Hocking himself is probably twice alluded to in the Prologue in the description of the "strange Cornish type of man, with dark eyes likes holes in his head" who powerfully attracts Birkin as well as in the minor character of William Hosken.

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The Rupert of the Prologue is torn not only between females and males, but between "two classes of men," the "white-skinned, keen limbed men with eyes like blue-flashing ice and hair like crystals of winter sunshine" and "men with dark eyes that one can enter and plunge into, bathe in as in liquid darkness." Although Rupert wants to "cast out these desires," he senses that a "man can no more slay a living desire in him" than "he can prevent his body from feeling heat and cold."

Despite the potential for true passion and tenderness between men--glimpsed in the famous wrestling sequence in the novel's "Gladiatorial" chapter and in Gerald's nursing of Rupert in the chapter "Man to Man"--real devotion between men is stymied by a failure of nerve.

Nonetheless, the tragedy of Gerald's death is undercut by Women in Love's extraordinary concluding endorsement of bisexuality. "You can't have two kinds of love," Ursula insists to Birkin after Gerald's body has been buried, as she dismisses Birkin's ideas as "an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity." Rupert's response and Women in Love's final sentence is a refusal to accept a delimited heterosexual arrangement: "I don't believe that."

Aaron's Rod

In affirming same-sex friendship, Lawrence typically contrasted his all-male idylls with effete homosexual men, while portraying women as upholders of suffocating marital convention. In Aaron's Rod, a coal miner leaves his fatuous wife, takes up the flute, and travels to Italy to join the free-spirited Rawdon Lily.

There he encounters a group of vacationing English exiles, whose homosexuality is implied in their doting interest in the working-class Aaron as well as in their social cattiness. (Wilde's friend Reggie Turner appears in the biting portrait of Algy Constable, "flapping his eyelids like some crazy owl.") The novel concludes with Rawdon beseeching Aaron to submit to the demands of his own soul.

Homosexual Themes in Later Works

Lawrence returned to homosexual themes in episodes in later works, among them the "Nightmare" chapter of Kangaroo (1923), as well in several short stories. His tales "The Blind Man" (1924) and "Jimmy and the Desperate Woman" (1928) both powerfully recast the familiar Lawrentian scenario in which homoerotic affection threatens--yet also complements--an unsatisfying marital relationship.

Conclusion

Lawrence's genius consists in his emphasis on the barely articulated, unconscious dynamics of homoerotic relations as they move in a state of crisis, flux, and cathartic confrontation. His willingness to transcend the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel, subverting what he once characterized as the "old, stable ego," and, in turn, the stable sexual self, enabled him at his best to depict the experimental excitement of same-sex relations.

Alone among writers of the period, he brought to the theme of homosexuality a genuine working-class perspective. A self-proclaimed enemy of the hyperarticulated sexuality of forward-thinking individuals, he was, paradoxically, himself the great novelist of the painfully unsayable. It was a gift that rendered Lawrence exceptionally adept at apprehending the "unspeakable" promptings of same-sex desire.

A ferociously brilliant artist, he remains one of the most forcefully imaginative, complicated, and least understood navigators of homosexual consciousness in the twentieth century.

A theory of art and an approach to living that influenced many European and American gay male and lesbian writers at the turn of the twentieth century, aestheticism stressed the independence of art from all moral and social conditions and judgments.

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.

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.

From ancient times, homoerotic writing has been a notable part of the literature of war.

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.

André Gide, one of the premier French writers of the twentieth century, reflected his homosexuality in many of his numerous works.

One of the major British artists of the twentieth century, Duncan Grant was also the sexual catalyst of the Bloomsbury Circle.

The thought of John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century, was influenced by his experience as a homosexual.

Though Katherine Mansfield was reticent in the depiction of lesbianism in her short stories, she had close female friendships and was always deeply concerned with the status of women.

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.