Peter Pan and the Uranian Movement

The founder of the Order of Chaeronea and co-founder of the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology, George Cecil Ives was also a friend of J.M. Barrie and played with the famous author of the Peter Pan stories on Barrie’s cricket team . The character of Peter Pan bears traces of Uranian influence, reflects some of the qualities of the beloved boy found in Ives’s poetry, and constitutes a new Ganymede figure for the twentieth century. The Uranian practice of idealizing the sleeping and the celestial youth as both beautiful and untouchable helps explain Peter’s iconic desirability, performance of chivalry, and pursuit by the predatory Captain Hook. Examining different iterations of Peter Pan, from his earliest incarnations in Barrie’s The Little White Bird through the play and prose versions, shows that we cannot fully understand the most famous ageless boy of the twentieth century without noting his connection to the Uranians and to Ives as a pioneer of the gay movement in England .