sex between men-a crime, and was used to prosecute Oscar Wilde. The Labouchere amendment of 1885 made “gross indecency”-a.k.a. In the post-Edwardian period, “there could be greater accommodation of same-sex desires and same-sex acts in working class communities,” says Professor Justin Bengry, a cultural historian of queer sexuality in England. Over time, British customs would obscure and eventually replace the thousand years of Middle Eastern history celebrating (some kinds) of sex between men, another example of “modernity” being born in this period.īut while El-Adl’s desires might have seemed strange to Forster, they would have been fairly recognizable to another group: working class Brits. Soon after he and Forster met, el-Adl married a woman (for whom he had romantic feelings), but it didn’t curtail his relationship with Forster.įorster was keen to get al-Adl to understand sexuality, and sexual orientation, in the same way that he did: An unconscious extension of the broader colonial project of reshaping the world in the image of (aristocratic) England. He was worried about being caught, but didn’t have the kind of existential, what-does-this-mean-about-my-identity crisis that we in the West associate with same-sex behavior. But whereas Scudder and Barrow seemed to think of themselves as gay, el-Adl experienced his desire for men differently. Like Alec Scudder and Thomas Barrow, el-Adl was young and working class. When Forster himself did, finally, embark upon a sexual relationship, it was with an Egyptian man named Mohammed el-Adl. But for working class men like Thomas Barrow, same-sex desire didn’t necessarily preclude having an otherwise “normal” existence, often including relationships with women. In the post-Edwardian period, upper class men were more likely to already understand the world in terms of heterosexuals and homosexuals, with a bright and absolute line dividing the two. In particular, literary research can substitute the experiences of the upper class for those of all people.
“It’s much easier just to look at some medical texts and maybe some literary ones, rather than do the difficult task of working out what people really thought,” said Professor Alison Oram, who led the initiative Pride of Place: England’s LGBTQ Heritage, which documented queer historical spaces for the British government. Yet the book is often used as period research. “He imagined these things well before he experienced them,” agreed Moffatt, Forster’s biographer. But when Forster wrote Maurice, he’d never had a relationship with another man, and he wouldn’t until midway through World War I, when he was 38 years old. On the surface, this feels like incontrovertible proof of Downton’s historical accuracy. Like Thomas Barrow, Alec Scudder seems preternaturally gay, fully aware of his sexual desires, that they are exclusively for men, and that they mark him, irrevocably, as a different sort of person. The affair between Scudder and Hall races forward, moving quickly through break-up and blackmail before delivering the happy ending that was Forster’s raison d’etre for writing the book in the first place.
After an abortive and agonizing affair with a fellow student from his own upper-class milieu, Hall meets Alec Scudder on a visit to his ex’s estate. It follows its titular protagonist, Maurice Hall-“a mediocre member of a mediocre school”-as he discovers his desires for other men. Maurice, his most autobiographical book, was written in 1914. Forster, born on New Year’s Day, 1879, documented the emergence of modern England through the foibles and failures of those that lived (like Forster himself) on the outskirts of the upper-class. The most obvious point of reference for Barrow’s character can be found in E.
A rejection of the past was so fundamental to this period that we still refer to the artistic flourishing of this moment as “Modernism,” despite it now being 100 years ago. World War I was still “the war to end all wars,” the Roaring Twenties were ratcheting up to the Great Depression, and the last vestiges of Victorianism were being thrown out the Overton window.
The post-Edwardian moment- Downton Abbey opens in 1912, with news of the sinking of the Titanic the movie takes the story all the way up to 1927-was an era of tremendous upheaval in Western culture. It’s an exciting tale set in an exciting period. In the film, audiences will see Barrow in the context of a wider gay world for the first time: visiting a secret gay bar, dodging police harassment, and possibly even finding love. “I think what we've done with Thomas in the story is tried to reflect how scary it was,” says Alastair Bruce, who worked as the historical advisor to the show, and is reprising that role with the new Downton movie, in theaters September 20.