The longest of Forster's gay stories is "The Other Boat," which was completed in 1958, when Forster was almost eighty years old. The tale recounts the struggle to fuse into wholeness the divided personality of Lionel March, a young army captain. The struggle comes to a crisis in his relationship with a sensuous, classless, effeminate youth named Cocoa, "a subtle, supple boy who belonged to no race and always got what he wanted."

Lionel's search for wholeness is complicated by his confused identity and made especially difficult by the conflict between his secret love for Cocoa and his self-definition as a member of a racist society.

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The story's violent conclusion, in which Lionel murders Cocoa and then commits suicide, expresses the young officer's inability to face either a life led contrary to prevailing currents or one without tribal identity. Unlike Cocoa, he lacks the heroism to achieve wholeness. "The Other Boat" explores with profound insight the psychological effects of racism and homophobia.

Forster as Essayist and Moral Presence

In the final decades of his life, even as his reputation as a novelist grew with every novel that he did not write, Forster abandoned fiction and became a superb essayist, thoughtful critic and biographer, and a shrewd analyst of politics and culture. As a dogged defender of civil liberties, he protested the persecution of gay books and authors.

For example, when Radclyffe Hall's lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness was prosecuted as obscene in 1928, he persuaded his Bloomsbury friends Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey to join him in defending it, though at the trial no expert testimony was permitted.

As England's most thoughtful exponent of liberal humanism, Forster in his later years became a significant moral presence, a liberal conscience that countered the excesses of left and right alike. Especially for young gay writers in the 1930s like Christopher Isherwood, W. H. Auden, William Plomer, and J. R. Ackerley, he functioned as an uncle figure, a symbol of committed humanism and responsible intelligence.

He summed up his beliefs in a series of memorable essays, most notably in "What I Believe" (1938), in which he announced his abiding faith in personal relations and individualism. He bravely asserted that "if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

In this credo, he also declared his belief in "an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky," who, he asserted, "represent the true human condition, the one permanent victory of our queer race over cruelty and chaos."

Himself a member of this spiritual aristocracy, Forster deserves a special place in the gay and lesbian literary heritage. He was not only one of the finest English novelists of the twentieth century but also a tireless defender of humane values.

Located on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt, Alexandria has, by virtue of its decadent sensibility and the tributes of numerous writers, achieved a reputation for tolerance, but recently it has turned away from Europe and towards Mecca.

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.

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.

Homosexuality, both male and female, has a rich, divergent, and increasingly open expression in the literature of the twentieth century.

Despite the widespread homophobia in the Modernist movement, several of its practitioners were homosexual; some of them wrote openly about homosexuality, and the groundwork was laid for the gay liberation movement.

Since World War II, the gay male novel has progressively flourished in England and especially in America.

Opera, an eclectic synthesis of voice, drama, music, costume, visual arts and spectacle, has played an integral role in queer culture since its development in seventeenth century Venice.

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.

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.

One of the most accomplished poets of the twentieth century, W. H. Auden found that his gayness led him to new insights into the universal impulse to love and enlarged his understanding of all kinds of relationships.

The English novelist Samuel Butler had a predilection for intense male friendships, which is reflected in several of his works.

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.

Alexandrian Greek poet C. P. Cavafy has written some of the greatest homoerotic poems of all time.

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, a Cambridge classicist and friend of E. M. Forster, is significant for the glbtq legacy as the author of an immensely popular book on ancient Greece and a posthumously published, surprisingly frank autobiography.

An American-born Israeli, Robert Friend was both an accomplished poet in his own right and also an exceptionally skillful translator of poetry from many different languages.

Radclyffe Hall, who lived her lesbianism openly and proudly, is best known for The Well of Loneliness, arguably the most important lesbian novel ever written.

English novelist and short story writer L. P. Hartley created psychologically subtle works of fiction in which the danger of abandoning oneself to love is a recurrent theme.

Noted for his elegant prose style and subtle representations of moral ambiguities, Alan Hollinghurst has in recent years emerged as Great Britain's most significant contemporary gay novelist.

A. E. Housman's poetry is inextricably rooted in homosexual experience and consciousness and is also a significant reflector of gay history.

A major Anglo-American novelist and a pioneer in the gay liberation movement, Christopher Isherwood created gay characters whose homosexuality is a simple given, an integral part of the wholeness of personality and an emblem of their common humanity.

For his time, D. H. Lawrence was a maverick in his open and adventurous discussion of all sexual issues and especially homosexuality, both male and female.

Best known for his genius in art and architecture, Michelangelo was also an accomplished author of homoerotic poetry.

The aesthetic of the important and influential Victorian critic Walter Pater reflected a homosexual sensibility.

Although overt homosexuality is absent from William Plomer's novels and poems, the relevance of his sexuality to his work is evident.

As one of the key figures that western civilization has used to define itself, William Shakespeare stands in a complicated, fiercely contested relationship to homosexuality.

Best known for his groundbreaking play Bent, iconoclastic playwright and screenwriter Martin Sherman has created an impressive body of work.

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.

British artist Henry Scott Tuke created works that celebrate the beauty of male youth, as well as the artist's lifelong love of the sea, swimming, and sailing.

American writer Glenway Wescott is author of a series of critically esteemed novels, but may be best known for his central position in New York's artistic and gay communities of the 1950s and 1960s.

Celebrating an ideal of manly love in both its spiritual and physical aspects, Walt Whitman has exerted a profound and enduring influence on gay literature.

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.

Passionate friendships with women were essential to the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf.