merry Pranksters, and a small but significant working class heresy that flourished here some forty years ago. A chain over a century long. Edward Carpenter was the best known and most popular hippie of his time.
I've taken much from Colm Tóibín's excellent review of Sheia Rowbotham's 2006 biography of Carpenter in the London Review of Books. Read it HERE.
See also The Edward Carpenter Archive HERE.
Edward Carpenter (1844 - 1929), the celebrated visionary reformer, socialist, poet, and what we would now call gay rights activist, lived for most of his life in my home city in the North of England. (Wikipedia has it that he lived in a 'gay community' here, which would be spendid, but it's not true. His remote cottage is pictured above.) There are council buildings bearing his name, and a statue in one of our parks. While his pose on the plinth may not exactly resemble a teapot, it seems camper the more you look at it.
During the brief period three decades ago when the red flag fluttered over our Town Hall, a revival of interest in Carpenter was encouraged by the city council, which celebrated his contributions to socialism, trades unionism, and the emancipation women, while neglecting his pioneering and immensely brave gay rights activism. I doubt that many in people this city familiar with Carpenter would be aware that he was a shirt-lifter.
He lived as an openly gay man at a time when to do so could bring upon you the fate of Wilde or Parnell. Carpenter got away with it because of his innate discretion, his personal magnetism, and the great respect he commanded among educated workers, and progressive circles in Victorian and Edwardian England and abroad. He was very well connected, much admired, and something of a guru.
In the 1890s he published, at his own expense, a widely circulated pamphlet on homosexuality, Homogenic Love. A quote from it gives a flavour of Carpenter,
I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.
When the sage was in his eighties, he was paid homage in my home town by a wealthy young American admirer, Chester Alan Arthur III, who was at the time collecting material for a work on homosexuality among the Fenian Brotherhood. Carpenter was of course a massive fan of Walt Whitman, as was his visitor. Carpenter had visited Whitman in 1877, and he mentioned to Chester Alan Arthur III that while there he had enjoyed some sack action with the great American poet and visionary. The octagenerian Carpenter then gave the much impressed Chester Alan Arthur III the best blowjob of his life, which he recalled forty years later to the poet Allen Ginsburg.
At last his hand was moving between my legs and his tongue was in my belly-button. And then when he was tickling my fundament just behind the balls and I could not hold it any longer, his mouth closed just over the head of my penis and I could feel my young vitality flowing into his old age.
Now the links emerge. Chester Alan Arthur III in later life became the sometime lover and sugar daddy of Neal Cassady, model for Dean Moriarty in Kerouac's On the Road, seminal novel of the Beat Generation. So there's only two degrees of separation between Carpenter and the Beats.
There's more. Neal Cassady was also the driver of the Merry Pranksters schoolbus, (destination: 'Furthur'), which toured the US in the 60s distrubuting free LSD, and inciting what came to be called 'happenings'. A little history would be interesting here.
By the end of the 1960s the ranks of LSD enthusiasts had become divided into two camps. Both shared the notion that LSD might change the world for the better, but they were divided about how to do it. The positions could be identified with the names of Timothy Leary and Ken Keysey. Broadly speaking, the Leary strategy was to proceed by turing on and creating an enlightened elite of the best and brightest, whose influence would permeate society. Keysey and the Merry Pranksters wanted to give acid to an many people as possible, and see what happened.
On this side of the Atlantic at least the divisions were clearly discernable, Leary followers were Hippies, while the Keysey tribe called themselves Freaks. Freaks took The Fugs version of Leary's 'Turn on, Tune in, Drop out' seriously, were full-time unemployed drug fiends, lived in chaotic affinity groups, and favoured the overthrow and non-replacement of the State. Hippies were much more media friendly.
I was an early admirer of Keysey and the Merry Pranksters, and soon took up freakery. There was an abrupt change of syle, I cut my hair short, abandoning bright flowing finery, bangles beads and bells, in favour of a look that suggested I might be on my way to work - both as a cunning camoflage and to distance myself from hippies. Because my local circle of freaks included people who had blown their crusts long before taking LSD, or were just plain weird, the ranks were predominantly working class. Some even managed a few days tripping in the steelworks, or down the pit.
The purpose of this digression is to show the global threads running through this city that link Carpenter, Walt Whitman, Kerouac, Cassady, the Merry Pranksters, and a small but significant working class heresy that flourished here some forty years ago. A chain over a century long. Edward Carpenter was the best known and most popular hippie of his time.
I've taken much from Colm Tóibín's excellent review of Sheia Rowbotham's 2006 biography of Carpenter in the London Review of Books. Read it HERE.
See also The Edward Carpenter Archive HERE.
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