Dishing About Sex Between Men in Victorian England  

Victorian Britons did not talk about sex, and certainly not sex between men. That is the conventional narrative, and for a long time it seemed borne out by the evidence from the period.

The greater frankness that surrounded the discussion of sexuality in the eighteenth century did not survive the reformation of manners and the evangelical revival that swept Britain during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. With the ascendancy of the middle class in the nineteenth century as both a political and a social force came an increasing emphasis on propriety, decorum, and personal restraint that defined the more carnal aspects of everyday life as inappropriate for public discussion. It was only in the late nineteenth century, so the story goes, that middle class values began to buckle under diverse challenges from workers, feminists, socialists, and many others. In this context, shocking scandals involving sex between men in the late nineteenth century, culminating in the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895, broke the Victorian silence on these matters, and set the stage for modern understanding of homosexuality.

This is a compelling narrative, but a central aspect of it is simply not accurate. The period of silence in the early to mid-nineteenth century, when sex between men was supposedly not discussed in public, never existed. In fact, the years between 1820 and 1870 saw an increase in the circulation of narratives centered on sex between men. You could not have regularly read the newspapers in mid-nineteenth century London and missed it.

My book Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform documents over one thousand separate reports within this fifty year period, appearing in the Times, the Weekly Dispatch, and the Morning Post; the leading newspapers for the middle, working, and upper classes respectively. Most of these reports do not concern famous individuals like the scandal trials of the later nineteenth century, and the language used is not as explicit as that found in the eighteenth century sources related to sex between men. Instead, these stories in the mainstream newspapers were primarily about the tribulations of average men whose sexual desire for other men caused them to run afoul of the law. Often the newspaper stories were only a few paragraphs, but when taken together and combined with the court documents, personal letters, obituaries, and other fragments left behind by hundreds of lives, both from the men themselves as well as their families, it all constitutes one of the greatest bodies of evidence for understanding sex between men in British society that exists prior to the twentieth century.

Two questions are immediately raised by these findings. The first relates to how this information remained undiscovered for so long. The second concerns how this new material alters what we know about the concept of homosexuality in the nineteenth century.

Addressing the first question involves recognizing that despite being published in the newspapers, this was not information that was easy to recover. The indexes to nineteenth century newspapers mask the true amount of coverage, and simple keyword searches using the new full-text newspaper databases are not the deus ex machina that many believe them to be. The Victorians were good at giving the necessary details of an attempted sodomy or indecent assault between men without resorting to explicit statements. It was possible to describe how men placed hands on one another in a way that could lead to a criminal charge, or exchanged telling looks that would instigate a sexual encounter, without ever having to say anything like “sodomy” or “buggery,” even as the context of the story made it clear to the newspaper reader that this was the issue. Over six years of research went into teasing out the one thousand accounts that form the foundation of Before Wilde. Hundreds of others no doubt remain to be recovered in other newspapers, but what has been amassed is enough to make the point that we need to reconsider the degree to which this behavior was “unspeakable” and unspoken in the public sphere.

Another reason for there being little attention to this material before now is that the changes that led to its preservation were not made specifically to address the issue of sex between men. The laws relating to “attempted sodomy” and “indecent assault” began to be enforced systematically in the early 1820s, but this was done as a part of a larger re-vamping of how the British state enforced all of its criminal laws. The systemization of the legal code in the 1820s and the founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 were done to address issues of social control in an increasingly urban society. The policing of sex was a part of this, but men like Robert Peel, Home Secretary and founder of the new police force, avoided talking about it whenever possible. The result was a profound change in the regulation of sex between men, but one that no one specifically took responsibility for, or wanted to draw attention to, and which consequently operated in a very uneven way. Convictions for these sexual advances between men usually resulted in prison sentences of one to two years, but some men were let off with as little as a £5 fine. The law was primarily concerned with keeping order in pubic space, and the types of liaisons they most frequently disrupted were casual encounters, often where one man used differences in wealth or age to facilitate the assignation. The police did not have the authority to move into more private spaces, such as individual homes, “molly houses,” or private “bal masques” where crossed-dressed men were known to be in attendance. There were thousands of prosecutions in the period, but there is also a great deal of evidence for the methods by which men could, with a few precautions, pursue these desires and still avoid the sanction of the law.

