Accounts of the “failure” of 1930s radical politics often alight on Auden's famous lines from “September 1, 1939,” “The clever hopes expire/Of a low dishonest decade.” Auden's apparent denunciation of the 1930s on the eve of war has been taken to index his despair at the failure of the political itself, his lines “not universal love/but to be loved alone” expressive of the necessary malfunctioning of any collectivist project in the face of individualism. The supposed cowardice of Auden and Isherwood's move to the US in 1939, much decried at the time, has typically been mobilized in support of this view. But there are a number of reasons for resisting reading these lines as a failure of the political per se – not least because in his hitherto unexplored unpublished diary of that week Auden laid out earnest plans for political reform through a form of socialist democracy. Rather than delving into the wide-ranging debates about Auden, America, and the Political that have been the subject of so much scholarly focus, I would like to draw attention to the equally political modalities of queer life explored in this poem. Curiously, the poem's queer valences have remained relatively unexamined, even in Richard Bozorth's excellent study, Auden's Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality (2001).

The “dive” in which the poem is set was the Dizzy Club, which Auden visited on September 1, 1939. As he recorded in a diary entry: “Went to the Dizzy Club. A whiff of the old sad life. I want I want.” Here Auden complains about a certain form of queer sociality, cast as graspingly promiscuous, marked by sadness and the past. And yet, the previous month he had begun a relationship with Chester Kallman. Falling for the young American, Auden earnestly hoped that the relationship would prove monogamous and began to refer to it as a “marriage” (Auden's hopes of exclusiveness were not fulfilled, but the two men remained lifelong partners). While “September 1, 1939” might convey the sense of an ending, the expiration of the hopes of the 1930s, or indeed despair at the impossibility of queer life, its negations call forth an emergent mid-century sexual identity: the respectable homosexual.