He seemed to have had a fairly late-in-life sexual awakening about men. His earlier writings showed more interest in women and courted women such as the actress Lillie Langtry but by his thirties his interest seemed to have shifted solidly to men.

When they first met he wrote passionate love poems to his wife and they had children together. However, they stopped having sex after the birth of their second child which was around the same he first started having affairs with men.

It's impossible to for certain what his predilections were. Perhaps he was pretending earlier and stopped later on. Perhaps his attraction to some women was real but he also had a preference for men, that he was on the gayer side of the Kinsey scale. But once he started experimenting with male sexual partners he seemed to really like it.