Gay Britons

In light of the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to strike down DOMA (Defence of Marriage Act, passed in 1996), it can be said, unambiguously that same-sex love is no longer the Oscar Wildean love that "dare not speak its name."

It's easy to name Oscar Wilde in the same breath as gay-love. Wilde was a courageous spokesperson and carefree practitioner of an amor that risked social wrath and cruel punishment in his days.

What about the quieter Victorian/Edwardian male Britons who were not that courageous, but expressive nonetheless of social relations that were taboo?

Thinking of British novelist, E.M. Forster, made the image of his A Passage to India float up in my mind. That's the novel that Forster is known for in India, where I had my first brush with E,M. Forster.

It took me years to extract the homoerotic theme in A Passage: Who can not but see the deep mutual affection affection between the affable Fielding and the pansy, somewhat neurotic, Aziz? Fielding is a strapping British "lad," with a muscular mien, a no nonsensical approach to approach to living the life of an expatriate Briton in colonial India. Aziz is the fusspot male, very feminine, with a wife that's conveniently dead. 

They chalk up a great friendship that crosses racial and national bars; Fielding is one of the few British males in the novel who does not believe that Aziz molested Ms. Adela Quested. My belief is that Fielding knew of the love that dare not speak its name kind of love that flew through Aziz's vein.

Both Aziz and Fielding acted straight, but were gay.

Later, much later, I came to know that E.M. Forster himself was a homosexual. In denouncing his writing as mediocre, the mercurial Nobel Laureate V.S. Naipaul said that Forster wasn't a real writer on India, he merely traveled to India to find boys. Naipaul dismissed Forster as an opportunistic homosexual.

Forster's homosexuality made me re read the relationship between Fielding and Aziz in a fresh light. It also made me read his other novel Maurice.

Maurice is without pretence, about the love between two Englishmen in England.

The love in Maurice faces obstructions, but the novel has a happy ending.

Forster wrote about the happy ending:

A happy ending was imperative. I shouldn’t have bothered to write otherwise. I was determined that in fiction anyway two men should fall in love and remain in it for the ever and ever that fiction allows, and in this sense Maurice and Alec still roam the greenwood. I dedicated it ‘To a Happier Year’ and not altogether vainly. Happiness is its keynote.

Looking back at the ending of A Passage to India, I don't see a "happy ending." I see a parting between Fielding and Aziz, though they promise to meet again. But the meeting is also implied as impossible, perpetually deferred, as the following words echo through the crisp and cool North Indian air, "Not now, not now, not yet, not yet."

Perhaps it was easier for Forster to foresee a happy union between Maurice and Alec because both were not only gay men in love with each other, but also white British males. In A Passage, on the other hand, Fielding was a Britisher of the then-ruling class, and Aziz was an Indian, conceivable in the role of a subaltern not as an equal partner to Fielding.