Hardened Bachelors: Henry James and Queer Filiation in Edwardian London

Students of Henry James have been inclined to assume that, for gay men who lived in the shadow of the trial and imprisonment of Oscar Wilde, closeted secrecy would be a strategic necessity of social life, conditioned by an ineradicable—even an endemic—state of homosexual panic that became the normal condition for men of the Edwardian era and beyond. While the criminalization of homosexual behavior that was codified at the end of the nineteenth century in Britain and the United States undoubtedly encouraged regimes of camouflage and repression among those vulnerable to prosecution, such responses were far from universal. This article reconstructs a surprisingly open network of queer filiation in which Henry James occupied a central place. But the lives of its satellite figures offer even more suggestive evidence of some of the countervailing forms of social practice that could survive even in that hostile era.