What does the name ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ bring to mind? Do you immediately think of the impossibly beautiful, impossibly blond Peter O’Toole in the title role of David Lean’s 1962 CinemaScope spectacular? There he is, face framed in white robes, staring firmly into the distant desert horizon; riding a camel; screaming, ‘No prisoners!’ as his men take vengeance on the Turkish army that has just massacred the residents of Tafas.
These images renewed the idea of ‘Arabia’ for a generation of credulous Western adventure-seekers, images constructing the Middle East as a place of dark passions, proud natives, and tragic beauty, with a sympathetic white leader at the centre to lead the people towards their freedom. The film had its queer fans, as well. Noel Coward joked that ‘if O’Toole were any prettier, the film would have been called “Florence of Arabia” ‘.1 As with many mid-century Technicolor epics, Lawrence of Arabia featured a sizzling on-screen romance with sexual tension sublimated into wisecracks and innuendo. In this case, however, the lovers were both men, with O’Toole’s Lawrence playing opposite the equally delicious Omar Sharif, in the role of Sharif Husayn bin Ali of the Harith.
White gay men have long had a haunted relationship with the politics of empire. Some of the first justifications for European colonization were charges that Black and brown people committed acts of sexual immorality such as sodomy. Tibira do Maranhão, for example, a Tupinambá Native man, was executed in 1614 for sodomy, one of the first people in the New World to be so executed, and tales of his execution and deeds were circulated in Europe. These charges served as evidence for Europeans that Indigenous people were immoral and unworthy political subjects, and required harsh penalties and paternalistic rule. Colonies were seen as a place of sexual license: in French slang, for example, faire passer son brevet colonial meant ‘doing it colonial-style’ – or to be initiated into sodomy.2
The first modern associations for the practice of anthropology were founded in 1869 in Germany, the same year that the term ‘homosexuality’ was coined there. Through images and stories from the colonies and anthropological and ethnographic data, ideas about sexuality and gender formed in the colonies ended up weaving themselves into the ways that Europeans thought about those things. Some people desired to separate themselves from colonized people by preserving strict standards of heterosexual morality, while some others, like the homosexuals beginning to recognise themselves and be noticed in European cities in the late nineteenth century, began identifying with these othered people. Sometimes, those homosexual encounters in the colonies led to ambivalence towards, or even explicit criticism of, European imperialism. As it turns out, the true story of T. E. Lawrence ends up revealing a lot about how these themes worked themselves out in the context of British military adventure in the Middle East.
Thomas Edward Lawrence was born in August 1888 in Wales, the illegitimate son of the nobleman Sir Thomas Chapman and a Scottish governess, Sarah Junner. Chapman, who liked drinking and the hunt more than family life with his wife and four daughters on their estate in County Westmeath, ran off with Junner after the birth of their first illegitimate child, Montagu Robert, leading his wife to issue an ultimatum. Giving up his estate and fortune, Chapman and Junner adopted the name Lawrence and moved around Wales and Scotland with their ever-growing brood of boys: after Thomas Edward, known in childhood as Ned, came Will, Frank, and Arnold.
The young Ned was plagued by fears about his illegitimacy, which was not confirmed until the 1920s. In the Victorian era such illegitimacy, especially in the upper-middle classes to which the derogated Lawrences now belonged, was cause for great scandal. Chapman left a letter for his sons to be opened only after his death, explaining the situation in which he had left them (the letter is quoted in Anthony Sattin’s excellent biography The Young T. E. Lawrence, which is repeatedly cited throughout this chapter):
You can imagine or try to imagine, how your Mother and I have suffered all these years, not knowing what day we might be recognized by someone … You can think with what delight we saw each of you growing up to manhood, for men are valued for themselves and not for their family history, except of course under particular circumstances … The ways of transgressors are hard.3
This uncertainty spurred repeated moves, the family constantly worried that new neighbours or friends might discover their secret. Only the need to provide a good education for their boys – the kind of education that might help them overcome a murky pedigree – drew them to settle in Oxford. By this time, Chapman had settled his estate and received an annual income that kept the family comfortably afloat.
