GLR January-February 2023

Homosexuality was still illegal in Britain when the Bloomsbury set was playing musical beds. “Plainclothes policemen patrolled popu lar cruising spots,” Strachey writes, “looking for signs of difference; wide-legged trousers, colored shirts, a powdered face. Painted boys were portrayed as a social menace, endangering British society with their moral contagion, a predatory presence in the streets around Pic cadilly.” But this hardly stopped Philip Ritchie, an Oxford undergraduate, from satisfying “Lyt ton’s growing aspiration for aristocratic con nections and his preference for an aesthetic sensibility combined with hints of dominant masculinity.” And Philip Ritchie was only one in a series. Again, from Virginia’s diary: “Lyt ton has thrown over Philip, and is on with Roger Senhouse, whom he wants us to be nice to.” As Nino explains: “Senhouse was a slightly enigmatic figure, finding sexual release in sadomasochistic fantasies. Lytton loved to be spanked, and Senhouse happily obliged.” It would be hard to imagine a more formi dable queen than Lytton Strachey: arch, maso

Dora Carrington. A Study of [Lytton] Strachey’s Face and Hands , 1916.

course of a few months, Taylor slept with Clive Bell; his mis tress, Mary Hutchinson; Alix Strachey; and possibly Duncan Grant. Virginia reported on all the activity with delight, won dering idly to Vita whether she could be used to illustrate a char acter in Orlando.” Virginia Woolf’s attitude toward homosexuality, however, was ambivalent. On the one hand, she had a famous affair with Vita Sackville-West and wrote Orlando , one of the classic nov els about sexual changelings. She even expressed pity to her mar ried, heterosexual sister Vanessa because, as Virginia wrote to her: “You will never succumb to the charms of your own sex— What an arid garden the world must be for you. What avenues of stone pavements and iron railings! Greatly though I respect the male mind, and adore Duncan Grant (but, thank god, he’s a her maphrodite, androgynous, like all great artists) I cannot see that they have a glowworm’s worth of charm about them.” On the other hand, Nino writes: “Virginia worried about the negative influence of pretty young men on her susceptible friends, resenting the triviality of homoerotic conversation ex changed: ‘I fought with Eddy Sackville-West over this. How silly, how pretty you sodomites are I said, whereat he flared up and accused me of having a red-nosed grandfather.’” However, “what she could forgive in Eddy she found inexcusable in Cecil Beaton, dismissing him as a young boy kept for sex with older men: ‘I say, judging from your style and manner (this is what I say to Cecil Beaton), you are a Mere Catamite.’” And when Lyt ton Strachey and Duncan Grant fell in love with her Hogarth Press assistants, she chastised them: “My anti-bugger revolu tion has run all the way around the world as I hoped it would. I am a little touched by what appears their contrition, & their anx iety to condone their faults. ... The pale star of the bugger has been in the ascendant too long.” It was as if one could be homosexual, but that was not enough; one had to be available to both sexes, and brilliant. Of course, they were subject to the usual miseries. Tommy Tomlin,

chistic, attracted to masculine tops. When World War I erupted, most of the original Bloomsbury set were conscientious objec tors. Lytton took a pillow to his hearing to sit on because he had hemorrhoids and, when asked what he would do if a German soldier attempted to rape his sister, replied: “I would try to in terpose my body between them.” He and Woolf are the two pre siding spirits of Bloomsbury, or at least the ones you keep hoping will be quoted. Lytton made a home for himself at Ham Spray (where do they get these names?) with the apparently het erosexual artist Dora Carrington in a platonic marriage of sorts, during which both of them sometimes had sex with the same young man. In fact, Dora married Ralph Partridge, one of Lyt ton’s boyfriends, to keep him in their ménage à trois with Lyt ton, and after Dora killed herself—which was soon after Lytton died—Ralph married another woman, an English writer named Frances Marshall. “It must have been strange,” writes Nino about a visit that Lyt ton’s niece, the young Julia Strachey, made to her uncle, “watch ing your father bring his mistress to Ham Spray while listening to your uncle’s lovers discuss the painful results of too much anal sex.” When the actress Valerie Taylor was introduced into the group, she was passed around by both sexes: “Over the

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