Until recently, marriage was seen as a safe victory for generations of gay activists. However a wave of regressive Supreme Court decisions in the USA has led many to consider the right to same-sex marriages ‘under threat’. The revived struggle in the United States, no longer to achieve, but now to defend, same-sex marriage has reintroduced many familiar homophobic talking points into public debate. This has included the idea that allowing gay couples to marry devalues or threatens the institution of (heterosexual) marriage.
These objections are rarely grounded in any kind of evidence, and tend to be emotion-based, rather than fact-based reactions to the prospect of broader access to marriage. However the historical record does show instances of queer couples (particularly those whose queerness is largely defined by same-sex orientation) challenging traditional marriage and monogamy structures. Within the letters and diaries of those in Chelsea’s bohemian arts scene in London in the 1900s and 1910s, a layered web of non-monogamy becomes visible. These sources show how queer people in a city where many same-sex relationships were still criminalised (though prosecutions largely tended to target poorer communities) built their own structures of relationships outside the monogamous norm.
Some of the internal tensions that the struggle for marriage equality has brought out in contemporary queer communities have highlighted the assimilationist aspirations of those who frame marriage as a priority over more revolutionary liberation-focused goals. This earlier period in London’s history also provides a useful illustration of how queer individuals’ complicity in existing systems of patriarchy, colonialism, and capitalism has infected movements, or even impulses, for queer liberation.
Chelsea in the first decade of the twentieth century was a hotspot of cultural production, as many of the period’s most famous authors, artists, and musicians gravitated towards the affluent streets on the banks of the River Thames, figures including John Singer Sargent, Bram Stoker, and Percy Grainger. Amongst these aesthetes were many queer figures who saw in this community opportunities for alternative forms of kinship and relationship structures that subverted the received heterosexual norms of wider society. With ‘lavender’ marriages between two queer partners common, and extramarital affairs effectively normalised, the codes for monogamy within this subculture were significantly different from those that were expected of other Londoners at the time.
The term ‘lavender marriage’ (which likely originated in the early twentieth century) generally refers to a marriage between a man and a woman in which at least one partner experiences same-sex attraction. Usually this term implies that the queer partner or partners had little to no interest in pursuing a sexual relationship with their spouse and that they indulged in extra-marital queer relationships during the course of their marriage. Throughout the twentieth century, when both partners in this kind of alliance were queer, a lavender marriage could provide an innovative and creative way of giving cover and a veneer of respectability to queer people in generally hostile environments. They most famously occured within Hollywood in the 1950s, when studios would often arrange marriages for their queer film stars.
It may have appeared that lavender marriages and open relationships offered a kind of liberatory sexual politics to those ingratiated into Chelsea’s queer spaces. However many of these relationships still operated within the context of a conservative and regressive relationship to whiteness and empire. Most of the more prominent figures in the network had direct familial links to monarchy and aristocracy, or at the very least supported their lifestyles on the spoils of colonialism.
These queer communities were marked by wealth, whiteness, and the most direct connections imaginable to the heads of church and state that represented normativity at its most stifling. And yet, individuals were finding ways, both deliberate and inadvertent, to undermine the rules and restraints of traditional marriage.
Within the world of the upper-class aesthetes who made up the bulk of Edwardian Chelsea’s social scene, these kind of lavender marriages were a popular relationship dynamic. They provided the aforementioned benefits and drew together many individuals into a complex web of sex and friendship that built unlikely alliances and solidified bonds within the network. That said, this form of consensual non-monogamy had limitations. The expectation that couples had to arrange themselves in marriages, albeit unexclusive ones, may well have contributed to the tendency of extra-marital same-sex couples to operate within a fairly strict monogamous framework, with only a few exceptions.
Bain News Service, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
The nature of these marriages often ran contrary to many normative expectations of monogamous wedlock, in particular the expectation of sexual exclusivity. Couples like Adolph and Olga de Meyer (he a prominent fashion photographer, she the goddaughter and rumoured biological daughter of the king) entered into marriages of convenience while conducting their own same-sex affairs within a shared social scene rife with ideas of bohemian liberalism. Olga de Meyer’s connections to royalty gave her a sense of untouchability that led to some of the most overt lesbian relationships of the period, while her husband produced a souvenir booklet of the Ballet Russes’ highly eroticised Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. Often, the affairs of couples like the de Meyers would be with partners who were themselves involved in similar arrangements, producing a wide-ranging and highly connected network of queer sex and matrimony.