Whether inspired by this experience of uprootedness or not, from a young age, Ned was fascinated by antiquarian objects, cycling around Oxfordshire with schoolmates and making rubbings of local churches and their monuments, and monitoring building sites for archaeological finds, which they presented to Oxford’s famed Ashmolean Museum. With his friend CFC Beeson, he collected old shards and fragments of pottery and reassembled them. A 1906 trip with Beeson to the south of France yielded weeks of cycling to ruined medieval churches.
While he adored his father, from whom he inherited a love for photography and shooting, rumours about his illegitimacy made him fear for his future and think of his mother as a hypocritical woman who ‘held his father as her trophy of power’.4 Perhaps as a consequence, at Oxford High School, where he studied, the young Lawrence chafed against strict discipline and lessons he thought were beneath him. At Oxford University, where he read history and wrote a thesis on medieval military history, he was an erratic if motivated pupil, who decided to conduct the archival research of French military and religious architecture himself on his bicycle, spending the summer of 1908 riding 2,400 miles across the French countryside to document the architecture. Continuing these interests, he followed up his graduation by touring crusader castles in Ottoman Syria on foot. English antiquarians at this time were often thought to be morbidly, queerly obsessed with old objects and the past, much as some decadent orientalists used fantasies of mysterious and magical other lands to escape bourgeois life.5
Back in England, Lawrence was shunned for having been born out of wedlock, and homosexual sex was still an illegal offence; for him, the Middle East seems to have opened up a new world of exotic, and erotic, experiences. These experiences were and continued to be, however, predicated on a view of the native population as ‘noble savages’ – representatives of romanticized primitive man, free to express themselves without the corrupting influences of civilisation. A 2014 monograph by Joseph Boone focusing on homosexuality and orientalism in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century anglophone literary cultures argues that ‘Western fantasies of the “Orient” ‘ contained ‘the potential for unexpected eruptions of sex between men that … disrupt European norms of masculinity and heterosexual priority’.6
The experience of the homosexual erotic could be, and for Lawrence seems to have been, that of an ecstatic dissolution of boundaries. Remembering this time later in his autobiography, Lawrence wrote,
The efforts for those years to live in the dress of an Arab, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only.7
This self-awareness, one which was not reproduced in uncritical media celebrations of the dashing Lawrence having ‘gone native’, accompanied him throughout his life and adds complexity to our understanding of this troubled colonial figure unable or unwilling to shed himself of his dominant status and the privileges it brought him. Even as he argued for more Arabs’ independence, he always referred to them as being ‘clean’ and ‘uncontaminated’, words recalling the Victorian view of children requiring guidance and direction and implying a pre-civilizational innocence.8
That summer of 1909, on foot and alone, he walked first along the path of the railway being constructed through Palestine and Lebanon. Like many British men of this period, Lawrence assumed that British colonization was superior to that of other imperial powers, including the Ottomans, who until after the First World War maintained, at least nominally, rule over Syria and Lebanon, which they had conquered in 1516. British and American missionaries did, at least, enable some Arabs to study abroad, many of whom returned and began to seed nationalist movements for which Lawrence always had a great deal of sympathy.
This new generation of educated Arabs (one of whom Lawrence described, in a letter home, as ‘a-most-civilized-French-speaking-disciple-of-the-Herbert-Spencer-Free-Masonic-Mohammedan- Young Turk,’ in a display of the dizzying array of intellectual influences on these growing movements) became his friends, collaborators, and the kind of men he increasingly believed should lead a return of Arab lands to Arab rule.9 As he travelled and studied the military strategy of both the crusaders and of their Indigenous opponents, he began to refine ideas about guerrilla warfare that he would later be credited with inventing, although in fact he merely introduced these military tactics into Western practice for the first time. Returning to Oxford several stone lighter – some assumed he had been severely ill, or did not recognize him – he finished his thesis and graduated in the spring of 1910.
The next December, Lawrence travelled back to Syria to study Arabic and work on archaeological digs under Leonard Woolley; he also worked with R. Campbell Thompson of the British Museum. It was while working on these digs that he met the teenage Selim Ahmed, known as Dahoum, a native-born assistant on an archaeological dig. He took to the boy quickly, and by 1913 the sixteen-year-old Dahoum was a senior member of the dig team.
