As we turn the leaf on a new chapter of modern history that embraces a more inclusive definition of love<\/a> \u2014 both culturally and, at last, politically<\/a> \u2014 here is a celebration of the human heart\u2019s highest capacity through history\u2019s most beautiful and timelessly bewitching LGBTQ love letters.<\/p>\n VIRGINIA WOOLF AND VITA SACKVILLE-WEST<\/b><\/p>\n The gender-bending protagonist in Virginia Woolf\u2019s pioneering novel Orlando<\/i>, which subverted censorship to revolutionize the politics of queer love<\/a>, was based on the English poet Vita Sackville-West, Woolf\u2019s onetime passionate lover and lifelong dear friend<\/a>. In fact, the entire novel is thought to have been written about the affair \u2014 so much so that Sackville-West\u2019s son, Nigel Nicolson, has described it as \u201cthe longest and most charming love-letter in literature.\u201d Be that as it may, the two women also exchanged some gorgeous love letters in real life, found in the altogether wonderful collection The 50 Greatest Love Letters of All Time<\/i><\/b><\/a> (public library<\/i><\/a>). Here is one from Virginia to Vita from January of 1927, shortly after the two had fallen madly in love:<\/p>\n Look here Vita \u2014 throw over your man, and we\u2019ll go to Hampton Court and dine on the river together and walk in the garden in the moonlight and come home late and have a bottle of wine and get tipsy, and I\u2019ll tell you all the things I have in my head, millions, myriads \u2014 They won\u2019t stir by day, only by dark on the river. Think of that. Throw over your man, I say, and come.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf<\/p><\/div>\n On January 21, Vita sends Virginia this disarmingly honest, heartfelt, and unguarded letter, which stands in beautiful contrast with Virginia\u2019s passionate prose:<\/p>\n \u2026I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn\u2019t even feel it. And yet I believe you\u2019ll be sensible of a little gap. But you\u2019d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan\u2019t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this \u2014 But oh my dear, I can\u2019t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don\u2019t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don\u2019t really resent it.<\/i><\/p>\n On the day of Orlando<\/i><\/a>\u2019s publication, Vita received a package containing not only the printed book, but also Virginia\u2019s original manuscript, bound specifically for her in Niger leather and engraved with her initials on the spine.<\/p>\n MARGARET MEAD AND RUTH BENEDICT<\/b><\/p>\n Margaret Mead<\/a> endures as the world\u2019s best-known and most influential cultural anthropologist, who not only popularized anthropology itself but also laid the foundation for the sexual revolution of the 1960s with her studies of attitudes towards sex. In addition to broadening cultural conventions through her work, she also embodied the revolution in her personal life. Married three times to men, she dearly loved her third husband, the renowned British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, with whom she had a daughter. But the most intense and enduring relationship of her life was with a woman \u2014 the anthropologist and folklorist Ruth Benedict, Mead\u2019s mentor at Columbia university, fourteen years her senior. The two shared a bond of uncommon magnitude and passion, which stretched across a quarter century until the end of Benedict\u2019s life.<\/p>\n Margaret\u2019s love letters to Ruth, posthumously gathered in To Cherish the Life of the World: Selected Letters of Margaret Mead<\/i><\/b><\/a> (public library<\/i><\/a>) \u2014 which also gave us Mead\u2019s prescient position on homosexuality<\/a> \u2014 are a thing of absolute, soul-stirring beauty, on par with such famed epistolary romances as those between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera<\/a>, Georgia O\u2019Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz<\/a>, Henry Miller and Ana\u00efs Nin<\/a>, and Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir<\/a>.