Wilson Collection: Edward Carpenter

(Print of Edward Carpenter, published 1907, and title page from Love’s Coming of Age, 1911)

Under construction.

Edward Carpenter

After visiting Walt Whitman, English Socialist Edward Carpenter concluded that the Poet “was before all a lover of the Male.”[1]

For Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen, Carpenter's Ioläus “opened up for me soul windows.”[2] And a peek into The Intermediate Sex was for liberationist Harry Hay an “earthshaking revelation.”[3]

In Love's Coming of Age (1896) Carpenter wrote, “Love is...its own justification.”[4] However various its “combinations,” “only in the most exceptional cases, if at all, may public institutions venture to interfere with” it.[5]

References 1. Jonathan Katz, Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay Men in the U.S.A. (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1976), 365. 2. George Chauncey, Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 284. 3. Stuart Timmons, The Trouble with Harry Hay: Founder of the Modern Gay Movement (Boston:Alyson Publications, 1990), 27. 4. Edward Carpenter, Love's Coming of Age (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1911), 155. 5. Ibid., 155.