Olga de Meyer’s lover, Winnaretta Singer (or the Princess de Polignac, to use her married title) was a central figure in this complicated network. The daughter of a wealthy sewing machine tycoon, she used her fortune and her position to establish herself as an influential patron of the arts, especially music. Singer hosted many of the parties and soirees where these queer figures mingled to listen to piano performances, or engage in tarot, palm readings, and seances. At the same time, she conducted affairs with many of the women involved in this scene. Her reputation as the lesbian lothario of London and Paris was secured both by the sheer quantity of her known partners and the indiscretion that allowed so many of these relationships to be publicly known.
These relationships, which mostly occurred during the course of Singer’s marriage to her queer husband, Prince Edmond de Polignac, also occasionally overlapped with each other. For example, Singer’s relationship with Olga de Meyer was far from over when, in 1905, she began a relationship with Romaine Brooks. Brooks was a somewhat androgynous artist deeply fascinated by fascism, whom Singer had met at an event organised by the de Meyers. This infidelity did not appear to trouble Olga de Meyer and their relationship continued until a financial dispute between Singer and Adolph de Meyer brought the affair to an end in 1907. Olga de Meyer’s loyalty to her husband over her lover led to the breakdown of the Singer-de Meyer relationship, indicating a deeper friendship than would be implied by a simple ‘marriage of convenience’.
It was not only in these queer ‘marriage blanc‘ scenarios that couples in Chelsea felt able to explore other sexual partners. For Lilith Lowrey, the wife of a wealthy financier, the influence of her queer neighbours may well have rubbed off on her heterosexual marriage. Her patronage of young musicians was just as much a sexual venture as it was an opportunity to support the arts and mingle in high society. One of her favoured pianists and lovers, Percy Grainger, described the relationship as being somewhat akin to sex work. Grainger also noted that Lowrey’s husband was well aware of the arrangement, approving of the assistance in meeting his wife’s significantly greater sexual appetite.
This kind of open marriage arrangement may look remarkably similar to many current forms of ethical non-monogamy. However it would be a mistake to consider these kinds of relationships as entirely radical departures from conservative frameworks. Many of the extra-marital queer relationships of the fin de siècle Chelsea arts scene still exhibited strong tendencies towards jealousy and all of its most potentially toxic manifestations. For example, Singer’s lover Alvilde Lees-Milne was known for spying both on her sexual partners and on her bisexual, fascist-sympathising husband, James Lees-Milne. Even in the most idealised forms of pornographic queer representation, it was hard to imagine a successful queer relationship without at least a craving for sexual exclusivity and, in some cases, complete ownership. Such is the case in Teleny, an 1893 work of pornography that has been widely attributed to Oscar Wilde, one of the area’s most celebrated residents, whose own same-sex liaisons took place alongside his otherwise apparently heterosexual marriage.
Furthermore, the very freedom that many of these individuals possessed to evade scrutiny in their personal lives was only ensured by their connections to the most exploitative machines of empire. The Baroness de Meyer, for example, whether his biological daughter or not, possessed an incredibly close relationship with King Edward VII. Even Lilith Lowrey, who wooed young pianists in her storied Cheyne Row mansion, was only able to maintain such a famous property through the money her husband Francis earned in the colonial plundering of Africa alongside Cecil Rhodes. Rhodes’ campaign of white supremacy in South Africa has left a brutal legacy that continues to be felt.
It is certainly easy to romanticise the traditions of lavender marriages and queer non-monogamy that were so prevalent in the London arts scene during the Belle Epoch. However, to over-simplify the past in this way would be to overlook the many tensions that existed between queer couples, as well as the growing interest in alternative relationship structures within heterosexual participants in this scene. Most importantly, however, it would be a failure not to take into consideration the considerable inequalities that allowed the rich and the powerful to live by a double-standard of sexual propriety. Provided they avoided relationships that troubled other structures like class and race, this group remained free from the expected social and legal repercussions of queer sex in the early twentieth century. Repercussions that, in the wake of the Wilde trials, were only too fresh in the public’s memory.