GLR May-June 2026

other’s lives. Plank was delighted, exuberant: “two people never came from such opposite poles and were better friends.” Per haps physical attraction drew them together. Plank wrote openly of Benson as “a fine hard physical specimen” who “goes in for all sorts of sport,” adding “and yet, we seem to fit perfectly, which is a miracle!” Surviving photographs show that Plank, too, was beautiful—tall, dark, slender, with striking bone struc ture and an infectious grin. By early March—barely three weeks after meeting—they were planning weekends away together. Were they lovers? It’s tempting to speculate. Plank wrote that line about Benson’s physicality mere days after his introductory letter, which sug gests exposure to a more relaxed state of (un)dress than the for mality required outside domestic spaces. With Plank’s private studio and Benson’s well-staffed house, not to mention their travels together, there certainly would have been opportunity, at least after the servants had gone to bed. The historical assumption has tended to be that Benson was uninterested in sex, perhaps because of the way in which ho moerotic love is explicitly distinguished from “promiscuous im morality” and “dingy sensualism” in autobiographical works like Our Family Affairs (1920) and Mother (1925). But in his fiction, homoeroticism abounds: bronzed youths bathing naked; Greekness, wildness, nudity, and sensual indulgence in drink, sea, and sun. Close male friends who live or holiday together and are “wrapped up in each other” appear regularly, and emo tional need is figured in physical terms. Even Benson’s autobi ographies are open about “human love, the heart’s need of one individual for another individual,” “want[ing] someone with the sense of thirst.” Plank wasn’t wrong about all the sport, either: until arthritis cruelly curtailed his activities, Benson was a very physical man. It’s difficult to believe that his relationship with Plank was celibate. Perhaps most suggestively, some scraps of poetry escaped the bonfires: a few surviving poems in Oxford’s Bodleian Library evoke kissing, shared beds, and lying entan gled with a lover in heartrending terms. Plank’s letters imply that he considered sexuality a private matter, relevant only to those concerned. In his artistic and the atrical circles, desiring men might necessitate care but was hardly unusual. For Benson, more firmly anchored in the Eng lish establishment, it was different. Like many gay Englishmen in the aftermath of Wilde, he knew the stakes and was careful to conform—publicly, at least—to the conventions of contem porary morality. Nevertheless, despite his religious upbringing, classical education had given him access to an intellectual and moral framework that enabled him to understand and justify his feelings as romantic love, spiritual connection, and a source of nobility rather than vice. § F OR ALL THEIR ESTABLISHMENT STATUS , Benson’s family mem bers were almost entirely queer, albeit to varying degrees: his mother had moved her lover Lucy Tait in with the family before her husband’s death; his sister Maggie lived and worked with Nettie Gourlay; Nellie Benson was courted by Ethel Smyth; Hugh was involved with Baron Corvo; and Arthur had a suc cession of chaste emotional attachments to much younger men, although his idea of consummation was reading aloud to a young man leaning against his knee. Plank was welcomed with May–June 2026

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