Uranians

The Uranians were a late-19th-century and early-20th-century clandestine group of up to several dozen male homosexual poets and prose writers who principally wrote on the subject of the love of (or by) adolescent boys.

[6] English advocates of homosexual emancipation such as Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds took to using the term "Uranian" to describe a comradely love that would bring about true democracy.

Many Uranian writers borrowed classical Greek themes such as paganism, democracy and male camaraderie or intimacy, applying these concepts to their own time.

Historian Neil McKenna has argued that Uranian poetry had a central role in the upper-class homosexual subcultures of the Victorian period.

The Uranians met each other and stayed in touch through such organisations as the Order of Chaeronea, which was founded by Ives and began holding occasional meetings in London about 1897.

Poems by the Uranians – as well as by their American counterparts, sometimes called the "Calamites" after the "Calamus" section in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass[16] – were included in Men and Boys: An Anthology (1924), edited by Edward Mark Slocum, which was republished with a new introduction in 1978.