There is, of course, a long tradition of mistranslating Plato and minimizing the physical element in Greek love. What makes Jowett's bowdlerization of Plato and deliberate mischaracterization of Greek homosexual activity so surprising is that Jowett himself was almost certainly attracted to men. He never married, felt riveted by male beauty, bonded with his (male) students, lived in a homosocial environment, and showed a revealing interest in Greek homoeroticism.

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Jowett's biographer, Geoffrey Faber, collects interesting details about Jowett's emotional life. His physical appearance was not conventionally masculine: "As a boy he looked like a girl; as an old man he looked and spoke something like a eunuch"; his classmates teasingly referred to him as "Miss Jowett." His relationship with the most important woman in his life, Florence Nightingale, who was herself probably a lesbian, was merely "Platonic": "He never desired her as a woman, nor did she ever desire him as a man."

In response to an "outbreak of abnormal immorality" among young men at Oxford, Jowett was, in the words of a close friend, "the wisest, most prudent and gentlest of counsellors" and "a help and blessing to many beyond what it is possible to publish." Apparently, certain events remained unspeakable, but Jowett showed courage for dealing with the problem responsibly.

Later, Algernon Swinburne tried to clear Jowett's name of allegations of improper conduct, pointedly disassociating him from Walt Whitman, Symonds, and other "Uranians": "The cult of the calamus [a reference to Whitman's Leaves of Grass], as expounded by Mr. Addington Symonds to his fellow-calamites, would have found no acceptance or tolerance with the translator of Plato." But is not the irascible Swinburne protesting too much? As a matter of fact, when Symonds was falsely accused of "corrupting" Magdalen College choirboys, Jowett, fully aware of Symonds' sexual proclivities, stood by his side and helped clear Symonds' name.

Other incidents complete the picture. When Hallam Tennyson was compiling a biography of his father, Lord Tennyson, he asked Jowett for a critique of In Memoriam, the poem in which Tennyson eulogizes his friend Arthur Hallam. Jowett's reply is quoted by Richard Dellamora: "[Tennyson] found [Shakespeare's] sonnets a deeper expression of the never to be forgotten love which he felt more than any of the many moods of many minds which appear among the dramas. The love of the sonnets which he so strikingly expressed was a sort of sympathy with Hellenism."

Jowett was probably homosexually inclined, but he also had a strong aversion to sexual intercourse: "There is not the slightest indication that Jowett ever knew by direct or deliberate experience the quality of sexual enjoyment," his biographer concludes. Maybe his sexual orientation is best termed "homosocial."

The reticence of Jowett's publications about Greek homoeroticism points up the price Victorian prudery, cant, and intolerance exacted of men who desired other men. As one of the leading classicists of his age, Jowett certainly knew that his translations were less than honest. But that was the price of respectability and of the comfortable life he led as an Oxford don. Surely, the knowledge of his misrepresentation of Hellenism must have also cost Jowett a considerable decrease in self-esteem.

Finally, Jowett has been the inspiration for a number of literary characters. Not only did Forster find in him the prototype of the self-denying schoolmaster Mr. Cornwallis in Maurice, but W. H. Mallock modeled Dr. Jenkinson in The New Republic (1877) on him. More recently, Jowett makes an appearance in Tom Stoppard's play The Invention of Love (1997).

Jowett's translations have been reissued in cheap paperback editions by Dover and by major publishing houses such as Penguin and Modern Library; his texts are reproduced in standard anthologies, such as Norton, and in the collection (with the singularly misleading and anachronistic title) Plato on Homosexuality: Lysis, Phaedrus and Symposium by Prometheus Books, where fresh translations are highlighted in brackets besides Jowett's.

Governments, publishers, editors, and even gay writers themselves have censored gay content in literature from the Renaissance to the present.

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.

Ancient Greece holds a unique place in the heritage of homosexual literature as it was a society that openly celebrated same-sex love in its poetry and prose.

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.

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.

In some of the most original poetry of the Victorian period, the sexually-repressed Gerard Manley Hopkins celebrated male beauty as one of the most splendid witnesses to the divine.

Famous as the mother of modern nursing, Florence Nightingale was a tough reformer who fought for her right to a career and an individual identity in the stifling atmosphere of Victorian England.

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

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

Algernon Charles Swinburne was interested in flagellation, sadomasochism, bisexuality, and lesbianism, not only for their erotics but also as gestures of social and cultural rebellion.

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.

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.