None of those reforms, including those that affected the regulation of sexual acts between men, were carried out with the stated goal of affecting such sexual behavior. The changes relevant to the regulation of sex between men were only small components of much broader programs of reform. In this respect there is much evidence to confirm the cliché that throughout the nineteenth century, men avoided publicly discussing this topic.31 The difficulty, though, was that many individual officials became involved in situations where such discussion could not be avoided, just as many individuals were likewise compelled to speak publicly about this behavior as laws were rewritten and a more intrusive level of policing was established. The moral injunction against sex between men remained in place in the early nineteenth century, but changes in the state and in society meant that the potential consequences of such acts shifted, sparking both public and private debates and discussions. One such debate, and one example of grappling with the potential consequences, was carried on between Frederick Samuel Lea and his father, his employer, and his fellow employee; the results were shared with the nation, as mediated through the newspapers and the courts. This book explores the cumulative effect of hundreds of such debates, and what they reveal about the social, political, and economic changes of the early nineteenth century.
Because the state’s efforts in this area intruded on terrain previously considered the prerogative of the family, part 1 of this book explores families and their responses to the issue of sex between men. Although in no case do the records show that family members treated the discovery of sex between men with any form of acceptance or even indifference, their reactions are more complex than the vitriolic denunciations and instant ostracisms that seem to be implied by the public statements associated with the better-known trials of the later nineteenth century. The discovery of sex between men was treated as a crisis by families of all classes, but the nature of that crisis, and the form of response it required, differed significantly according to class. Although almost all responses sought to punish the individual or individuals responsible for instigating the behavior, they also more often than not allowed for the reincorporation of the men into the family. The severity of the transgression that such an act represented and the degree to which it might or might not be considered “the worst of crimes” were open to debate.
Chapter 2 turns to the question of how the men engaging in sex with other men understood those acts. Sex between men was condemned by all men in their public lives, although social class and geographic space could affect a man’s perception of what it meant to privately have sex with another man. Upper- and working-class men’s understandings of masculine identity might allow for sexual contact between men under some conditions. Within the middle-class understanding of respectability and character, such behavior was more problematic. The distinction between the desire for sex and the desire for sex with a man was central to these justifications, as were the types of physical acts engaged in, an individual’s age, and the individual’s active or passive role in those acts. Locations such as the Mediterranean, the public school, and the urban environment of London could all be associated with sexual acts between men, with the same act having different meanings and different consequences depending on the location. At least a few men in this period left records indicating that they did structure part of their personal identity around such desires. For other men, however, understanding the multiple possible attitudes toward sex between men is crucial to comprehending the nature of the changes that occurred in the nineteenth century.
The three chapters of part 2 examine the institutional forces that influenced understandings of this behavior throughout society. All three areas examined—the laws, policing, and the newspapers—were, not for the first time, influencing the regulation of sex between men in the early nineteenth century. In England the laws against sodomy and attempted sodomy date back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respectively.32 The early watch system facilitated arrests of men on charges of sex between men, just as the later Metropolitan Police would. Private pamphlets and Old Bailey Session Papers published the details of sodomy and attempted-sodomy trials before the newspapers eclipsed them in this role. Yet despite these precedents for punishing and publicizing acts of sex between men, each one of these three broad areas underwent significant transformations in the early nineteenth century.
These shifts are shown most clearly in chapter 3, which assesses the changes in the relevant laws. It begins by considering the revision of the laws against sodomy, attempted sodomy, unnatural assault, and “threatening to accuse of an infamous crime” in the context of Robert Peel’s effort to consolidate English criminal law. The penalties and evidence requirements for cases involving sex between men were altered in statute law, although this change did not always affect what had been occurring in practice under common law. Some examples, such as the imposition of a two-year prison sentence for attempted sodomy and unnatural assault, suggest little real change beyond the increased frequency of application of the law. Other changes in statute law, such as those related to the threat to accuse another man of attempting an infamous crime, had real consequences in the courtroom. I argue here that the need to modify this law was a result of the increased use of the laws against attempted sodomy and unnatural assault in the courts. Not only did these laws allow men to bring their social betters into court on their word alone, but the accusation impugned the character of the accused in a way particularly egregious to men invested in current notions of respectability. This consequence partially explains why the penalties for making a false accusation were so much more severe than those for unnatural assault itself. Close examination of the revision of the laws related to sex between men indicates the ways in which class antagonisms and differing definitions of masculinity shaped the reform process.
The interconnected themes of class antagonism and transformations in systems of state control are explored further in chapter 4, which focuses on the early years of the Metropolitan Police. Contrasting the policing of the 1820s to that of the 1830s and 1840s, this chapter argues that many aspects of the public policing of sex between men were established in West End neighborhoods well before 1829. The most important changes after 1829 consisted of the increased frequency of arrests, the new uniformity of the police presence throughout the city, and the self-policing this inspired. This chapter also focuses on the difficult position of the common officer in policing sex between men, which reflected the problems of working-class men in general when invoking these laws against propertied men. The precarious line these officers walked became most evident in 1830, when, on their own initiative, a small group of constables went into Hyde Park to entrap men who were soliciting sex from other men. The controversy that erupted when these officers began to bring middle- and upper-class men to court on unnatural-assault charges is examined as a microcosm of the clash between competing notions of class, morality, and masculinity that was sparked by the institutionalization of a police force of working-class constables.
Chapter 5 focuses on newspapers in the early nineteenth century, comparing the ways that different publications chose to cover unnatural- assault stories from the 1820s through the 1860s, when such coverage was at its height. Although it also brings to light some major events and “scandals” centering on sex between men that have not been discussed in the secondary literature, this chapter focuses on the brief reports of sex between men that appeared in the court sections of some papers. The Times, the Weekly Dispatch, and the Morning Post are analyzed as the leading middle-, working-, and upper-class newspapers of their day, respectively; together they published nearly one thousand reports over a fifty-year period. This analysis reveals that the liberal daily press was responsible for the greatest number of stories concerning sex between men. The chapter ends with an examination of newspaper readership among different segments of the population and argues that the majority of men in mid-nineteenth-century London were most likely aware of what was reported in “that part of the paper.” This and other evidence suggests the need to reassess assumptions about how and to what degree sex between men was discussed within the public sphere.
The third and final part of the book assesses the impact of the changes discussed in part 2, beginning in chapter 6 with the identification of patterns in the new systems regulating sex between men. Certain types of cases, such as those involving only working-class men, were regularly underreported in the liberal newspapers, just as sexual acts between men occurring in certain geographic locations,