Uranian Children’s Literature and the Early Gay Movement in England

Uranian Children’s Literature and the Early Gay Movement in England: The Romance of Youth considers how writers associated with the Uranian poets, Order of Chaeronea, and British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology (BSSSP)—among the earliest efforts to organize on behalf of same-sex love in England beginning in the mid-1890s—used boys’ fiction to imagine a world in which same-sex romantic bonds could be possible. Some of the central figures in the early gay movement in England wrote for children or influenced others who did, and these juvenile writings both contributed to a larger discourse of homosexual emancipation and addressed the interests of Uranian youth. Uranian writers and members of the Order of Chaeronea and BSSSP recognized how the conditions of modern life posed distinct challenges to shaping the character of boys, and they used children’s literature and the rhetoric of chivalry to propose solutions to the boy problem and promote their vision of a homosexual future. This volume provides the first book-length account of the role of children’s literature in the early gay movement in England, including works by E.E. Bradford, George Cecil Ives, J.M. Barrie, Laurence Housman, Kenneth Ingram, and Beverley Nichols.