<\/p>\n Margaret Mead & Ruth Benedict<\/p><\/div>\n In August of 1925, 24-year-old Mead sailed to Samoa, beginning the journey that would produce her enormously influential treatise Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation<\/i><\/a>. (Mead, who believed that \u201cone can love several people and that demonstrative affection has its place in different types of relationship,\u201d was married at the time to her first husband and they had an unconventional arrangement that both allowed her to do field work away from him for extended periods of time and accommodated her feelings for Ruth.) On her fourth day at sea, she writes Benedict with equal parts devotion and urgency:<\/p>\n Ruth, dear heart, <\/i><\/p>\n . . . The mail which I got just before leaving Honolulu and in my steamer mail could not have been better chosen. Five letters from you \u2014 and, oh, I hope you may often feel me near you as you did \u2014 resting so softly and sweetly in your arms. Whenever I am weary and sick with longing for you I can always go back and recapture that afternoon out at Bedford Hills this spring, when your kisses were rained down on my face, and that memory ends always in peace, beloved.<\/i><\/p>\n A few days later:<\/p>\n Ruth, I was never more earthborn in my life \u2014 and yet never more conscious of the strength your love gives me. You have convinced me of the one thing in life which made living worthwhile. <\/i><\/p>\n You have no greater gift, darling. And every memory of your face, every cadence of your voice is joy whereon I shall feed hungrily in these coming months.<\/i><\/p>\n In another letter:<\/p>\n [I wonder] whether I could manage to go on living, to want to go on living if you did not care.<\/i><\/p>\n And later:<\/p>\n Does Honolulu need your phantom presence? Oh, my darling \u2014 without it, I could not live here at all. Your lips bring blessings \u2014 my beloved.<\/i><\/p>\n Letter from Margaret Mead to Ruth Benedict, October 1925 (Library of Congress)<\/p><\/div>\n In December of that year, Mead was offered a position as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, where she would go on to spend the rest of her career. She excitedly accepted, in large part so that she could at last be closer to Benedict, and moved to New York with her husband, Luther Cressman, firmly believing that the two relationships would neither harm nor contradict one another. As soon as the decision was made, she wrote to Benedict on January 7, 1926:<\/p>\n Your trust in my decision has been my mainstay, darling, otherwise I just couldn\u2019t have managed. And all this love which you have poured out to me is very bread and wine to my direct need. Always, always I am coming back to you. <\/i><\/p>\n I kiss your hair, sweetheart.<\/i><\/p>\n Four days later, Mead sends Benedict a poignant letter, reflecting on her two relationships and how love crystallizes<\/a> of its own volition:<\/p>\n In one way this solitary existence is particularly revealing \u2014 in the way I can twist and change in my attitudes towards people with absolutely no stimulus at all except such as springs from within me. I\u2019ll awaken some morning just loving you frightfully much in some quite new way and I may not have sufficiently rubbed the sleep from my eyes to have even looked at your picture. It gives me a strange, almost uncanny feeling of autonomy. And it is true that we have had this loveliness \u201cnear\u201d together for I never feel you too far away to whisper to, and your dear hair is always just slipping through my fingers. . . . <\/i><\/p>\n When I do good work it is always always for you \u2026 and the thought of you now makes me a little unbearably happy.<\/i><\/p>\n Five weeks later, in mid-February, Mead and Benedict begin planning a three-week getaway together, which proves, thanks to their husbands\u2019 schedules, to be more complicated than the two originally thought. Exasperated over all the planning, Margaret writes Ruth:<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be so blinded by looking at you, I think now it won\u2019t matter \u2014 but the lovely thing about our love is that it will. We aren\u2019t like those lovers of Edward\u2019s \u201cnow they are sleeping cheek to cheek\u201d etc. who forgot all the things their love had taught them to love \u2014 <\/i><\/p>\n Precious, precious. I kiss your hair.<\/i><\/p>\n By mid-March, Mead is once again firmly rooted in her love for Benedict:<\/p>\n I feel immensely freed and sustained, the dark months of doubt washed away, and that I can look you gladly in the eyes as you take me in your arms. My beloved! My beautiful one. I thank God you do not try to fence me off, but trust me to take life as it comes and make something of it. With that trust of yours I can do anything \u2014 and come out with something precious saved. <\/i><\/p>\n Sweet, I kiss your hands.