🏳️‍🌈🏺2-Gay in History🏺🏳️‍🌈

In 1913, Lady Vita Sackville-West married the diplomat Harold Nicolson. They shared a love of gardening & raised two son over fifty years of marriage, until death did them part. From all appearances, an ideal English marriage.

But they were both bi & the marriage was open.

Both closeted when they tied the knot, once it came out they gave each other complete liberty. Harold had a long term relationship with ‘Tray’ Mortimer the literary critic, who was almost part of the family, & had numerous other discreet trysts. Vita, however, was never discreet.

Five years in, she took up again with Violet Keppel, a former girlfriend. They traveled Europe together with Vita in men's clothes, going by ‘Julian’ even to Violet, & passing as Violet's husband. The letters Violet wrote to Julian are unhinged.

When they threatened to never come back, Harold flew a little plane to confront them. Harold explained that love didn’t have to be zero-sum, & the marriage survived for another forty years.

Lavender marriages were common between gays & lesbians, many of Harold & Vita’s friends were in one, but this wasn’t that.

Then a decade into the marriage came Virginia Woolf.

The affair that followed became a friendship that lasted a lifetime. Woolf published 'Orlando' — a novel about a poet who lives four centuries & changes sex partway through, a fantasia of Vita, illustrated with real family photographs of the unconventional couple. It was the first English novels to treat gender as something a person could move through during life. Genderfluid, like Vita.

They later found another young bi couple, Vita and Harold showed them open marriage was possible, & the couple were lifelong friends with benefits, & even Harold’s eventual biographer.

Vita’s son Nigel found her memoir after she died & published it in the 70s as “Portrait of a Marriage.” He wrote that his mother "fought for the right to love, men and women," rejecting the convention of what a happy marriage was.

Married their whole lives. Bi their whole lives. Happy their whole lives. Reject convention.

In the 1950s Mary Garman, who was married to the poet Roy Campbell, moved into a cottage on the Sissinghurst grounds—Vita & Harold’s beautiful estate that is still a Heritage Site. Mary quickly figured out what was going on, & called the place "something between a psychiatry clinic and a posh brothel."

The list of lovers for context:

Vita's women — Rosamund Grosvenor, the first, & ongoing while she was engaged to Harold. Violet Trefusis. Virginia Woolf. The poet Dorothy Wellesley, who got Vita's 2,500-line poem 'The Land' dedicated to her. Mary Garman. Hilda Matheson, the BBC's first Director of Talks, nicknamed "Stoker." Evelyn Irons of the Daily Mail women's page, later a war correspondent & the first woman awarded the Croix de Guerre — & Olive Rinder, Irons's girlfriend, in what was briefly a throuple. Christopher St John, born Christabel Marshall. And Gwen St Aubyn, who was Harold's sister.

Harold's men — Raymond Mortimer, the critic, for decades; both Nicolsons called him "Tray." Also James Lees-Milne, who later wrote Harold's two-volume biography. The French aesthete Jean de Gaigneron, who went on to squire Violet Trefusis around Paris. And reportedly Ivor Novello.