![]() As one of my characters in Uranians puts it, “Maybe feeling like you have to have two kids, two cars, a grass lawn all winter, and a steak dinner every night to be happy is what got Earth into such a bad state.” And, more than unsustainable, the dream is precarious, so that any attempt to swap out its props and set dressings gets treated as a threat to happiness itself. You know the one: single-family suburban home, the crowded commute, college funds for the kids, and the high-earning jobs that pay for this lifestyle-which tend to be jobs aligned, indirectly or not, with our fossil-fueled status quo. And in the U.S., at least, when we look at the sectors responsible for most of our emissions, it’s hard not to see the connection between, on the one hand, emissions from transportation, power generation, land use, agriculture and the meat industry, etc., and on the other hand, a pattern of consumption tied up with a certain image of American middle-class prosperity. Fossil fuel interests may have abused the notion of individual carbon footprints, but it’s still important to confront how mass consumption drives demand. (Here, Carpenter’s early stabs at gender theory are limited, but still interesting, invoking a stereotypical binary to position queer people as healthy, helpful intermediaries.) Though copping to Uranians’ fair share of “a poor and frivolous sort,” generally, Carpenter says, “the experience of the Uranian world forming itself freely and not subject to outside laws and institutions comes as a guide-and really a hopeful guide-towards the future.” In short, if we’re trying to create a socialist utopia, one driven by open, democratic principles instead of greed and narrow thinking, who better to lead this transformation than the Uranians? This “Uranian”-taking up a term from Ulrichs, inspired by Plato-“puts Love before everything else … postponing to it the other motives like money-making, business success, fame, which occupy so much space in most people’s careers.” These new, “intermediate” sexes pursue their relationships “beneath the surface of society,” at the risk of disgrace, prosecution, and ruin. Maybe the increased public attention to homosexuals indicates a “new type of humankind may be emerging,” for whom an “immense capacity of emotional love represents … a great driving force.” Here, not only is homosexual love not worse than its more familiar counterparts-maybe it’s better. In 1908’s The Intermediate Sex, Carpenter comes out swinging. Still, Carpenter continued to write cultural surveys and defenses of homosexuality through the decade after the Wilde trials, growing ever bolder in his optimism. But he did get the young man’s name and address. Carpenter did not take up Merrill’s invitation and abandon his guests. Carpenter was, if anything, too careful, a bit hopeless even, his enthusiasm for men more often unconsummated and unrequited, directed at younger, working-class socialists with at best ambivalent sexualities. He was an early adopter of a certain rural, “simplified” lifestyle movement that George Orwell would later deride as “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.” Orwell here definitely had Carpenter in mind, and only the fourth charge (“sex-maniac”) was unfair. ![]() ![]() An early British socialist, Carpenter organized and wrote polemics advocating for unions, animal welfare, vegetarianism, and anti-pollution measures. At 46, Edward Carpenter cut a strikingly handsome figure, with dark, high-arched brows, a full, silver beard, and an intensity to his features belied by the sheer earnestness of his idealism.
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