And, of course, Edward Carpenter-- another. He was a giant among poofs. Oh, lets not forget Radclyffe Hall, please! She was Very Butch, yes, but though we're gathered on this page to talk about Mr. Carpenter, I want it known first that Ms. Hall--an English lesbian-- stole my heart away when I was barely fifteen. That gal could really bewitch. If Butch meant soaking up sensitivity like hers, I was ready.

A walk through Mother Nature in Radclyffe Hall's prose and a reader may learn to love the natural world forever. Her book, still a classic in its odd and special way, was titled The Well of Loneliness, a phenomenon that became a poignant, unforgettable contribution to lesbian herstory. To my history too. After reading The Well of Loneliness, in fact, I kept it handy for loans to high school-age chums. The last page made a powerful, heartrending plea for social tolerance. In Radclyffe Hall's day, scientists called those persons attracted to their own gender, inverts. Same-sex desires, they assumed from questionable perches, were inverted. Hearing about such assumptions as I did, Ms. Hall's tolerance plea fell loudly on my ears.

But so did the amazing writings of England's Edward Carpenter, to whom Ms. Hall also once called our attention. In fact, she actually signed on, witnessing as a writer to Carpenter's originality and power, not to mention certain efficacious effects stemming from others' absorbing of him.

Yes, Radclyffe Hall and her English invert and Parisian lesbian friends all knew of the famous writer-invert, Carpenter, whom I too finally discovered in the musty basement of a second-hand bookstore during that same teen year. Other luminaries of the 19th Century knew him too, complimenting him, as well they should have. He had a clear vision, many thought, of what must most infuse a harmonious society (in general) and our personal lives-(in-particular.)

That is, it-- it is vision-- would infuse inner-outer harmony, if those so affected could only be persuaded to wish, as did Carpenter, to feel alive and to feel wisely connected somehow to life.

Carpenter's birthday much pre-dated Radclyffe Hall's though, for a time, they were contemporaries. In his era there were several names in vogue for "the Love that Dare not Speak its Name." From the going words used in the year 1896, Carpenter chose the term Uranian Love, while gay males and lesbians he called Uranians, and, later,after the turn of the century, he began regularly to refer to The Intermediate Sex.

This "intermediate" ideal was clearly no hermaphrodite, no, because Carpenter pointed out how mostly indistinguishable characteristics marked the bodies and carriages of Uranian men or women.

He also suggested shamelessly, as Whitman had, that, as he put it, "the capacity" for same-sex love "also exists, though in a germinal and undeveloped state, in the breast of mankind at large."

This, folks, is a radical conception.

He had his own vision of future harmony and he promised that this vision constituted the revolution he envisioned. He was a working-class aristocrat who moved far into the countryside, fleeing from "stuffy" London, tending orchards on a farm, his long-time companion at his side.

He never grew old, Edward Carpenter, and he never felt old. And sometimes when I fancy reincarnation, I don't imagine myself as an ancient king, nor a famous general. No, I dare to fantasize I'd be a writer like Edward Carpenter again, except this time around I'd be getting a new menu at life's table, like one I am getting. Edward Carpenter like me-- and as he himself realized--had become a moon, reflecting Leaves of Grass--a central sun-- and writing, as a result, his own Whitmanesque-type verse and titling it Towards Democracy.

In his revealing autobiography, My Days and Dreams, first published in 1916, Carpenter told what it was like to age on the internal trail he'd known. He said:

Surely all these other things--these games and examinations, these churches and chapels, these district councils and money markets, these top hats and telephones and even the general necessity of earning one's living--if they are not ultimately for that, what are they for?

A new book, James T. Sears' Lonely Hunters, quotes my notes on first discovering Carpenter. They tell how I'd found at 15: a rare mildewed copy of (Carpenter's) Love's Coming of Age, a foremost sex-liberation tome of its day (1896). Turning the yellowed pages, I found myself mesmerized by the exquisite spiritual intonations of its author. His gentle sophistication was, for me, my first communion with a great gay thinker.

The latest published reincarnation of 19th Century (Carpenter) source materials-- published back in 1984--(Edward Carpenter: Selected Writings, Volume 1: Sex) came by way of The Gay Men's Press in London. Its been both a svelte hardback and paperback, chock full of Carpenter's uncanny, gentle, happy trappings of his reader's inmost thoughts-- reaching those readers from every era and summer-salting the attentive ones through new dimensions--closing gates from previous painful reincarnations---- social-prison-boxes-- and locking them forever behind, sometimes.

Eventually, with a smile, one sees that Carpenter has, with only a spirited finese, seduced with his visions of heart/warmed ideals, leading beyond the banality of cluttered rooms, climbing perhaps, on a hill, his arm resting gently beside yours, peering across to satisfying possibilities shimmering in the immediate distance.

