The state and the newspapers instead most often drew attention to casual sexual encounters in public space between men of differing class backgrounds who could otherwise present themselves as respectable. In such encounters, the focus of the reporting was the sexuality of the respectable middle-class man.
The concluding chapter takes the idea that the sexual desire of respectable middle-class men was the most problematic for society and attempts to understand the medical theorization of same-sex desire in light of this fundamental point. British physicians shared the common cultural view that sex between men was incompatible with moral behavior, and this view has led to sharp contrasts being drawn between these physicians and Continental theorists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, who developed and popularized a theory allowing for same-sex desire to be inborn in an individual rather than acquired over time through immoral behavior. Greater awareness of how class structured understandings of sex between men in Britain, though, reveals that Krafft-Ebing’s work represented less of a break with the ideals of character and respectability in Britain than has sometimes been assumed. Ironically, the first important attempt to explain sex between men by a British physician, Havelock Ellis (working in conjunction with John Addington Symonds), represented a more significant rupture with past British understandings. This innovation of Ellis and Symonds was as much related to the shifting intellectual climate of their time as it was to the evolution of sexology as a scientific discipline.
The conclusion reinforces the book’s argument that shifts in the conceptualization of the self and in perceptions of experience can be understood only in the context of the culture within which they are generated. We can better understand the cultural significance of male same-sex desire at any given time by looking at the society in which it is expressed. Such an inquiry may have broader implications than simply providing a better understanding of sexual acts between men. 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 bourgeois values. Similar cultural insights may come from a better understanding of the characteristically different but also prominent discussion of sex between men that accompanied the ascendancy of middle-class men into social and economic power in the first half of the nineteenth century.
PART ONE
Understandings
CHAPTER 1
Families and Sex between Men
The anonymity of urban space has long been viewed as important to the history of sex between men in modern European history, but such anonymity was always limited.1 Moments of standing alone in a park at night, in front of a picture-shop window, or in a particular kind of public house in anticipation of a sexual encounter with another man were stolen from lives that were lived within family and community networks. Although there was a continuous homosexual subculture from the eighteenth through the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of the evidence for sex between men preserved for the first half of the nineteenth century does not relate to it but rather to a much broader group of men whose sexual acts with other men, rather than being separated from the rest of their lives, were relegated to the “twilight moments” within them.2 For the majority of the existing evidence, the context is the family rather than the molly house.
The family was a site where the transgression represented by sex between men was assessed and where the consequences of those acts were decided. Many situations that eventually became court cases had first been debated and assessed within families, and family interventions long preceded increased state interest in this behavior. Families invariably condemned sexual acts between men when they were made public, and in all recorded cases they also worked privately to separate and sanction men known to be engaging in such acts; but family reactions also varied widely. By understanding patterns in the regulation of sex between men within the family, and how those patterns differed according to class, we can form a clearer picture of how society understood these acts. Although sex between men was almost always treated as a crisis when the families discovered it, its designation as “the worst of crimes” seems accurate only for a minority of the families examined and for a minority of individuals within those families.
Family connections and networks of mutual economic support were essential to individual survival and social status at all levels of British society, especially for the urban working class, whose existence was dependent on continuous wage labor. In an age of rapid economic change and severe limits on labor organizations, a family’s economic situation could deteriorate rapidly for reasons beyond its control. Although workers clubbed together in friendly societies and other self-financed insurance programs to insulate their families from shocks in a laissez-faire economy, the most pervasive survival strategy was to employ the labor of wives and children.
Although this use of family economic resources was often a necessity, it undermined the authority of the father as the head of the urban working-class household. It also reduced fathers’ already-circumscribed ability to control the marriage choices of their children. The ability to pass on artisan skills and tools, or to arrange for the employment of a son based on a father’s position within the community, were both diminished in the urban capitalist economy. In rural communities, various forces had worked to regulate the marriage of the young, to ensure that any new household would be economically viable and lessen the risk that the children would become a burden on the parish.3 These forms of community supervision of marriage, based in part on the imperatives of a rural subsistence economy with limited geographic mobility, were not replicated in urban centers.
Middle-class individuals were also highly dependent on family for securing their economic position, but here the mechanisms at work tended to increase the authority of middle-class fathers. At the start of the nineteenth century, middle-class men often did not monopolize either the capital or the labor that went into the building of their family enterprises: they relied on their wives to manage smaller businesses and oversee accounts and employees. They also depended on the capital resources and family alliances that women brought with them into a marriage. As the century progressed, however, the size and scale of businesses increased, marginalizing women’s participation and increasing the control of the father over the economic life of the family.4 Likewise, a father’s power over his children increased as a son’s training in the family business or education for a profession became more dependent on the financial support of the father. Daughters were even more tied to the economic fortunes and good favor of their fathers, dependent as they were on dowries and having no other option for supporting themselves that would allow them to maintain middle-class status.
For the upper-class family, continuity was the overriding characteristic of their experience of the economic changes and urbanization in this period. Although the fear of social revolution was palpable in certain years, only in the 1880s did the broader economic and technological changes that altered the fortunes of so many others in society finally begin to affect the upper classes, primarily through the importation of cheap foreign grain. The expanding economy and empire offered opportunities for younger sons in the military and in the financial sectors, but otherwise it did not greatly affect the relationships within the upper-class family. With social position linked so closely to family connections, most individuals carefully guarded their status within the family.5 Upper-class individuals were among the few with the wealth necessary to live independently of the labor and support of a family, but almost no one seems to have made such a choice. Even within the anonymous city, therefore, almost no one lived without family connections for an extended period, and few were ever alone for long.
Even among the massive influx of new immigrants to the city, experiences were mediated through the family. For the whole of the period under study, the birth rate in London was lower than the death rate, so that London’s steady increase in size over these years was sustained through migration from the countryside. Many working-class migrants practiced forms of serial migration, obtaining housing, social contacts, and information on employment from relatives and friends who had already moved to the city. In this