Many recent historians, biographers, have made much of the fact that, particularly now, (but even half a century ago if one really wished to do the groundwork & follow the paper trail) we can discover, by careful perusal of the available documentation in historical archives and (still) some reading between the lines, that there was a large amount of -mainly clandestine- same sex activity, especially in the larger cities & towns in the western world and indeed more widely, in many, perhaps even most civilisations in our historical records. The penalties for such behaviour were often severe, although this was not always necessarily the case. Often it depended on whether there were laws set out at the time, explicitly forbidding such practices, how they were interpreted and to what extent they were being strictly enforced.
There was an article in the ‘Guardian‘ a daily paper published in the UK, a few years ago, which was entitled ‘Highwayman’s 1750 confessions reveal ‘unusual’ ambivalence about gay sex’. The sub heading read: ‘Rare pamphlet includes roistering criminal’s surprisingly enlightened attitude to the advances made to him by an innkeeper’s son’, and we are told in an “incredibly rare” deathbed confession from an 18th-century highwayman, written just before he was “hung in chains” for robbing the Yarmouth Mail, detailing his supposedly enlightened response to a failed gay seduction. Entitled ‘The Life of Thomas Munn, alias, the Gentleman Brick-Maker, alias, Tom the Smuggler’ it is twenty four page long pamphlet that is a part of the once-popular genre of ‘deathbed confessions’, as detailed by Munn to the Yarmouth gaoler on the morning of his execution on 6 April 1750. In part of it he describes an incident in a Southampton inn, when the son of the innkeeper evidently joined Munn in his bed, informing him that “I love to lie with a naked man”. The text explains that:
‘He had not been long in Bed but began to act a Part so Contradictory to Nature that I started up in Bed, wanted Words to express my Confusion, Surprise and Passion, at his Propositions,” Munn says. The lad evidently leaves however, after Munn threatens him with a penknife, and makes “many Excuses” the following day.
As Munn tells it:
“It was what I never met with before, nor since, but had Philosophy enough in me, to think it a pity to expose a young Man, tho’ he pointed at a very heinous Sin; and certainly we that commit Crimes beyond what is common, ought to be pitied, for no Man is certain if he comes under the same Temptation, that he shall be able to withstand it.”
So we are led to believe that Munn resisted the advance, by threatening him with a knife, but nevertheless took pity on the young man and felt he should be excused. But is it not more likely, that in fact Munn had had sex with the boy, enjoying it at the time but then been left feeling guilty about it all his life, and had wanted to explain it away as a ‘temptation’ that he resisted, despite how difficult this had been? We might like to think this is a an example of liberal thinking but it strikes me it is more a ‘plea for pardon‘ in the next life. What other possible reason would Munn have for relating this story on his deathbed?
My point being that we tend to understand things now in the past, through the prism of our lives in the 21st century, and not in the context of how Munn might have actually felt in the 18th century about the incident. There is also a temptation to rewrite our history books to explain peoples actions through the prism of a 21st century viewpoint. Some people now accuse those who define themselves as ‘woke’ of seeing and acting too much through today’s cultural and social prism, in their assessment of the past. I can empathise with both viewpoints. Much also depends on the definitions that we utilise to define the parameters of what we are documenting. We have a swathe of definitions that we can use now to define ourselves, (all of us) for better or some might say, worse. A century and a half ago even the clinical terms ‘heterosexual’ and ‘homosexual’ were not known or used before about 1870; the first public appearance of the term homosexual in print can being found as late as 1869, in a German pamphlet entitled (when translated) “Paragraph 143 of the Prussian Penal Code and Its Maintenance as Paragraph 152 of the Draft of a Penal Code for the North German Confederation”, and was written by Karl-Maria Kertbeny, whom I suppose we would now call a ‘closeted’ Hungarian writer and journalist, as he had published it anonymously. And the use of and concepts inherent, in the words ‘bisexual’ or ‘transexual’ were not being discussed at all.
It is often the case, that those engaged in same sex partnerships or sexual activity would not have thought of themselves as ‘homosexual’, let alone documented the matter. In fact, arguably, in some respects, perhaps gender fluidity was a more widely accepted and acceptable concept for some pre 20th century western societies than it was in, say, the last half of the 20th century (or even, dare I say, now).
In any research, we often have to look at the ways in which the statutory laws of the period were prosecuted against such behaviour to uncover the activity itself, and this itself varied widely in different periods, regions and countries, even throughout Western Europe. The terms that men in same sex relationships have used to define themselves over time, have varied widely, indeed still do so. For some, in western culture particularly, the pejorative term ‘queer’ became the definition of choice of some men from around the mid 1990’s onwards, replacing ‘gay’, which itself replaced the rather more clinical term of ‘homosexual’.
