newman (5)

David Hilliard writes...

that relationships such as Newman's with Froude and St John were not regarded by contemporaries as unnatural.

Nor is it possible, on the basis of passionate words uttered by mid-Victorians, to make a clear distinction between male affection and homosexual feeling. Theirs was a generation prepared to accept romantic friendships between men simply as friendships without sexual significance. 

Only with the emergence in the late nineteenth century of the doctrine of the stiff upper lip and the concept of homosexuality as an identifiable condition, did open expressions of love between men become suspect and regarded in a new light as morally undesirable.

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Men born in the first decades of the nineteenth century...

had a capacity, which did not survive into later generations, for intense male friendships.

    

The friendship of Alfred Tennyson and Arthur Hallam, immortalised in In Memoriam A.H.H., is a famous example. Less well-known is that of Charles Kingsley [priest] and his closest friend at Cambridge, Charles Mansfield [chemist].

When Ian Ker reissued his biography of Newman in 2009...

he added an afterword in which he put forward evidence that Newman was a heterosexual.

He cited journal entries from December 1816 in which the 15-year-old Newman prayed to be preserved from the temptations awaiting him when he returned from boarding school and met girls at Christmas dances and parties.

As an adult, Newman wrote about the deep pain of the 'sacrifice' of the life of celibacy. Ker comments: "The only 'sacrifice' that he could possibly be referring to was that of marriage. And he readily acknowledges that from time to time he continued to feel the natural attraction for marriage that any heterosexual man would."

In 1833, Newman wrote that, despite having willingly accepted the call to celibacy, he felt "not the less the need of the sort of interest [sympathy] which a wife takes and none but she - it is a woman's interest"..


~wikipedia~