Wystan Hugh Auden (more commonly known as W. H. Auden) played an important role, as we have seen, in the lives of both Benjamin Britten (Chapter 2) and Christopher Isherwood (Chapter 3). Like them, he was a gay man and an artist, and he collaborated artistically with both of them – as a friend of the younger Britten, and close friend and lover of the older Isherwood. Although Isherwood always emphasized the boyish, sexual dimension of his relationship with Auden, it was, I believe, a more deeply loving relationship, on Auden's part, than he ever acknowledged, perhaps even to himself. We can see this both in their quite psychologically radical collaborative plays during the 1930s in which they explore the lovelessness and violence of British patriarchal manhood, and in Auden's poetry during this period, among his best work. Auden's later work continued to be absorbed by the problem of manhood, in particular, by associated anxieties, and he wrote some distinguished poetry and many penetrating essays. However, the psychological and artistic depths Auden's work plumbed when he was in a still lively sexual and personal relationship to Isherwood, very much his equal as a man and artist, came to an end, as Isherwood moves to Los Angeles and Auden falls disastrously in love with Chester Kallman. Isherwood and Auden remained friends, albeit at a distance, but the relationship was no longer intimate and ongoing in the way it had once been. Auden's relationship to Britten, however, ended, broken, as we have seen (Chapter 2), by Britten's indignation at Auden's imperious questioning of both his love for Pears and his vocation as an artist.

What divided Auden from his formerly intimate friends and collaborators was not their sexual lives: All loved other men, and thus all broke the Love Laws that forbad such love across the boundaries. It was something else, namely, their understanding of the relationship of their loves to patriarchy.