The Inverted City London and the Constitution of Homosexuality ...

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had largely been placed, and it sought both to detract from the city and provide a
means of sustaining a sense of self within it.
The realisation of Fernandez's vision is also an impossibility, however. There
can be no doubting the desire on the part of Carpenter, Ives and Symonds to do each
of the things he proposes; it was virtually their stated project. However, their work
and ideas about sexual dissidence were informed by prevailing social and cultural
'norms'. They were constrained by the very forces they were seeking to challenge and
escape. Their particular seizure of Hellenism as ajustificatory discourse, for example,
was not just coincident with the more general interest in the ancient Greeks, it was
dependent on it. It was further dependent upon the particular pedagogical structures
at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge through which each of these men passed.
The quest for orderly Hellenic sexual and social relationships also mirrored a wider
cultural impulse to control and define errant and unpredictable desire. The use of
Hellenism in the exploration of homosexuality was in many way inherently
conservative. Moreover, this Hellenic vision could never be all-embracing; these
writers had other allegiances, commitments and prejudices, which tied them into other
identifications and milieu. They clearly could not 'cut [themselves] off from [their]
time'. Indeed, for many Hellenism and pastoralism merely provided an escape,
nostalgia, and a convenient justification for the adoration of youth. Others saw their
radical potential, and their ability to sustain and structure a socialist agenda. For Ives
and Carpenter this radicalism often involved the urban present and not 'an unknown
elsewhere'. It seemed to them that the city might be the place where the solidarity and
eroticised comradeship of the ancient Greeks might begin to be realised, and where a
process of social and cultural transformation might commence.