Before Wilde. Charles Upchurch

the more religiously inflected concept of character that defined middle-class masculinity.⁵² Although some within the working class were committed to rigorous versions of Christianity, such as Methodism, the economic imperatives of these men’s lives played a greater role in shaping their definition of masculinity, which continued to value physical strength, masculine dominance, and community obligations, even when economic conditions forced compromises of these ideals.

      These conditions did not make working-class men more inclined to sexual acts with other men, or any less likely to denigrate such acts publicly, but they did shape judgments about the severity of such transgressions and the circumstances under which they were felt more or less onerous than other options in a given situation. Evidence from the period suggests that understandings of masculine dominance might allow for sex with another man, provided that other man was rendered subordinate by being younger or rendered effeminate by the performance of more submissive acts. The work of Matt Houlbrook has shown that in early twentieth-century London, age-structured systems of organizing sexual relations between men were still found within the working class. Men retained their masculine status after such encounters even if the working-class “lads” they partnered with were well into their twenties.⁵³ This assessment coincides with the remarks of nineteenth-century observers who found “less repugnance” to homosexuality among the lower orders of British society.⁵⁴ In the case of soldiers and working-class extortionists, masculine status among peers could be sustained even with an association to sex between men, provided it was for financial gain, and it was the partner of the working-class man who was effeminized by the act. Although there were clearly many working-class men who would not and did not condone such associations, and who would not have seen themselves reflected in the actions of soldiers or extortionists, working-class masculinity, like upper-class masculinity, might allow sexual acts between men to be justified, either to an individual himself or to a small community of trusted men, in a way that middle-class masculinity did not. If cultural texts from the ancient world allowed for at least a potential alternative understanding of sex between men for some upper-class men, as discussed earlier, the economic resources and imperatives of working-class men provided the context for a similar potential proximity for at least some of these men as well.

      These differing ways of configuring masculine status among the different classes are important for understanding the changing nature of the regulation of sex between men in early nineteenth-century London. In the 1820s, new methods of policing and publicizing sex between men came into force, including the establishment of London’s first professional police force and a rise in the circulation of newspapers. Although wealth could be used to carve out spaces of comfort, privilege, and relative privacy, the urban environment of London was not a protected or safe space for anyone. In the city, men and women from all backgrounds and classes mixed, and none of those interactions could be entirely controlled. The geography of London was not offstage in British politics, but rather center stage.

      The sexual encounters between men in London that were most often uncovered, disrupted, and discussed involved two men of different classes. Certain broad spatial patterns are also evident. Locations such as parks, urinals, and public houses, noted in eighteenth-century accounts as locations where sex between men occurred, continued to be prominent. Police-court records indicate that the West End neighborhoods served by the Marylebone and Marlborough Street police courts accounted for the greatest number of arrests (see chapter 6). But there is also a great deal of evidence that sex between men was not just confined to the entertainment districts of the West End or locations like the molly houses. Sex between men occurred in a wide variety of locations around the city, and men who strongly identified with their feelings of same-sex desire were only one part of the story.

      True, many associated London with opportunities for sexual encounters between men. When trying to convince a police constable to commit sexual acts with him one evening on the street, Thomas Hosier reportedly described “the crime as one of common occurrence in both London and France.”⁵⁵ In 1843 the presiding judge at the Central Criminal Court sentenced two men for indecently assaulting each other “after alluding to the painful increase of such offences” in recent years.⁵⁶ Several months earlier a magistrate at the Marylebone police court also commented that “it was a melancholy thing that cases of so shocking a description should be of such frequent occurrence.”⁵⁷ At the end of a case centering on an indecent assault between men standing in front of a shop window, the presiding magistrate lamented that “he believed assaults of that kind were of common occurrence in the city of London, and that the police would say the same thing.”⁵⁸

      The types of sexual encounters referred to in these cases were those that occurred in public space, those which one of the involved parties chose to make public via the legal system, and those observed by a third party. It was often difficult to find privacy. Sex between men could not be regularly engaged in even in the home without a substantial risk of detection. Working-class homes were crowded, and in middle-class homes individuals were constantly under the eyes of servants and family members. Although quiet sexual contact might occur between men sleeping in the same bed in a working-class home, and quick encounters might take place in opportune moments in a middle-class house, such behavior was difficult to sustain.⁵⁹ Moreover, although families might make grudging accommodations for a family member caught engaging in such acts, they would not permit sexual relationships between men to continue once discovered.

      Even men who lived alone took a great risk when bringing another man home. One man who took that risk was John M’Dougal, a twenty-year-old clerk in the War Office, who picked up a younger man, Thomas Dolamore, in the Strand around nine o’clock on a Monday night and took him back to his nearby rooms at 6 Warwick Court, Charing Cross.⁶⁰ But M’Dougal’s sexual advance was not welcomed. The younger man left M’Dougal’s house in anger, quickly returned with a constable, and gave him in charge.

      Frederick Randall’s problem, by contrast, was that the young man that he brought home would not leave. Randall had first met the twenty-year-old John Joyce at the Lyceum Theatre, and subsequently the two men met at the Half Moon public house and on the London Bridge Wharf. Randall took Joyce up to his rooms, ostensibly to show him the “fine view” he had from the window, but while there Randall gave Joyce alcohol and started a suggestive conversation that included showing him “indecent prints” and “French letters,” or condoms. The evening did not go as Randall had planned, though: Randall took the risk of leaving the young man alone in his rooms and went out to get a constable, allegedly telling the policeman whom he eventually found “not to take [Joyce] into custody if he could get him out of the house without.”⁶¹