Residential Higher Education and the Production of Homosexual Knowledge in Early 20th-Century Britain

In early-twentieth-century Britain, the gender-segregated residential college was an old-fashioned outlier in the higher education landscape. These unusual institutions provided elite, highly educated men with unique sites for theorizing the meaning and value of intimate all-male communities. This paper explores the thinking of two early-twentieth-century theorists of male homosexuality, the Cambridge academic G.L. Dickinson and the art collector and dealer E.P. Warren, who spent the 1910s and ‘20s living in Oxford and Cambridge colleges. Historians’ accounts of the development of the concept of male homosexuality have led them variously to emphasize more politically radical figures, scientific rather than humanistic discourses, and figures who themselves had more self-actualized conceptions of their own homosexual identity. This paper argues, by contrast, that Dickinson’s and Warren’s intellectual immersion in the classics-focused curriculum of early-twentieth-century Oxford and Cambridge, as well as their lived experience in a gender-segregated residential educational culture that prized intimate relations between teachers and students, shaped their efforts to articulate influential theories of male same-sex desire. In manuscript and privately printed writings that nevertheless circulated widely among a sympathetic audience, they articulated clear genealogical links between the ancient ideal of ‘pederasty’ and modern sexual-object-choice-based ‘homosexuality’. Their defenses of the value of male homosexuality were grounded in their theories of the erotics of education and in entanglements with anti-democratic, elitist, and misogynistic politics. Following interventions in queer history and theory by scholars such as Laura Doan, Heather Love, and Kadji Amin, I show that Dickinson’s and Warren’s cases allow us to appreciate unsavory, unsatisfying, and ‘disturbing’ alternative genealogies of male homosexual identity and culture. I demonstrate that elite gender-segregated residential higher education was at the heart of significant early conceptualizations of male homosexuality, and that this has consequences for how historians might understand the broader queer history of twentieth-century Britain.