labingi

Lawrence’s Sexuality: The 2012 Edition
Because every once and while, we need to revisit this question.

I just watched Lawrence of Arabia: The Battle for the Arab World, a documentary I highly recommend. Among other things, it features a couple of Lawrence biographers: Mack, who I could listen to all day, and some guy who kept recurring to expressions like, “Was he a closet homosexual? Who knows, but...”

Positing that Lawrence might have been a closet homosexual is a bit like positing that Jack Harkness can sometimes be straight. If by “sometimes straight,” one means that Jack sometimes enjoys sleeping with women, the statement is defensible, but it doesn’t really tell you anything you need to know about his sexuality.

So here follow my latest thoughts on Lawrence’s sexuality, poorly substantiated by vague paraphrases from recollections of writings I’m not going to look up right now.

Was Lawrence Homosexual (Closeted or Otherwise)?

I think it entirely possible that Lawrence was intrinsically more attracted to men, but again, this really doesn’t tell you anything you need to know. His sexuality was so heavily socially constructed that I’m fairly sure he himself didn’t have much sense of how he “intrinsically” felt.

He occasionally says things that suggest some attraction to women (ex. his statement about the “flesh itching” is in a heterosexual context), but such statements should be weighed against the fact that he came from an extremely heteronormative culture, where framing sex as heterosexual was the default. This no more means he was “straight” than his referring to homosexual men in barracks as “beastly” means he was a homophobe (which he emphatically was not); it’s just the way people talked.

At the same time, I can’t recall reading a single statement from Lawrence in which he expresses sexual attraction toward men. The closest is his statement that he found men physically beautiful and women not, but the context is aesthetic, not sexual. It also has the “absolutist” stamp of Lawrence in a bad mood and, as a single illustration, is not enough on which to support a thesis about a man who routinely contradicted himself in his writings: for example, saying almost the same day that he was in bliss to be back in the RAF and that it was hellish, etc.

Whether or not he was innately homosexual, Lawrence was strongly homosocial. He spent almost his whole life surrounded by men. From his childhood with four brothers, to his wanderings in the Middle East culturally segregated from much contact with women, to his work in the political sphere (90%+ men), to his enlistment in the Tank Corps and RAF, to his literary correspondence (virtually entirely with male authors), relationships with men defined his life.

He did have a few close epistolary friendships with women, notably Charlotte Shaw and Lady Astor. The pattern of these correspondences, however, is just about the same as his correspondences with men, and it seems clear that he regarded these women as “honorary men,” not in the sense of elevating them philosophically above “womankind,” but in the sense of recognizing in them that same sorts of characteristics that he enjoyed in his male friends and responding to them in kind.

Lawrence explicitly eschewed women with whom he might be expected to relate in a sexualized or gendered way, whether prostitutes or his young women fans or young, unmarried women in general. To the extent that sex is linked to social behavior, it would make sense that his sexuality was more aimed toward men because was more comfortable with them. But if this is “homosexual” (a big “if”), it is homosexual via homosociality more than innate sexual desire--and his homosociality is the tendency that shaped his social life.

But What about Dahoum?

Mr. “Where They in a Gay Relationship? Who Knows?” notes that Lawrence and Dahoum were very close and did atypical things like exchange clothes, that there were rumors about their being sexually involved, etc. It is clear that Lawrence loved Dahoum, very likely with the intensity of first love (he was in his early 20s). There seems little doubt among scholars today that his dedication of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom to “S. A.” refers to Dahoum, and in this dedication he says, “I loved you.”

(This is a man who later wrote his mother that he had never loved people, only things, and it is the only instance I can recall of Lawrence ever saying he loved a human being, discounting very early closures of letters home with “love, Ned,” or some such, which was plainly convention.)

So were they in a gay relationship--who knows? But I would be very surprised. As the documentary notes, Lawrence liked to shock people, and it seems not unlikely that he would rather enjoy rumors about himself and Dahoum. As for their truth, this was a young man who was already highly ascetic, who came out of a strict Victorian (and homophobic) upbringing, which he rejected in many ways but also internalized. In later letters, he often equates sex with animalistic behavior. He writes of wishing he were able to lower himself to the level of his RAF comrades who frequented prostitutes. These statements, of course, come in the wake of a sexual trauma he had not yet suffered when he knew Dahoum, but the seeds of the mindset would already have been in place, reinforced by his disdain for his parents’ illicit affair and the hypocrisy in which that affair bathed their proper Victorian household. All in all, I could imagine him being romantically in love with Dahoum--even aware of a sexual element in it--but in the end, I imagine he’d feel, as Clive said to Maurice, that “it would bring us down.” I expect he would have felt that sex with Dahoum would “spoil it,” whatever “it” might be.

Deraa

So what about Lawrence's account of being raped at Deraa? Fact or fiction? Everyone in the documentary doubts it happened the way Lawrence described it. And I'm sure they're right. Mr. "Who Knows?" is actually plausible here in suggesting that something happened that ended in sexual unpleasantness and Lawrence interpolated a lot around it.

Something happened. It makes no sense to posit that Lawrence just made up being brutally raped. If it were a conscious lie, he'd gain nothing out of it: it's shaming. And he was not crazy enough, I deem, to invent such a story from scratch, make himself believe it, and let it destroy his self-esteem to the extent he did. He had emotional instabilities, but he was not utterly disconnected from reality.

