However, as Dickinson painfully realized, Platonic love was gravely threatened in the modern world. He wrote in the Autobiography: "For those who like young men, and have the maieutic [or Socratic] faculty, Cambridge, and especially King's, is ideal. But the position is precarious, and it is not very likely that even a pale adumbration of Socrates will long be tolerated in an age at once scientific, utilitarian and unimaginative."

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For this reason, Dickinson, in old age, returned to his passion for Plato. After Two Thousand Years: A Dialogue Between Plato and a Modern Young Man, written shortly before his death, attempts to harmonize friendship and love, learning and civilization. Sections include discourses on property, forms of government, socialism, the control of population, war, education, truth, art, and love.

In the dialogue, Philalethes (the "lover of truth") asks Plato: "In your treatment of that love [eros] did you not admit that the body has a part in it?" Plato responds: "When souls are shut in bodies do not the bodies, of necessity, take part in the affections of the soul?" Needless to say, this question has vexed readers of Plato for two thousand years and more. Does Platonic love exclude physicality or not? Eventually, Philalethes poignantly sums up the failure of Platonic eros: "Whereas your doctrine seems to most of us so terribly immoral, on the other hand you have the reputation of being so pure in your conception of love that we never speak of 'platonic' love without a touch of irony, because it is thought to be something impossible and therefore hypocritical."

Dickinson thus ultimately indicts Platonic love for its impracticability. Diotima's lofty ascent proves too high, too exacting, too strenuous. He found Plato's wonderful idea(l) utterly elusive in his own world.

In its first century of existence, gay male autobiography has become increasingly more open, frank, and unapologetic.

The Bloomsbury circle's open acceptance of erotic license and hostility toward social convention are important elements in the history of homosexuality among the English upper classes in the first half of the twentieth century.

A twentieth-century British editor who fostered the careers of a number of important gay writers, J. R. Ackerley also wrote a small but significant body of gay literature that includes memoirs and drama.

The Cambridge Apostles, founded in 1820 as a secret society at Cambridge University, is significant for the glbtq cultural legacy because it fostered frank discussions of homosexuality, promoted Platonic love, and helped establish Bloomsbury.

Edward Carpenter, a champion of both women's and homosexuals' liberation, was one of the great socialist visionaries of England at the turn of the twentieth century.

One of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century and a tireless defender of humane values, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage.

Benjamin Jowett, classical scholar and translator whose bowdlerization of Plato illustrates the dishonesty made necessary by Victorian homophobia, was probably homosexual in orientation.

Among Greek writers on homosexual themes, Plato is preeminent not only as a major philosopher but also as the greatest master of Greek prose.

The English biographer and essayist Lytton Strachey spoke openly of his homosexuality to his Bloomsbury friends, but his openly gay works were published only after his death.

John Addington Symonds was the most daring innovator in the history of nineteenth-century British homosexual writing and consciousness.

Although he was sexually attracted to women, Alfred Lord Tennyson wrote poetry suffused with homoeroticism, including the most beautiful homoerotic elegy in the English language.

Nineteenth-Century German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs was both the first modern theorist of homosexuality and the first homosexual to "come out" publicly.

Oscar Wilde is important both as an accomplished writer and as a symbolic figure who exemplified a way of being homosexual at a pivotal moment in the emergence of gay consciousness.