Frederick Rolfe - Homosexuality

Homosexuality

Frederick Rolfe was entirely comfortable with his homosexuality, and associated and corresponded with a number of other gay Englishmen. Early in his life he wrote a fair amount of idealistic but mawkish poetry about boy martyrs and the like, and these and his Toto stories contain pederastic elements, but the young male pupils he was teaching at the time unanimously recalled in later life that there had never been any hint of impropriety in his relations with them. As he himself matured, Rolfe’s settled sexual preference was for late adolescents. Towards the end of his life, he made his only explicit reference to his specific sexual age preference, in one of the Venice letters to Charles Masson Fox, in which he declared: 'My preference was for the 16, 17, 18 and large.' Grant Richards, in his 'Memories of a Misspent Youth' (1932), recalls 'Frederick Baron Corvo' at Parson's Pleasure in Oxford - where scholars could bathe naked - 'surveying the yellow flesh tints of youth with unbecoming satisfaction'.

Those of whom it is either speculated or surmised that they had sexual relations with Rolfe - Aubrey Thurstans, Sholto Douglas, John 'Markoleone', Ermenegildo Vianello and the other Venetian gondoliers - were all sexually mature young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one (with the exception of Douglas, who was considerably older). The idealised young men in his fiction were of a similar age.

In 1904, soon after his ordination as a Roman Catholic priest, Robert Hugh Benson formed a chaste but passionate friendship with Rolfe. For two years this relationship involved letters “not only weekly, but at times daily, and of an intimate character, exhaustingly charged with emotion.” All letters were subsequently destroyed, probably by Benson’s brother.

Rolfe sought to characterise the relationships in his fiction as examples of 'Greek love' between an older man and an ephebe, and thus endow them with the sanction of the ancient Hellenic tradition familiar to all Edwardians with a classical education.