Sexual Heretics

London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970. First edition. Hardcover. Plates foxed. Else near fine copy/frayed. 8vo. Cloth. Pp xii, 460. Illustrated: (4) pp. of plates. . Index. An obituary of the author laid in. Includes the works of John Gambril Nicholson, Walter Pater, Alfred Lord Douglas, A. E. Housman, Aleister Crowly, and Anonymous.
This book developed from the author's long interest in Aubrey Beardsley. In it he attempts to to explain how homosexuality influenced English art, literature and thought during the second half of the 19th Century. An "old controversy" had to do with whether male attraction was due to environment or heredity. "These questions were debated exhaustively at the end of [the] last century, when the idea of homosexuality as congenital was useful to men like Symonds who sought an apology for it. Various continental psychiatrists discounted this idea...The fact remains that, as far as we know, the majority of English male homosexuals have not been congenitally orientated so much as swayed in that direction by parental relationships in early childhood, or by habits formed at school, or in reaction from early heterosexual rebuffs—or by all three factors." Maybe, but some of the most notable authors of the period—John Addington Symons, Walter Pater, A. E. Housman, and of course Oscar Wilde—left us numerous poems, articles and fiction in which the attraction is more or less clear.