At ten, Walpole was sent to Eton College, where he became part of the "Quadruple Alliance" of sensitive literary friends, which included Thomas Gray, the most popular poet of the century, and Richard West, a sensitive and inverted young writer who died in his twenties and was the cause of a deeply moving series of letters and poems between Walpole and Gray.

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These two men remained friends throughout the latter's life, and Walpole continued to champion his poetry and defend him personally in the forty years he survived him.

The two traveled on the continent together after university--they both went to Cambridge--and after several months together on the "Grand Tour," they had a bitter falling out that took years to put behind them.

Walpole shared Gray's devotion to other men, and though he is as little likely to have actually had sexual experiences with men, he did love several in his long life, for a great portion of it devoting himself to one cousin, Henry Conway.

Walpole is famous for such literary productions as The Castle of Otranto (1764), which almost single-handedly instituted the Gothic novel vogue.

The Castle of Otranto tells the story of a jealous and ambitious prince, Manfred, who exercises power through abuse of the men and women around him. Early on in the work, he is responsible for his "puny" son's death, and later he murders his daughter. Between these two events, he torments his wife and attempts to rape his son's fiancée.

This may not sound very "gay," but Walpole is chronicling the virulence of paternal control and exhibiting various ways in which a family can be dysfunctional. It may take the sexual outsider, after all, to point out the destructiveness of a father.

In another important work, this time a play, The Mysterious Mother (1768), Walpole problematizes the family in other ways. His Gothic enterprise seems intent on exposing the horrors of domestic life. He claimed to come to the Gothic material in his dreams. These are dreams that some of us probably know quite well.

The other side of his life of writing is that found in the forty-four volumes of his Correspondence. Walpole was one of the most famous letter writers of the century, and his delightful effusions are filled with a connoisseur's knowledge of literature and the arts, a gossip's familiarity with scandal, and a fop's attention to the details of dress, family, and social position.

Throughout the Restoration and eighteenth century, sodomitical characters were both presented and pilloried in literature.

Since homosexuality was severely persecuted during the Romantic period, writers who treated the subject more or less positively were forced to encode it or leave it unpublished and were themselves frequently forced into exile.

The Gothic has always offered writers and readers the chance to experience the excitement of transgressive sexuality of various kinds, including male and female homosexuality.

Travel has afforded gays and lesbians both freedom from the restraints of their own cultures and the erotic stimulus of exotic sexual customs and partners.

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.

James Ogilvy, the 7th Earl of Findlater and 4th Earl of Seafield, was an accomplished amateur landscape architect and philanthropist; after his death, scandal erupted when he was outed by his own relatives in Scotland.

Thomas Gray, the best-loved English poet of the eighteenth century, wrote several poems that express the love he felt for other men.