Inside 'The Love That Dares: An Anthology of Queer Love Letters'

Whether it's passionate entreaties, secret scribbles, or sexy yearnings, queer love speaks across the centuries in these carefully curated notes written by the famous and the infamous.

Photo by Liam Truong on Unsplash

I keep a shoebox full of letters from a young man who I met in high school when I was 15. After spending a week sleeping on his family’s couch during a school trip (and a couple of nights in his bed while he timidly tucked himself into a blanket on the floor), we never met in person again. Yet, we began a furious correspondence that lasted years. I’d write him several times a week about my dreams and desires, sending off my missives as I awaited his strange, graphic, honest confessions of teen angst. Inside the envelopes—beautifully decorated with pen-and-ink drawings—he sometimes tucked in a mix tape or copies of books (the Bhagavad Gita, The Tibetan Book of the Dead) that I treasure as art pieces.

We never confessed any explicit emotions for one another (as far as I recall)—and he claimed to be straight and would tease me with his fantasies for various women—but these letters are packed full of passion and embarrassing truths that I cherish.

I thought about these revelations of heartfelt feelings as I read the letters in The Love That Dares: An Anthology of Queer Love Letters. Edited by Barbara Vesey and Rachel Smith, the compendium contains a trove of eye-opening, wistful and passionate communications between paramours and partners as well as friends and confidants. So not only do we get to read the gushy fanboy enthusiasm of Oscar Wilde, who wrote to Walt Whitman in 1882, but also we see the famous poet’s response in a letter he wrote to his lover Harry Stafford that describes Wilde’s visit.

Later, Black Civil Rights activist Bayard Rustin’s poignant 1945 letter to his lover Davis Platt is heartbreaking since, not only does he have to mask his identity (he calls Platt either Marie or M. so he can protect their relationship), he also explains the conflicted feelings he has—when homosexuality was a crime in most of the country and considered a mental health case. “Emotionally, I am at present strongly attached to Marie; intellectually, I know that every effort must be made to find a different solution, for my vocation, which is my life, is at stake..."

Audre Lorde's letters to Pat Parker spanned decades (a few from the 1980s are included) and provide a different sort of revelation. As the editors explain, their relationship wasn't sexual, but one of "mutual love, respect and support, and was made more intense not just by their shared love of language and their experiences of racism and sexism, but by their both living with and going through cancer treatment.”

On top of the letters, Vesey and Smith have included anecdotes and facts that will be useful to anyone curious about learning more queer history. And this is undoubtedly just the tip of the iceberg. As Mark Gatkiss writes in his introduction to the book, “Who knows how many coded, ecstatic little messages have been lost to us, burned by embarrassed family members or to head off police searches?”

Curious about how this essential anthology came together, I asked Barbara and Rachel to share more about their project and how queer people today could access the archive at Bishopsgate Institute, as well as start—or share—their own archives for future generations.

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Jerry Portwood: Your references and resources list is massive and a huge help! So much work went into making this book a reality: I know this is a labor of love, but how much time do you estimate you put in individually and/or together from the beginning to the finished book we have today?

Barbara Vesey: (checks email trail) The first record I have (we archivists love checking the records!) of correspondence about the book is from late September 2020—but that was Rachel inviting me to edit our initial spreadsheet of people we were longing to include, so I think our wonderful editor Ellie must have got in touch with us at Bishopsgate Institute (as she knew that the Special Collections and Archives there hold just about the largest LGBTQ+ collections in the country) a couple of months before that, even.

And I remember that things got held up quite a bit by Covid, as it meant we couldn’t physically go to other archives or individuals and had to rely on ordering up previously published collections of letters or just using the internet for our research. So I think it must have been over three years between first getting in touch and the book coming out (initially in hardback and audiobook in 2022, now just out in paperback).

Rachel Smith: Yes, we had a Zoom meeting with Ellie in September 2020 and we turned in our last draft in 2021, so it was a pretty quick turnaround! Covid did slow us up a bit but didn’t hold us back.

Some of the notable people's letters and missives are well-known, but were there any surprises or complete shocks in your research?

BV: The title, The Love That Dares, comes from a line in a poem called “Two Loves” written by the (frankly, evil) “Bosie” (Lord Alfred Douglas, whose mad dad the 9th Marquess of Queensberry was the one who left Oscar Wilde a note at the theatre where The Importance of Being Earnest was playing, accusing Wilde of being a “somdomite”—yes, he misspelled it!—which led to Wilde suing the Marquess, losing the suit and being sentenced to hard labour at Reading Gaol).

So we have this poem as an epigraph, and initially we were going to bookend this with the poem “The Love that Dares to Speak Its Name” by James Kirkup—that is, until we read it! It’s a very graphic poem in the voice of a Roman centurion who has sex with the corpse of Jesus. That was a bit of a shocker and, we decided, not really in keeping with the tone we were going for! We wanted the book to be a celebration, something joyous and life-affirming!

Apart from that, I remember also being a little saddened and disappointed to learn in the course of our research (and mentioned in the book) that the composer Benjamin Britten could be very cruel to people—particularly young boy singers whom he would work with for some of his choral pieces—basically dropping them once their voices broke.

I was also pleasantly surprised at the composer John Cage's frankness, when in a letter to his lover, the dancer Merce Cunningham, he writes “starved for a good long fuck with you”!

Barbara, you mention in your introduction how you had to winnow down the letters and people included. Any favorites that you hope people discover that might not have made it into this book?

