Gordon Square – The Bloomsbury Group
The most influential circle of queer intellectuals
Gordon Square and the surrounding streets were home, in the first decades of the twentieth century, to the most influential circle of queer intellectuals in British history. After their father’s death in 1904 the Stephen siblings – Virginia (later Woolf), Vanessa, Adrian and Thoby – moved to 46 Gordon Square, beginning what became the Bloomsbury Group.
Around these squares lived Lytton Strachey, who was gay; John Maynard Keynes, who was bisexual; E.M. Forster, who concealed it throughout his career; the painter Duncan Grant, who had relationships with Keynes, Strachey and Vanessa Bell; and Vita Sackville-West, in love with Virginia Woolf. They understood that sexuality, like consciousness, was multiple and could not be reduced to a single category. They were ahead of the law by fifty years. This square is where they invented what it meant to be modern.