WELCOME TO LOFF'S BRAIN

“[The French Riviera is] a sunny place for shady people.” —Somerset Maugham.

“[The French Riviera is] a sunny place for shady people.” —Somerset Maugham.

Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)

“Maugham thought that writing, like drinking, was an easy habit to form and a difficult one to break,” Jeffrey Meyers noted in his 2004 biography of the British writer. “It was more an addiction than a vocation.”

- From Daily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason Currey

As a great admirer of gay literature, the social circles of gay and bisexual male writers is something that piques my interest. Due to the dangerousness of the matter in the past and also because it revolves around a relatively small niche, it seems that there was high level familiarity between these figures. The United Kingdom, a country whose literary input has abundant homoerotic tones, is a very adequate setting to analyze such a configuration.

I've been building a graph on this subject for some time, and now it seems mature enough for me to post it. It's a diagram based on friendship connections — deep or superficial —, although romantic and family-related connections are also included. Just a mutual recognition of existence isn't enough to justify a connection (otherwise most of them would be linked to Wilde!), and rivalries were not considered too. All the writers included were born during the Victorian and Edwardian eras (1837-1910), where this interconnectivity seemed particularly strong.

This is just an early version, as I imagine there is still a considerable amount of information that I missed. Therefore, I'm very open to suggestions and comments on it!