"It was like feasting with panthers; the danger was half the excitement. I used to feel as a snake-charmer must feel when he lures the cobra to stir from the painted cloth or reed basket that holds it and makes it spread its hood at his bidding and sway to and fro in the air as a plant swaying restfully in a stream... I don't feel at all ashamed at having them."

Upon visiting his good friend Edward Carpenter, and his companion George Merrill, Edward Morgan Forster, the author of such classics as A Room with a View and Howards End, he was subjected to an extraordinary assault on his senses. Recalling it later, he remembered how Merrill had stroked him 'gently and just above the buttocks." This moment of epiphany was so strong that the 'sensation was unusual and I still remember it... It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving my thoughts." This encounter with a man of the lower orders would lead to Forster writing his most personal novel, the semi-autobiographical, Maurice.

Forster once expressed, in a memorandum, to himself, that he longed 'to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket.' In common with Wilde, and many others of his class, he too wanted the pleasure of 'feasting with panthers' and this probably explained his admiration for the open way in which Carpenter and Merrill lived their life together.

Unlike Carpenter, Merrill was a 'working-class bloke from the slums' and, apparently, was said to be so uneducated that, when he heard that Gethsemane was the last spot where Jesus had slept on his last night of freedom, he asked, in all ignorance, 'Who with?' Carpenter's life was remarkable, not only for his relationship with Merrill, but in many other ways.

Born in Brighton in 1844, Carpenter went to Cambridge and took orders, becoming curate to the Christian Scientist F D Maurice. Feeling at odds with his background, he rebelled, inspired by the poetry of Walt Whitman:

"It was not until I was twenty-five that I read Whitman - and then with a great leap of joy - that I met with the treatment of sex which accorded with my sentiments."

So began a prolific career as an author of best-selling tomes on a number of diverse subjects such as science, economics, Wagner and gardening. He was also a charismatic public speaker, electrifying audiences with his talks on the inequities of society. He envisaged a world where men and women could be bound together, not by work or commodity relations, but by the force of love. True democracy, he surmised, required a change not just in the class structure but in the mode of reproduction of the human heart. Needless to say, he had his critics. George Orwell denounced him as a "fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer and sex maniac" although, strangely, the author of 1984 forgot his sexual orientation.

Whereas Orwell's socialist credentials have come into question since his death, Carpenter practiced what he preached.

In 1891, he met the twenty-one year old George Merrill in a railway carriage. It was love at first sight. They exchanged a few words, a look of recognition. Carpenter gave Merrill his address and from then they began their life together. The younger man stayed with him for the rest of his days, dying a year before mentor, leaving the older man heartbroken.

Forster too would also have the love of a younger man. For half a century, he shared his life with Bob Buckingham, a married policemen with two children. Yet he never found the courage to come out of the closet, despite the cajoling of his close friend, J R Ackerley. It was this reluctance, a hangover from Wilde's conviction, that Maurice remained unpublished until his death in 1970.

One has to admire Ackerley's persistence, although it appears to have been a lost cause. When criticizing Forster's reluctance to become open about his sexuality, pointing to the likes of André Gide, he responded with the lamentable cry of:

"But Gide has no mother!"

© Howard Watson 2002