It is one of those standard scenarios we are asked to envisage– the imagined dinner party for which we must provide our list of ideal guests, no restrictions, re: space and time, living or dead. Dress: smart casual, RSVP, ASAP.

So we send out our imagined invitations. Maybe we can have Virginia Woolf at the end of the table next to Elizabeth the First, Barack Obama over from James Baldwin, Samuel Taylor Coleridge beside Taylor Swift.

And opposite me, for ease of conversation, there would be you.

Of course, it would be.

E. M. Forster (1878-1970) was one of the foremost British novelists of his generation. His fiction wrestled movingly with the trouble and muddle of personal relationships, first in Edwardian England such as in A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), and then in the additionally fraught context of India under the British Empire in A Passage to India (1924). During the thirties and forties, he became a thoughtful broadcaster and essayist, championing democracy, tolerance and literature. With his death came the posthumous publication of his novel Maurice (1971) and a collection of stories The Life to Come (1972) that had explicitly gay themes.

It’s rude to quote people to themselves, I know. And rude to talk about Sex and Politics over dinner. Forgive me. But let me continue. Please. There is more to say. You had also written about how you believed in Parliament. Democracy, you said, ‘allows public criticism and if there is not public criticism there are bound to be hushed-up scandals.’ Parliament, you said, is often sneered at because it is a Talking Shop, but you believed in it because it is a talking shop.

But – please, forgive me – you didn’t talk yourself, did you? You didn’t allow your work to speak for you. You were aware how important your book was, could be. You had ‘created something absolutely new, even to the Greeks.’ That’s what you said. Your novel was a glimpse into a brave new world that many had never seen, or rather had not realised they’d seen. But you never talked about Maurice Hall, who discovers himself to be ‘an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort.’ And at the time, maybe it was unspeakable, unpublishable – at least in England. Even in 1928 the furore around, and censorship of, Radcliffe Hall’s novel about lesbians, The Well of Loneliness, proves this. A book no more explicit than yours and certainly of less artistic merit.

Parliament did its talking. It took a while. The first landmark year was 1967. In England and Wales, sex between men was decriminalised, though only in private and between men over 21. Scotland would have to wait until 1980, Northern Ireland until 1982. The lifting of the ban in 1967 came with the proviso that we speak our names quietly. Lord Arran urged that homosexuals ‘show their thanks by comporting themselves quietly and with dignity . . . any form of ostentatious behaviour now or in the future or any form of public flaunting would be utterly distasteful.’

You were alive then, I was not. 

You were alive then, but you hadn't spoken out.

A. E. Dyson, who would later found the Homosexual Law Reform Society, had sent a letter to The Times in support of the reform. The signatories came from many quarters. Philosophers, a former prime minister, bishops, scientists, poets, novelists.

You had been asked for your name, but you did not give it. You, the very last of your generation – E. M. Forster, Grand Old Man of Letters, Order of Merit, holed up at King’s College, Cambridge. Maybe I should be angry. You being who you were, being where you were, and saying nothing. As there were men being arrested, harassed, blackmailed, beaten, sent to doctors for so-called treatment, and you saying nothing. Not giving the world your words.

You did send a letter to Dyson congratulating him on his success, but why not have given him your name?

Angus Wilson, of the signatories to the letter, wasn’t impressed with your choices. In 1976, after your death, he described you, Noel Coward and Somerset Maugham, all gay, all silent, as ‘three terrible men.’

Well, I can’t say that. There would be the thrill of self-righteousness, and then what? Only guilt at the thrill. Grubby self-satisfaction. There is rage that can never quite be rage, can only be a looking back in sadness. You can see that, can’t you? As I take away the soup, bring out a main course of overcooked roast beef and undercooked vegetables, you can see that. You can see how this is about sadness at what could have been. At the gift you could have given to the people of your own time. To the gay men and lesbians – three quarters of whom, Magnus Hirschfeld estimated, would never have read a book on homosexuality. To the straight men and women – you could have shown them their world, that which they live and love and die in, as seen through different eyes. You could have revealed the comparative ease of their world, its invisible understandings. When in the novel, Clive Durham deceives himself into becoming straight, he becomes aware of ‘a world of delicious interchange’ – this is their world freighted with straight meanings, straight assumptions, all taken for granted by the straight people who dominate it. Clive goes into a cinema to see a film, and while unimpressed with its artistry, he is awed by the enormity of this straight world that he now feels part of. He notes of just this film that, ‘the man who made it, the men and women who looked on – they know, and he was one of them.’ Could I be anything, but sad that you didn’t give this insight to the world – in 1914, 1945, 1970?

But I can’t call you terrible. 

Never.

Not you.

Don’t leave. Stay. I don’t know what I’m asking for. That you should have, in your eighties, thrown the book at the world? Coming out, being outed – it isn’t easy, I know that. I knew that even as I sat watching the cranes from the third floor of that university library window, and flicking through that book, your book that is now also my book. It was not as if you lived in lofty silence. During the Radcliffe Hall case, you sent a letter to The Nation and Athenaeum critical of censorship. You were also one of the expert witnesses called up in the Lady Chatterley affair in which you described Lawrence’s novel as having ‘very high literary merit.’ You wrote against anti-Semitism and racism, broadcasted against Fascism and for Culture. You mused in 1941, how after the establishment of peace, tolerance of German people would be important in a post-war world. You were the first president of the National Civil Liberties Union – now called Liberty.

