Remapping the sites of modern gay history: Legal reform, medico-legal thought, homosexual scandal, erotic geography

Journal of British Studies

Volumn 46, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 116-142

  Bristow, Joseph ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 61049569196     PISSN: 00219371     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/508401     Document Type: Review

References (79)

1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, 1978), 4-5
2. While Foucault published two more volumes in his History of Sexuality, his project remained incomplete at the time of his death in 1984. Much of Foucault's critique of inquiries that uphold the idea of the "triple edict of taboo, nonexistence, and silence" during the Victorian period has a particular target in mind. He is critical of Steven Marcus's Freudian study of pornography, The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York, 1966)
3. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985)
4. Jonathan Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford, 1991)
5. Alan Sinfield, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar and the Queer Moment (New York, 1994)
6. Richard Dellamora, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1990)
7. and Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994). All of these writings, to varying degrees, engage both respectfully and critically with Weeks's and Foucault's works. Dellamora's Masculine Desire, for example, opens by discussing both of these scholars' writings
8. Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London, 1977), 27. A second edition of Weeks's book, which includes a new chapter on the 1980s, appeared from the same publisher in 1990
9. Foucault, Introduction, 34
10. Jeffrey Weeks, Making Sexual History (Cambridge, 2000), 8
11. See Mary Mcintosh, "The Homosexual Role," Social Problems 16, no. 2 (1968): 182-91
12. and Dennis Altman, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation (New York, 1971)
13. D. H. Lawrence, quoted in ibid., 157
14. Weeks, Coming Out, 95
15. Pam Johnson, "Edith Simcox and Heterosexism in Biography: A Lesbian-Feminist Exploration," in Not a Passing Phase: Reclaiming Lesbians in History, 1840-1985, ed. Lesbian History Group (London, 1989), 62
16. Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 (Chicago, 2004), 32
17. Jeffrey Weeks, "Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance: Some Problems in the History of Homosexuality," in The Making of the Modern Homosexual, ed. Kenneth Plummer (London, 1982), 102
18. See also Weeks, "Foucault for Historians," History Workshop Journal 14 (1982): 106-19
19. Weeks, "Discourse, Desire and Sexual Deviance," 103
20. H. G. Cocks, Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (London, 2003), 7
21. Matt Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914 (Cambridge, 2003), 5
22. John Addington Symonds, "To Havelock Ellis" (July 1891), in The Letters of John Addington Symonds, ed. Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters, 3 vols. (Detroit, 1967-69), 3:587
23. Cook, London, 44
24. Weeks, Coming Out, 22
25. Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (Basingstoke, UK, 2005), 93
26. and Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (Harlow, UK, 1981), 103
27. Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality, 93-94. Brady notes that the silence in The Times was likely precipitated by the overexposure of the scandal featuring cross-dressers Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park in 1870-71. I return to Brady's and other recent analyses of the arrest, arraignment, and trial of Boulton and Park below
28. Weeks's comments on the Home Office files appear in Sex, Politics and Society, 102
29. Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 ( Chicago, 2005), 242
30. All of these observations complement the astute analysis that Frank Mort made in 1980 about the ways in which the 1967 act constructed "a new type of homosexual subject, understood as operating in the private sphere; a subject who in matters of sexuality and morality is defined as consenting, privatised and person-focused." While Mort recognizes that it is in the interests of sexual minorities to defend the rule of reformist legislation, he also stresses that gay people should not be "'transfixed' by its operation." See Frank Mort, "Sexuality: Regulation and Contestation," in Homosexuality: Power and Politics, ed. Gay Left Collective (London, 1980), 43, 41
31. Houlbrook, Queer London, 271
32. Houlbrook takes "homosex" as "an amalgam" that "indicates sexual activities of various sorts between two males" from John Howard, Men like That: A Southern Queer History (Chicago, 2001), xviii. One trusts that the term might describe participation in all-male group sex as well
33. These figures appear in Chris Waters, "Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social: Peter Wildeblood and the Making of the Modern Homosexual," in Moments of Modernity: Rethinking Britain, 1945-1964, ed. Becky Conekin, Frank Mort, and Chris Waters (London, 1999), 137
34. Rupert Croft-Cooke, The Verdict of You All (London, 1955), 26, 151
35. reprinted in Waters, "Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social," 266
36. It is valuable to compare Leslie J. Moran's comments on how critics might connect the rise in arrests in the years leading up to reform and changes in policing practices, since this topic preoccupied the Wolfenden Committee. As Moran says, "many factors were at play in the statistical representation of homosexuality." Such factors included "the intensity of the ups and downs of public indignation or pubic annoyance caused by the behaviour of the offenders" and "the outlook of senior police offices." See Leslie J. Moran, The Homosexual (ity) of Law (London, 1996), 199-20. Moran's discussion is not confined to the policing of London