Lawrence, like many colonialists obsessed with what they saw as the noble beauty of native peoples, praised Dahoum for his simplicity and honesty. They lived together in the dig camp and Lawrence carved what Woolley later called ‘a queer crouching figure … in the soft local limestone’ in his likeness. The implication was that Lawrence had a sexual relationship with Dahoum. Woolley wrote: ‘To portray a naked figure was proof … of evil of another sort. The scandal about Lawrence was widely spread and firmly believed.’10 Woolley did, however, insist that he himself did not believe the apparently universal rumours: ‘The charge was quite unfounded … he was in no sense a pervert; in fact he had a remarkably clean mind. He was tolerant, thanks to his classical reading, and Greek homosexuality interested him … he knew quite well what the Arabs said about himself and Dahoum and so far from resenting it was amused.’11
In the summer of 1913, Lawrence even took the unprecedented step of bringing Dahoum home to Oxford, along with another dig-site comrade, Hamoudi. Dahoum and Hamoudi had portraits sketched for the collection of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; but Lawrence refused to allow them to be exhibited or commercially photographed, in the then-common tradition of the spectacular exhibition of ‘exotic’ peoples.
Whether he and Dahoum ever had sex, rumours were not quelled by the dedication poem with which Lawrence opened his 1926 book, Seven Pillars of Wisdom. The poem, entitled ‘to S. A.’, opens:
I loved you, so I drew these tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in starsTo earn you Freedom, the seven-pillared worthy house,
that your eyes might be shining for me
When we came.12
One approach is to interpret this poem as being addressed to ‘the Arab People’; others can’t help thinking of Dahoum, whose full name was, after all, Selim Ahmed. Full of exciting stories of adventure, Seven Pillars of Wisdom also includes some additional passages that read as almost flamboyantly queer to the contemporary eye. Consider this:
In horror of such sordid commerce our youths began indifferently to slake one another’s few needs in their own clean bodies – a cold convenience that, by comparison, seemed sexless and even pure. Later, some began to justify this sterile process, and swore that friends quivering together in the yielding sand with intimate hot limbs in supreme embrace, found there hidden in the darkness a sensual co-efficient of the mental passion which was welding our souls and spirits in one flaming effort [to secure Arab independence]. Several, thirsting to punish appetites they could not wholly prevent, took a savage pride in degrading the body, and offered themselves fiercely in any habit which promised physical pain or filth.13
Ah yes. We’ve all been there, haven’t we, girls?
Identifying situational male-male homosexuality – especially in the context of nationalist armed service – as more ‘pure’ than contact with women seen as diseased and dirty is a long tradition in right-wing gay circles. Ernst Röhm, who we will discuss later in our chapter on the Bad Gays of Weimar Berlin, was a Nazi who saw no conflict between his politics and his homosexuality, which he conceived of as more masculine (and therefore more heroic and more pure) than heterosexuality. In his influential work of criticism Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit argues that anti-feminism and the association of women with impurity and failure in battle was a crucial part of the development of fascist masculinity in the twentieth century.14 But Lawrence was far from a fascist, and similar ideas about masculinist gay purity also circulated in journals like Der Eigene and the anarchist and anti-feminist poetry cult that arose in the early twentieth century around Stefan George. In England, the certified Good Gay and ardent socialist Edward Carpenter, inspired by Walt Whitman, wrote of the ‘manly love of comrades’, a strain of homosexual identification in which the worship of ancient Greek forms of masculinity and the relationship between homosexual masculinity and democracy emphasized sex as a path towards emotional bonding and political transformation. This was connected to his attempt to combat the idea that gay men were effeminate and unhealthy by stressing the ‘health, vitality, and manliness’ of men who had sex with men and the ways in which homosexual contact supposedly erased class difference in ancient Greece.15
Ancient Greece, the Orient, and the supposed ‘primitive’ were, for many of these writers, roughly equivalent sources of mythic pasts with which to justify and construct their contemporary identities. ‘In these authors’, writes the critic Parminder Kaur Bakshi, ‘Orientalism is continuous with and culminates the process of affiliation begun with classical scholarship.’16 The translation of The Arabian Nights by Sir Richard Burton, along with the 1859 translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald, was seized upon by writers and activists seeking exaltations of sensual love among the stiff and cold world of late Victorian Britain. While these visions were rooted in and limited by their orientalism, they often led to what Joy Dixon calls ‘radically inclusive’ visions of the way forward for human society.17
The 1913 Constantinople coup seemed to open up new political possibilities for Arabs: in Beirut, a council formed to elect a committee demanding the use of Arabic as a state language and local control over revenue.18 In 1913, in Paris, the first Arab National Congress met to discuss the possibility of revolution and reform; this event, led by Arab students studying in France, was one of the origins of Arab nationalism. Various groups in the Arab-speaking world began to arm themselves for a conflict that seemed increasingly inevitable. Lawrence ended up running guns from Aleppo to Beirut in the spring of 1913, travelling the whole while with Dahoum and visiting various markets where he bought antiquities to decorate the house he had built himself at Carchemish, though first he had to smuggle them past Turkish customs officials.