<\/i><\/p>\n As the summer comes, Mead finds herself as in love with Benedict as when they first met six years prior, writing in a letter dated August 26, 1926:<\/p>\n Ruth dearest, <\/i><\/p>\n I am very happy and an enormous number of cobwebs seem to have been blown away in Paris. I was so miserable that last day, I came nearer doubting than ever before the essentially impregnable character of our affection for each other. And now I feel at peace with the whole world. You may think it is tempting the gods to say so, but I take all this as high guarantee of what I\u2019ve always temperamentally doubted \u2014 the permanence of passion \u2014 and the mere turn of your head, a chance inflection of your voice have just as much power to make the day over now as they did four years ago. And so just as you give me zest for growing older rather than dread, so also you give me a faith I never thought to win in the lastingness of passion. <\/i><\/p>\n I love you, Ruth.<\/i><\/p>\n Letter from Margaret Mead to Ruth Benedict, January 1926 (Library of Congress)<\/p><\/div>\n In September of 1928, as Mead travels by train to marry her second husband after her first marriage crumbled, another bittersweet letter to Ruth leaves us speculating about what might have been different had the legal luxuries of modern love<\/a> been a reality in Mead\u2019s day, making it possible for her and Ruth to marry and formalize their steadfast union under the law:<\/p>\n Darling,<\/i><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/i><\/p>\n I\u2019ve slept mostly today trying to get rid of this cold and not to look at the country which I saw first from your arms. <\/i><\/p>\n Mostly, I think I\u2019m a fool to marry anyone. I\u2019ll probably just make a man and myself unhappy. Right now most of my daydreams are concerned with not getting married at all. I wonder if wanting to marry isn\u2019t just another identification with you, and a false one. For I couldn\u2019t have taken you away from Stanley and you could take me away from [Reo] \u2014 there\u2019s no blinking that.<\/i><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/i><\/p>\n Beside the strength and permanence and all enduring feeling which I have for you, everything else is shifting sand. Do you mind terribly when I say these things? You mustn\u2019t mind \u2014 ever \u2014 anything in the most perfect gift God has given me. The center of my life is a beautiful walled place, if the edges are a little weedy and ragged \u2014 well, it\u2019s the center which counts \u2014 My sweetheart, my beautiful, my lovely one. <\/i><\/p>\n Your Margaret<\/i><\/p>\n By 1933, despite the liberal arrangements of her marriage, Mead felt that it forcibly squeezed out of her the love she had for Benedict. In a letter to Ruth from April 9, she reflects on those dynamics and gasps at the relief of choosing to break free of those constraints and being once again free to love fully:<\/p>\n Having laid aside so much of myself, in response to what I mistakenly believed was the necessity of my marriage I had no room for emotional development. \u2026 Ah, my darling, it is so good to really be all myself to love you again. . . . The moon is full and the lake lies still and lovely \u2014 this place is like Heaven \u2014 and I am in love with life. Goodnight, darling.<\/i><\/p>\n Over the years that followed, both Margaret and Ruth explored the boundaries of their other relationships, through more marriages and domestic partnerships, but their love for each other only continued to grow. In 1938, Mead captured it beautifully by writing of \u201cthe permanence of [their] companionship.\u201d Mead and her last husband, Gregory Bateson, named Benedict the guardian of their daughter. The two women shared their singular bond until Benedict\u2019s sudden death from a heart attack in 1948. In one of her final letters, Mead wrote:<\/p>\n Always I love you and realize what a desert life might have been without you.<\/i><\/p>\n See more of their gorgeous correspondence here<\/a>.<\/p>\n ALLEN GINSBERG AND PETER ORLOVSKY<\/b><\/p>\n Their letters, filled with typos, missing punctuation, and the grammatical oddities typical of writing propelled by bursts of intense emotion rather than literary precision, are absolutely beautiful.