Some thirty-seven Americans figure among the Uranians whose works were collected in Men and Boys: An Anthology, edited by Edmund Edwinson (pseudonym of Edward M. Slocum) and published in 1924.

Of these, by far the most important is William Alexander Percy (1885-1942), who published several volumes of verse later collected in an edition issued by Yale University Press. He achieved lasting fame, however, with his autobiography Lanterns on the Levee (1941), the classic depiction of the world of the plantation-owning class in the Mississippi delta, where he subtly reveals his pederastic interests.

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Although members of his family, including the late novelist Walker Percy, have tried to deny his homosexuality, he was one in spirit with his British contemporaries.

Another American who belongs in this set is Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928), the Boston art connoisseur who spent most of his life in England. Besides Itamos (1903) and The Wild Rose (1909), he published (under the pseudonym Arthur Lyon Raile) a Defence of Uranian Love in three volumes (1926-1928). He is responsible for major holdings by American museums of Greek erotic vases depicting pederastic themes--a treasure long withheld from the general public.

Conclusion

Although Uranianism received its initial impetus from Ulrichs and the German movement, it was an indigenous phenomenon that owed nothing to German predecessors or models. It was an afterglow of the great poetic tradition of nineteenth-century England and remained firmly in a post-Tennysonian style.

The Uranian poets made little impression on English letters. The authors belonged to a self-conscious, unconventional elite who shunned the prying gaze of their contemporaries. Their work was often privately printed, in small editions meant solely for initiated readers.

None of the Uranian poets ever rose to the level of an A. E. Housman, whose work shares their paganism and sexual unconventionality, but whose orientation was ephebo- or androphilic, and whose great love affair had been with a college undergraduate of his own age, not with an adolescent.

Pederasty is the erotic relationship between an adult male and a boy, generally one between the ages of twelve and seventeen, in which the older partner is attracted to the younger one who returns his affection.

"Uranian" and "Uranianism" were early terms denoting homosexuality, in English use primarily from the 1890s through the first quarter of the 1900s.

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.

The love of the second-century Roman emperor Hadrian for the beautiful youth Antinous was exceptional not because the lovers were male, but because of its intensity.

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

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

Russian-English poet and writer on sexuality, Marc André Raffalovich is best known today as a patron of the arts.

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

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.