From what I can conjecture based on my minuscule knowledge (and common sense) about the Middle East in WWI, the most implausible part of this story seems its political superstructure: that he was tortured for information but nothing much came of it, that a rather high Turkish official imprisoned and assaulted him, but then they just let him go. This is just odd.

I could imagine Lawrence largely constructing this frame, maybe a little bit consciously in order to make this story "fit" with his larger war narrative and, perhaps, to cover a more abject, more embarrassing story of getting himself into trouble in the streets. But even if it began with a conscious dissimulation, I expect that over the years, he came to believe this is what happened. The memory plays tricks like that on all of us, every day, all the more so with regard to traumas we replay and replay with no other perspective to counterbalance us.

It doesn't really matter much, though, if this frame is real. The salient points, for Lawrence, were these: 1) that he was raped, 2) that he held himself to be responsible for giving in to rape in order to avoid greater pain, and 3) that he viewed this capitulation as an irremediable surrender of his integrity and an irrevocable stain. This psychological construct fits rather well with Mr. "Who Knows's" guess that Lawrence might have walked semi-knowingly into a dangerous, sexualized situation--he was a risk-taker--and that it got out of hand. It makes a lot of sense to me that in such a case he would have trouble admitting that he put himself in such danger without any great war-related reason, but that the whole situation would leave him feeling deeply shamed and deeply responsible for what happened, well beyond the basic event of being raped. But "who knows"?

The fact is, what "really" happened doesn't matter. If the case went to court and some Turkish soldier's freedom were dependent on the verdict, it would matter. But no one is at issue except Lawrence. The only reason we care is that we care about his psyche, and in his psyche it happened; it shaped the whole rest of his life. Years after the purported event, he wrote about it repeatedly in different letters to different people with the same basic description of his psychological devastation. The impact on him is clear.

His post-war sexual life was defined by his identification as a rape victim complicit in his own rape. Out of (or reinforced by) this trauma come a constellation of mindsets: a rigorous asceticism, a dislike/fear of physical contact, a strong sense of sex as dirty (not sinful but abject), a feeling that he was mentally and emotionally incapable of ever having sex, a belief that women must find sex debasing, and a belief that he himself was "unclean" physically and--for want of a better word--spiritually.

(All of this makes tremendously powerful his statement to E. M. Forster that reading "Doctor Woolacott" had made him revise his ideas about homosexual sex and see it as a potentially emotionally positive thing.)

And then there's the question of his masochism.

Was Lawrence a Masochist?

Yes. I think that's clear:-) At least on a broad, not just sexual, level. In contrast to the Deraa account, the stories that Lawrence paid a fellow to whip him seem to be almost universally accepted. I don't remember all the specifics off the top of my head, but my recollection is that, I too, found somewhat compelling the evidence that gentleman brought forward when he published. It seemed plausible, like an account from someone who had interacted with Lawrence, not someone making up media sensationalism about him.

So, yeah, that's probably true. And it may be true that he got sexual release from these sessions. It was almost certainly entangled with his feelings about Deraa (in his account of which, he links being beaten to sexual arousal). Some have suggested he was harkening back to medieval penitent tradition, which fits with his interest in the medieval world and his asceticism. It is also clear that for Lawrence, his sexuality and guilt/deserving to punished were psychologically connected. But I think it's important here to distinguish between basic, physical sexual release and what we usually think of as sexual gratification. If Lawrence met his sexual needs this way, I'm virtually certain that his mindset was essentially the same as his mindset about masturbation, which is that it's rather base and annoying to deal with and sometimes the body demands it.

At the very least in his later life, Lawrence kept his sexuality carefully solitary. He had sexual needs--he writes about this openly--but he kept them as minimal and infrequent as he could and he was rigorous about not directing his sexual energy toward another person, male or female. He avoided socially sexual situations, ignored or laughed off flirtations, and if he did pay to be beaten, he carefully kept those encounters anonymous and professional.

Lawrence's Sexual Politics

Lawrence's personal engagement with sexuality ranged from life-damaging guilt and horror to--at the most positive end--a kind of banality and mild humor. But he was not one to mistake himself for the world, and his sexual politics were always very generous.

He had multiple openly gay friends and speaks positively about homosexuality as early as The Seven Pillars. He variously states that is not indecent (as written by E. M. Forster) and that it can encompass beautiful relationships among men and, he supposes without direct knowledge, women too. Nor was he opposed to heterosexual sex. Though his life was somewhat marred by his parents' affair, he had no problem with fornication, as evidenced in his straightforward acceptance of Robert Graves's free love interests. He was friends with divorcees. He speaks sympathetically of his companions in the barracks who frequented prostitutes and was--unsurprisingly--chosen as a confidant by at least one. He didn't mind sexual talk. Like most 20th century people, he rather liked discourse about sex, and he makes no objection to the stream of dirty language that pervaded the barracks. (The Mint, in fact, may have more profanity, pound for pound, than any other text I've ever read!) He was profoundly non-judgmental of actions that didn't harm others. He had great compassion for human beings in all their diverse and complex needs.

He was generous with everyone except himself.