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It's clear from the text that Sebastien is homosexual, if not in act, in affection.

Blanche alludes to indiscretions with Sebastien. And when Charles visits Sebastien in Morrocco, the latter is playing sugar daddy to the reprobate German soldier Kurt. Whether there is any sexual manifestion between Kurt and Sebastien is a not a matter of text but the suggestive aspect is certainly there.

As for the dynamic between Charles and Sebastien, it is homosexual in nature but not explicitly sexual. It is undeniably romantic and not without erotism. But it's quite reasonable to assume a more complex romance between the two young men than one that is sexual.

Remember that when Charles is collected from the train station by Julia, he expresses feeling a "thin bat-squeak of sexuality" when passing a lit cigarette from his lips to Julia's. He conveys this with a certain amount of surprise, as though feeling something in that moment that he's never felt before.

It could be assumed from this that his romance with Sebastien, although not entirely Platonic, lacks the carnality and lust that Julia sparks in him. Perhaps it is this innocence that inspires Cara's characterization of their love as immature. Certainly, from that point on there is certain lustfulness in his attention to Julia.

To a great extent that "maturing" of Charles' interest heralds the beginning of the paranoia and jealousy Sebastien feels about his family stealing his friend.

As to what is implied by "grave sins," I think it's quite likely that it does not refer to sexual acts of any significance. A grave sin is not necessarily a mortal one. Waugh was a converted Catholic and Catholicism is one of the book's driving themes. But as a Protestant, Charles attitude to genuine homosexuality would likely have been even more sneering. His reference to grave sins is light and off the cuff. Prim and inexperienced as he still was in those Arcadia days, his grave sins were likely not so grave as the literalists would have us believe.

His reaction to Blanche and later to the relationship between Sebastien and Kurt is one of tempered disgust. The overt carnality of their behavior, the lustiness, offends his middle class Protestant sensibilities as being, at very least, unseemly. So whatever sensuality existed between him and Sebastien probably lacked the indelicacy of rutting behavior.

It's hard to say exactly what Sebastien hoped his romance with Charles would evolve into. But it's a fair guess that Charles' end of the romance had more to do with the otherworldly allure of aristocracy, Catholicism, scandal, dandyism, flamboyant wealth, and indulgence.

I'd forward the notion that Charles was being something of a tourist in his relationship with Sebastien and the Flytes. Not that he was insincere in his affection, only that he was carried away with the novelty of it all, to a lesser extent than he was interested in Sebastien specifically.

And his unconcerned reaction to being associated with "sodomites" is more akin to a brash young man happily owning being called an "asshole" or a "sociopath." It's fun and oh-so rebellious but it lacks seriousness or truth. If he had actually been a sodomite he probably would have been more abashed by the comment. It just isn't in Charles' character to be that brazen, even with Sebastien at his side.

Although he does delight in making his cousin uncomfortable in this context, it seems more like a sassy kid playing a game that he knows he won't get in trouble for. Let's remember sodomy was a jail-able offense in those days.

His subsequent liaison with Julia (despite its melancholy result) is the mature relationship Cara's comment foreshadows. It is deeper and more candid than the one with Sebastien, if not as winningly fantastical or classically romantic. It's Waugh's great genius that he makes us feel this comparison, makes us question which is the more poignant of the two loves � without providing us the easy out of an articulated answer.

I've read Brideshead many times over the years and it is often the first book I recommend to people. Part of reason for that is the subtlety with which all of these themes are handled. It is a book full of humor, truth, and complexity � unapologetically unspecific about its controversies.

I've seen many people try to force their own agendas onto the interpretation of the Charles/Sebastien relationship. Waugh never provided the answer and the text (as we can all see) was happily opaque about the details.

What we can say is that Sebastien was homosexual (even if he and Charles only ever snuggled) and that Charles definitely displayed sexual interest in women and was uncomfortable when confronted with overt sexuality from men.

Was Charles bisexual? Possibly.

I subscribe to the idea that sexuality is spectrum, wherein an individual's sexuality is rarely all the way to one extreme or the other. How evenly balanced was Charles on this spectrum? The text doesn't tell us.

But ...

If Charles relationship to Sebastien was the forerunner to the one with Julia, then that is likely because it was easy to play at romance with a boy � a boy it so happened who was much like the sister who would eventually become his lover.

Remember that Charles had no real experience of women at all in those Oxford days. His mother was dead and he had been at various all-male institutions of learning until that point. That drive with Julia, the cigarette they briefly shared, was his first intimate experience of a women.

