1 The group eventually became much more popular after its core members were responsible for designing the opening ceremony of the 2004 Athens Olympics. On the performance described here, see Edafous, Omada, Ενός λνκτού σιγή (Athens 1995)Google Scholar.

2 Capetanakis, D., ‘Lazarus’, in Demetrios Capetanakis, A Greek Poet in England, ed. Lehmann, John (London 1947) 34 Google Scholar. Henceforth cited as GPE.

3 Republished in the famous popularizing series of Galaxias.

4 I am suggesting here a largely subcultural rereading still not represented in official criticism. From the articles written on Capetanakis, only the one by David Ricks comes close to touching on the homosexual themes of Capetanakis’s English poems, and this is done almost cryptically, swept under a footnote. First Ricks says about Capetanakis’s ‘Detective Story’: ‘There is a barely concealed indication that the protagonists are adherents of άγονη αγάπη κι αποδοκιμασμενη’. Ricks supplements this coded Cavafian reference to homosexuality with a further reference to a gay poet, which is added in a parenthesis (still within the footnote): ‘Capetanakis’ poem “Experienced by Two Stones” might be compared with Thorn Gunn’s “The Bed”‘: Ricks, D., ‘Demetrios Capetanakis: A Greek poet in England’, Journal of the Hellenic Diaspora 22 (1996) 73 Google Scholar. See my reading of that poem below.

5 Ricks, ‘Capetanakis’, 63.

6 Kanellopoulos, P., ‘H συντομη πορεία του Δημήτρη Καπετανάκη’, η λέξη 47 (September 1985) 714 Google Scholar.

7 See the introductions to Kosofsky-Sedgwick, E., Epistemology of the Closet (London 1991)Google Scholar and D. Fuss, Inside-Out (London 1991).

8 Quoted in Duggan, L., ‘The trials of Alice Mitchell: sensationalism, sexology, and the lesbian subject in turn-of-the-century America’, Signs 18:4 (1993) 793 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9 Hall, S., ‘Who needs identity?’, in Hall, S. and Du Gay, P., Questions of Cultural Identity (London 1996) 4 Google Scholar. An elaborate discussion of identity and identification would be beyond the scope of this article. I have decided instead to refer to three key interventions, Stuart Hall’s on identity and subjectivity, Lisa Duggan’s on gay identification, and Stephen Heath’s on suture, all of which have helped shape the overall argument of this article.

10 A co-founder of the Hogarth Press, Lehmann became a very successful literary magazine editor. His best-known achievement was New Writing and Daylight, which reached its peak during the war.

11 This slim book, as well as a handful of very warm reviews by writers with whom Capetanakis had become friends during his stay in England (amongst them Geoffrey Grigson, J.P. Ackerley and E.M. Forster), secured a posterity for his work. The book itself counted at least five reprints in English and a Greek translation in 1984. Some of the poems and articles included in it were reprinted in English anthologies. Four poems have also been turned into a lieder cycle by the well-known homosexual composer Ned Rorem.

12 Ricks, ‘Capetanakis’, 61.

13 See Τετράδιο Δώτζρο (1945) 14-30, Μα Εστία 19/445 (June 1946) 262-92.

14 Practically all Capetanakis’s references in his English writings can be seen to have a homosexual subtext, while most of the English colleagues he befriended led homosexual lives.

15 Wright, A., John Lehmann: A Pagan Adventure (London 1998) 127 Google Scholar.

16 Indeed, Plomer was one of the first English writers to write about Cavafy, and exchanged some letters with the poet, before dedicating his own poems to him and borrowing identifiably Cavafian settings for his short stories set in Greece, published in his Four Countries (London 1949).

17 Trotter, W., Priest of Music: The Life of Dimitri Mitropoulos (Portland 1995) 27 Google Scholar.

18 For an influential elaboration of this argument, see Bravman, S., Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge 1997)Google Scholar.

