This has struck me as a curiosity for a long time, especially as I know and have worked with a number of Anglo-Catholic clergy and laypeople. Those who are heterosexual seem to hold to more traditional notions of sexuality and marriage (which is in part true for those who are gay), and this is all the more puzzling when such a significant proportion of Anglo-Catholics (particularly the clergy) are gay.
So, when did the association begin to appear? And how did sexualities understood then by Anglicans as ‘deviant’ and ‘wrong’ become so common in clerical circles?
David Hilliard, an Australian historian, wrote the seminal paper on the subject (pdf here).
Hilliard notes that the link between Ritualism and what was then considered "effeminacy" was recognized outside the Anglo-Catholic movement by the mid-C19:
Clergymen of “extreme High Church proclivities,” sneered Punch, “are very fond of dressing like ladies. They are much addicted to wearing vestments diversified with smart and gay colours, and variously trimmed and embroidered.” A Protestant visitor to St.Matthias’s, Stoke Newington (London), which with its coloured vestments, incense, and lighted candles was regarded as a centre of advanced ceremonial, wrote in the Rock that the “style of dress and the close-shaven face, favoured so greatly by English imitators of Rome, do give to most men a rather juvenile, if not womanly appearance.”
He also notes that many of the movement's leaders were scholars inhabiting a largely single-sex university environment, discusses the role of "camp" in Anglo-Catholic worship, and identifies ACism in relation to other phenomena that could have been considered "countercultural":
“Anglo-Catholic baroque” was a theatrical, slightly unreal style which reflected the restless gaiety of the 1920s and the postwar urge to reject established social conventions. High Mass in an Anglican church with baroque interior decor, sung to music by Mozart or Schubert, belonged to the age of the Charleston, Theosophy, the Russian Ballet, and the first dramatic successes of Noel Coward. The same people often sampled them all.
A French sociologist who has studied the Church of England argues that the Anglo-Catholic movement appealed to gay men for two reasons:
*Its emphasis on the Incarnation translated to a focus on the redemption of the whole person as an embodied creature.
*It offered alternative models (such as the parish or monastic community) to the nuclear family championed by much of Evangelical Protestantism and its positive view of celibacy provided priests with a respectable reason for not marrying.