Sebastien, whatever the degree of carnality they shared, was the training ground for all the romances and women to come. Becoming close to the flamboyantly effeminate Sebastien helped Charles build a bridge across the chasm of his ignorance of women. It also put him in the sphere of several iconoclastic women, including Lady Marchmain, Cara and Cordelia. Each had their own indiscreet relationship with Charles. Julia was the last holdout for Charles in this sense, and the ultimate ascent.

The physical and mannered similarities between the siblings can only have made the this truth more evident. Of course he was reminded of Sebastien the whole of his affair with Julia � they were so very alike. That he acknowledges Sebastien as the forerunner is a rueful observation, I think.

To conclude, I don't think Charles and Sebastien were just friends but neither do I think they were lovers in any carnal sense either.

I think it highly unlikely that their romance was ever consummated. In fact, I think the purity of their love was gradually destroyed by Charles' sexual awakening. Sexuality is the fall from innocence that drives the two friends apart (Waugh making a parallel to Adam and Eve being driven from paradise?). And it is that which makes Charles so melancholy about Sebastien in later years � his inability to be what Sebastien needed him to be � the ever-innocent, ever-loyal, brother in romantic innocence.

Sex is to their romance what Dust was to the characters in Philip Pullman's Dark Materials � the sullying of innocence and pure love. If you don't know what I'm getting at, just ask Aloysius.

But then maybe that's just my agenda.

I have always assumed they were lovers; this paragraph is pretty explicit:

"Now, that summer term with Sebastian, it seemed as though I was being given a brief spell of what I had never known, a happy childhood, and though its toys were silk shirts and liqueurs and cigars and its naughtiness high in the catalogue of grave sins, there was something of nursery freshness about us that fell little short of the joy of innocence."

I'm pretty sure we can imagine what those "grave sins" were!

Oh, my. Oxford and Cambridge both were utterly male bastions, and there's hardly a book written about a young gentleman at "Oxbridge" during the period from the late 19th to the present that doesn't address young men experimenting with their sexuality. Remember that most of these students came out of English public schools, such as Eton and Harrow, with their "harrowing" (sorry) fagging system, where I think the same sexual stirrings, in these male children, expressed themselves in brutality toward their younger classmates.

Many of these men left university, married lovely young Honorables who'd been presented at court, and lived happily ever after. or at least chummily thereafter, with their wives, producing heirs. I just finished Iris Murdoch's The Book and the Brotherhood, which is wonderful, and deals with the fallout of these sexual liaisons decades after leaving university. Very good book.

EDIT: I didn't answer your original question or your Bonus Question: No, I don't think they were lovers, despite Ned's apt quote; I do believe the "high naughtiness" bespeaks of an adolescent sense of sin, not an adult confession. I do think, however, myself, that Charles regrets this.

The ending. It's been 45 years, probably. Hmm. I remember saying to God (even then, more an Imaginary Friend than a deity), You win again. But it was quite sad. I was simply sorrowful, inconsolably so, that Sebastian was so bereft. I think I was too young to have any sense of what Charles and Sebastian's sister what's-its meant to each other. I probably read it altogether too young; there is such a thing, I firmly believe. I don't know what I would think today. It's only a sweet picture from my past of an even further past. I'd rather have a dim recollection than a reread, I do believe.

Yes, they were lovers. Of course Waugh couldn't make that explicit one had to read between the lines. My take on it is that at the time Waugh was writing Freudian theories on Psycology were gaining a wide acceptance and Freuds view of Homosexuality was that it was an immature sexuality, that adult men who were attracted to other men were immature and had not made the leap to what Freud though was the fully mature Heterosexuality. I think you see that in Charles developement as he graduates from Sebastian to Julia. His "immature" love for Sebastian was, as he admits in the Novel the precurser or template for his love for Julia. This developement is also paralleled by his "spiritual" maturity. Waugh was a conservative Catholic, so naturally to him. Charles becoming mature meant becoming Catholic.

I believe they were lovers. I saw the BBC miniseries and read the book in my teens, and my best friend and I were pretty convinced that they were lovers even back then. I've since read the book one more time, and am watching the miniseries on DVD. I know we're talking about the book, but look at how they hang all over each other in the miniseries. And how Charles looks adoringly at Sebastian.

Also, in the first chapter of the book, Charles speaks of Sebastian's beauty. I can only speak from a woman's POV, but I don't really think men talk like that about one another. Women do, but not men.

I'm glad to find this conversation and hope someone's still monitoring/reading.

I'd also like to recommend "Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead." Gives quite a lot of background, including the fact that Waugh had at least two but possibly three male lovers while at Oxford.

They were in love with each other and I'll die on this hill