Man Apart: Priesthood and Homosexuality at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

There is what I take to be an observable phenomenon in British culture: namely the attractiveness of the celibate Roman Catholic priesthood to certain male homosexuals at the end of the nineteenth century.¹ Whether this has always been the case, and indeed whether the phenomenon has a wider geographical range, is beyond our immediate focus. Certainly, however, from the mid-nineteenth century through to the early decades of the twentieth, there is a recognizable pattern of homosexual orientation, if not necessarily practice,² which is brought to mind by names such as J. H. Newman, F. W. Faber, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Frederick Rolfe, John Gray, R. H. Benson. I take it, too, that these are merely the tip of what might be called a cultural iceberg. Whether the pattern continues to the present is also beyond the scope of this study. I would only observe that, since the start of the gay liberation movement in the late 1960s, the terms of the debate have changed and the discreetness of the past, with its room for ambivalence, has evaporated. And it is precisely this ambivalence about sexual identity during the late nineteenth century which gives rise to our late twentieth-century curiosity.³ Gender and sexuality are issues much in the foreground of our contemporary cultural debates; in the late nineteenth century, discussion was only just under way and still at the classificatory stage.