Queer Sources of Adult Creativity
By: William Kuhn
Tags: Creative Non Fiction, LGBTQ, History, Creativity, Sexuality

Adolescent Taboo

Queer Sources of Adult Creativity

How teenage sexual frustration might lead to ultimate vocation

Harrow schoolboys, copyright Mark Draisey Photography, used with permission

Does anyone else love the striped socks, the bared legs, and the bear hugs of an all-boy boarding school? Or is it only me? Part of the appeal is that these boys are in a place famous for queer sexuality, though fairly few of them will identify as queer later in life. They’re in a place famous for privilege, but they’re undergoing something universal too. Their awkward and uncomfortable sexuality-in-the-making is pointing toward a future where something else is being made. What’s often overlooked about this period in everyone’s life is the growth of potential vocation and adult creativity that emerges from the increase of erotic feelings in our teenaged emotional lives.

My hypothesis is that everyone’s adult ingenuity and imagination lives in a direct relationship with the birth of their sexual selves. I’d like to explore that hypothesis in relation to two stories. One is the boarding school life of one of Britain’s greatest poets, Lord Byron. The other, pretty ridiculous by contrast, is my own experience at a suburban high school in central Ohio.

These are both experiences that now would be described as queer. What may’ve been experienced initially as a disability turns out in both cases to have been something of an advantage. The early taboo on same-sex sexual attraction also led early to adult vocation, both in Byron’s life and in mine.

1 Lord Byron at Harrow School, 1801–1805

Byron arrived at his boarding school with a bad foot and no father. He was thirteen and a spoiled brat. He hated it and prolonged his stays away from Harrow as much as he could.

By the time he was sixteen things had changed dramatically. As an older boy he was able to attract a small group of younger boys who looked up to him. There were intense relationships with these younger boys that he described in verse. He disguised the gender and the names of the people involved.

He had romantic friendships with two boys who, like him, had come early to their titles, the earl of Clare and Lord Delawarr. Byron struck his new school friends as absurdly proud of being a lord. They called him “the old English baron” to tease him out of it. Inevitably there were misunderstandings between them, and these too made their way into Byron’s first poems.

Many of his early verses are those of a kid who liked lying on gravestones. They dwell on death and dying as the only ways of preserving schoolboy love. Recall that in the early nineteenth century love between men was forbidden. If it didn’t always lead to death, if discovered it almost always led to disgrace. As a result the teenaged Byron concluded that the dead are better off than we are. Away with the tears which we fruitlessly shed — Let us mourn for the living, not weep for the dead.

He also imagined a mutual death with one of his closest friends. He rested his head on this boy’s chest. I’ll make my last, cold, pillow on thy breast; that breast, where oft in life, I’ve laid my head. Death is a way of his being able to sleep with this boy forever, without interference from a judgmental society. Together in one bed of earth we’ll lie!

Sex between schoolboys was both against the rules and customary at British boarding schools. It had to be kept secret because boys caught doing it were punished. Their parents were told. There were expulsions. They were branded with public shame it was hard to live down, no matter how ancient their titles.

Byron always claimed that his schoolboy romances were pure and Platonic. They were matters of the heart not the body. Whatever happened they were times of intense erotic imagination. He also discovered examples of legitimate same-sex desire in the ancient languages and history Harrow boys had to study. The god Apollo loved young Hyacinth. The Roman emperor Hadrian loved handsome Antinous. Byron compared one magnificent boy he knew to the Roman king of the gods. Equal to Jove that youth must be, greater than Jove he seems to me.

As an adult writer Byron considered his adolescent passions so key to his adult creativity that he penned two memoirs of his early love life. His later friend, Hobhouse, ensured that one of these, and perhaps the more important, was destroyed soon after Byron’s death. Why destroy an account of a Platonic schoolboy friendship?

It’s certainly more likely and more fun to conclude that Byron had both Clare and Delawarr backwards and forwards, in their striped socks and out of them, on gravestones and elsewhere, before they all left Harrow. Neither of them was ashamed either then, or later. Byron himself always remembered his last year at Harrow as among the happiest times of his life.

Decades later when Byron met Clare by chance on an Italian highway, he described the few minutes they spent together as one of the most memorable scenes of his life.