Carpenter, I once wrote in The Advocate, laid the foundations for his own life early on. He was among the first thinkers who acted to square the insights of a most intimate inner life with its outer demeanors, promising, like Carpenter did, and like the exquisite rose that he was, to bloom sometimes unnoticed by the many. The hearts of his students now leap--as they grasp Carpenter's worldview and gain from his words what they wish to gain from living the self's life-- and then they seem, with amusing insight, to penetrate the core of disjointed living patterns affecting them.

Carpenter was a visionary who spoke insightfully about friendship-sexuality, with an emphasis on the first aspect, namely being a friend. He saw far beyond the view that politics is only about elections, economics and parliaments and he looked to women, gay males, and artists in every field to plant the seeds of a new age he foresaw, a universal age that would, hopefully, celebrate the underlying unity of earth's peoples.

The English visionary, with his certain genius, took note of of press-close-to-the-flesh questions people too often think too intimate, such as sexuality, daily relations with neighbors, relations with our own thoughts, egalitarian relationships, and the development of truly satisfying interpersonal contact in status-conscious societies where money, buyers, and where contentious spirits loosed by a misdirected and unhealthy faith in competition, predominate.

In his time he was appreciated and the giants listed on Europe's most famous intellectual billboards presented Carpenter with a joint letter of profound appreciation on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

He'd been an aristocrat, but had found himself--along with George Merrill--settling in the countryside and excelling at manual labor, the loving commoner, George at his side. Born during 1844--the year the first telegraph message was sent--Carpenter's insights flared across far horizons similarly, opening communicative possibilities undreamed of in the last century's sexually repressed social past.

Dr. R.M. Bucke, author of the long-selling mystical classic, Cosmic Consciousness, believed Carpenter an evolved type. But considering the mystical bent of Carpenter's perceptions, he would never have thought to disseminate his views by touting as evolved. No hocus-pocus halo, thanks, but instead, perhaps, call Carpenter a secular mystic, his knowledge of ancient world-wide religious themes amazing, while he perpetually turns these immense themes to earthly uses.

American psychologist William James acclaimed him. So did the mystical Russian, P.D. Ouspensky. The Canadian Dr. Bucke wrote of Carpenter's visionary powers, attached as they were to the psychologically affirmative poetry of Walt Whitman:

Whether Carpenter would have attained Cosmic Consciousness if he had never read Whitman cannot perhaps be said, either by himself or by anyone else, but therre seems little doubt that the study of the Leaves was a material factor leading up to his illumination.

Carpenter's name continues to pop up in American and European histories. He's known outside the gay liberation movement itself, especially for his highly evolved views about feminism, socialism, anarchism, anti-vivisection, food, war, friendship, and great teachers.

Marilyn Ferguson, in her well-known book, The Acquarian Conspiracy, recalls Carpenter as "a remarkably visionary social scientist and poet of the late 19th century." She quotes his acurate description of how people see the world differently if only they allow themselves to on the other side of hidden pictures, in personal paradigm shifts. Carpenter, she says, described the shifts this way:

So great, so splendid, is this experience, that it may be said that all minor questions and doubts fall away in the face of it; and certain it is that in thousands and thousands of cases, the fact of its having come even once to an individual has completely revolutionized his subsequent life and outlook on the world.

During the decadent decade following World War I, there were public moods of frantic pessemism and, happily, the literary giants on the Continent recognized in Carpenter an antidote to the cynicism of the doomsayers. This was why such as Radclyffe Hall and George Bernard Shaw signed his 70th birthday letter, pointing to his amazing contributions. Edward Carpenter was elegant yet earthy, even practical, yet balanced and serene, blessed with serene laughter, a penetrating yet eloquent worldliness that dispelled mind-shadows and played up the promises of the future.

The famous 70th birthday letter from his many celebrated admirers said,

Your books, with no aid but their own originality and power, have found their way among all classes of people in our own and many other lands, and they have everywhere brought with them a message of fellowship and gladness. At a time when society is confused and overburdened by its own restlessness and artificiality, your writings have called us back to the vital facts of nature, to the need of simplicity and calmness; of just dealing between man and man; of free and equal citizenship; of love, beauty and humanity in our daily life.

And a final tellling word about George Merrill, Carpenter's life-long love. In Merrill the humble high-brow, an artistocrat, found a world of fun-loving pleasure, one unsullied by priggish puritan strains. Though he had little of the polish and sophistication of his lover Carpenter found Merrill a natural man. It is said Merrill knew nothing of the Bible. When he heard that Jesus had spent his final night in the Garden of Gethsemane, his unaffected response was, "Who with?"

Guests came from far and wide to Millthrope, the country home these happy men shared. The visitors traveled into rural territory not only to pay their homage, but to gather up new ideas. During their 30-year relationship, Carpenter and Merrill seeded fresh new attitudes in fertile ground.

The produce from their orchards was regularly transported to country markets. The spiritual essences that rose through the lives of these two people ascends aloft still--gaining momentum and crossing foreign borders where the essences waft, waiting briefly, then calling out once again to be born.