Ralph Walker: Ralph Walker is creator of The Loving Brotherhood. This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#41). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
Frank Leib has set out to make clear the rich dimensions of the life-transforming possibilities of homosexual love, by reminding us of the long history of “fierce companions,” from antiquity to our own day. This book is a paean of praise for Edward Carpenter, the Anglican priest, poet, and mystic, filled with much material from and about his life and writings and accounts of his wide-ranging connections and associations with well-known figures of his time, from the late 19th into the early 20th century.
Leib draws evidence from the life of Carpenter as well as the spiritual and literary tradition, all the way back to the Greeks and before. As Carpenter clearly recognized, our “homogenic” love (his word) is rooted in our deeply involved, expansive and all-inclusive spiritual nature.
The kind of connection that we are capable of as gay men may well be even more clearly spiritual than the connection between a man and a woman, or certainly more than is ordinarily experienced in most couplings, either hetero- or homosexual. But if this is true, how can each of us discover it for our own selves?
Carpenter offers hints and Leib gives suggestions. I would underline the importance of friendship, as did Walt Whitman, whom Carpenter came to America to meet and with whom he had much talk and indeed also made love. Deep and abiding friendship underlay Carpenter's love, including that for his companion of thirty years, George Merrill. Until you and your mate are friends, you cannot be fully lovers and companions. If your partner is not someone who stirs the fires of deepest love, compassion, and passionate sex, then you are somehow “invalidating” sex as a viable spiritual and moral connection. Blessedly, Carpenter seems to have truly surmounted the bugaboo of sex.
Himself a product of the Victorian age, somehow, though not without struggle, he moved to a recognition of the beauty and wonder of sex and got past the ingrained prejudices which have made it “dirty” or “disgusting” or “immoral.”
Carpenter explored perhaps more widely and deeply than anyone else the rich and glorious expressions of homogenic love, from pre-history to early 20th century and in civilizations and cultures sometimes almost unknown. And unequivocally finds all of it good!
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