Frederick Rolfe: Difference between revisions

Frederick Rolfe was entirely comfortable with his homosexuality, and associated and corresponded with a number of other gay Englishmen. Early in his life he wrote a fair amount of idealistic but mawkish poetry about boy martyrs and the like, and these and his Toto stories contain pederastic elements, but the young male pupils he was teaching at the time unanimously recalled in later life that there had never been any hint of impropriety in his relations with them. As he himself matured, Rolfe’s settled sexual preference was for late adolescents. Towards the end of his life, he made his only explicit reference to his specific sexual age preference, in one of the Venice letters to [[Charles Masson Fox]], in which he declared: 'My preference was for the 16, 17, 18 and large.'<ref>Rolfe to Fox, 13 January 1910, in Cecil Woolf ed., ''The Venice Letters'', Cecil & Amelia Woolf, 1974, p.46.</ref>

Those of whom it is either speculated or surmised that they had sexual relations with Rolfe - Aubrey Thurstans, Sholto Douglas, John 'Markoleone', Ermenegildo Vianello and the other Venetian gondoliers - were all sexually mature young men between the ages of sixteen and twenty-one (with the exception of Douglas,<ref>This was Sholto Osborne Gordon Douglas (1873-1934), educated at Fettes College, Portsmouth Grammar School and Christ Church College, Oxford, author of ''A Theory of Civilization'' (1914) and of several volumes of poetry, most notably ''Ungodly Jingles'' (1923).</ref> who was considerably older). The idealised young men in his fiction were of a similar age.<ref>Toto in ''Stories Toto Told Me'', Tarquinio and Lucrezia in ''Don Tarquinio'', Renato and Eros in ''Don Renato'', and Zildo in ''The Desire and Pursuit of the Whole'' are all in their mid- to late-teens.</ref> Rolfe sought to characterise the relationships in his fiction as examples of '[[Greek love]]' between an older man and an [[ephebe]], and thus endow them with the sanction of the ancient Hellenic tradition familiar to all Edwardians with a classical education.