“The center of aesthetic and homosexual activity was the Club of Hypocrites, where young men danced together — in spite of prohibitions, Evelyn Waugh explains that its members were known — not only for their drunkenness, hut also for the flamboyance of their costumes and their manners, which were in certain cases obviously homosexual. The George Restaurant was also a meeting place for Oxford homosexuals during the inter war period. The most flamboyant homosexuality at Oxford was embodied by two aesthetes, Harold Acton and Brian Howard, who had already been together in Eton from 1918 to 1922. Their homosexuality was aggressive, pretentious, and based primarily on style, posing, effect. Similarly, their “aestheticism” was intended to be a philosophy of life, a literary and artistic viewpoint, and not solely a sartorial caprice. Acton and Howard were at the avant-garde of an Oxonian aestheticism which strove to be in touch with the modern world and not locked up in a dusty fin de-siecle cult. In distinction to their com rades, who concentrated on cultivating their uniqueness while never venturing beyond their own rooms and by associating only with certain carefully selected people, they met enormous numbers of people and made a name for themselves through their social talent and their journalistic or poetic writings, and they organized a propaganda campaign for their “movement.” Martin Green describes them as “children of the sun” (Sonnenkinder) who refused to grow up after the war and who embodied all the adolescent arrogance at the heart of the Oxonian homosexual myth. Evelyn Waugh saw Brian Howard as an “incorrigible homosexual,” and his total lack of shame frightened him. The aesthetes made no mystery of their homosexuality, but it was not so much that as their affectations and the sense of their artistic superiority which earned them the hatred of the athletes. And if the hostility between the two camps frequently led to the ransacking of the aesthetes’ rooms by tipsy athletes, it was more a means of defense against a lifestyle and sexual ori¬entation that was beginning to submerge them than a witch hunt organized against the untouchables. Homosexuality may still have been under attack, but it was already recognized.”
- A history of homosexuality in Europe: Berlin, London, Paris, 1919-1939, volume I & II
by Florence Tamagne