May 16

Denton Welch, gay author and painter

Ever feel as if you didn’t quite fit in as a child? Well, whatever your experience, your adolescence was likely not as colorful and “different” as that of Orville Pym, a creative child who had lost his mother to a mysterious disease. The damaged youth wandered around the grounds of a hotel where he had been taken by his father to vacation with his older brothers. When he discovered an old book on physical culture and began working out to improve his body, he worried that he wasn’t sweating enough. Later he locked himself in the small bottom drawer of a dressing chest and, immediately “overcome with the erotic allure of being a prisoner,” innocently fantasized that he was in a dungeon. Orville instinctively welcomed the guilt of these thrilling, vaguely sexual yearnings, still unable to understand his incipient homosexual fetishes. He knew he was not like other boys, but the allure of deviancy far outweighed any desire to fit in with his peers.

Orville yearned to be butch. Endlessly experimenting with fashion and different looks, he finally painted the toes and heels of his white gym shoes black, hoping to appear “daring and vulgar.” While he left his hair “rough” and appeared in his new, supposedly masculine outfit, his brother humored him by saying, “My God, you look tough.” But little Orville couldn’t mask his feminine side. He had always been intrigued by broken bits of china he found at thrift shops, and he would press his recent purchases into his side, giving in to the peculiar pleasure of a forbidden obsession.

It wasn’t easy being a creative child. Orville, happiest when he was alone, felt the urge to create his own drama. When he snuck into an abandoned ballroom at the hotel, the little master of masochism discovered a double bass enclosed in a case with a broken strap. Suddenly inspired, Orville ran to the musician’s cloakroom and locked himself in, stripped off his clothes, and started whipping himself with the strap. His brother caught him in full fantasy. “Christ! What are you doing?” he howled in utter amazement. "You’d be locked up if anyone else found you doing this sort of thing.”

(Exactly!)


Orville loved to spy on the gruff and rugged schoolmaster and two older male students, who were camping in the nearby woods. When Orville got caught peeping by the schoolmaster, he was invited inside for tea. Orville was ordered to take off his wet clothes. The erotic tension between Orville and the schoolteacher was so thick you could cut it with a knife. Orville decided he wanted to be this man’s slave, and after washing up the dishes for the schoolmaster, he asked if there would be “anything else.” The older man said Orville could polish his shoes. This triggered another erotic fantasy as he thrust his hands inside the damp leather, which to him seemed like “caves of lust.”

(Let me know if I’m going too fast for you – please take time to savor every detail)


The Orville described above was the main character in a book called “In Youth Is Pleasure” (1945), an autobiographical novel by Englishman Denton Welch (see his self portrait at the start of this post), who was born in Shanghai in 1915. He spent his earliest years there with his English father and American mother, who died in 1926. Welch, then 11 yeas old, was devastated. He suffered the double blow of losing a mother and being sent to be educated in England, which was such an unhappy experience that at the age of 16 he ran away from school.

Welch had better luck at Goldsmiths' School of Art. Intending a future as a painter, his life changed forever at age 20, when he was knocked off his bicycle by a woman driving a car and subsequently run over. The injuries to his spine and kidneys were severe, and he never fully recovered. His altered circumstances caused him to take up writing, and he is today best-known for his three semi-autobiographical novels, Maiden Voyage (1943), In Youth Is Pleasure (1945), and the posthumous A Voice Through a Cloud (1950). All three are suffused with nascent homosexuality. William Burroughs claimed that In Youth Is Pleasure was a major influence on his own work, and none other than E. M. Forster praised Welch's writing.

Welch met his companion and lover, Eric Oliver, in November 1943 while he was convalescing. Oliver was a farm-worker living nearby and was a regular visitor. He acted as nurse for Welch, then his secretary, and finally as his literary executor when Welch died at the age of 33 on December 30, 1948. Unfortunately, Oliver was given  to drinking binges lasting several days, during which time he would simply disappear to parts unknown.

All his life Welch was open about his homosexuality, which was unusual, and even brave, at the time he lived. Welch's writings make clear what gay literature, and modern literature generally, lost when the accident that made him a fine writer finally claimed his life (spinal tuberculosis).

Maiden Voyage (1943), his first major work, was published under the patronage of Edith Sitwell. It is an account of Welch's sixteenth year, when he ran away from his English public school and was then sent to Shanghai to live with his father. The book created a sensation on publication in 1943; its frank and unflattering description of English public schoolboy life forced the book’s publisher to seek advice from libel lawyers. The narrator’s homosexual awakening is explored through masochism and voyeurism. Winston Churchill's private secretary gossiped in a letter that, "the book was reeking with homosexuality. I think I must get it."

New and used copies of Denton’s works are available from Amazon.com.

Photo below: Welch working on the restoration of his antique (1783) doll house, a project that he continued even while in the hospital. It is now on display in a children's museum.