And you wrote us, people like us, a happy ending. Though to do this, you couldn’t let Maurice and Scudder – your fairy tale couple – stay in English society. You gave Maurice, essentially, two options: exile in England or exile to France. Maurice’s doctor, who fails to ‘cure’ him, recommends he go to France, where relations between men have been legal since 1790. ‘England,’ the doctor says, ‘has always been disinclined to accept human nature.’

The other option you gave Maurice was the Greenwood, that mythic place of English liberty where Robin Hood and his merry men hid, where Shakespeare could write about a marriage ceremony, almost, between two men beneath the boughs of Arden. You said the character of the English (though I am sceptical of the notion of national character on the whole) suffered from an incompleteness of heart. That though there’s passion there – seen with magnificent flashes: in Shakespeare, in the Lake Poets – that passion lies submerged. It’s a passion hidden like your novel was, like Maurice and Scudder chose to be, because they choose England. Of course they do. They go to the Greenwood, avoiding the bite of the law, and the threat of censure. They retreat from the raucous public, to use, as Woolf might have put it: the ‘little language that lovers use.’

You didn’t forget your novel. Gave it to friends. Lytton Strachey. D. H. Lawrence. Christopher Isherwood, of course. Oh, how he tried to persuade you to publish. Christopher commemorates you in Down There on a Visit, as his England. Of you he writes: ‘he and his books and what they stand for are all that is truly worth saving from Hitler; and the vast majority of people on this island aren’t even aware that he exists.’ You were his ‘unheroic hero.’

In March 1970, Christopher Isherwood visited your rooms in Cambridge. Do you remember? He wrote about you in his diary, you, at the ripe old age of 90: ‘He is under the sentence of death, just as visibly as if he were lying on his deathbed. And yet he enjoys conversation, affection, food, sherry. He told me he had put his homosexual stories out of his mind (I think he only meant, had ceased to think of them) but when I talked about Maurice he showed pleasure and he told me he was glad to think of all this again and wished he could write another such story.’

But after 1924 and A Passage to India there were no more novels from you. The world you had written about had departed. And what you really wanted to write about – relationships between men – had no public, as far as you could tell. After all, your reputation after Maurice was published did dip for a while – the novel was deemed too sentimental, too personal. In the introduction to a collection of unpublished short stories, some of which also openly addressed homosexuality, Oliver Stallybrass notes that: ‘not every reader will find it easy to assess coolly a group of stories in which buggery is an almost unvarying feature.’

I wish you had written another such story. What a world it might have been if you had continued writing novels, even if the art you created came out like you did, after your death: a secret canon of novels written over thirty years, hustled out of the Greenwood after such a wait, watched over by outlaw and pagan god, a prize hidden in beneath the branches of an ancient oak. Some bright further example, alongside your other books, of England’s heart. 

I can’t say you were terrible. Because that book spoke to me as closely as a lover might, spoke with your voice, friendly, casual, that, oh yes, tells a story: ‘One may as well begin.’ I had read it hurriedly – in bed, on buses. Your other novels soon after. 

But beyond the work, what then? 

Take my hand, old man, and walk with me, out of the Greenwood, through into the future. When dinner is done, it is customary to go for a walk.

After the initial decriminalisation in Parliament, there was a long silence, and then further silencing. That was about a book too. A picture book for children called Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin. Ignorance and terror were still in the air, I’m afraid. The book was used by the Conservative Government as a means to bring in a law – Section 28 – that demonised and scapegoated people like us. Equal age of consent wouldn’t appear until the year 2000, after several attempts. Civil partnerships arrived in 2005. Equal marriage rights for same-sex couples were won in 2013, in England and Wales. Scotland – 2014. Northern Ireland – 2020. And that Talking Shop that you believed in and doubted has 45 open and out members – more than any other legislature in the world.

Lord Arran was ignored; people spoke up.

In the United Kingdom, the Talking Shop has largely done its job. Legal equality, largely, has been achieved. Things aren’t perfect. The poetry of individual human lives does not always match with the prose of the law. Sometimes sniggering and silliness still slides into insanity, but men and women no longer have to go to the Greenwood.

But there is somewhere else I would like to show you. Let me take you there in words, starting from that library third floor. Taking the stairs down, and going out through the campus. Come with me. Where we’re going, it isn’t far. We cross a road. There aren’t many students around – it’s still early, and undergraduates can dream well into the day. There’s another road, where cars bunch together at rush hour. You disapprove, I know, I know – all this grey concrete over once green fields. But still, it’s only a little way on, past the Tesco and then another road with its roundabouts. 

And here we are. Open black gates flanked by black plaques with gold writing, and black tubs of flowers. See through the gates, a boulevard of trees where cars are parked, amid rows of gravestones. There are mourners scattered here and there, under a sky shot through with flecks of cloud that burn with light. 

They don’t know you’re here. I didn’t know you were here. 