Biographers disagree as to whether Lawrence was already working for British intelligence at this time. In 1909, the same year that the British Museum began its digs at Carchemish, the Secret Service Bureau, a department of British intelligence that would come to be known as MI6, began operations. Lawrence was working with the Royal Navy and British diplomats, both institutions already deeply tied to the British Museum. The dig was located on the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway, a line under construction intended to link Berlin with the Arab and Ottoman worlds that deeply concerned the British, who saw potential German control over the Arab lands as a threat to their domination of the Indian subcontinent. The sources of funding for the Carchemish dig have also always been somewhat ambiguous. It is certainly not impossible to imagine that intelligence was somehow involved.
By the time that the First World War broke out in July of 1914, Lawrence and his colleagues, whether already spies or not, found themselves co-opted by the British military. Lawrence enthusiastically greeted the war, and the probability that war would dislodge the already tenuous Turkish control over the Arab world. Funded to search for biblical ruins in the Negev Desert, they were sending their survey maps of that strategically important desert back to military intelligence. This trip was conducted under the auspices of the Palestine Exploration Fund and was Lawrence’s first confirmed piece of work for the British national security state.
In addition to possible military uses, the exact border between British territory in Egypt and Ottoman territory in Palestine had long been a sore point in British- Ottoman relations. Under the guise of an archaeological dig for evidence of biblical stories about the movement of Moses and the Jews, the expedition began, with Dahoum joining as assistant on the expedition. This was where Lawrence would learn how to travel in the desert and to read a landscape for its potential use in military campaigns. He visited Aqaba, a coastal city in present-day Jordan where he would later lead a spectacular attack on the Turks, and Petra, a historical city in southern Jordan inhabited since 7000 BCE and famous for its rock-carved architecture, many of whose buildings are carved into the rose-stone cliffs.
By December of 1914, Lawrence had been co-opted into the Arab Bureau intelligence unit in Cairo, leaving Dahoum behind to guard the archaeological dig. In 1916, while on an intelligence mission, he was sent to the Arabian peninsula and involved himself in the Arab Revolt, a military uprising against the Ottoman Empire aiming to create a single independent Arab state from Syria to Yemen. The Arab lands had long been considered by European colonial administrators to be somewhat of a backwater, of interest only for their geographic importance in defending and administering colonies in India and Africa. The second Industrial Revolution and the increasing global demand for oil, and its discovery aplenty in the Middle East, sent European powers scrambling to control this newly crucial resource.
The Ottomans had formed a military alliance with Germany, so the Allies, Britain and France, were determined to share the spoils of the oil-rich region. The revolt was declared by Sharif Husayn, the ruler of Mecca, in June of 1916, on the basis of a British promise to recognize an independent Arab state after the First World War. Unbeknownst to Husayn, or to Lawrence himself, the British and French had already drawn up plans that May for how the land would be divided between themselves once the Arabs had helped them defeat the Ottomans. Husayn was the only one of the six leaders of Arabian tribes who was not an Ottoman loyalist: deeply religious and conservative, even reactionary, he was bitterly opposed by liberal Arab nationalists.19
Distracted by the other fronts in the war – not least of which, the deadlock on the front in France and Belgium – the imperial powers preferred to let the Arabs do their work for them. If the First World War seems utterly pointless in hindsight, its motivations are utterly clear: if the war was terrible, as Lenin once quipped, it was terribly profitable.
