Proof

It is not proof, proof of anything, that I seek. Proof is highly overrated. I read writers who place your fingers upon the pulse of their lives, not to prove that they are living, but simply that you might feel, feel, from your fingertips to your heart, from your heart to your head, what they feel.

During a time when it was illegal to be openly homosexual in England and amongst the English, D. H. Lawrence, in all of his writing, was evidently, sensitively, undeniably homosexual. To his close friends and to those of similar disposition, what was there to hide. Most could only wonder.

I am very fond of Lawrence and all that he wrote. He was courageous, and brilliant in that boldness. His only error, which was not his at all, was the apparent gender of his destiny. Born a man, his heart and soul were those of a woman. I feel him. I always have. I, too, am gender-fluid, gender-defiant.

The criticism and obituaries of Lawrence were, with the exception of those by E. M. Forster and Aldous Huxley, unsympathetic or hostile. As Oscar Wilde and Thomas Mann, Forster and Huxley were also homosexual.

Does it take one to know one, as if proof self-condemnation were? Sadly, yes, often, it does.