Pride, the poetry of Michelangelo and the love that dare not speak its name

Over centuries, LGBT+ history in the arts has been hidden. Kevin Childs looks at the stories erased by language, historians, book burnings or, worse, by silence

Friday 05 July 2019 18:57 BST
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Some art historians insist that if he were gay Michelangelo must have been celibate
Some art historians insist that if he were gay Michelangelo must have been celibate

Someone discovered a scrap of verse recently by the First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon, sent in a letter in 1925 to a young man he’d fallen in love with, the actor and later director, Glen Byam Shaw. On the face of it, and like much of Sassoon’s love poetry, the context is what gives the poem meaning.

Though you have left me, I’m not yet alone:
For what you were befriends the firelit room;

And what you said remains and is my own

To make a living gladness of my gloom

The firelight leaps and shows your empty chair

And all our harmonies of speech are stilled:

But you are with me in the voiceless air

My hands are empty, but my heart is filled.

It’s a small thing, just a few lines, and although there’s nothing in the words he uses which suggests his new love is a man, there’s a vague sense of it. The great game of sexuality then was a necessary precaution when same-sex desire for men was a matter of criminal sanction and, arguably, even the publication of an overtly gay love poem could land everyone involved in the dock. But in 1925 Sassoon, it seems, couldn’t help himself. Sitting by the fire one night in October, having spent the previous evening with Byam Shaw, everything reminds him of the young man’s absence, and he’s compelled to write. It’s taut and sexually charged, yet the lines have a warmth about them – a tenderness. Sassoon is not troubled or desperate, just brim full of love.

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