<\/p>\n Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky in San Francisco, 1955<\/p><\/div>\n In a letter from January 20, 1958, Ginsberg writes to Orlovsky from Paris, recounting a visit with his close friend and fellow beatnik, William S. Burroughs<\/a>, another icon of literature\u2019s gay subculture:<\/p>\n Dear Petey:<\/i><\/p>\n O Heart O Love everything is suddenly turned to gold! Don\u2019t be afraid don\u2019t worry the most astounding beautiful thing has happened here! I don\u2019t know where to begin but the most important. When Bill [ed: William S. Burroughs] came I, we, thought it was the same old Bill mad, but something had happened to Bill in the meantime since we last saw him . . . . but last night finally Bill and I sat down facing each other across the kitchen table and looked eye to eye and talked, and I confessed all my doubt and misery \u2014 and in front of my eyes he turned into an Angel!<\/i><\/p>\n What happened to him in Tangiers this last few months? It seems he stopped writing and sat on his bed all afternoons thinking and meditating alone & stopped drinking \u2014 and finally dawned on his consciousness, slowly and repeatedly, every day, for several months \u2014 awareness of \u201ca benevolent sentient (feeling) center to the whole Creation\u201d \u2014 he had apparently, in his own way, what I have been so hung up in myself and you, a vision of big peaceful Lovebrain. . . .<\/i><\/p>\n I woke up this morning with great bliss of freedom & joy in my heart, Bill\u2019s saved, I\u2019m saved, you\u2019re saved, we\u2019re all saved, everything has been all rapturous ever since \u2014 I only feel sad that perhaps you left as worried when we waved goodby and kissed so awkwardly \u2014 I wish I could have that over to say goodby to you happier & without the worries and doubts I had that dusty dusk when you left\u2026 \u2014 Bill is changed nature, I even feel much changed, great clouds rolled away, as I feel when you and I were in rapport, well, our rapport has remained in me, with me, rather than losing it, I\u2019m feeling to everyone, something of the same as between us.<\/i><\/p>\n A couple of weeks later, in early February, Orlovsky sends a letter to Ginsberg from New York, in which he writes with beautiful prescience:<\/p>\n \u2026dont worry dear Allen things are going ok \u2014 we\u2019ll change the world yet to our dessire \u2014 even if we got to die \u2014 but OH the world\u2019s got 25 rainbows on my window sill. . . .<\/i><\/p>\n As soon as he receives the letter the day after Valentine\u2019s Day, Ginsberg writes back, quoting Shakespeare like only a love-struck poet would:<\/p>\n I have been running around with mad mean poets & world-eaters here & was longing for kind words from heaven which you wrote, came as fresh as a summer breeze & \u201cwhen I think on thee dear friend \/ all loses are restored & sorrows end,\u201d came over & over in my mind \u2014 it\u2019s the end of a Shakespeare Sonnet \u2014 he must have been happy in love too. I had never realized that before. . . .<\/i><\/p>\n Write me soon baby, I\u2019ll write you big long poem I feel as if you were god that I pray to \u2013<\/i><\/p>\n Love,<\/i><\/p>\n Allen<\/i><\/p>\n In another letter sent nine days later, Ginsberg writes:<\/p>\n I\u2019m making it all right here, but I miss you, your arms & nakedness & holding each other \u2014 life seems emptier without you, the soulwarmth isn\u2019t around. . . .<\/i><\/p>\n Citing another conversation he had had with Burroughs, he goes on to presage the enormous leap for the dignity and equality of love that we\u2019ve only just seen<\/a> more than half a century after Ginsberg wrote this:<\/p>\n Bill thinks new American generation will be hip & will slowly change things \u2014 laws & attitudes, he has hope there \u2014 for some redemption of America, finding its soul. . . . \u2014 you have to love all life, not just parts, to make the eternal scene, that\u2019s what I think since we\u2019ve made it, more & more I see it isn\u2019t just between us, it\u2019s feeling that can [be] extended to everything. Tho I long for the actual sunlight contact between us I miss you like a home. Shine back honey & think of me.