ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 address the work of John Gambril Nicholson, one of the major poets of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century who writes about the love of men for boys and adolescents. Known almost exclusively as a poet for adults, Nicholson published a children’s short story, “A Story of Cliff School” (1895); a school novel for boys titled In Carrington’s Duty-Week (1910); and a privately printed second novel, The Romance of a Choir Boy (1916), about the relationship between a young curate and his protégé. All three depict same-sex love, and both novels represent relationships between a boy and a young man. Turn-of-the-century sexologists and homosexual apologists saw relationships between boys and men as continuous with the variety of pederastic relations seen in Ancient Greek cultures, what John Addington Symonds simply calls “Greek Love,” and they documented the importance of mentors and tutors to the sexual development of boys. Nicholson’s work wrestles with the morality of sexual activity in the context of same-sex love, and his fiction for and about boys demonstrates both the values and dangers of Greek Love to Uranian youth.
