Thanks! But don't people have layers of "knowing" amid systems of denial? Nobody actually expected Liberace to get married.
Tolkien was himself a queer writer, i.e. a writer about queer themes and characters. In the *Unfinished Tales* he has an early version of Gandalf talking about Bilbo Baggins:
“…he had never married. I thought that odd… I guessed he wanted to remain ‘unattached’ for some reason deep down which he did not understand himself—or would not acknowledge for it alarmed him.”
This is all but disclosing Bilbo's homosexuality, and rather sympathetically. It tells me that Tolkien the man was able to track these details—the processes happening "deep down," the systems of denial. All of it.
So I don't expect him to be overlooking that his friend Mary Renault was a very butch woman who wrote distinctly 'queer' fiction and had a female partner.
Working at Oxford, I'd assume even that Tolkien might be hearing gossip about Forster.
Would he have surmised Forster's sexuality just from the novels? There's a well-known exchange with Truman Capote and Lionel Trilling about this subject, circa 1943.
"Well didn't you guess it?" Capote says.
Trilling replies: "Yes, as I was writing my book, it began to dawn on me that probably he was homosexual."
This tells us that a literary scholar in 1943 even from a very conservative religious background might well surmise sexuality from a novel even with no overt reference to sexuality. Rather, Forster's writing felt 'queer'.
Even Tolkien's apparent silence on sexuality in a culture that was generally very homophobic suggests to me he's symathetically keeping the secret. Compare Marshall McLuhan, the truly devout Catholic, who insulted gays quite regularly and saw vast conspiracies of gays aligned against him.
The source on Capote/Trilling--
