Maurice has always made me tear up. The narrative is timeless, one of self-discovery and acceptance of oneself, set right here in the heart of Cambridge. Paradoxically, it is also before its time, published 57 years after it was first finished. Indeed, this is the paradox of queer artistry, as a Practical Criticism supervisor once told me, a tethering to its time, though it is determined to move forward. Queer art cannot move forward because it is grounded in a contextual sphere that it yearns to escape. So, it must be thrust forward, and the way in which we tackle that is through revisiting these queer works in their contexts.

One palpable absence is the lack of intersectionality: queerness at Cambridge has been majorly reserved for the rich, able-bodied, white man getting with another rich, able-bodied, white man. This is rooted in several causes, most pertinently the inaccessibility of the university to anyone who was a person of colour, or a woman, or anyone on the margins of society, which in itself is its own paradox. This article doesn’t seek to continue the history of silencing uncomfortable queerness, but rather it sits in this silence while also seeking to amplify the hushed voices within it.

“Queer art cannot move forward because it is grounded in a contextual sphere that it yearns to escape”

Rupert Brooke, Cambridge pretty boy, notorious “one-quarter sentimental homosexual,” and equally notorious in my friendship circle for writing terrible poetry, had a long string of trysts with men until his death in 1915. He loses his virginity to a boy at Rugby School, Denham Russell-Smith, a rendezvous he later recounts as “an abortive affair” in a letter to James Strachey in 1912.

These meetings with various men continued in his youth, and upon his time in Cambridge, mingling with Bloomsberries, a sort of proto-cruising, though not without guilt. Brooke separates himself from the Bloomsbury Group, overwhelmed and breaking down over fears of social rejection and internalised fears of sodomy, pushing him towards a yearning for a Byronic, heroic death in war as a means of sexual purification. He gets his wish, and dies in the Great War. Rupert Brooke is always viewed as a tragic figure, a sort of lost poetic potential as a result of his untimely demise, though few know that it came as a consequence of his queerness. Social stigma is pervasive, breaking into the hearts of even the most neo-pagan, liberated group of artists Cambridge may ever have seen: as he puts it in Desertion, “Did you learn so suddenly (and I not by!) / Some whispered story”.

Not every story is tragic, and looking a bit further back in time takes us to Edward Carpenter. Unfortunately another rich white man, he was educated at Brighton College and taken into Trinity Hall in the 1860s, where his relationships with men began, including with future Master of Trinity Hall, Edward Beck. However, his unique experience at Cambridge, working under an English Socialist tutor, and discovering an attraction to men, seeped into his works, publishing both socialist philosophical tracts and political, homoerotic poetry.

“We dress up history, ornament it with beauty as queer people, perhaps as a form of historical reclamation”

His first collection, Narcissus and Other Poems, is one of the first interpretations of the tale of Narcissus as uniquely homoerotic, ending “Heart-broken Echo mocks the starry night profound”. This incredibly gay poem commences his 50 year writing career, but poses something unique to the queer Cambridge experience that we still see today. Under these classical allusions, Carpenter dresses up queerness as elevated, educated, on the peaks of Parnassus. We can see similarities between this and later queer institutions that became part of Cambridge: the aforementioned Bloomsbury group, or the Adonian secret society. We dress up history, ornament it with beauty as queer people, perhaps as a form of historical reclamation, or as a means of separating the queer self from the heteronormative collective through elevation rather than subjugation.

That is ultimately the crux of this article: we cannot change the discrimination that women or people of colour have faced which means that queer history here in Cambridge is totally void of them. We may look at modern scholars, and examples such as Patricia Duncker as contemporary history, but little ink has been spilled to make any of these people, with the exception of Woolf, to be foundational in the queer Cambridge canon. The existence of this canon, such a strong canon as Maurice, Orlando and Narcissus evidences, for all of the struggling queer artists out there, that your art is probably worth something; it is unique because it is queer.

There is an intangible allure to the unflinching audacity of queer writers unabashedly challenging social structures, and queer students can see themselves in those worlds. But more than that, we can see the slow construction of art in the Cambridge sphere that is both queer, and simultaneously unafraid to challenge the biases of the rich white men who created previous queer art.