37. Moran, The Homosexual (ity) of Law, 22-28, 48-59, and 102-17
38. and Frank Mort, "Mapping Sexual London: The Wolfenden Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution, 1954-1957," New Tormations 37 (1999): 92-113
39. Waters makes a comparable point about Wildeblood's disidentification with effeminate queers in Against the Law ("Disorders of the Mind, Disorders of the Body Social," 146-47)
40. Mort, "Mapping Sexual London," 110
41. Cook, London, 7
42. Cook implies that the exclusive Cannibal Club was a feature of the 1880s; by comparison, Dane Kennedy points out that the club was "at its height" in 1865 in The Highly Civilized Man: Richard Burton and the Victorian World (Cambridge, MA, 2005), 170
43. David M. Halperin, "Forgetting Foucault: Acts, Identities, and the History of Sexuality," Representations 63 (1998): 97
44. It is interesting to see that Oosterhuis's study of Krafft-Ebing's sexual radicalism objects to Weeks's apparent belief that doctors were "powerful agents in the organisation, and potential control, of the sexual behaviors they sought to regulate" (Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity [Chicago, 2000J, 7)
45. Weeks, Making Sexual History, 32
46. Elsewhere, Brady finds it convenient to talk loosely about "historians in the Weeks/Foucault tradition" who "argue that 'homosexual identity' was constructed by medical and legal classifications of this 'species' of abnormal male in the late nineteenth century" (Masculinity and Male Homosexuality, 40)
47. Tosh, as I mention below, discusses "hegemonic masculinity" in his Manliness and Masculinities in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Harlow, UK, 2005), 44, 45
48. R. W. Connell expounds the concept in Masculinities (Berkeley, 1995), 77-78
49. Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality, 2 3
50. Tosh advances his innovative argument in A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT, 1999). 74 Tosh, Manliness and Masculinities, 44
51. Douglas's famous phrase first appeared in his poem, "Two Loves," in John Francis Bloxam's homophile journal The Chameleon (Oxford, 1894)
52. reprinted in Brian Reade, ed., Sexual Heretics: Male Homosexuality in English Literature from 1850 to 1900 (London, 1970), 162
53. Cook, London, 5-6
54. Holbrook Jackson, The Eighteen-Nineties: A Review of Art and Ideas at the Close of the Nineteenth Century (London, 1913; repr., London, 1926), 116
55. Timothy d'Arch Smith, Love in Earnest: Some Notes on the Lives and Writings of English "Uraman" Poets from 1889 to 1930 (London, 1970)
56. Cook's position counters the immense amount of scholarship on the Wilde scandal - which began in 1911 with the first purported transcript of the trial, intensified in 1948 with H. Montgomery Hyde's derivative version of the events, and then flourished when Richard Ellmann published his fine but flawed biography of the Irish author in 1987. While Ellmann's biography, Oscar Wilde (London, 1987), remains the definitive work of its kind; it follows in a long tradition of mythmaking and error-ridden speculative studies of Wilde's personal and professional life. There are numerous errors of fact in Oscar Wilde, as Horst Schroeder has shown in Additions and Corrections to Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, 2nd ed. (Braunschweig, 2002)
57. Cook, London, 52
58. Cocks, Nameless Offences, 105
59. The Boulton and Park scandal has absorbed a great deal of scholarly energy during the past twenty years. Neil Bartlett was the first to examine in detail the trial transcript held at the Public Record Office (together with press reports) in Who Was That Man? A Present for Mr. Oscar Wilde (London, 1988)
60. Morris B. Kaplan, as I clarify below, has recently offered by far the most thoroughly documented account of the scandal to date in Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca, NY, 2005), 19-101
61. See Sinfield, The Wilde Century, 7-8
62. and Bartlett, Who Was That Man? 148
63. Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, 101
64. Charles Upchurch, "Forgetting the Unthinkable: Cross-Dressers and British Society in the Case of the Queen vs. Boulton and Others," Gender and History 12, no. 1 (2000): 142
65. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames, 96
66. William Cohen, Sex Scandal: The Private Parts of Victorian Fiction (Durham, NC, 1996), 96
67. Clifford Geertz, "Thick Description: Toward an Interpretative Theory of Culture," in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York, 1973), 3-32
68. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames, 265, 7
69. Kaplan is quoting Frank Harris My Life and Loves (1922-27; repr., New York, 1991), 640
70. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (London, 1982)
71. Rictor Norton, Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture of England (London, 1992)
72. and George Chauncey, Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 (New York, 1994)
73. Quoted in Cook, London, 17
74. Hirsch's memoir of this episode, which first appeared in his 1934 French edition of the supposedly "correct" edition of Teleny, or the Reverse of the Medal, which had been published in England (and, according to Hirsch, in radically edited form) in 1893 by Leonard Smithers, has been translated by Peter Mendes (Clandestine Erotic Fiction in English, 1800-1930: A Bibliographical Study [Aldershot, 1993], 447-49)
75. On the myths surrounding the green carnation, see Karl Beckson, The Oscar Wilde Encyclopedia (New York, 1998), 122-24
76. Cook, London, 33
77. On Toynbee Hall, see Diana Maltz, British Aestheticism and the Urban Working Classes, 1870-1900: Beauty for the People (Basingstoke, UK, 2006), 67-97
78. Quoted in Cook, London, 38
79. Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 63