John Addington Symonds and the Problems of Ethical Homosexuality

Abstract Victorian Britain had a distinctive problem with male effeminacy that extended beyond gender nonconformity to encompass a history of highlighting the corrupting influence of the “effeminatus.” Projected forward, this figure would haunt Britain as it faced global competition and the loss of empire. Fears of effeminacy also conditioned the response to sexology by the English homophile advocate John Addington Symonds, who is the focus of this chapter. His posthumously published memoir charts a sexual history running parallel with the Weibling (feminine-identified) identity that Ulrichs claimed for himself but the need to renounce effeminacy led Symonds to an identification that was most problematic in sexology: that of the “Mittel Urning” who both desired masculine men and identified himself as such. Formed by Victorian Oxford, Symonds was drawn to alternative visions of male homosexuality that were rooted in the Greek pederastic tradition and Walt Whitman’s poetics. Having exchanged a gender-based model for others based first in age and then in class difference, however, he found a problem remaining that was subtended by his own social privilege: in each model, the ideal partner was figured through a defining difference from Symonds himself, which inevitably rendered each relationship unequal. According to the logic of the Criminal Law Amendment Act and the conviction of Oscar Wilde in 1895, both age- and class-based models were open to accusations of callous manipulation and victimization that made Symonds’ claim to a Whitmanite belief in “democratic” relations ring hollow.