The risks Byron and these boys took if they did have sex with one another, nevertheless, would have been considerable. Those chances taken were good training, for Byron certainly, and maybe for the other two as well. They helped to make for happiness and bravery both in their later love lives and in their later careers. Byron’s love life always depended on risk taking, even when he was far beyond his schooldays.

Coping with the taboo surrounding schoolboy love drove Byron into poetry. It was the origin of his adult persona of injured, misunderstood soul who longed only for wild romantic fulfillment. The hypocrisy of forbidding at a British boarding school what most boys did anyway was the first of multiple British dishonesties about sex that drove him ultimately into exile. He found his later identity as a man and a poet by outraging conventional British opinion on sexuality and marriage. This also underwrote his fame and success as a writer. Was he always happy doing it? No. But he’s not one of the four principal romantic poets for nothing. His whole achievement rests on breaking the rules of poetry as he found them. That rule breaking began at his boarding school.

2 Bill Kuhn at Whetstone High School, Columbus, Ohio, 1972–75

In my own high school days, there were no boy-lords. There were no nearby graveyards for writing poetry. I chose to stand out, instead, by wearing a plaid jacket with a polka-dotted shirt for my senior picture.

Bill Kuhn, long suppressed photo, used by permission of the sitter

Many of my friends were having their first sex in high school, but I wasn’t. I was going through the motions of dating girls occasionally and refusing to come to terms with my homosexuality on a full-time basis.

Columbus, Ohio was scarcely a desert when I was growing up. My father was a professor and Columbus is a university town, but I knew no gay people and there were no role models in the media. I wasn’t brought up in any church, but every teenaged boy I knew made it clear that to be gay was an abomination, even if he couldn’t spell it, or use the word properly in a sentence. I was blind to the other, and contradictory messages these boys were sending me.

Like Byron I developed language as the most important of my maturing sexual organs. I did well in English, French, and Latin. I knew that good grades were my ticket to more urban and sophisticated places where people like me probably existed. I got a writing award and this captured the attention of a big university that was far away. I was invited to apply.

I found the first elements of my vocation in understanding that both sexually and creatively I had to get out of Columbus, Ohio. I’ve always been sexually most at home hundreds of miles and ideally an ocean away from where I grew up. Byron too ultimately found the kind of love life he wanted to lead only in exile from England.

I was reluctantly attracted to boys when I was in high school. One played the trumpet. Another was good at every sport he tried. A third was a classic student government type. I didn’t dare to try being friends with them then, but I developed the language that allows me to reveal that one of these boys repeatedly slugged me in the shoulder to try and get my attention. Another, from under his thick mane of dark hair, shyly asked for my help in chemistry. A third, whom I used to watch undressing in the locker room, made a surprising concession when pressed by a girl we both knew. He admitted that he and I looked alike. Maybe we were alike in other ways? I collected those images in my mind when I was a kid and stored them away like erotic baseball cards in a secret shoe box.

I kept them with me when I quit my first real job to go abroad and write short stories. They soothed me and put me to sleep at night in the midst of what I knew was a risky maneuver. They were at the heart of an intellectual project I began in grad school where I tried to explain the appeal and endurance of the British monarchy. It’s only years of writing about royalty that has made me see how much I imagined that rank and distinction would repair the self-loathing I developed in high school.

Sweet, foiled, teenaged desire. You made me what I am today. You gave me books and the ambition to write them. You gave me writing and the will to explore things so taboo that the teenaged me couldn’t even have put them into words. But now as an adult I can.

What did adolescent desire give you? And how does that relate to the adult you’ve become? If you look at your most creative self, are there some links to the sexual teen you once were?

Byron once wrote to a friend to amuse him. He described all the debauched nightlife of his London season and concluded I am buried in an abyss of sensuality. Buried he might’ve been, but in that abyss he was also born. His adult creativity was uniquely linked to what he went through as a schoolboy.

Just as Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has tips that may be applied beyond the queer world for dressing, cooking, and decorating, I’d like to think that these two stories of queer, hyper-sensitivity to the sexually forbidden may have more universal appeal. Consider whether you too don’t employ the sexually taboo of your adolescence as the raw material in your adult creative genius. It’s possible that queer people, who often have to meet and bear their burden early in life, may also have the advantage of being early introduced to the source of their creativity.