BV: Yes! I had been following Alok Vaid-Menon on Instagram for a while and got in touch with them to ask if we could use a couple of their amazing posts on there. They very kindly did get back to us, but said they were working on a collection of their own so couldn’t OK our using them first. We were a bit gutted but, of course, we understood and respected that!

Another person I wish we could have included is Joseph Beam (1954-1988), a gay rights activist of color who wrote the beautiful book In the Life and short stories included “Brother to Brother” and “No Cheek to Turn”. If you search, you can hopefully find reprints of these, and Bishopsgate Institute have reference copies you can look at if you can visit the Special Collections in person. Beam died of AIDS in 1988, and all we had was a snail-mail address for his sister in Washington, D.C. We wrote to her twice but never heard back, so we couldn’t include anything of his work in our compilation, which we were really sad about.

Really, we hope people are moved to read more about everyone in the book, but especially people they might not have known much about before, like Djuna Barnes, Violet Trefusis, Bayard Rustin, and the young contemporary poet Ivan Nuru. Hopefully, the references and resources included in the book will help people get started on their own journeys into LGBTQIA+ people, events and works of art, past, present and future!

Rachel, you mention the bad spelling of some of the writers, but I also wonder if you had hoped to show the handwriting/penmanship of some of the people who wrote letters. I'm sure that some were gorgeous and others atrocious. What do you think is lost when we see these transcribed and typed rather in their original hand? Anything people can glean from going to the source?

RS: The handwriting is equal parts gorgeous and atrocious! I do think there is something lost in not seeing the original writing and, at the same time, people’s penmanship can be so difficult to read it’s detective work trying to figure out what they meant! If anyone is interested in viewing the original letters held at Bishopsgate Institute (John Dalby’s and John Thompson’s, the Rebel Dykes, Sean Dellenty), they are most welcome to! No appointment or proof of ID necessary, just come on down!

I appreciate the "sidebar" information, and think the book offers a great resource for people to understand the background on many topics. How did you determine what made it in? What other delicious details did you have to cut? Anything you want to share with readers now?

BV: Yes, we hit upon the sidebar idea partly as another way to include people and relationships we didn't have letters (or permission to use letters!) for. And really it was one of those things—what do they call it?—like where you learn a new word and suddenly you see and read it everywhere?

RS: Confirmation bias?

BV: Yes, thanks, Rach! Living with this book over more than two years, we just seemed to keep coming across fun facts, important info and scintillating goss that we felt it would be wonderful to include. Like I'd be listening to a podcast and they would mention another podcast about LGBTQ+ history; or a poet or public figure would turn up in our Insta feeds; or there'd be stuff from our own pasts. For instance, I’ve visited Oscar Wilde's tomb at Père Lachaise and read about how it has been defaced in the past, so we were just really excited about including it in the book.

We were sorry not to be able to include more of the correspondence between Alan Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky ... just couldn’t get the publishing rights sorted in time.

Also, we had been really excited about the prospect of including a Maori invocation, after we learned that the Maori language does not have gendered pronouns (found this out from the excellent podcast The Allusionist), but repeated attempts to get permission from the New Zealand MP Elizabeth Kerekere went unanswered. Fair enough, really, as she’s a busy MP!

RS: The sidebar boxes also allowed us to include people like Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (a.k.a. The Ladies of Llangollen), who hardly wrote any letters to each other because they rarely left each other.

Although there have been efforts to archive digital and electronic media in recent years, what do you think will happen to queer correspondence and the way we remember it in the future?

BV: I have to admit, I haven't written a letter in many years. I don't even send Christmas cards. I am a big postcard-sender and collector, though. Letters are wonderful, though, and I should get back in the habit. About 12 years ago a very close friend died unexpectedly, and his sister got in touch with me to ask if I wanted back some letters he had sent me from when we were teenagers, which at some point he had asked for back from me (he was thinking of using them in a piece of fiction he was working on). So that was lovely, getting those back, though at the same time sad and painful to revisit as his voice came through so clearly. Letters are so immediate that way.

RS: My partner and I still write physical cards and notes to each other. She and I are both auto-archivists so we would be happy for them to be shared and remembered.

When the hardback was published, we launched the Love That Dares Archive at BI, which is mentioned in the resources section of the paperback as well. Our first deposit is a collection of handwritten letters sent and received during Covid. If anyone has any letters they would like to be shared or remembered please email library@bishopsgate.org.uk! Don’t worry, we also have closure periods, so they wouldn’t need to be made accessible straight away!

If people are inspired to continue this research, how would they access or archive? Any pointers, warnings or caveats for the would-be historian or scribe seeking to dive in?

BV: Bishopsgate Institute is a great place to start! Also a good old search (using the search engine[s] of your choice) can unearth some interesting paths to follow.
If people want to start their own archive, then no special equipment is required except for space (virtual or IRL). If they are saving physical letters, photos, etc., then some place dry and free from bugs is ideal. As we say at the end of the book, if they have letters they’d like the Institute to look after/share with future generations, Bishopsgate offers a wonderful home and dedicated custodians! This goes, too, for diaries, memorabilia and any keepsakes people have and aren’t sure how best to keep them.

RS: Put a date on everything! And, to echo Barbara, you don’t need anything special to start an archive, except what is special to you.

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Bishopsgate Institute is open weekdays 10-5; with late opening Wednesdays til 8pm, by London’s Liverpool Street Station.

The Love That Dares: An Anthology of Queer Love Letters is available now.