Assessments of the social transgression represented by sex between men in the first half of the nineteenth century have largely been shaped by the views of upper- and middle-class men from that period. If today we recognize the self-interested nature of arguments for aristocratic government and laissez-faire economics made by these groups, we have been more willing to take their pronouncements on sex between men as representative of the views of the society as a whole. In part this generalization has occurred because so few personal papers or memoirs record information on this topic. Individuals of all social classes seem to have been reluctant to discuss the topic, let alone preserve records of what was spoken or written. But because people were forced to publicly voice their views on this behavior in the courtrooms, with hundreds of records surviving for cases occurring between the 1820s and the 1860s, it is possible to gain insight into that institution so vital to the control of the sexuality of its members: the family.
The family provided an alternative forum to the courtroom, where individuals assessed the transgression represented by sex between men and imposed punishments and sanctions deemed necessary to resolve the crisis caused within the family. It continued to exercise these powers throughout this period, even as social and legal changes (discussed in greater detail in chapters 3–5) impinged on its prerogatives. Surely many more such incidents were discovered, adjudicated, and settled solely within the forum of the family than ever came before the courts. Although some of the punishments decided within families were no doubt harsher than those family punishments described above, more often the transgression seems to have been accommodated. Families faced trade-offs: forgiving sex between men might be preferable to allowing children to suffer privation for want of the financial support of a father. It might be preferable to face the social stigma for taking a disgraced relative back in than to allow him to languish in permanent exile. The threat of sex between men might be more tolerable than the prospect of keeping a son idle at home, where he would become an economic drain on the family. None of these alternative views of sex between men is more “accurate” than the more familiar views of upper- and middle-class men: each is just as particular to individual circumstances as the views of those elite men. These examples suggest, though, that the pattern of designating sex between men as “the worst of crimes” was characteristic of a particular segment of British society. If we are to understand what such a designation means, we need to examine the groups that propagated and supported this idea.
CHAPTER 2
Class, Masculinity, and Spaces
Circumstances played a large role in how men understood their sexual activities with other men. The class backgrounds of the participants, the relative ages of the individuals involved, and the spaces in which those sexual acts occurred were all important. How men felt about their male sexual partners differed if the other man was met in a public school, known as a family friend, or encountered in Hyde Park at night. Sexual pickups in front of shop windows, lingering in certain sections of city parks, and suggestive stares in and around public urinals were recurring themes from the early eighteenth century to the early twentieth century, as was the existence of certain public houses and commercial spaces where “mollies” or “pooffs” congregated.1 These relationships were also shaped by the exercise of power, resulting in more or less overt forms of influence, coercion, and violence. Many of these aspects of sexuality between men during this period have been identified by other scholars, but they have not been differentiated according to class and geographic location.
One model for differentiating patterns of behavior and motivation between groups of men, grounded in the concerns of the early nineteenth century, is provided by Anna Clark’s analysis of the diaries of Anne Lister. Lister’s diaries are one of the few detailed autobiographical narratives from the early nineteenth century whose author specifically identifies and describes in detail her same-sex desire. In analyzing the diaries, Clark isolates three main areas to understand how an individual might have constructed an identity that positively incorporated same-sex desires: the desires that originate within the individual, the material conditions that structure an individual’s options, and the available cultural texts through which that person can interpret experience.2 Lister’s narratives provide excellent evidence of all three factors, but the usefulness of Clark’s approach is not limited to such fortuitous circumstances. Even when the internal desires of individuals are less well documented, it is possible to gain considerable insights from categorizing evidence of material resources and available cultural texts. I draw on this approach to demonstrate the forms of sex between men most typically associated with the working, middle, and upper classes, respectively. The resulting analysis demonstrates that the state was involved most heavily in situations where those acts had the greatest political consequences.
As Clark demonstrates in the case of Anne Lister, positive representations of same-sex desire in the ancient Greek and Roman texts carried great cultural authority among the upper classes. An upper-class young man’s education in the early nineteenth century would have incorporated such texts by Virgil, Lucretius, Horace, Tibullus, Martial, Tacitus, Suetonius, and Petronius.3 From the military prowess of the Sacred Band of Thebes to the example of the Roman emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous, the ancient world provided a counterpoint to the condemnation of sex between men in the Christian tradition.4
Upper-class men also had knowledge of the contemporary Mediterranean world, where some cultures allowed more open expressions of sexual desire between men than was allowed in Britain. Michael Rocke has demonstrated that patterns of age-structured sexual relations between older and younger men associated with ancient Greece and Rome persisted on a wide scale into the early modern period.5 The work of Graham Robb and George Mosse indicates that into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Mediterranean cultures continued to make allowances for certain forms of sexual contact between men. This aspect of Italian society was sometimes encountered or sought out when upper-class British men undertook a grand tour of Europe as the culmination of their education. According to at least one visitor to Naples, “Love between men is so frequent that one never expects even the boldest demands to be refused.”6
Upper-class men looking to ancient literature or to the contemporary Mediterranean found cultural texts and practices that demonstrated that such acts did not have to damage a man’s masculine status or reputation. Within the ancient world, sexual acts between men were not effeminizing, provided that a man was not seen to be submitting to the desires of another man. He asserted his own desires primarily by pursuing younger men and by always playing the penetrative role. Within this model of masculinity, only some men can achieve full masculine, or vir, status, and their success is based on their economic, social, and sexual domination of others.7 Evidence of a similar pattern of male sexuality and masculine status, based on the domination of a partner rather than on the sex of that partner, has been discussed for early modern England by Alan Bray and for eighteenth-century England by Randolph Trumbach, and it is within this tradition that the acts of same-sex desire exhibited by early-nineteenth-century upper-class figures, including Lord Byron, seem best explained.8 Although often eclipsed by the passions Byron felt for women, the homoerotic allusions in his writings and his sexual interest in younger men both conform to this pattern.9
Upper-class British culture also demonstrated a tolerance for extramarital sexuality, so long as the indiscretions did not lead to a public scandal. This tolerance applied to the sexual affairs of men and, to a lesser degree, women in the eighteenth century, although the allowance for women’s sexual indiscretions diminished as the century progressed. In their sexual affairs with other men, individuals such as George Dawson Lowndes seem to have been breaking the rules of decorum as much as the laws, and Lowndes consequently faced a great deal more ostracism than other men of his own class, like Richard Heber (see chapter 1), whose behavior became more discreet after the initial exposure of his affair with