Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (review)

Since the publication of Jeffrey Weeks's groundbreaking study Sex, Politics and Society (1980), most scholars have accepted the late nineteenth century as the starting point for the medical and legal construction of homosexuality. The passage of the Labouchere Amendment to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act and the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, in particular, have stood as defining moments in the history of homosexual persecution and self-making. Boldly announcing that his book "is part of a new generation of historical research" (2), Sean Brady rejects the traditional timeline and asserts, instead, that British law and medicine consistently refused to recognize the very existence of sexuality between men.

Before looking at specific cases of sexuality between men, Brady provides a review of the historiography of homosexuality and the lingering influence of Weeks and Michel Foucault over a field that is now in its fourth decade. He also takes issue with "cordoned off" approaches of histories of homosexuality (19): the failure of scholars to examine how sexuality between men was understood by the public within the larger context of gender structures and masculinity. Building on John Tosh's work on middle-class masculinity, Brady argues that even working-class men embraced what Tosh identifies as the "uxurious model" of masculinity. Masculinity as a social status required demonstration in the home, the workplace, and all male associations, so that the bachelor (whether or not he engaged in same-sex practices) threatened the cultural concept of masculinity. It is within this context, Brady insists, not in the classifications of sex psychology or the changing legal definitions, that homosexuality came to be seen as effeminate and unmanly. In addition to Tosh, Brady repeatedly refers to the research of H. G. Cocks whose Nameless Offenses: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003) also rejects the "Weeks/Foucault tradition" (40) and dates the culture of secrecy as early as 1830. While Cocks examines the "namelessness" of homosexuality in the law, Brady is also interested in its namelessness in medicine, the media, and politics.

In his reading of the 1885 law that is so crucial to the Weeks/Foucault model, Brady rightly points out that the purity crusaders who championed the legislation primarily were concerned with protecting girls from male predators. In a last-ditch effort to derail the bill (and uphold masculine sexual prerogative), Henry Labouchere tacked on the clause about acts of gross indecency between men. Brady begins his own study with the 1861 Offences Against the Person Act which removed the capital charge for sodomy, but he doesn't see this law as any more crucial in constructing homosexual identity than Labouchere's amendment. Curiously, this earlier Act received no special attention in the press, and the demarcation of "homosexuals as a class" remained equally absent from such future laws as the 1898 Vagrancy Act.

In the following chapters, Brady examines specific examples of the widespread "culture of resistance," from the press to the Home Office, that shaped the ambivalent response to the issue of sexuality between men. Occasional court cases did concentrate the public's attention on acts of sex between men, but according to Brady the focus on the defendants' "character" portrayed the men as aberrations, "beyond the pale of acceptable masculinity" (27), not a "type" of individual. While the public had a "tacit" knowledge of homosexual behavior, "society" (defined by Brady as doctors, judges, MPs, and news editors) deliberately silenced discussion in the misguided belief that ignorance about such practices would prevent the further commission of them. The "Stella and Fanny" trial of 1870, now as familiar to us as the later trials of Wilde, hints at the public's level of awareness. But Brady cautions that there are no clear cut identities at play in this case, bravely admitting that "Boulton's sexuality confuses and confounds the modern historian as well as the nineteenth-century public and his 'drag' sodomite friends" (73).

The strongest evidence of...