Gay Liberation was Born in Victorian Oxford

When Victorian Classics Teachers Insisted on Studying "Greek Love" as it Really Was, the Gay Lib Genie was Released from Its Bottle

The powerful counter-message of 20th century gay liberation actually began in the classrooms of Oxford University during Victorian times--and it slipped out as an accident.

Until the 1850s, Cambridge and Oxford were sleepy universities that were hardly universal in their subjects. They were devoted to turning boys into Anglican vicars and there was little besides safe, Christian versions of the classics to study there. Queen Victoria's husband Prince Albert was the first igniter of change. In 1848, as Chancellor of Cambridge, he joined with faculty reformers to bring in German-style departments teaching history, modern literature, and natural and social sciences in their early forms. These reforms spread to Oxford, then across the Atlantic to Harvard and Yale.

At Oxford, classics scholar and translator of Plato Benjamin Jowett had his own reform plan. He wanted his students to study Greek and Roman civilizations as they actually were, not as edited to fit Christian theology. This mean that "Greek love," homosexuality, would now be studied tolerantly, as something accepted then but not now. This let a powerful genie out of its bottle.

As soon as undergraduates read Plato's Symposium, a dinner dialogue between gay men about how gay love was superior precisely because it was freed from the shackles of reproduction, a subversive new counter-message was placed in public view. And when those students read Homer's Iliad, about the male lovers Achilles and Patroclus and how their passion for each other was central to the epic, they saw for themselves that gay love was not only accepted back then, it was admired for its connections to warrior bravery and strength.