ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the mix of tender love and homophobic recoil that one finds in the representation of working-class men in Orwell’s writing. If Woolf, Strachey, and other modernists drew attention to the lasting negative impacts, public and private, of Victorian patriarchy, Orwell’s work testifies to the continuing destructive effects of male homosocial desire as constituted in the early twentieth century within the academic institutions in which he was formed. For Orwell, that legacy involved a strenuous manliness with overt homophobia, especially as directed toward ‘Oscar-Wilde’ types including bisexual and homosexual writers such as Stephen Spender and W. H. Auden who, like Orwell, supported the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War but who, unlike him, declined to engage in military action. H. G. Wells is an early twentieth-century writer who was highly aware of the dangers posed by modern imperialism.
