Waugh noted in his diary the Horizon [the literary magazine launched by Cyril Connolly in 1940 to which Waugh contributed] was being run by ‘the rump of the left wing’. To Connolly in 1953, he wrote: ‘I always enjoyed the magazine & was grateful to you for printing my work in it, but there was an ugly accent — RAF pansy — which kept breaking in… That spoiled the enterprise for me.’

— Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter

RAF pansy? Did Waugh mean Brian Howard?

In the spring of 1924, the term before his final examination, he [Evelyn Waugh] seems to have become active homosexually. He told Christopher Sykes that while in Oxford he had experienced an ‘extreme homosexual phase’ (Sykes’s words) which, for the short time it lasted, was unrestrained, emotionally and physiscally’. There appears to be an allusion to this in a letter to Dudley Carew from Oxford this spring:

My life has been extremely precarious. … At present I am keeping my balance but I may crash at any moment. We will then combine and run a Sadist brothel at Wigan. … Of course no one in our class need ever starve because he can always go as a prep school master not a pleasant job but all roads lead to Sodom.

And in another letter to Carew:

I have been living very intensely the last three weeks. For the last fortnight I have been nearly insane. I am a little saner now. My diary for the period is destroyed. I may perhaps one day in a later time tell you some of the things that have happened. It will make strange reading in the biography.

And from a third letter to Carew this spring:

St John [his third name] has been eating wild honey in the wilderness. I do not yet know how things are going to end. They are nearing some sort of finality. One day I will tell you things to surprise you and sell an edition of the biography if faithfully recorded.

 Christopher Sykes, who either knew everything or was pretending to, writes of this in his official life of Waugh: ‘Names and details need not and should not be given.’ Possibly Waugh was now going to bed with Alastair Graham, but Harold Acton thinks this is unlikely - he believes that Graham’s attractiveness to Waugh was increased by the chastity of their relationship. Possibly it was Hugh Lygon, handsome and fair-haired, with whom Waugh was sharing digs. Those who knew Hugh claim to perceive traces of him in the character of Sebastian in Brideshead Revisited. At all events this homosexual episode or phase, whatever it was and whomever it involved, passed swiftly and was not to be repeated. Waugh’s letters to Carew suggest that it did not disturb his conscience.

All other sources say that Evelyn Waugh never actually happened to share digs with Hugh Lygon, though the two of them did have such a plan.

He [F.F. Urquhart, Dean of Balliol] was an undisguised snob. <…> …power and influence appealed to him… <…> By 1910 he could boast that there were ‘three members of Cabinet who call me Sligger’. <…> Every available inch of mantelpiece and walls [in his rooms] was covered with photographs of previous generations of undergraduates. Here he held ‘open house’ [for a circle of selected students] late each evening.

…professor Horace Slughorn

Waugh resented Sligger because he had lured Richard Pares away from the Hypocrites; Waugh alleged that Sligger lusted after Pares himself, and a letter from Sligger to Pares rather bears this out: ‘Well, Wig my dear, it is a very pleasant thought that we shall meet so soon…’

<…>

Sligger made some attempt to win over Waugh, inviting him to lunch so that they could talk about Pares, but he never offered wine or beer to undergraduates, and on this occasion Waugh’s glass was filled with lemon squash - ‘an error not to be easily forgiven’, says Christopher Hollis. Thereafter Waugh delighted to collect and spread stories about Sligger.

<…>

Peter Quennel describes Evelyn <…> standing beneath the window [of Sligger’s room] and singing, to the tune of ‘Here we go gathering nuts in May’,

The Dean of Balliol sleeps with men,

Sleeps with men, sleeps with men. 

—

The Brideshead Generation by Humphrey Carpenter

I thought I’d post a rather extensive quote about Richard Pares (more information than I could find anywhere), Alistair Graham, rumors of Evelyn Waugh’s homosexuality, ‘fairies’ at Oxford and even Mario Bowra, the prototype of Mr Samgrass.

