The sexuality of G.K. Chesterton
A Christian writer had some ‘gender trouble’
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London in 1874. He was called Gilbert. His parents were middle-class and Unitarian, on the more liberal side.
He was raised in the period style of dressing boys in androgynous styles. He was seen as strikingly feminine even in that style.
As a teenager he was tall but his voice didn’t change.
A 1973 biography by Dudley Barker notes: “even in adult life, Chesterton was to speak in a high tenor.” A friend described Chesteron’s adult voice as “rather cracked and creaking, which gave the impression of adenoids.”
Alarmed at Gilbert’s developmental delays, and apparent absent-mindedness and quality of being a ‘dreamer’, his parents took him to a ‘brain specialist’. As Barker continues:
“According to his mother, the specialist declared that the boy had the largest and most sensitive brain he had come across, that he would turn out to be an imbecile or a genius, and that he must be carefully guarded against mental shock or strain.”
With his teenage years he entered his “morbid” period.
In his autobiography published in 1936, Chesterton refers to the dark phase as happening because of Oscar Wilde, who was a celebrity at the time.
Chesterton writes of his “morbidity” being “due to the atmosphere of the Decadents, and their perpetual hints of the luxurious horrors of paganism…”
The references here point to Oscar Wilde and the subject of homosexuality, but Chesterton assures: “I have never indeed felt the faintest temptation to the particular madness of Wilde…”
As a teenager he began drawing strange sexual images of women.
Chesterton would think back on them as “the worst and the wildest disproportions of more normal passion” — as he plunged “deeper and deeper as in a blind spiritual suicide.”
A 1986 biography by Michael Ffinch narrates it this way:
“His fits of depression became more and more frequent, he filled his notebooks with grotesque and often sadistic figures, and there appeared for the first time a woman in what might be called an ‘inviting position’. Seeing some of his wild drawings at this time, two of his closest friends thought Gilbert might be going mad.”
This woman in an “inviting position” is the only evidence that Chesterton, anytime in his life, knew what a naked woman looked like.
The depression connected to Oscar Wilde lifted as he began to read Walt Whitman.
That’s the unusual story in Chesterton biography. Owing to a vigorous reading of Leaves of Grass, he began to get a footing in life. As Ffinch puts it:
“It had been Whitman who had lifted him out of the mood of pessimism into which Wilde and the Decadents had sunk him.”
For all these queer references, Ffinch is quick to note: “Chesterton’s denial of any homosexual tendency is supported by all the evidence, and only worth mentioning because he has occasionally been accused of it.”
Chesterton’s life is written by Catholic writers who are often eager to find divine order in his life.
Heterosexuality in its most conventional and sentimental form is just assumed. It is not the evidence of his life.
In a 2013 paper, “Queer Clubs and Queer Trades: G.K. Chesterton, Homosociality and the City,” the scholar Merrick Burrow examines Chesterton’s teenage relationship with a friend, the handsome Edmund Clerihew Bentley. They’d each become famous as mystery novelists.
In 1908, in the dedication to his novel The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton wrote a dedication to Bentley. It is curious memoir of a cultural malaise he recalls sweeping over the land when they were teenagers:
“A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.”
A ‘sick cloud’? Line after line feels oddly suggestive.
“They twisted even decent sin to shapes not to be named:
Men were ashamed of honour; but we were not ashamed.”
Homosexuality was known as the love ‘not to be named’.
Then a reference to a “green carnation” seals the context of these queer codes: this is about Oscar Wilde, whose trial was ongoing during the time.
But then Chesterton writes, about his friend, of “the doubts that drove us through the night,” as now they’ve “found common things,” have “marriage and a creed…”
As Merrick Burrow puts it: “The possibility of reading a homoerotic aspect to this transition from boyhood friendship, with its ‘doubts that drove us through the night’ (xl), is clearly available…”
There is then, he adds: “the possibility of a queerness secreted at the heart of Chestertonian orthodoxy . . .”
He married in 1901.
A family biography by his sister-in-law, Ada Chesterton, reported: “The woman he worshipped shrank from his touch and screamed when he embraced her.”
Frances Chesterton was little known to his fans. Throughout their marriage, she seems more an assistant than a wife, helping run the business of her husband being a public figure. When he began writing his autobiography, she implored: “Please, Gilbert…keep me out of your book.”
More information about the marriage came available in a 1941 memoir by Ada Chesterton, known socially as “Keith.” The Chesterton industry has dealt with the problem of her presentation of facts, often, with queer-bashing insults. But Ada was a noted journalist of the day, respected by Chesterton himself, and privy to his disclosures to his brother.
She writes in her book, The Chestertons, of Gilbert and Frances’ marriage:
“The final adjustment between them seems never to have been made, and Gilbert, young and vital, was condemned to a pseudo-monastic life, in which he lived with a woman but never enjoyed one.”
Frances was said to have had an imperforative hymen, and pursued a series of surgeries, to no avail. They never had sex. G.K. Chesterton, the great defender of Christian orthodoxy in regard to sex, was a lifelong virgin.
He is often cited in the gender wars as he wrote against homosexuality. In his book The Everlasting Man he writes “it is not true to human nature or to common sense,” and he rambles on about the “cult of Ganymede.”
In fact, he knew nothing about sex of any kind.
The marriage wasn’t great in any other way.
Michael Ffinch sees Chesterton writing about Frances in a poem, “Together,” composed five years after they married:
“Oh when the bitter wind of longing blows,
And all between us seems an aching space
Think that we hold each other close; so close
We cannot even see each other’s face”
The key images are of Chesterton alone.
In the typical portrait, Chesterton looks puzzled, confused or distant — and growing in size, year by year. He’d end up at around 400 pounds—humorous about it as with everything. He’d try to get out of his car sideways, he said, but “I have no sideways.”
He’d written of sex as a wild force that had to be tightly controlled by religion and social codes: “The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.”
In fact, he drowned his own eroticism in food, cigarettes and alcohol. He was a glutton who punished himself into morbid obesity and regular periods of unconsciousness and illness.
He was a functioning alcoholic— detoxing repeatedly, and going back on it.
The subject is delicately ignored in most religious treatments. A 1973 biography by Dudley Barker uses phrases like “drinking too much” and “drinking more heavily” — but suggesting a man who drank socially.
But a biographer writes of Chesterton in 1912:
“He would drink almost anything put in front of him — wine, tea, beer, lemonade — almost without noticing that he was doing so; but usually it was either wine or beer. Moreover, the drinking took place when he was working harder than most men, and for longer hours.”
Ada Chesterton reported “it was his liver, poisoned, resentful and inert, that killed him.” But his fans keep saying he died of congestive heart failure. It’s a final deception in a life that was full of it. 🔶
