O.K. I get the joke. Quite funny really, for as I took the tiny track off the A27 between Brighton and Lewes to Charleston, the famous Bloomsbury farmhouse set in the south downs, I found I was a day late for the annual Gay Outing Festival.
Charleston is a quintessential Sussex flint farmhouse, complete with duck pond, cottage borders full of hollyhocks and a neat veggie patch with artichokes and runner beans. But it is so much more than that. It is a place that inspired a whole generation of Laura Ashley-loving, home decorating and Jocasta Innes stencils. For it is here that the Bloomsbury set, with their complicated relationships and bohemian lifestyle lived and loved
Did David Garnett, long time homosexual lover of Duncan Grant, really marry Angelica the daughter of Grant’s exploration of heterosexuality with Vanessa Bell, who she pretended was the child of Clive Bell her ex-husband who lived with them?
Well apparently, yes. But it is not these “complicated ménages”, as our charming guide described them, that make Charleston so worth a detour. It is the sheer beauty of a home playfully painted. Walls, cupboards, headboards, desktops all became a palette: nothing was out of bounds to the artists, children and guests who came there.
And what a collection to sit around your hand-painted dining table: E.M Forster, Maynard Keynes, Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. There are those who might argue that this ‘group’ were no more than a product of the wealth that they came from, that their ‘simple’ life in the glorious chalk downs of southern England, where days could be passed with art, books and discussing politics were privileged indolence. That being conscientious objectors was simply a way of draft dodging but it is, of course, more than that.
What strikes you as you shuffle, ten at a time around the old farmhouse, is its intimacy. For here is a place where ideas and creativity were encouraged simply for their own sake and convention could be breached within the safety of silent walls.
Would I have liked the place as much if I been there the day before? I doubt it. The contemporary gay movement in Britain is too aggressive to comfortably fit into Bohemian Bloomsbury. I have a feeling that the discreet bisexuality of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant would have felt acutely embarrassed by the “annual celebration of Charleston’s gay heritage with tea and cakes and musical accompaniment from Brighton’s Rainbow Chorus”.
Sexual orientation should not be about being ‘in’ or ‘out’, with its exclusive overtones of joining a club and being labelled. It can be, as the Bloomsbury set showed, complicated and intensely private. So I am glad I missed the ‘gay outing’ but sad that yet another word that conjured up childhood trips and picnics has been given the tacky seaside humour of Brighton Pier and that gay Britain feels a need to create absolutes from ambiguity.
