GLR September-October 2024

while still in the convent. Children could be inconvenient. Because homosexual acts were punish able by death in England, those who could afford it had to live abroad during those years, and Byron was among them. But he was notorious even in a society that was es

nicating his way across Europe? Ten nessee Williams put him in his play Camino Real as one of several figures from literature to whom Williams was drawn. (Proust’s great homosexual char acter Baron de Charlus was another.) But what Byron stands for now, if anything, is

BYRON A Life in Ten Le tt ers by Andrew Stau ff er Cambridge University Press 401 pages, $29.95

pecially venereal (gonorrhea is mentioned frequently in his let ters). And then there was the drinking and the gambling. Byron was in almost constant debt for most of his life. Like the Bloomsbury set whose members were hopping from bed to bed a century later without regard to gender, Byron refused to be confined by middle-class morals. Even today, it’s hard to rec oncile the man who could write that pæan to the vagina with the one who fell in love with fifteen-year-old choirboy John Edelston, and later with Nicolo Giraud. Perhaps homosexuality gave him some sort of freedom that he couldn’t find in rela tionships with women. How often he frequented the Turkish baths and brothels is unknown. But on his final trip to Greece to help finance its war of independence from the Turks, con scious of his fading powers, he returned to adolescents—in cluding a fifteen-year-old page named Loukas Chalandritsanos. Loukas, though happy to accept Byron’s money and favors, did not return the poet’s amorous interest. § S O WHAT DO WE MAKE of Lord Byron today? Was Byron sim ply the first sex tourist—an oversexed British aristocrat for

debatable. The Romantic movement, which Byron epito mized, is usually characterized as a reaction to the 18th cen tury’s Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution. We too are living in a scientific age, of lithium batteries and algo rithms, and are so industrialized that we cannot find ways to dispose of the products with which we have trashed the earth. But we’re not as comfortable with sexual mutations as Byron was. Contrast any of his letters with an essay The New York Times recently ran on polyamory, which read somehow as if an open marriage was a new way to prepare meatloaf. Gone are the days of Boyd McDonald’s Manhattan Review of Un natural Acts ! Each addition to the LGBT lineup (Q, I, A, et al.) seems to make us less free, not more, because they all turn into identity politics, and there’s nothing less fluid than iden tity politics. Byron seems unimaginably slippery in compari son. All that we know for sure is that, when he made an effort to settle down and married Annabelle Milbanke, he soon dis covered that he couldn’t stand the uxorial role, and he gave up his wife and their baby daughter (Ada Lovelace, who grew up to be a mathematician responsible in part for the develop ment of the computer). He was, to say the least, conflicted: a man whose sex life still astounds us for its plenitude and indifference to societal norms. And yet, while described as having an effeminate voice by one of his observers, his masculinity seems never to have been questioned, even when he was in love with a beautiful young man (he was never attracted to older men). Was he ever penetrated, or was he always the penetrator? Byron may have escaped the binary by just ignoring it. But what aspect of Byron’s sexuality is heroic today? Adultery is commonplace, bisexuality is still regarded with skepticism and rarely dis cussed, and trans issues have come to be the new battleground. Byron was his own sexual identity. He and the nonbinary move ment may have nothing to do with each other. Yet Byron’s indifference to sexual classification, along with his lordly command of the English language, makes his life and work rejuvenating today—and shockingly contemporary. Today he may seem like a character in Bridgerton , but consider the following excerpt from Canto the Eleventh of Don Juan , in which Juan is presenting his credentials to the diplomatic es tablishment of England: Juan presented in the proper place, To proper placemen, every Russ credential; And was received with all the due grimace By those who govern in the mood potential, Who, seeing a handsome stripling with smooth face, Thought (what in state affairs is most essential) That they as easily might do the youngster, As hawks may pounce upon a woodland songster. Unless I’m crazy, he’s describing in the last two lines what we would call chicken hawks.

TheG & LR

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