Lawrence became involved in this revolt as one of its leaders, later claiming that he had four motives for doing so: to win the war, to be part of a movement of national self-determination, to see the Arab lands united under a benighted British sovereignty he presumed would lead to independence, and, most importantly, that he ‘liked a certain Arab very much, and … thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present’.20 This certain Arab could only be Dahoum. These drives, and their entanglement with the brute world-historical forces of profit and exploitation, left legacies of violence and broken promises that would shape the making of the contemporary Middle East. If, as Neil Faulkner argues, Lawrence experienced the complexities and contradictions of this conflict as ‘inner torment’, this led him to participate in and even lead some of the Arab Revolt.21 The revolt itself began with a gunshot fired by Sharif Husayn from the minaret of the Great Mosque in Mecca. Lawrence enthusiastically wrote, ‘I hate the Turks so much that to see their own people turning on them is very grateful,’ while other English officers worried that the seemingly disorganized and poorly armed Arab armies would have difficulty countering Ottoman forces.22
Despite these fears, the Arabian Peninsula quickly began to fall under Arab control. In October of 1916, Lawrence was formally transferred to the Arab Bureau. ‘He entered Arabia’, Neil Faulkner writes, ‘full of ambition, enthusiasm, and zest for life; he left … with his mind darkened and destabilized’23 by his growing awareness that he was participating in a play-acted revolution for the benefit of another imperial power. When Lawrence returned to Cairo and his desk intelligence job a few days later, he was greeted with the news that Ottoman troops were rapidly approaching the Arab front and that the Arab Revolt desperately needed support. Lawrence argued against sending in British troops, arguing that they would be perceived as invaders. Instead, he argued, the seemingly weaker and less-organized Arab armies were best used as defensive guerrilla fighters, whose superior knowledge of the terrain could enable them to defeat much larger armies.
Despite an early setback at the Battle of Nakhl Mubarak in December of that year, by early 1917 regular guerrilla attacks across the Arabian Peninsula were damaging the Ottoman army’s ability to take back the Arab lands. Feuding with British officers who saw the Arabs as uneducated and unsophisticated, Lawrence began to lead a series of daring explosive attacks on rail lines and other Ottoman infrastructure, leading to enormous damage without significant Arab casualties. In the spring of 1917, with the Western Front bogged down in immobile trench warfare and British politicians eager to deliver a splashy victory to their people, the empire began paying more attention to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.
By now Lawrence was concerned about the imperial horse-trading that continued in Europe. The British seemed amenable to a French proposal to invade Syria with a joint Anglo-French ground force. Lawrence was additionally concerned with the successful political campaign waged by Zionists, who seized upon Britain’s aims on Palestine and lobbied for the region to be turned into a homeland for the Jews. And so, in the spring of 1917, Lawrence went rogue, promoting to Arab leaders the idea of taking Damascus with Arab troops. Disobeying British orders, he assuaged his guilt at the betrayal of the Arabs by seeking to assist their troops in Syria. At the Battle of Aqaba, fought over the Red Sea port he had visited as an archaeologist years before, he led the Arab forces to a resounding victory.
It was that November, during the revolt, that Lawrence experienced one of his only confirmable sexual experiences – an experience of such violence that it is difficult to know whether ‘sexual’ is even an appropriate adjective for it. He was captured in Syria and turned over by Hajim Bey, the Ottoman governor, to be gang-raped by a group of soldiers. Lawrence himself, in a version of Seven Pillars thought destroyed and later rediscovered, described a desire ‘that had been awakened by the experience and journeyed with me since, fascination and terror and morbid desire, lascivious and vicious perhaps, but like the striving of a moth towards its flame’24.
It is difficult to make sense of the truth of this encounter. Some historians, like James Barr, have claimed that the episode was exaggerated or even invented out of whole cloth; one might read Lawrence’s description of his sexual awakening as a kind of porn story, a narrative of self-awakening. Other biographers believe that the event likely took place, at least in some form. In exchanges with the gay novelist E. M. Forster, he called himself ‘funnily made up, sexually’, and in a later letter to Forster, claimed ‘the Turks, as you probably know … did it to me, by force … I couldn’t ever do it, I believe: the impulse strong enough to make me touch another creature has not yet been born in me’. Writing to Robert Graves, he reported that, as regarded ‘fucking’, he ‘hadn’t ever and didn’t much want to’.25
The ethics of believing survivors compel us to believe Lawrence, and to assume that his dabbling in BDSM (stay tuned for more on this) represented an erotic processing or reclamation of this experience. Graves provides another fascinating point of entry into understanding Lawrence and his connections to a strain of homosexual identity influenced by primitivism. A mythologist, Graves’s most famous work, The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth, proposes a universal-to-Europe ancient mother goddess whose worship generated ‘pure’ poetry and who had been violently replaced by patriarchal Christianity.