When addressing the question of what this new information tells us about understandings of homosexuality in the nineteenth century, the advantage of working with hundreds of narratives becomes apparent. Unlike many previous accounts, which made broad cultural extrapolations from a few sensational events, the size of the sample brought together in Before Wilde allows for the discernment of the typical from the anomalous. Before Wilde is the first social history of sex between men in nineteenth century Britain, and creates a composite image of beliefs throughout the culture, with equal attention given to the middle, upper, and working classes.

Attention to class and social status is important because the highly charged nature of an accusation of sex between men was extremely disruptive to social hierarchies. It was one of the few areas of the law where working class men regularly brought men of higher class status before a magistrate. Servants were known to accuse employers, shop assistants their customers, while propertied men often countered that such charges were invented to extort money from them. The role of the new police was especially fraught in this area of the law, since the constables were all working class men, and yet their job meant that their word alone might bring in a middle or upper class man to court on a charge of criminal immorality. Police were often distrusted by the magistrates and juries, and the character of officers was regularly attacked when they arrested men of higher class status. A group of officers in 1829 were publicly vilified for going into Hyde Park at night to entrap men cruising for sex, in part because the men they arrested were from the middle and upper classes. Periods of the greatest economic and social tension, especially the “Hungry 40s,” are also the periods when the reporting of sex between men was most extensive. The politics of class are intimately tied up with the public representation of same sex desire in this period, and Before Wilde is the first work to explore these connections.

Another focus of analysis that is central to the hundreds of court cases examined in Before Wilde, but which up to the present time has not received significant attention in historical studies of sex between men, is the role of the family. The difficulty of daily life in this period meant that men who had sex with men did so primarily in moments stolen away from their family and community responsibilities, and when those liaisons were discovered it was often the family that first intervened. Families, and especially the women within them, often played a leading role in deciding what sort of sanction an individual might face in the days or months before an incident ended up in the courtroom. If someone’s health was going to fail on learning that a son was involved with sex between men, it was invariably that of the father, and it was the wife, sister, or niece who stepped in to hold the family together, to petition the state, or even to negotiate with an extortionist. Family has often been left out of historical accounts of sex between men in order to stress the connections that these men made with each other, but at least for the early to mid-nineteenth century this approach does not align well with the surviving evidence. Placing family at the center of the narrative of sex between men allows for the exploration of how the majority of society viewed this behavior, and provides a previously neglected counterpoint to the pronouncements of the elite men who framed the laws and controlled courtroom procedure.

In addition to the objectives outlined above, a central goal of Before Wilde is to reintegrate hundreds of individual stories and experiences back into the historical record. The book’s argument is built by layering multiple examples that illustrate trends, using quoted material whenever possible. In bringing these experiences back into the discussion, for a period when they were thought unrecoverable, Before Wilde seeks to demonstrate that same sex desire was always there, always discussed, and always an issue that societies had to grapple with. The implications of these sexual acts change over time and between cultures, but the discussion never really lapses. I began this work almost ten years ago, hoping to find anything at all to say about the period between 1820 and 1870. The result, I think, will have implications far beyond the study of sex between men alone. For a generation scholars have been formulating useful cultural insights over the increased attention to homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century and its relationship to the generally perceived decline of middle class values also then occurring. Similar cultural insights may likewise come from a better understanding of the characteristically different but also prominent discussion of sex between men that accompanied the ascendancy of respectable men into social and economic power in the first half of the nineteenth century.

Charles Upchurch is an assistant professor of British history at Florida State University. He received his doctorate in 2003 from Rutgers University, and has previously published work on cross-dressers and British society in the 1870s. His book, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform, was recently reviewed by Larry Kramer for the Huffington Post.