... having been breathed out

Everything under the cut excerpted from Matt Cook's London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885-1914, though as I’ve mentioned before, this book ought really to be called London and the Culture of Male Homosexuality, 1885-1914; as women are mentioned once in the introduction and then promptly forgotten.

However! This (relatively) short passage gives a GREAT and thought-provoking overview of some of the social currents at work in late-Victorian legislation against male homosexual practices, while also complicating certain notions about why given Acts were historically important, and what they might “mean."

Some of my most intriguing take-aways, in case you don’t want to read the whole thing (these also roughly correspond with the sections I bolded under the cut):

• You can see legislators really struggling to differentiate—or, even to know whether they wanted to differentiate—their aversions to sodomy specifically from their aversions to male-male desire in general. The laws against sodomy were of incredibly long standing (1533!), and had continued to be reaffirmed throughout the intervening centuries; but starting in 1861 there was a simultaneous broadening of punishable acts and a narrowing of applicable gender (and even species, since sodomy could be committed with beasts) to specify man-on-man incidents. At the same time, the other punishable acts were all couched in such vague terms ("unnatural offences”; “indecent assault”; and my favorite, “attempted sodomy”) that they give the distinct impression of a group of people who felt very nervous and threatened about something, but were not sure what that something might be.



• Relatedly, Cook’s discussion of the 1885 Labouchere Amendment is fascinating because, as he points out, it shifted the focus from unwanted advances (‘any indecent assault upon any male person’ as per the 1861 law) to consensual sexual practices between men. A huge and obviously disturbing shift, even if a largely symbolic one. It also reaffirmed that these laws applied even to acts committed in private. Given the Victorian obsession with the separation of public and private spheres, this is a pretty big deal, even if, as Cook points out, the “in public or private” language wasn’t strictly necessary—if something is illegal, it’s illegal everywhere.



• The turn of the 20th century is such an interesting period with regard to shifting conceptions of “homosexual acts” (the paradigm on the way out) versus “homosexual people” (the paradigm on the way in, though of course that’s only obvious in hindsight); and Cook’s discussion of the 1898 Amendment to the Vagrancy Act has all kinds of repercussions for that shift. The Amendment officially enabled police profiling based on suspects’ non-sexual behaviour, and on their being in the “wrong place at the wrong time”; it essentially criminalised seeming like the kind of person who would commit sexual acts with other men, rather than actually committing those acts.To say it was the first time police had operated in a similar way would obviously be absurd (and indeed Cook outlines an 1870 case of two male cross-dressers arrested—though later acquitted—for soliciting). But the 1898 Amendment makes it official legal practice, which is both horrifying and fascinating. I was especially interested in Cook’s suggestion that the 1898 Amendment was actually further-reaching than the more famous Labouchere Amendment, for exactly the reasons outlined above.

In any case, Cook’s full excerpt below the cut! I highly recommend the whole thing; it also features some nitty-gritty details on sentencing, etc., which the writers among you might find useful.

( COOK’S TEXT (all bolding added): )