Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (review)

There have been so many outstanding recent studies of homosexuality in Victorian Britain that the appearance of yet another poses the question of whether it was strictly necessary. Charles Upchurch, however, amply justifies his project to document sex between men during Britain's age of reform. As he points out, the bulk of existing scholarship has dealt very much with the latter part of the nineteenth century, generally starting from the abolition of the capital penalty for sodomy in 1861, or even later, from the furore over Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park and the emergence of a psychiatric model for interpreting same-sex behaviour. Upchurch's meticulous study looks back to the earlier part of the century—still relatively underanalysed by historians of sexuality in general—to illuminate a complex and fascinating imbrication of desire, class, urban life, legal systems, the development of modern policing, conflicting interest groups, and the formulation of certain tenets of appropriate middle-class masculinity, within a broader political and legislative context. He does, in fact, go back a long way "before Wilde," leading us to consider (not for the first time) the extent to which Oscar Wilde's high-profile courtroom debacle became as it were a brand name that inflected and even distorted popular and scholarly understandings of cultures of, and attitudes toward, male same-sex desire in the Victorian era.

As with so many topics in the history of sexuality, what historians have pervasively assumed to be an area concealed under a pall of silence and unmentionability is revealed, upon further interrogation, to have been very far from invisible. Upchurch has uncovered hundreds of reports concerning male-male sex in multiple newspapers across the political spectrum as well as numerous routine, rather than sensational, court cases. It would appear that by this period (as H. G. Cocks indicates in Nameless Offences [2003]) there was less interest in raiding molly houses or their later equivalents, places where men seeking men could foregather in relative privacy. Nineteenth-century urban policing was more concerned with encounters in streets and parks and other public or semipublic venues. It is somewhat surprising to gather that, although vice societies had played a significant role in policing homosexual behaviour in the eighteenth century, this was not an area of interest for early-nineteenth-century moral reform bodies. Did this have to do with the legal changes documented by Upchurch, so that it was no longer a matter of bringing private prosecutions, or did anti-vice organisations have differing preoccupations in this period?

There is an illuminating chapter on the context of legal reform during the 1820s and 1830s, a period of significant modernisation. Upchurch summarises this as

a new pattern for imposing order by the use of criminal law, shifting away from the use of rare but brutal displays of state power on the body of the convict and toward a system where less severe punishments were implemented with much greater frequency and consistency. This shift required the creation of a more pervasive and bureaucratic system of law enforcement and the inclusion of more types of behaviour within the scope of the law.

(83)

This, he argues, had significant repercussions in the regulation of sex between men. A number of acts passed during this period of general tidying up and rationalisation bore on same-sex activity, though one is not in the least surprised to read that these were "often passed in Parliament without debate . . . as part of legislation that was primarily concerned with other matters" (91). The 1828 Offences Against the Person Act significantly broadened the grounds for conviction of sodomy by removing the requirement that emission should have occurred. The 1827 Larceny (England) Act also created a wide definition of "infamous crime" that included attempted sodomy, solicitation, and persuasion to the act (qtd. in Upchurch 3).

A particularly valuable aspect of this work is Upchurch's...