19 Capetanakis, ‘Detective Story’, GPE 19.

20 GPE 63.

21 GPE 67.

22 Cunningham, V., British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford 1989) 149 Google Scholar.

23 Burton, P., ‘Introduction’, in Lehmann, J., In the Purely Pagan Sense (London 1985) 2 Google Scholar.

24 Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties.

25 A very good account of the poetics and politics of homosexual writers in the period under discussion is given by Sinfield, Alan in his Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (London 1997 Google Scholar [1989]), esp. the chapter ‘Queers, treachery and the literary establishment’, 60-85. I follow Cunningham and Sinfield in focusing primarily on male homosexual writers.

26 GPE 20.

27 See Hennegan’s, Alison ‘Introduction’ to The Well of Loneliness (London 1982) viii Google Scholar, and O’Rourke, Rebecca, Reflecting on the Well of Loneliness (London 1989)Google Scholar.

28 GPE 32.

29 GPE 73-4.

30 GPE 83.

31 GPE 84.

32 GPE 16.

33 ‘Cambridge Bar Meditation’, ‘A Saint in Piccadilly’, ‘What We Must Take From the Land of Fear’, ‘Prophets’: all published in the first issue of New Writing and Daylight, Summer 1942, 33-5.

34 ‘Prophets’, GPE 23.

35 ‘A Saint in Piccadilly’, GPE 21.

36 Lehmann, J., Collected Poems 1930-1963 (London 1963) 26-7Google Scholar.

37 Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture 68.

38 For the position of London as a gay metropolis at the time in question, see Houlbrook, M., ‘A Sun Among Cities’: Space, Identities and Queer Male Practices, London 1918-1957 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 2002)Google Scholar, and Cook, M., London and the Culture of Homosexuality (Cambridge 2003)Google Scholar.

39 ‘The Land of Fear’, GPE 12.

40 David, H., On Queer Street: A Social History of British Homosexuality, 1895-1995 (London 1997) 147 Google Scholar.

41 The phrase ‘this game with its exacting rules’ is used by John Lehmann to describe the courting of lower-class men in his In the Purely Pagan Sense, 52.

42 ‘American Games’, GPE 31.

43 A chapter of this unfinished study was posthumously published by John Lehmann in GPE.

44 GPE 123-4, emphasis added.

45 All the magazines edited by Lehmann published, as a symbolic gesture, texts on Greece, poems with a Greek setting and Modern Greek literature in translation. The same happened with the Listener, Personal Landscape etc.

46 GPE 45-46.

47 Ibid.

48 Sitwell, E., Selected Letters (London 1998) 248 Google Scholar.

49 Ibid., 295-6.

50 GPE 41.

51 Lehmann, J., I Am My Brother: Autobiography, II (London 1960) 120 Google Scholar.

52 Parker, P., Ackerley: A Life of J.R. Ackerley (London 1989) 180 Google Scholar.

53 Alexander, P., William Plomer: A Biography (Oxford 1989) 243 Google Scholar. The reference to John Hampson Simpson underlines even more Capetanakis’s insistence on identity as performance. Simpson was a homosexual writer who had adopted a pen-name in order to publish the covertly homosexual novel Saturday Night at the Greyhound.

54 Wright, Lehmann 129.

55 It suffices to mention here Sir Richard Burton’s ‘Terminal Essay’ to his translation of Arabian Nights (1885-1888), which concludes that one Sotadic Zone exists, within which ‘the vice is popular and endemic’. This zone includes Italy, Greece and Asia Minor, as well as North Africa, and then expands eastwards. Burton, R., ‘Terminal Essay’, in A Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, X (London 1886) 245-6Google Scholar.

