The Untold Gay History Of Britain’s First World War Poets Revealed

One of the reasons we’re able to understand, with such vivid knowledge, what life was like during WW1 is thanks to some great poetry.

But what many who grew up reading Britain’s First World War poets in school–and those who continue to read them at A Level–may be surprised to hear is that some of them loved men.

In a new podcast Love and War, launched on Armistice Day 2020, the visceral works of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney, Charles Sorley and even Rupert Brooke have been rediscovered. This time, brought to life and revealed with all their gay context left in.

The poets lived their lives at a time it was illegal to be gay, with the partial decriminalisation at least 50 years away.

And for years our prejudices about the LGBTQ community, and laws like Section 28 which put curbs on teaching about LGBTQ life in education, has meant we have left out perhaps the most significant contexts of the war poetry we’ve come to revere–the love story they tell.

Poet Sassoon (left) with a fellow soldier (right)

Supplied: Kevin Childs

“Whatever we think about war, LGBTQ people have been fighting in wars for millennia–often unacknowledged,” Kevin Childs, who directed the podcast, tells me.

“In the two World Wars gay and bisexual men and women fought and died for a country that rejected them. Very few places were as homophobic as Britain in the first half of the 20th century with a very active prosecution policy for gay men.

“In a sense, they were fighting as much for recognition as for ‘King and Country’. It just took a long time to come, and it’s right to remember them now.”

The new podcast pieces together the gay, bisexual and queer poets’ lives through their own words. 

“Many of the poems are actually love poems even when they’re at their most visceral and brutal. Before the war, Sassoon was a late romantic poet. He was obsessed with nature and the countryside. That imagery still slips into his war poetry, giving it a sort of grandeur as well as intimacy and visceral quality.

“His love for the men he serves with is quite palpable—as well as clearly erotic. When a young man he was in love with was killed on patrol one night, he became reckless with his own life until he was wounded during the Somme and returned to Britain.”

Love and War dramatizes and explores how these poets have touched generations of readers. And yet this new fresh look, which doesn’t ignore their love for other men, brings a whole new light to their grief, their passions and their sacrifices.

“Dulce et Decorum est” a poem written by Wilfred Owen during World War I, and published posthumously … [+] in 1920

Supplied: Kevin Childs

Podcast director Childs says to strip the poets of their sexuality, as we have for years, has been neutering the impact of their poetry on the last hundred years of remembrance.

“The narrative around LGBTQ people has been skewed towards the idea of ‘weakness,’ Childs tells me. “The idea that somehow LGBTQ people can’t fight? A prejudice which ignores a long, rich strain of LGBTQ warriors going back to at least the Greeks.”

“Until very recently LGBTQ people weren’t allowed to serve in the military and would be brutally thrown out if found out. To ignore our history is to ignore a significant number of LGBTQ lives. As well as much of the culture that has made us what we are.

“To erase, or deny, their sexuality is to lose the essence of their poetry. These poets captured something so essential.

“Would their poetry have had the same intensity if they weren’t LGBTQ? That’s a redundant question. You cannot divorce the poets from their sexual orientation, and when you listen to the poetry in this light, the poems are transformed. Their sexuality was a core part of their identity and their response to the War that engulfed them.”

The poets that Childs’ podcast explores were very young and under enormous mental and physical strain when they wrote their poetry. So it’s even more extraordinary that, despite the pain and anguish around them, their work was part of a movement that has defined our understanding of poetry today.

“They were also creating what we would now recognise as modern, if not modernist, poetry. Its rhythms, its diction, its concerns and themes–all before poetry became heavily intellectualized and obscure.

“It’s part of their power and explains why they’re still so popular. They really do seem to be speaking to us, whatever generation ‘us’ is.

“The obvious lesson is the pointlessness and cruelty of war. As Gurney said in one of his letters, couldn’t God (or by extension humans) ‘have found a some better, milder way of changing things than by the breaking of such beautiful souls?’

“However often we’re told this, it seems, we still forget or ignore the lesson.”

And perhaps the most important lesson here is that when we strip the context of love from words, as history has done to some of these poets, we forget something more substantial. We can all recognize the value in love and human connection. It brings us together in even the most challenging times.

Love and War is out now on Acast, and in all the places podcasts live.

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