English utopian socialist and poet who defended homosexuality in The Intermediate Sex
Living with the working-class George Merrill from 1898 for the rest of his life, he wrote Homogenic Love (1894) and The Intermediate Sex (1908), portraying same-sex love as a democratic feeling that crossed class.
A British socialist, poet and philosopher from an admiral’s family in Hove, educated at Cambridge. Leaving his Anglican curacy, he went north to live among workers, joined the Social Democratic Federation in 1883 and William Morris’s Socialist League the next year, and wrote the long poem Towards Democracy while living the “Simple Life” at Millthorpe. From 1898 he lived with the working-class George Merrill for the rest of his life, and in The Intermediate Sex (1908) he defended homosexuality. He co-founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology in 1914 and died in Guildford in 1929.
Activities and affiliations
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1874–1929
Literature and arts
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1883–1884
Social Democratic Federation (SDF)
Literature and arts -
1884–
Literature and arts
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1914–
British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology
Literature and arts
Related historical events
- 1885–1941.11.06Sexual Reform Movements in Europe and the Reaction of the 1930s (1885–1941)Socialist writerLaid a foundation of the British gay rights movement with The Intermediate Sex.
- 1885.08.07–1938.07.19Sexual Reform in Britain: From the Wilde Trials to The Well of Loneliness (1885–1938)Socialist poet, president of the BSSSPJoined the defence of homosexual love to socialism and became first president of the BSSSP.
The Simple Life and Uranian love
After Brighton College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he became curate to the Christian Socialist F. D. Maurice, but weary of Victorian hypocrisy he found solace in Walt Whitman’s poetry and visited Whitman in America in 1877. Leaving the ministry in 1874, he lectured for the University Extension Movement in Leeds and Sheffield, where he came into contact with manual workers. With an inheritance from his father in 1882 he built a house at Millthorpe, making sandals and living the “Simple Life”, and in 1883 he published the first part of Towards Democracy, a long poem inspired by Whitman and the Bhagavad Gita. The same year he joined the Social Democratic Federation; in 1884 he left with William Morris for the Socialist League, and from 1892 he was active in the Independent Labour Party.
Returning from India in 1891, he met George Merrill, a working-class young man from Sheffield, and the two lived together from 1898 until Merrill’s death. In the 1890s he wrote against discrimination by sexual orientation, publishing Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894), Love’s Coming of Age (1896) and The Intermediate Sex (1908). In The Intermediate Sex he called Eros “a great leveller” that crosses the bounds of class and caste, on which true democracy might rest. In April 1914 he founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology with Laurence Housman, George Ives and others.
E. M. Forster said that a visit to Millthorpe in 1913 inspired his gay-themed novel Maurice, and Carpenter’s life also influenced D. H. Lawrence. In 1922 he and Merrill moved to Guildford, and on his eightieth birthday he received an album signed by every member of Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government. After Merrill died suddenly in January 1928 and a stroke paralysed him that May, he died on 28 June 1929 and was buried in Merrill’s grave. Historians such as Jeffrey Weeks and Sheila Rowbotham revived interest in him in the 1970s and 1980s, and he has been called the “gay godfather of the British left”.