The point about Housman's sexuality is that a rather definite pattern emerges if you look at which poets twentieth century English composers chose to set. Look at Britten's rather strange choices of lyricists/librettists for starters. Housman was a gay literary icon, the most prominent one of his time, and the most mainstream. However, "Is My Team Ploughing" is brilliant but exceptional - he didn't have a whole lot to say. Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence were active at the same time, dealing with a much wider range of subjects than just muscular young lads having dramatic emotions in quaint rural environments, but attracted far fewer song settings. There was a reason for that.

I find British coyness around this sort of issue really irritating. BBC Radio 3 announcers will often talk their way through whole programmes of the gay men's English song genre without ever saying a word about its historical basis. (The best gay composers of the time weren't part of the clique - Michael Tippett set his own words and Peter Maxwell Davies never set any gay writer I can think of). It's not as if there was any shortage of biographical material.