56 For an account of Greece and Italy as Utopian spaces for modern homosexual writing, see Aldrich, R., Seduction of the Mediterranean: Writing, Art and Homosexual Fantasy (London 1993)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. On the importance of Greece (as both symbol and landscape) for the reverse discourses of modern homosexualities see Bavmann, S., ‘The lesbian and gay past: it’s Greek to whom?’, Gender, Place and Culture 1:2 (1994) 149-67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57 Spender, S., ‘Introduction’, in List, H., Junge Männer (London 1988) 3.Google Scholar

58 In a very similar vein, Isherwood’s, homosexual narrator in Down There on a Visit (London 1962)Google Scholar finds his idealistic view of Greece challenged by modern Greece. While in Greece he exclaims: ‘I couldn’t care less, here, about Classical Greece; I feel far more remote from it than I ever do in Northern Europe’ (105). In Christopher and His Kind (London 1977) Isherwood returns to such comments, recalling his unease with modern Greece and his jealousy over his lover’s frequent encounters with Greek men. Most of the latter are chauffeurs or fishermen, and generally portrayed as uncivilized, including one who ‘was capable of going to bed with many human beings and with many sorts of animal’ (141). Naturally, ‘not one of [these] boys had heard of Homer’ (145).

59 The orchestrated attack against the gifted Classical scholar was certainly prompted by other interests and served various aims (including internal university politics). It nevertheless exploited the assumption that an ancient Greek text had to be ‘morally sound’, judged of course by the standards of conservative nationalist morality. Although intellectuals rushed to support Sykoutris (and, to an extent, Plato), it is interesting to note that, even decades after that instant, and after the dead Sykoutris was elevated to the status of the nation’s mythical teacher, disciples felt the need to stress that he was also a ‘πρότυπο Ήθους, πρότυπο Αρετής, πρότυπθ Ανδρισμου’: Detzortzis, N., ‘О διδάσκαλος’, in Ιωάννοο Σοκοοτρή: Μελεται και άρθρα (Athens 1956) 42 Google Scholar.

60 The reception of Cavafy’s oeuvre was often driven by this view. Stratis Tsirkas would, for instance, seriously argue that Cavafy learned homosexuality ‘while at school in England’, a comment that R. Liddell refutes with an orientalist banality also quite popular in Greece: ‘an Alexandrian need not go far to learn that practice’. See Liddell, R., Cavafy: A Critical Biography (London 1974) 62–77 Google Scholar. See also Peranthis’s, M. ‘fictionalized biography’, О αμαρτωΑός: Κωνστα,ντίνος Κιχβάφης (Athens 1953) for similar viewsGoogle Scholar.

61 Homosexual theorists have challenged the way social institutions enforce an understanding of heterosexuality as the gender and sexual norm and as the foundation of ‘normal life’ in the society. For Adrienne Rich this is the social matrix of ‘compulsory heterosexuality’; based on that analysis Michael Warner has proposed the influential term ‘heteronormativity’, which I use in this discussion. See Rich, A., ‘Compulsory heterosexuality and lesbian existence’, Signs 5 (1980) 631-60CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Warner, M., ‘Introduction: fear of a queer planet’, Social Text 29 (1991) 3–17 Google Scholar.

62 Savvidis, G.P. (ed.), Γιώργος Θεοτοκάς & Γιώργος Σεφερης: Αλληλογραφία (1930-1966) (Athens 1975) 56 Google Scholar.

63 Capetanakis was a close acquaintance of both Theotokas and Seferis and introduced the latter’s poetry to the Lehmann circle. As Roderick Beaton notes, Capetanakis’s ‘brief career in England helped lay the foundations for George [Seferis’s] own success in that country.’ Beaton, R., George Seferis: Waiting for the Angel (New Haven 2003) 139 Google Scholar.

64 Karandonis, A., Ό Δημήτριος Καπετανάκης στην Ελλάδα’, Προβολες A’ (Athens 1965) 191 Google Scholar. Note that this quotation ends with a claim about authenticity (‘η θάλασσα θάλασσα, η γυναίκα γυναίκα, о άντρας άντρας’) of precisely the type that Capetanakis undermines in poems such as ‘The Land of Fear’ quoted above.

65 Ibid., 196-7.

66 GPE 59.

67 GPE 29.