Edward Carpenter was born on September 29, 1884, in Hove, England. In addition to being a poet, essayist, and socialist theorist, Carpenter was one of the earliest gay rights advocates of the modern era. At the age of eighteen, Carpenter was accepted into Trinity Hall at Cambridge University, where he first began to explore his feelings for men, developing a brief but close friendship with Edward Anthony Beck, who later became Master at Trinity Hall. Following his graduation from university in 1868, Carpenter became involved with the Anglican Church, serving as a curate but becoming increasingly dissatisfied as the years went by. During this time, Carpenter began to engross himself in poetry to alleviate his frustrations, eventually discovering the works of U.S. writer Walt Whitman, which he described as a moment of “profound change” for him. Carpenter met Whitman in 1877, by which time he had left the Anglican ministry and moved to the north of England to become a lecturer. During this time Carpenter began to write his own poetry and his sexual preferences for working class men became apparent. Over the course of his life, Carpenter had a series of sexual relationships with working class men, including George Merrill, a working class man from Sheffield. The pair cohabited from 1898 to 1928, when Merrill died. Carpenter is best remembered for his 1908 work, The Intermediate Sex, where he expressed his view on homosexuality and his own personal preferences. In his book, Carpenter remarked that homosexuality was on the rise, which indicated to him a new era of sexual liberation. Carpenter suffered a paralytic stroke in May 1928 and died more than a year later on June 28, 1929, at the age of eighty-four. For more on Edward Carpenter, see Aspects of Queer Existence in 19th-Century America, by Rich Wilson and Gavin Arthur and Edward Carpenter's Night of Love (1923), by Jonathan Ned Katz and Joey Cain.