The British parliament and government had few problems agreeing to the Contagious Diseases Acts 1864 and the Cantonment Acts of 18 for the provision of brothels for the Indian Army. The sexual demands of the military were also privileged above any ideology regarding sex.
The criminalisation of commercial male-female sex only applied to women, for instance: men were not punished. There were also practical exceptions to the British state’s apparent prudishness when it came to sex. In it, Carpenter was accused of “morbid appetites, naked dancing, corruption of youth, paganism and socialism.” Double standards
In 1910 O’Brien produced and circulated a pamphlet entitled Socialism and Infamy: The Homogenic or Comrade Love Exposed: An open letter in Plain words for a socialist Prophet Edward Carpenter. He finally found a small labour press in Manchester, but his work was met with hostility from Dr O'Brien, a member of the Liberty and Property Defence League who was seemingly adverse to both socialism and homosexuality.
This is indicative of the prevailing attitudes among ‘respectable’ society.Įdward Carpenter, the socialist, also had significant problems finding a printer for Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society (1894).
But his work was only privately published and circulated, and upon his death his family destroyed his papers. Meanwhile Symonds, a great classist scholar, published three works – two versions of A Problem in Greek Ethics and the later work A Problem in Modern Ethics (in 1873, 19 respectively) that sought to justify sex between males within a historical context. He henceforth had all his work published abroad. But how they fared in the political climate of the period is enlightening: Ellis, a leading sexologist of his day, saw his great opus of the topic ‘Sexual Inversion’, written with Symonds in 1897, withdrawn from sale in Britain. Such works show that great advances were being made in the understanding of sexual diversity. In 1913, meanwhile, the novelist EM Forster wrote his ‘gay’ novel Maurice. The famous Wilde case aside, had the courts really gone ‘soft’ on this crime? Were more lenient sentences a reflection of the emergence of a more tolerant attitude?įor clues, we can look to the writings of Victorian ‘sexologists’ and other authors including Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter and John Addington Symonds.
That led to Wilde’s trial of the 1890s, perhaps the famous – albeit most atypical – criminal prosecution of sex between males of the period. Interestingly, it was the alleged suicide of Francis Archibald John Douglas (Viscount Drumlanrig) following a failed affair with Liberal politician Lord Rosebery that led his father, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry, to protect his younger son ‘Bosie’ from the alleged ‘corrupting influence’ of Oscar Wilde. There are records of such sentences leading to suicides, both attempted and realised. Yet by 1903 the sentence dealt for buggery to coal miner William Bradly from Leigh, Lancashire, at the same court was just 15 months’ imprisonment.īut the fact still remains that men were being sent to prison for significant periods for the crime of having consensual sex with each other. For example, the ‘Death’ sentence handed down to Joseph Dean at the February sitting of the Liverpool Assize in 1851, automatically converted to transportation for life by this period, was not uncommon in the mid-19th century. This would, perhaps, suggest a highly tolerant attitude towards such behaviour in the later period – a view strengthened when we observe that the sentences dealt to those convicted of the crime of buggery rapidly become more lenient.