‘Everyone in Oxford was homosexual at that time,’ said John Betjeman, who was there. Though homosexuality was illegal, many senior members of the university, most notably the flamboyant don Maurice Bowra, actively encouraged it, sometimes acting as go-between in setting up assignations for their pupils. Tom Driberg enjoyed soixante-neuf with a young don in the rooms where more cerebral tutorials were supposed to take place. The Hypocrites’ Club was the epicentre of what would now be called the university’s gay scene. According to Sykes, who knew Waugh extremely well, Evelyn was never shocked by homosexuality and remained very interested in the subject. He was, after all, ‘interested in all things which shed light on human character’. But later in life he would worry about his son discovering his past indiscretions. In the spring of 1924, Evelyn informed his old school friend, Dudley Carew, that his life had become ‘quite incredibly depraved morally’. Drunkenness at the Hypocrites was part of the story, but hardly sufficient to qualify as incredible depravity. Something else was being hinted at. Tom Driberg, dancing with a fellow member, saw a drunken Evelyn rolling on the sofa with another boy, ‘with (as one of them later said) their tongues licking each others’ tonsils’. Anthony Powell’s first encounter with Evelyn was a sighting of him at the Hypocrites sitting on the knee of another member, Christopher Hollis. A club guest, Isaiah Berlin, also saw him on a settee kissing a friend. Evelyn later teased Christopher Sykes for not having had a homosexual phase, saying that he had missed out on something special. But it was not just sexual experimentation. There were genuine love affairs. When the staunchly heterosexual Henry Yorke read Brideshead Revisited, he told Evelyn that it made him regret not falling in love at Oxford himself: ‘I see now what I have missed.’ What he missed was what Waugh experienced: real passion. Evelyn’s sexual abstinence at school seemed to make his Oxford love affairs even more intense. Though Evelyn relished the companionship of eccentric and slightly crazed friends like Terence Greenidge and Harold Acton, romantically he was drawn to fragile, beautiful boys. Before being seduced by the Hypocrites, he had become intimate with a shy and scholarly left-wing Wykehamist from Balliol called Richard Pares.

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Alec Waugh’s book about 1931, A Year to Remember, gives a detailed account of the scandal and its impact on his brother. He explicitly states that the events of that summer inspired Brideshead Revisited. Refusing to name the peer, even in 1975, the year of the memoir’s publication, Alec decided to call him Lord Marchmain:

In real life Lady Marchmain was the sister of a prominent Duke, and the case was being brought because of a quarrel between her husband and her brother, at her brother’s instigation. A groom for whom Marchmain had formed an attachment many years before was to be cited. The case was never brought because the King intervened. He could not allow a man who had been his own representative to be exposed to scandal. But the case was only dropped on the condition that Marchmain left the country.

Of Hugh, also not named, he writes: ‘His younger son was very good looking, very charming. He was also a very heavy drinker.’ Alec remembered that the wealthy and distinguished bisexual expatriate writer Somerset Maugham, who knew the family well, made the connection between Hugh Lygon and Sebastian Flyte in New York in 1945: ‘We all know, of course, who Sebastian was. A charming boy. He drank himself to death.’ Hugh had stayed with Maugham in the south of France.
Before recounting the story of the Beauchamp affair, Alec Waugh told of another encounter that took place in the summer of 1931. It involved W. Somerset Maugham and a young playwright called Keith Winter, who was a friend of Evelyn’s and Balfour’s. Winter was taken to the Villa Mauresque, where Maugham resided. Various other guests came and went, but Winter spent the night with Willie Maugham, teaching him a new sexual trick with his fingertips. Maugham was reminded of the boys he had enjoyed in Bangkok. Winter hoped to be taken up as Maugham’s new paramour, but Maugham dropped him unceremoniously. And the moral of the story? Winter (also unnamed in Alec’s memoir) went on to become a well-known writer, married with three children, a presenter for the BBC, a member of the Savile Club, a lecturer in American universities. Alec Waugh’s message is clear: promiscuous homosexuality is not in itself an impediment to success in life. As with Alec’s own disgrace at Sherborne, it was the discovery and not the act that did the damage. Boom’s big mistake was to get busted.

The grounds [to accuse lord Beauchamp] were: ‘THAT the Respondent is a man of perverted sexual practices, has committed acts of gross indecency with the male servants and other male persons and has been guilty of sodomy.’
The following paragraphs then lay out the litany of evidence that had been gathered by Westminster, Buckmaster and their detectives:

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