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Review

Rowbotham’s gripping biography of British socialist Carpenter resurrects the very queer life of an overlooked and under-honored pioneer of what blossomed, many decades after his death in 1929, as gay liberation. Carpenter lived for 40 years with a working-class lover, balancing a very public homosexual and activist persona and a quite private domestic life. Late in the 19th century, he advocated the decriminalization of homosexuality; he was also a keen champion of woman’s suffrage, prison reform, and worker’s rights, and rejected capitalism, British imperialism, and “cant in religion.” He identified happily as a homosexual, but embraced society overall with an exuberant enthusiasm for broad alliances. He counted novelist E.M Forster, British Prime Minister Ramsey Macdonald, and Walt Whitman among his friends - though Rowbotham is skeptical that the poet and the homosexualist had sex when Carpenter visited America in 1877. This is by no means an uncritical study: Carpenter’s anti-Semitism, not uncommon in Britain of the time, is exposed. But it is an exquisitely readable - and indispensable - combination of passionate prose and rigorous research.

 -- Richard Labonte, Books to Watch Out For