Graves was in regular correspondence with the American gay liberation activist Harry Hay, whose 1950s research attempted to match Graves’s mythologic reflections with the primitivist matriarchal communism hypothesized by Friedrich Engels, and find roles for proto-gay figures in both. While Hay (and, presumably, Graves) did not share the misogyny of Lawrence’s descriptions of ‘sordid’ women, their primitivism was often shared by people who did. Many early illustrations in Der Eigene, the anarchist-masculinist gay journal, were by the artist Sascha Schneider, whose illustrations included Winnetou, a Native American character invented by the German author Karl May who popularized European notions of Native peoples as noble savages uncorrupted by civilization.
That December, with Lawrence still recovering from the attack and increasingly doubting that the British would ever make good on their promises to the Arabs, Field Marshal Edmund Allenby, the leader of the British Empire’s Egyptian Expeditionary Force, dismounted his Rolls-Royce and strode through the gate of Jerusalem, in a carefully stage-managed event meant to impress upon the locals the supposedly sensitive and enlightened imperialism of the British and upon the British public the success of the empire where previous crusader kings had failed.
Lawrence, who by this time surrounded himself with personal bodyguards commanded by Abdullah al-Nahabi, returned to Aqaba determined to lead an Arab force into Damascus capable of resisting the division of the territory between France and Britain. British leaders, fearful that stalemate would lead to revolution as had begun in Russia, redoubled their efforts to defeat the Ottomans in the Holy Land. A series of unsuccessful military raids in early 1918 lowered morale, but as the year pressed on, just as the tide on the Western Front began to turn, the Ottomans began to fall. Yet another series of spectacular raids reassured Lawrence of the success of his guerrilla tactics.
By this time, far from riding camels like Peter O’Toole in the filmed epic, Lawrence was fighting from a mechanized and armoured Rolls-Royce. At the Battle of Megiddo in September, the Ottoman army began to crumble and retreat, losing its will to fight. The troops under King Faisal, son of Sharif Husayn, prepared to take Damascus. By the end of September, only 17,000 Ottoman troops remained of the 100,000-strong army from the beginning of that month. The Germans destroyed their ammunition in Damascus on the night of 30 September. The British allowed Faisal and his troops to enter first, knowing that such a gesture would make the people more prone to accept what they understood as a kind of pan- Arab liberation. People celebrated in the streets of the city. But the celebrations did not last long: only a few days later, Faisal was informed that the French would serve as ‘protecting power’ in Syria and rule Lebanon directly.26 Lawrence claimed that he had no knowledge that this might happen.
Simultaneously, trying to re-establish contact with Dahoum after the tumult of the war, he learned that Dahoum had died in one of the waves of famine and disease that had stricken the war-torn region. ‘Men prayed me that I set our work, the invio-late house, as a memory of you,’ he wrote of Dahoum, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. ‘But for fit monument, I shattered it, unfinished. And now the little things creep out to patch themselves hovels in the marred shadow of your gift.’27 Later, he would write, ‘I went to the very bottom of Arab life – and came back with the news that the seven pillars were fallen down.’28
World War I left a tangled and bloody legacy, not least in the Middle East. The Ottoman Empire collapsed but was replaced by the British and French empires. The British takeover of the Holy Land paved the way for the partition of Palestine and the creation of the State of Israel. As Neil Faulkner points out in his excellent history of Lawrence’s involvement in the war as it took place in the Middle East, we are still living with the consequences of the fragile, unstable, unjust, and violent ‘peace’ and partition in the early 1920s.
Lawrence, whose romanticism blinkered him not only to Arab humanity but to political reality, saw in the camels and robes of his Hashemite comrades a savage nobility that contained some essential truth of human existence. There might have been room for a metropolitan anti-colonial fighter on the ground in the Arab world during the revolt. Only a few years before this book was written, many bright young leftists from the United States and Europe went to Syria to support the libertarian-socialist-feminist Rojava, fighting in a war whose contours were shaped by the fighting and borders of the First World War a hundred years before. But Lawrence was not that kind of man. Instead, he sought medieval nobility and a racist vision of ethnic purity – and was condemned to be disappointed by the venal realities of realpolitik.
