Christopher Isherwood

Peter Martland and Miles Pattenden wrote:

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​"Isherwood was acknowledged as one of the leading literary figures of the twentieth century, successful both as a novelist and diarist and, through his unashamed portrayal of homosexual culture in oppressive societies an icon of the gay rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s. If his time at Corpus was undistinguished, he has become one of the College's most celebrated alumni."

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Isherwood, a biography by Peter Parker, includes the following:

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Throughout his life, but particularly in the wake of the new sexual liberation of the 1960s and 1970s, Isherwood drew up battle-lines across the sexual divide, glaring balefully across the chasm that separated him from the heterosexual majority. Most of Isherwood's closest friends were homosexual, and such alliances drew strength from the knowledge that Christopher and his kind were beyond society's - and, for much of his life, the laws - pale…

 

Even at Corpus, which [one of his contemporaries] had encouragingly described as 'a hotbed of homosexualism', Isherwood had only two sexual encounters. He was not without admirers, however.”

 

Isherwood was not the first of his family to become a Cambridge LGBT+ Alumnus. Katherine Bucknell’s biography of Isherwood, Inside Out, refers to his uncle Henry as a “handsome, blond, blue-eyed” man “who instinctively attracted attention to himself and always got his way. Henry took a B.A. at Cambridge then qualified as a barrister... He was homosexual, and for this the family seemed to dismiss him, despite his privileged position. His style was camp; he "lisped slightly and dropped his final g's, as in huntin' and shootin'; otherwise his enunciation was so precise that it seemed affected. The family also dismissed Henry's spiritual struggles, which were clearly linked to his sexuality.”