This is all-important, Moffat says, because Forster was “certain that his homosexuality was the central fact of his being.” This is reductive, but there is no need to quarrel with it too much. There can be no doubt that Forster’s sexuality was essential to his experience of life—everyone’s is. But that is exactly the problem: everyone is sexual, and everyone is different, and so it is impossible to deduce anything very profound about any particular person from the bald fact of his or her sexual orientation. Nor is it possible to deduce very much about any gay writer from the fact that he is gay. Consider that Forster belonged to the same generation as Proust, whom he admired very much, and Mann, whom he seems not to have read at all. (One of Kermode’s complaints is that in Aspects of the Novel Forster had “remarkably little to say” about his great contemporaries.) Both of these writers wrote much more explicitly about homosexuality than Forster did, although Mann concealed his homoerotic desires under his image as a bourgeois paterfamilias, and Proust turned his male lovers into women when he put them into his novel.

Forster never adopted this strategy, in part because, at the time he wrote his first five novels, he had not had any lovers. But there was also a principle at stake, as he wrote in his diary: “N.B. I have never tried to turn a man into a girl, as Proust did with Albertine, for this seemed derogatory to me as a writer.” So Forster himself shared Moffat’s sense that it was not “truly honest” for a gay writer to write in a way that could lead the reader to believe he was not gay. This did not mean, apparently, that he should not write about heterosexual characters and relationships—even A Passage to India, the only novel Forster wrote after Maurice, revolves around the potential marriage of Ronny and Adela. But it did mean that Forster became uncomfortable with strained rhapsodies about “the touch of a man on a woman.” As he grew older, he complained more than once that the impossibility of treating gay love openly in a novel had made novel-writing itself unappealing to him. After Howards End, he wrote of his “weariness of the only subject that I can and may treat—the love of men for women and vice versa.” Near the end of his life, he reflected, “I want to love a strong young man of the lower classes and be loved by him and even hurt by him. That is my ticket, and then I have wanted to write respectable novels. No wonder they have worked out rather queer.”

There is something “queer,” in both Forster’s sense and the contemporary sense, about Forster’s “respectable” novels. At times he said that The Longest Journey, his second book, was the one that gave him the most pleasure to have written, “a book to my own heart. I should have thought it impossible for a writer to look back and find his works so warm and beautiful.” Few readers have shared this judgment—it is probably the least read of Forster’s novels. But his affection for it is understandable if it is read as his first, half-conscious attempt to write about homosexuality.

The story of Rickie Elliot’s moral education, like that of Lucy Honeychurch, drives home the lesson that each person must listen to his actual desires, even at the price of violating convention. But while Lucy’s trial of conscience involves choosing one man over another as a husband, Rickie’s is a matter of learning to despise the institution of marriage itself, and to vindicate his natural preference for intimacy with men. The dedication Forster chose for the novel is Fratribus—“to the brothers”—and the man Rickie finally chooses above his cold, conventional wife is his half-brother, Stephen Wonham. But the passions and intensities of the novel only really make sense if Rickie’s attraction to men is sexual, and at moments Forster seems to say as much—so explicitly that it is surprising neither he nor his readers apparently noticed this subtext: