Masculine Plural ― Queer Classics, Sex, and Education

The Classics were core to the curriculum and ethos of the intensely homosocial Victorian and Edwardian public schools, yet ancient homosexuality and erotic pedagogy were problematic to the educational establishment, which expurgated classical texts with sexual content. This volume analyses the intimate and uncomfortable nexus between the Classics, sex, and education primarily through the figure of the schoolmaster Philip Gillespie Bainbrigge (1890-1918), whose clandestine writings not only explore homoerotic desires but also offer insightful comments on Classical education. Now a marginalized figure, Bainbrigge's surviving works - a verse drama entitled Achilles in Scyros featuring a cross-dressing Achilles and a Chorus of lesbian schoolgirls, and a Latin dialogue between schoolboys - vividly demonstrate the queer potential of Classics and are marked by a celebration of the pleasures of sex and a refusal to apologize for homoerotic desire. Reprinted here in their entirety, they are accompanied by chapters setting them in their social and literary context, including their parallels with the writings of Bainbrigge's contemporaries and near contemporaries, such as John Addington Symonds, E. M. Forster, and A. E. Housman. What emerges is a provocative new perspective on the history of sexuality and the place of the Classics within that history, which demonstrates that a highly queer version of Classics was possible in private contexts.

Jennifer Ingleheart, Professor of Latin, Durham University

Jennifer Ingleheart is Professor of Latin at Durham University. She was educated at Bradford Girls' Grammar School and Wadham College, Oxford, and took up a lectureship at Durham University after completing her doctorate in 2004. She is the author of A Commentary on Ovid, Tristia, Book 2 (OUP, 2010) and the editor of Two Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid (OUP, 2011), and Ancient Rome and the Construction of Modern Homosexual Identities (OUP, 2015). Her ongoing projects focus on books that have been censored or censured for their sexual content, and on the translation of Classical culture into modernity.