Beckford's father was alderman and lord mayor of London, and his mother, connected by marriage to the Dukes of Hamilton, a stern and unrelenting Calvinist. Beckford's father died when he was ten, and his mother decided that it would be best not to risk sending her delicate son away to school. She hired a series of tutors and monitored his education herself. Beckford early on displayed an interest in art and music, and especially in the exotic Oriental arts of the Arab world. As he entered adolescence, he was lucky that one of his series of tutors was Alexander Cozens, whose own fascination with Eastern lore encouraged Beckford's own.

Sponsor Message.

At the same time that Beckford's aesthetic taste began to develop, so did his devotion to emotional self-indulgence. Chief among his emotional attachments was a young cousin, William Courtenay, known as "Kitty" to family and friends, who responded to Beckford's attentions with adolescent devotion.

For years, Beckford poured out his soul in a series of epistolary endearments to Courtenay that were as extreme as they were indiscreet. These letters, almost inevitably, fell into the hands of Courtenay's reactionary and powerful uncle Lord Loughborough, a chief justice. Although, Loughborough could not catch Beckford and Courtenay in flagrante dilecto, he let out a rumor that he had, and he advertised the scandal in the morning newspapers from October through December 1784.

The result of this newspaper campaign was the utter ruin of Beckford's reputation. He lived as an exile in his own estate at Fonthill, and he traveled freely on the continent. But he was never again received in polite society. He lived until 1844, for sixty years an outcast.

In his travels, he met various men who befriended him and boys whom he loved. Some stayed close to him throughout his life, and a few earned his sincere devotion. But society meant too much to him not for him to feel the blow of his disgrace, and the frantic building that went on at his estate, which began with a wall around the entire property and ended with his massive gothic Fonthill Abbey with its huge central tower, might be understood as his attempt to deal with his status as an outcast.

Beckford wrote one novel that is still read with wonder, Vathek (1786), which appeared in an unauthorized translation of the original French in which he wrote it. It tells the story of Vathek the ninth Caliph of Abassides, who goaded on by a wicked mother, indulges his appetites in a fantasy of sensual power. His companions in wickedness are the lovely Nouronihar and the child Gulchenrouz, who remains pure.

It is easy to see Beckford's personal life in this tale and to understand his celebration of Gulchenrouz at its close as a clear articulation of love. At the same time, it is important to understand it also as a consideration of the pleasures of the flesh and a protest that they cannot be enjoyed without cost. In a sequel to Vathek, which he never published, Beckford planned a series of episodes that explored various forms of aberrant sexual behavior.

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transsexual people have contributed significantly to the field of architecture and to the creation of queer space.

From its beginning, the nineteenth century in England had a purposeful homosexual literature of considerable bulk, both male and female, though it was fettered by oppression.

Since homosexuality was severely persecuted during the Romantic period, writers who treated the subject more or less positively were forced to encode it or leave it unpublished and were themselves frequently forced into exile.

During the eighteenth century, men whom we would now call homosexual, such as Johann Winckelmann, Horace Walpole, and William Beckford, were at the forefront of public taste, championing respectively the fresh interest in Classical, Gothic, and Oriental styles.

The Gothic has always offered writers and readers the chance to experience the excitement of transgressive sexuality of various kinds, including male and female homosexuality.

Patronage--the sponsorship of artists and the commissioning of artistic projects from them--is of central importance to cultural history.

Travel has afforded gays and lesbians both freedom from the restraints of their own cultures and the erotic stimulus of exotic sexual customs and partners.

The United Kingdom has a rich and vibrant legacy of queer cultural expression despite a long history of severe legal sanctions against male-male sexual acts and other manifestations of sexual and gender deviance.

The most notable law reformer in the English-speaking world, English philosopher, jurist, economist, and political scientist Jeremy Bentham argued for a tolerant attitude toward homosexuality in a series of papers first published in full in 1985.

James Ogilvy, the 7th Earl of Findlater and 4th Earl of Seafield, was an accomplished amateur landscape architect and philanthropist; after his death, scandal erupted when he was outed by his own relatives in Scotland.