<\/i><\/p>\n He ends the letter with a short verse:<\/p>\n Goodbye Mr. February. EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY AND EDITH WYNN MATTHISON<\/b><\/p>\n In 1917, during her final year at Vassar College \u2014 which she had entered at the unusually ripe age of 21 and from which she was almost expelled for partying too much<\/a> \u2014 Edna St. Vincent Millay<\/a> met and befriended British silent film actress Edith Wynne Matthison<\/b>, fifteen years her senior. Taken with Matthison\u2019s fierce spirit, majestic beauty, and impeccable style, Millay\u2019s platonic attraction quickly blossomed into an intense romantic infatuation. Edith, a woman who made no apologies for relishing life\u2019s bounties, eventually kissed Edna and invited her to her summer home. A series of disarmingly passionate letters followed. Found in The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay<\/i><\/b><\/a> (public library<\/i><\/a>) \u2014 which also gave us Millay on her love of music<\/a> and her playfully lewd self-portrait<\/a> \u2014 these epistolary longings capture that strange blend of electrifying ardor and paralyzing pride familiar to anyone who\u2019s ever been in love.<\/p>\n Writing to Edith, Edna cautions of her uncompromising frankness:<\/p>\n Listen; if ever in my letters to you, or in my conversation, you see a candor that seems almost crude, \u2014 please know that it is because when I think of you I think of real things, & become honest, \u2014 and quibbling and circumvention seem very inconsiderable.<\/i><\/p>\n In another, she pleads:<\/p>\n I will do whatever you tell me to do. \u2026 Love me, please; I love you. I can bear to be your friend. So ask of me anything. \u2026 But never be \u2018tolerant,\u2019 or \u2018kind.\u2019 And never say to me again \u2014 don\u2019t dare to say to me again \u2014 \u2018Anyway, you can make a trial\u2019 of being friends with you! Because I can\u2019t do things that way. \u2026 I am conscious only of doing the thing that I love to do \u2014 that I have to do \u2014 and I have to be your friend.<\/i><\/p>\n In yet another, Millay articulates brilliantly the \u201cproud surrender\u201d at the heart of every materialized infatuation and every miracle of \u201creal, honest, complete love\u201d<\/a>:<\/p>\n You wrote me a beautiful letter, \u2014 I wonder if you meant it to be as beautiful as it was. \u2014 I think you did; for somehow I know that your feeling for me, however slight it is, is of the nature of love. \u2026 nothing that has happened to me for a long time has made me so happy as I shall be to visit you sometime. \u2014 You must not forget that you spoke of that, \u2014 because it would disappoint me cruelly. \u2026 I shall try to bring a few quite nice things with me; I will get together all that I can, and then when you tell me to come, I will come, by the next train, just as I am. This is not meekness, be assured; I do not come naturally by meekness; know that it is a proud surrender to you; I don\u2019t talk like that to many people.<\/i><\/p>\n With love,<\/i><\/p>\n Vincent Millay<\/i><\/p>\n ELEANOR ROOSEVELT AND LORENA HICKOK<\/b><\/p>\n Eleanor Roosevelt<\/a> endures not only as the longest-serving American First Lady (1933-1945), but also as one of history\u2019s most politically impactful, a fierce champion of working women and underprivileged youth.<\/p>\n But her personal life has been the subject of lasting controversy.<\/p>\n In the summer of 1928, Roosevelt met journalist Lorena Hickok<\/a>, whom she would come to refer to as Hick. The thirty-year relationship that ensued has remained the subject of much speculation, from the evening of FDR\u2019s inauguration, when the First Lady was seen wearing a sapphire ring Hickok had given her, to the opening up of her private correspondence archives in 1998. Though many of the most explicit letters had been burned, the 300 published in Empty Without You: The Intimate Letters Of Eleanor Roosevelt And Lorena Hickok<\/i><\/b><\/a> (public library<\/i><\/a>) \u2014 at once less unequivocal than history\u2019s most revealing woman-to-woman love letters<\/a> and more suggestive than those of great female platonic friendships<\/a> \u2014 strongly indicate the relationship between Roosevelt and Hickok had been one of great romantic intensity.<\/p>\n Eleanor Roosevelt & Lorena Hickok<\/p><\/div>\n On March 5, 1933, the first evening of FDR\u2019s inauguration, Roosevelt wrote Hick:<\/p>\n Hick my dearest\u2013<\/i><\/p>\n I cannot go to bed tonight without a word to you. I felt a little as though a part of me was leaving tonight. You have grown so much to be a part of my life that it is empty without you.