Upon his return to the UK, Lawrence became involved in a travelling photo show called ‘With Allenby in Palestine’ bringing orientalism to the masses. This was part of a broader tradition of human zoos and exotic spectacles that the young Lawrence had, by insisting that Dahoum not be photographed or exhibited, once rebuked. When Lawrence’s photo dressed as a Bedouin proved the most popular, the show changed its title to ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia.’ Lawrence was suddenly a celebrity.
In addition to being a celebrity, he advised Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for the colonies. While Lawrence worked there, this office, far from caring for the Arab people Lawrence claimed to love, oversaw the bombing of villages across present-day Iraq; one village was destroyed in only forty-five minutes. Churchill urged the use of chemical weapons against some of Iraq’s native populations, whom he described as ‘uncivilized tribes’. When others in the Colonial Office opposed this move, Churchill argued that gassing them was more humane than the alternative: methodical genocide. Lawrence, to his credit, seems to have disliked this work, both for its bureaucratic nature and its anti- Arab sentiments; he even wrote a Swiftian satire ‘encouraging’ the gassing of Arabs in the London Times.29
He began instead to contemplate writing a biography of the (also gay) diplomat, anti-colonial activist, and Irish nationalist Roger Casement, but was blocked from seeing Casement’s unexpurgated diaries (full of scandalous gay content) and decided against the project. Neither fame nor work at the Colonial Office much suited Lawrence, who in 1923 re-enlisted, this time in the Royal Air Force, as an airman. From 1919 to 1926, he wrote Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which until his death was only available in a first edition for subscribers. An amended and shortened version, Revolt in the Desert, hit the market in 1927 and immediately became a best-seller.
It was at this time that he began living out a particularly kinky sexual fantasy: he invented an uncle, who he referred to as ‘R’; and in that persona delivered instructions to John Bruce, a strapping young Scot from the Tank Corps, for the whipping of the naughty ‘Ted’ – himself. This relationship played out over twelve years, each beating carefully diarized by Lawrence, including the date and the number of lashings. One entry, for example, read ‘30 from Jock’, his nickname for Bruce. The letters were detailed and profoundly kinky. In one letter, he urges the use of birch instead of a belt, claiming that the belt hadn’t served its function. In another, which might reveal some of his own psychological contradictions about these experiences and desires, he wrote, ‘Please take any chance his friendship for you gives, to impress upon him how wrong it is for him, at his age and standing, to force us to use these schoolboy measures against him. He should be ashamed to hold his head up amongst his fellows, knowing that he had suffered so humiliating and undignified a punishment.’30 Once again, the allure of heterosexual men within a sexual context, a double-bind allowing desire to be disavowed at the very moment it is enjoyed, was a key ingredient in Lawrence’s homosexual desires.
Why did Lawrence’s kinky proclivities stay secret for so long? Bruce, upon selling his story to the tabloids in 1969, claimed that he thought that ‘Uncle R’ actually existed: we’ll let you, the reader, decide whether anyone could be quite so thick. If you lived in Great Britain in the late 1960s, when homosexuality was barely decriminalized, and you liked Lawrence, you would have wanted to suppress the rumour. His popular revival in the 1960s, timed to the David Lean film, was fuelled by a revisionist history of colonialism that saw British agents as liberatory forces for local populations.
Undeniably an agent of British imperialism, Lawrence was genuinely concerned with the culture and struggle for self-determination of a people he saw himself as becoming part of. That desire to ‘go native’ was also a colonial act. Even if he wasn’t empire’s worst agent, he still was one of its agents. And even today, groups like Reddit’s ‘gaybros’, not to mention books like Jane Ward’s Not Gay: Sex between Straight White Men, prove the lasting appeal of hypermasculine homosexual sex without gay identification.
Two months after leaving military service, in May 1935, Lawrence was killed in an accident near his cottage in Dorset. Trying to avoid hitting some cyclists, he lost control of his motorcycle and was thrown, dying six days later in hospital. He had been appointed a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order, a Knight of the Legion of Honour, and awarded the Croix de Guerre in his lifetime; after his death, a bust of his likeness was placed in St Paul’s Cathedral alongside the tombs of other great British generals. David Lean’s 1962 film immortalized him as a tall, daring, dashing, and egotistical hero – when in fact he was short, shy, somewhat nerdy, and deeply conflicted.