English writer Edward Morgan (E. M.) Forster was BOTD in 1879. Born in London to a middle-class family, he was educated at Cambridge University, where he met notorious homosexual Lytton Strachey. He became a satellite member of the Bloomsbury Group, befriending literary queers including Virginia Woolf and John Maynard Keynes. His early novels Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room With a View, witty satires of Edwardian morality unravelling amid the pagan splendour of Italy, became bestsellers, establishing him as an unlikely literary star. His 1910 novel Howard’s End, a portrait of two liberally-minded sisters clashing with a hard-headed industrialist family, brought him further success. Its much-quoted epigraph, “Only connect” summarises Forster’s ethos of compassionate humanism and can also be read as a coded expression of his repressed sexual longing. He volunteered for the Red Cross in Alexandria during World War One, finally losing his virginity (at the age of 38) to an Egyptian soldier. He worked in India in the 1920s as private secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas, inspiring a non-fiction book The Hill of Devi and his final novel A Passage to India, a critique of the British colonisation of India. During the 1930s and 1940s, he became a popular broadcaster on BBC Radio. On a weekend visit to Edward Carpenter’s home, Forster had his bottom fondled by Carpenter’s working-class lover George Merrill. The experience inspired the deeply closeted Forster to write Maurice, a queer romance about a middle-class man who falls in love with a gamekeeper. Privately circulated, it inspired D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but remained unpublished in Forster’s lifetime. In later life, he collaborated on the librettos for Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, a sobering drama about a fisherman accused of molesting young men in his employment, and Billy Budd, an adaptation of Herman Melville‘s novella about a sadistic captain-at-arms persecuting a beautiful young naval cadet. In later life, he had a long-term relationship with policeman Bob Buckingham, living with Buckingham and his wife during his final illness. He died in 1970, aged 91. His work resurged in popularity during the 1980s, with successful film adaptations by James Ivory, Charles Sturridge and David Lean. Matthew Lopez‘s 2018 play The Inheritance transplants the plot of Howard’s End to contemporary gay New York, in which Forster’s ghost is interrogated about his failure to come out of the closet.