<\/i><\/p>\n Then, the following day:<\/p>\n Hick, darling<\/i><\/p>\n Ah, how good it was to hear your voice. It was so inadequate to try and tell you what it meant. Funny was that I couldn\u2019t say je t\u2019aime and je t\u2019adore as I longed to do, but always remember that I am saying it, that I go to sleep thinking of you.<\/i><\/p>\n And the night after:<\/p>\n Hick darling<\/i><\/p>\n All day I\u2019ve thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonite you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you, I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort. I look at it & think \u201cshe does love me, or I wouldn\u2019t be wearing it!\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n And in yet another letter:<\/p>\n I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.<\/i><\/p>\n Hick herself responded with equal intensity. In a letter from December 1933, she wrote:<\/p>\n I\u2019ve been trying to bring back your face \u2014 to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips.<\/i><\/p>\n Granted, human dynamics are complex and ambiguous enough even for those directly involved, making it hard to assume anything with absolute certainty from the sidelines of an epistolary relationship long after the correspondents\u2019 deaths. But wherever on the spectrum of the platonic and romantic the letters in Empty Without You<\/i><\/b><\/a> may fall, they offer a beautiful record of a tender, steadfast, deeply loving relationship between two women who meant the world to one another, even if the world never quite condoned or understood their profound connection.<\/p>\n OSCAR WILDE AND SIR ALFRED \u201cBOSIE\u201d TAYLOR<\/b><\/p>\n Even as we make historic progress on the dignity and equality of human love<\/a>, it\u2019s hard to forget the enormous indignities to which the lovers of yore have been subjected across the 4,000-year history of persecuting desire<\/a>. Among modernity\u2019s most tragic victims of our shameful past is Oscar Wilde<\/a>, who was imprisoned multiple times for his \u201ccrime\u201d of homosexuality, run into bankruptcy and exile, and fell to an untimely death. But Wilde\u2019s most \u201csinful\u201d quality \u2014 his enormous capacity for passionate, profound love \u2014 was also one of the most poetic gifts of his life.<\/p>\n In June of 1891, Wilde met Lord Alfred \u201cBosie\u201d Douglas, a 21-year-old Oxford undergraduate and talented poet, who would come to be the author\u2019s own Dorian Gray \u2014 his literary muse, his evil genius, his restless lover. It was during the course of their affair that Wilde wrote Salom\u00e9<\/i> and the four great plays which to this day endure as the cornerstones of his legacy. Their correspondence, collected Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters<\/i><\/b><\/a> (public library<\/i><\/a>), makes for an infinitely inspired addition to the most beautiful love letters exchanged between history\u2019s greatest creative and intellectual power couples.<\/p>\n Oscar Wilde and Bosie<\/p><\/div>\n In January of 1893, Wilde writes to Bosie:<\/p>\n My Own Boy, <\/i><\/p>\n Your sonnet is quite lovely, and it is a marvel that those red rose-leaf lips of yours should be made no less for the madness of music and song than for the madness of kissing. Your slim gilt soul walks between passion and poetry. I know Hyacinthus, whom Apollo loved so madly, was you in Greek days. <\/i><\/p>\n Why are you alone in London, and when do you go to Salisbury? Do go there to cool your hands in the grey twilight of Gothic things, and come here whenever you like. It is a lovely place and lacks only you; but go to Salisbury first. <\/i><\/p>\n Always, with undying love, yours, <\/i><\/p>\n Oscar<\/i><\/p>\n In early March of 1893, Wilde channels love\u2019s exasperating sense of urgency:<\/p>\n Dearest of All Boys \u2014 Your letter was delightful \u2014 red and yellow wine to me \u2014 but I am sad and out of sorts \u2014 Bosie \u2014 you must not make scenes with me \u2014 they kill me \u2014 they wreck the loveliness of life \u2014 I cannot see you, so Greek and gracious, distorted with passion; I cannot listen to your curved lips saying hideous things to me \u2014 don\u2019t do it \u2014 you break my heart \u2014 I\u2019d sooner be rented* all day, than have you bitter, unjust, and horrid \u2014 horrid. <\/i><\/p>\n I must see you soon \u2014 you are the divine thing I want \u2014 the thing of grace and genius \u2014 but but I don\u2019t know how to do it \u2014 Shall I come to Salisbury \u2014 ? There are many difficulties \u2014 my bill here is \u00a349 for a week! I have also got a new sitting-room over the Thames \u2014 but you, why are you not here, my dear, my wonderful boy \u2014 ? I fear I must leave; no money, no credit, and a heart of lead \u2013<\/i><\/p>\n Ever your own, <\/i><\/p>\n Oscar<\/i><\/p>\n * \u201crenter\u201d was slang for male prostitute in London<\/p>\n Their affair was intense, bustling with dramatic tempestuousness, but underpinning it was a profound and genuine love. In a letter from late December of 1893, after a recent rift, Wilde writes to Douglas:<\/p>\n My dearest Boy,<\/i><\/p>\n Thanks for your letter. I am overwhelmed by the wings of vulture creditors, and out of sorts, but I am happy in the knowledge that we are friends again, and that our love has passed through the shadow and the light of estrangement and sorrow and come out rose-crowned as of old. Let us always be infinitely dear to each other, as indeed we have been always.<\/i><\/p>\n [\u2026]<\/i><\/p>\n I think of you daily, and am always devotedly yours.<\/i><\/p>\n Oscar<\/i><\/p>\n In July of the following year, Wilde writes:<\/p>\n My own dear Boy,<\/i><\/p>\n I hope the cigarettes arrived all right. I lunched with Gladys de Grey, Reggie and Aleck York there. They want me to go to Paris with them on Thursday: they say one wears flannels and straw hats and dines in the Bois, but, of course, I have no money, as usual, and can\u2019t go. Besides, I want to see you. It is really absurd. I can\u2019t live without you. You are so dear, so wonderful. I think of you all day long, and miss your grace, your boyish beauty, the bright sword-play of your wit, the delicate fancy of your genius, so surprising always in its sudden swallow-flights towards north and south, towards sun and moon \u2014 and, above all, yourself. The only thing that consoles me is what Sybil of Mortimer Street (whom mortals call Mrs. Robinson) said to me*. If I could disbelieve her I would, but I can\u2019t, and I know that early in January you and I will go away together for a long voyage, and that your lovely life goes always hand in hand with mine. My dear wonderful boy, I hope you are brilliant and happy.<\/i><\/p>\n I went to Bertie, today I wrote at home, then went and sat with my mother. Death and Love seem to walk on either hand as I go through life: they are the only things I think of, their wings shadow me.<\/i><\/p>\n London is a desert without your dainty feet\u2026 Write me a line and take all my love \u2014 now and for ever.<\/i><\/p>\n Always, and with devotion \u2014 but I have no words for how I love you.<\/i><\/p>\n Oscar<\/i><\/p>\n * The fortuneteller\u2019s prophesy apparently came true \u2014 Wilde and Douglas travelled to Algiers together the following January.<\/i><\/p>\n In 1895, at the height of his literary success, with his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest<\/i> drawing continuous acclaim across the stages of London, Wilde had Douglas\u2019s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, prosecuted for libel. But the evidence unearthed during the trial led to Wilde\u2019s own arrest on charges of \u201cgross indecency\u201d with members of the same sex. Two more trials followed, after which he was sentenced for two years of \u201chard labor\u201d in prison. On April 29 of that year, having hit emotional and psychological rock-bottom, his reputation ruined and his health deteriorating, Wilde wrote to Douglas on the eve of the final trial:<\/p>\n My dearest boy,<\/i><\/p>\n This is to assure you of my immortal, my eternal love for you. Tomorrow all will be over. If prison and dishonour be my destiny, think that my love for you and this idea, this still more divine belief, that you love me in return will sustain me in my unhappiness and will make me capable, I hope, of bearing my grief most patiently. Since the hope, nay rather the certainty, of meeting you again in some world is the goal and the encouragement of my present life, ah! I must continue to live in this world because of that.