lgbt-history-archive: “It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always
lgbt-history-archive: “It comes to this then: there always have been people like me and always will be, and generally they have been persecuted.” – E.M. Forster, “Maurice” (1971). Picture: E.M. Forster (January 1, 1879 – June 7, 1970), left, and Bob Buckingham, c. 1934. Edward Morgan Forster, better known as E.M. Forster, who was born one hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, was one of the great English writers of the early twentieth century, best known for novels including “A Room with a View” (1908), “Howards End” (1910), and “A Passage to India” (1924). Forster’s work is notable for its ironic treatment of class distinctions and hypocrisy in British society, and for the writer’s unique humanism (which, many argue, is summed up by the epigraph to “Howards End”: “Only connect…”). Forster was openly homosexual among his friends, but not to the public. At the age of fifty-one, he met Bob Buckingham, a married policeman, and the pair entered a loving relationship that lasted until Forster’s death. Tellingly, Forster also developed a lasting friendship with Buckingham’s wife, May. “Perhaps,” one recent article notes, “this is not so surprising for the writer who valued personal relationships above all else, and for whom the motto ‘only connect’ applied as much to his private life as to his novels.” E.M. Forster died of a stroke on June 7, 1970; he was ninety-one. In 1971, Forster’s friends oversaw the publication of “Maurice,” Forster’s controversial novel about same-sex love. Although the book was written in 1913, Forster understood that its subject matter made it too controversial to publish during his lifetime. It was particularly unheard of for a literary depiction of homosexuality to end happily, as “Maurice” does, but on this point Forster would not compromise; as he wrote in 1960: “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.” #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #EMForster -- source link
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