Born into a fabulously wealthy family in Boston, when he was young, Warren kept a diary detailing his crushes on other boys and making no secret of the gentlemen to whom he was attracted, much to the dismay of his family. Warren just wasn’t cut out for life in puritanical Boston, so he traveled to England to study at Oxford, an all-male university where consensual male-on-male action between aristocratic young men was mostly ignored.

 

At Oxford, Warren felt comfortable courting comely classmates, and he furnished his room with the best art, furniture, silver, porcelain, and crystal. Several of his Oxford scholars focused on homoeroticism in ancient art and culture and spoke about the virtues of the Greeks, and Warren found his calling. He decided to stay in England, and he began buying, selling, and collecting ancient Etruscan, Greek, and Roman art.

 

Warren wrote a three-volume A Defense of Uranian Love using his pen name Arthur Lyon Raile and privately printed and published it one-book-a-year from 1928 –1930. Warren: “My verses and my prose advocate a morality, but it is not the current morality in certain matters.” What an understatement; the books suggest a plan for a Utopian society where aristocracy, nobleness, and masculinity bring about a civilization like the ancient Spartans had that could flourish. “Uranian” was a euphemism for “gay” in the Victorian era.

 

While at Oxford, Warren met John Marshall, a middle-class young man who was studying to be an Anglican priest. They fell in love, and Marshall abandoned Theology for the Classics. After his father’s death in 1888, Warren started to receive an annual income of a million U.S. dollars a year ($33 million in 2025 dollars). The boys left Oxford the next year and began restoring a Georgian mansion, The Lewes House, making it a showplace for a collection of ancient art.

Marshall learned how to determine the value, provenance, and authenticity of the pieces that caught Warren’s interest, and he became a skilled negotiator on the prices paid for the purchases.

 

Warren was deliriously rich, and the couple began acquiring art to fill their many rooms. Their collection was better than those of the Americans J. P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Frick. They became the most important collectors of classical antiquities in the world, eventually gaining almost complete control of the market. Almost everything that worth collecting came to them for first refusal.

 

Warren commissioned a version of Auguste Rodin’s (1840 – 1917) Le Baiser, requesting that the sculptor make the male figure especially well-hung. Although earlier versions of the famous statue didn’t feature a visible penis, Rodin happily agreed. This sculpture was turned down by museums in the USA for being too explicit, but it can be seen at The Tate London.

 

Warren donated pieces to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including collections of pottery depicting pornographic male images. The Boston Museum finally cataloged and exhibited a few of them in 1950, but the Met put theirs in storage, where they continue to sit uncatalogued, unphotographed, unexhibited, and unacknowledged. Warren’s gifts to the Boston Museum make up 90% of its classical collection, regarded as one of the finest in the world.

 

A solid silver six inch tall drinking goblet dating to the first century was found near Jerusalem, and Warren purchased it from a dealer in Italy soon after its discovery. Now known as “The Warren Cup”, it depicts a man and a boy having sex while a servant boy watches. The craftsmanship is exquisite. Warren tried to sell it to museums in Europe and North America, but no one would touch it because of its depiction of sex between two men. It’s a major piece of classical work, but it stayed in Warren’s personal collection. Even the next owners refused to show it. Finally, in 1999, the British Museum purchased it for a huge amount of money, and photographs of its pornographic details were splashed all over the tabloids. It continues to attract big crowds. Sex sells.

 

Handsome young men were part of the Warren-Marshall household, ostensibly to assist in cataloging the acquisitions. The couple also had homes in coastal Maine, Boston, and England, but Warren spent most of his time in Italy and Greece acquiring more art. Left on his own, Marshall married one of Warren’s female cousins, who was anxious to end her unflattering label of “spinster”. Together they advised and aided in the purchase of antiquities for the Met, while Warren pursued young men using his considerable fortune to sponsor the educations of the gentlemen who held promise but had no money. This arrangement started a stormy on-again off-again relationship with Marshall, but as they got older, the men became a couple again.

 

For three decades Warren, Marshall, and the wife lived together. The men had the main bedroom while the wife had her own rooms on another floor of the house. They enjoyed meals together and traveled as a trio. After the death of Marshall’s wife in 1928, the fellows took up residence at an apartment in Rome, where one night, Marshall went to bed early, saying that he was not feeling well, and he was gone by the next morning. A devastated Warren never recovered and he returned to England. 10 months later Warren joined Marshall.

 

Because he was open with his gayness, Warren’s family didn’t attend his funeral, and none of the museums that he had donated so many priceless works of art sent a representative to the memorial service. Warren’s ashes, and those of Marshall and his wife are all interred together in a cemetery in an Italian village, where the trio had been happiest.

 

In 1911, Warren had adopted a four-year-old boy, Travis Warren, who grew up at Lewes House. Warren left Lewes House to H. Asa Thomas, his “secretary”. He left his other homes to Charles Murray West, another “secretary”. Both Thomas and West sold their places. Travis Warren inherited $3,000 ($55,000 in 2025 dollars) a year managed by a trust until he turned 28 years old, when he was to receive $20,000 ($367,000 today), and the trust could invest up to $30,000 on his behalf. Despite this money, poor Travis was destitute by the end of his life.