<\/i><\/p>\n Another letter, written on August 31, 1897, shortly after Wilde\u2019s release from prison, reads:<\/p>\n Caf\u00e9 Suisse, Dieppe<\/i> My own Darling Boy, <\/i><\/p>\n I got your telegram half an hour ago, and just send a line to say that I feel that my only hope of again doing beautiful work in art is being with you. It was not so in the old days, but now it is different, and you can really recreate in me that energy and sense of joyous power on which art depends. Everyone is furious with me for going back to you, but they don\u2019t understand us. I feel that it is only with you that I can do anything at all. Do remake my ruined life for me, and then our friendship and love will have a different meaning to the world. <\/i><\/p>\n I wish that when we met at Rouen we had not parted at all. There are such wide abysses now of space and land between us. But we love each other. Goodnight, dear. Ever yours, <\/i><\/p>\n Oscar<\/i><\/p>\n Oscar and Bosie in 1893<\/p><\/div>\n But perhaps the most eloquent articulation of their relationship comes from a letter Wilde wrote to Leonard Smithers \u2014 a Sheffield solicitor with a side business of printing erotica, who became the only publisher interested in Wilde\u2019s books in his post-prison years \u2014 on October 1, 1897:<\/p>\n How can you keep on asking is Lord Alfred Douglas in Naples? You know quite well he is \u2014 we are together. He understands me and my art, and loves both. I hope never to be separated from him. He is a most delicate and exquisite poet, besides \u2014 far the finest of all the young poets in England. You have got to publish his next volume; it is full of lovely lyrics, flute-music and moon-music, and sonnets in ivory and gold. He is witty, graceful, lovely to look at, lovable to be with. He has also ruined my life, so I can\u2019t help loving him \u2014 it is the only thing to do.<\/i><\/p>\n More of their exquisite correspondence appears in Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters<\/i><\/b><\/a>, but that one sentence alone \u2014 \u201cHe understands me and my art, and loves both.\u201d<\/i> \u2014 is an immeasurably beautiful addition to history\u2019s most profound definitions of love<\/a>, a sublime manifestation of the highest hope one creative soul can have for a union with another.<\/p>\n _______________________<\/p>\n Brain Pickings<\/em> is the brain child of Maria Popova, an interestingness hunter-gatherer and curious mind at large obsessed with combinatorial creativity who also writes for <\/i>Wired<\/em> UK and The Atlantic<\/em><\/a>, among others, and is an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow. She has gotten occasional help from a handful of guest contributors<\/a>.<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n![\"Vita](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Vita-Sackville-West-and-Virginia-Woolf-300x211.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Margaret](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/Margaret-Mead-Ruth-Benedict-300x187.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Letter](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/letter-mead-benedict1-195x300.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Letter](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/letter-mead-benedict2-195x300.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"gay](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/gay-love-letters-mydearboy-196x300.jpg\")
<\/a>From the wonderful 1998 anthology My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries<\/i><\/b><\/a> (public library<\/i><\/a>) \u2014 a diverse collection of missives covering the universalities of romantic love, from longing and infatuation to jealousy and rejection to tenderness and loyalty \u2014 comes the correspondence of Beat Generation godfather Allen Ginsberg<\/b> and the poet Peter Orlovsky<\/b>. The two had met in San Francisco in 1954, embarking upon what Ginsberg called their \u201cmarriage\u201d \u2014 a lifelong relationship that went through many phases, endured multiple challenges, but ultimately lasted until Ginsberg\u2019s death in 1997.<\/p>\n![\"Allen](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/ginsberg-orlovsky-300x198.jpg\")
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\nas tender as ever
\nswept with warm rain
\nlove from your Allen<\/i><\/p>\n![\"Eleanor](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/eleanor-roosevelt-lorena-hickok-300x152.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Oscar](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/oscar-wilde-bosie1-300x211.jpg\")
<\/a>
\nTuesday, 7:30<\/i><\/p>\n![\"Oscar](\"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/oscarwilde-bosie-212x300.jpg\")
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