I came out to someone in this cemetery, of all places. I came here to come out specifically. Simply because it was away from the roads: a patch of green in suburban sprawl, on the outskirts of Coventry. I had no idea that this was where your ashes were scattered, near the home of the man you loved. I had no idea, and yet here I was, almost choking on my heart, my words only extricating themselves from me with difficulty, trembling as they entered the wide world. Only the second time I had said this to anyone, said this thing that feels like a confession, but isn’t a confession at all.

There’s this line in one of your early books, A Room with a View, about a kiss kept secret between two young lovers, a man and a woman, in the Italian countryside. When you wrote, ‘Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion; we cannot tell whether our secret is important or not,’ I can’t help but wonder whether you weren’t writing about two things – not only the secret of this kiss, but about us too, other affections and the kind of men we are. The world you lived in, well, that was a world in which perhaps you could have been ruined by a kiss. 

My friend muddled what I was saying. She thought what I had said was a joke, but soon realised her mistake, and fell silent. She pondered, then spoke, her words now careful, measured. Here, in this place where your ashes were scattered, in among the roses – innocuous, and as far as I know, unmarked.

In 1976, Christopher wrote about a discussion between you and him. 

You asked him, Does the novel date? 

Do you remember? 

And he said, Why shouldn’t it date? 

And your eyes filled with tears.

It is of its time, your book – of 1914, before the war, a world that is gone, as worlds are wont to do. It is of its time, but no more than the work of your beloved Austen. Or that of Hardy, Brönte, or Conrad. It is a novel like any of theirs, but with the exception that we are in it: our kind, our tribe, front and centre, without ambiguity or obfuscation, striding through the Edwardian English countryside and old academic colleges. There we are, inducted into history, in our proper place.

What you wanted of your novels was to leave people either happier or better, and to add some permanent treasure to the world – and what a gift, what a treasure you gave. You wouldn’t tolerate reverence: all a lot of silliness. You wouldn’t even give democracy more than two cheers. So let’s strip you of your accolades – your Order of Merit, your membership of the Order of the Companions of Honour – and dispense with the formality of surnames upon which critics insist. Morgan – that’s what your friends called you.

Morgan, you believed in the private life, in personal relationships: both your strength and your fault. You were cowardly, Morgan. But you made no secret of your cowardice. And I was cowardly too, through long years of silence. And I cannot say with any confidence I would not have done the same.

For all that, selfish though it is, my late friend, you are not late for me and through your work, you are so alive. The final test of a novel is our affection. The same, you said, as we have for our friends. When reading your novels, I always know I am amongst friends. And the very dearest at that.

I can see you very clearly, peering over a badly-folded swan napkin and incorrectly arranged and mismatching cutlery. I have seen footage of you from 1958 pottering around your rooms at King’s College, at the University of Cambridge, where you retired in your old age. Timid, closing a huge door lightly behind you. Squinting through your spectacles, your hair a thick halo about your head, as you begin writing at a desk.

I see you very clearly, and I know what I would say. I would tell you about the time I watched, out of a third floor library window, cranes serenely do their work – covering over green land with more brick, glass and concrete. I was sitting at a desk, like you in the footage. But the university I’m in is Warwick, not Cambridge. And it’s 2011. And I’m not old, but young at only twenty. The lights in this section of the library had switched off; no one had walked by in a while. The bookshelves to my right were blocks of bluish shadow in the early morning. I should have been writing an essay, but my mind was on other things. On my situation. On affections I was still learning to express and share and name. On you. On the novel I’d just finished reading on the table in front of me. The cover shows two men, one with his arm in the arm of the other. You’d recognise the book. Well, you’d recognise the name.

Maurice by E. M. Forster.

I turned to the back of the book. There’s a terminal note, written in September 1960 – three years after the Wolfenden Report which recommended that sex between men, in private, in England and Wales should be decriminalised. The novel itself had been published in 1971. Yes, it was published. In the year after you died, it was published.

And although you are dead it does not surprise me to see you, here before a steaming bowl of homemade soup, shop-bought bread – you with your creed of acting as if you were immortal, you who wrote stories about buses to the afterlife, mysterious transformations, and all through your work that singing vein of mysticism. Yours would have been an understated resurrection, a gentle opening of a large door, shut lightly behind you. 

And now, sitting over dinner, with me.

Amongst friends, yes? Though we have never met.

You remember the terminal note? You observe that since having written the novel in 1914, the perception of gay men had gone ‘from ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt.’ You go on: ‘We had not realised that what the public really loathes in homosexuality is not the thing in itself but having to think about it. Unfortunately it can only be legalised by Parliament, and Members of Parliament are obliged to think or appear to think.’

J. S. Loveard is a writer. Currently at work on a novel, Common Place, he is on the Ph.D for Literary Practice at the University of Warwick. He also tutors and lectures at the Centre for Academic Writing at Coventry University. He has writing in 3AM and fiction forthcoming in Banshee. He contributed text to the album Where the Marsh Plants Grow by UK-based experimental choral ensemble, Via Nova, the recording of which was funded through Arts Council England. He lives in Royal Leamington Spa, U.K.