Recent studies of the Victorian era have analysed the overemphasis on masculinity during this period of Empire. Historians of homosexuality have detected what is termed a ‘sexual panic’ in the writings of the age. Effeminate aristocrats, their hangers-on and working-class males were all equally worried about the public appearance of sexual preferences. Male homosexual activities were of course illegal (it was decriminalized only in 1967). However, the debates were never one-sided. Jeremy Bentham, a key thinker, believed that homosexuality should be decriminalized. Contemporary readings have excavated the homosexual themes in many Victorian poets and novelists. The contexts of army life, adventure and travel, the public school system and the empire produced a cult of masculinity.

Twentieth-century critics have suggested that Tennyson's In Memoriam celebrates ‘homosocial’ (rather than homosexual) bonding. Certain passages from the poem offer the homosocial theme readily:

Or, his address to Arthur Hallam:

Here the reference to marriage (‘widowed’) alongside the emotional expressions of love for a ‘brother’ have been seen as veiled expressions of homosexual desire.

Gerard Manley Hopkins sought to negotiate the constraints of his Catholic belief with his homosexuality.