GQ April 2016: Having Sex with a man doesnt make you gay.. but if you’re man enough to do it and still call yourself straight, be man enough to talk about it
Even as recently as the early 1990’s for example, the Health Education Authority (HEA), for whom I worked in this period for over ten years, decided to use the abbreviated, perhaps rather clumsy term ‘MWHSWM‘ as a catch all category, to target health information at ‘Men Who Have Sex With Men’, whom for various reasons did not define as gay. ‘Not all men who have sex with men are gay’ ran the advertising strap promoting safer sex, in British magazines, such as the -very mainstream- Radio Times. Issues such as trans-sexuality were not really covered by the HEA’s sexual health campaign in this period at all; equally (being involved in developing that campaign myself) we didn’t stop to ask ourselves whether (as we are asking now about the Coronavirus), the epidemic might also have changed the cognitive patterning of those affected by the virus and whether the mental health as a whole of all the groups affected might need greater support and related information. To be fair, research projects later set up by the HEA with government funding- more targeted, locally funded projects, did so, in a few areas across the UK in what was also acronymised as the MESMAC (link is to Yorkshire MESMAC) (MEn who have Sex with Men, Action in the Community) programme and others, which were evaluated and then copied in many cases with local funding by local authorities. One such project in London was managed by the Terence Higgins Trust, the key community based organisation that sprung up at the time to work with and support those affected by HIV/AIDS, though others soon followed.
Between women, whilst lesbian sex was generally not prosecuted in the same way as sex between men (the story that Victoria famously refused to believe such acts between women existed at all, turns out -perhaps sadly- to be entirely apocryphal and was probably invented in the 1970’s), often other charges were levelled in their place, such as the practice of sorcery and witchcraft. However statistics from 1929, just a few decades after Victoria died, show that far from being unheard of, fourteen per cent of single women and- quite remarkably- twenty per cent of married women reported some form of sexual contact with other females.
However, part of the problem has been that for decades, centuries even, those writing the history of people famous as artists, musicians, politicians, scientists have written out some of the defining characteristics of their subjects, or at least not dwelt upon them in any detail. To some extent this was often the result of pressure on them by the subjects estate, where papers were hidden, obscurification was practised or relevant material was simply destroyed.
Whilst I will concentrate the discussion on men here in the main, as being potential role models for gay men, it should be made clear that there were plenty of women in the period who were living their lives as lesbians (whether or not they used this word to describe themselves), some of whom became famous or well known in the Victorian and later periods in their various areas of study or trade. To take just one example: Rosa Bonheur, lived from 1822-1899 and was a naturalist painter.
Living in France, she became its most famous (and indeed richest) female artist of the period and was feted in both France and Britain at the time: indeed Queen Victoria was a huge admirer of her work. She was the first woman to be awarded France’s highest decoration, the Legion D’ Honneur.
She was not a great admirer of most men, although her father was an exception, who encouraged her ardent feminism. ‘He told me again & again it was a women’s mission to improve the human race’. She gave herself to her art: ‘I wed art. It is my husband, my world, my life dream, the air I breathe’. She specialised in painting canvases of the natural world, especially of animals. In the epic, eight foot wide canvas, that made her name Ploughing in the Naivernais (1849) four farm workers are completely overshadowed by the twelve great Charolais cattle they are driving in the plough. She is buried with her first companion and childhood friend Nathalie Micas and her later companion, the american painter Anna Elizabeth Klumpke, in Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, along with various other iconic figures, such as Oscar Wilde.
As another example, in this period, take the case of a very famous musician, where only now, as late as 2020, things are becoming a little clearer. Frédéric Chopin, (1810-1849) was born in Poland, before moving to Paris in 1830. As Philip Oltermann & Shaun Walker discuss, in a recent article about his ‘hidden sexuality’ in the Guardian,
‘archivists and biographers have for centuries turned a deliberate blind eye to the composer’s homoerotic letters in order to make the Polish national icon conform to conservative norms”
‘Chopin’s Men’ was a two-hour radio programme that aired on the Swiss public broadcaster SRF’s arts channel, which argued that the composer’s letters have been deliberately mistranslated: rumours of his affairs with women have been exaggerated whilst hints of an apparent interest in what we now call “cottaging” (or looking for sexual partners in public toilets) are simply ignored. When the music journalist Moritz Weber started researching Chopin’s letters in more detail, he discovered a “flood of declarations of love aimed at men”, sometimes direct in their erotic tone, and full of playful allusions. In one, Chopin specifically described rumours of his affairs with women as a “cloak for hidden feelings”.
Chopins Men https://www.srf.ch/play/radio/redirect/detail/67b92c60-dbd4-4743-8232-a007f1ec101c a radio programme from SRF
His letters (twenty two in all have survived) to his long time school friend Tytus Woyciechowski (whom was actively involved in Poland’s infamous January uprising of 1863) are quite explicit and often start with “My dearest life” and end with: “Give me a kiss, dearest lover.” In one he wrote:
“You don’t like being kissed.. please allow me to do so today. You have to pay for the dirty dream I had about you last night.”
These letters still make for awkward reading to some, in a country whose main airport is named after Chopin but whose president, until recently, Andrzej Duda, had recently denounced the LGBT rights movement as an “ideology worse than communism”. Some may argue (and indeed it is often said nowadays), ..but why do we need to know of such details? What relevance does his sexuality have to his output as a great musician? and ‘why must activists insist on bringing the subject up so frequently’?
Well, in an 1829 letter to Tytus, Chopin refers to him as “my ideal, whom I faithfully serve, […] about whom I dream”, and tells him that it is he who has inspired an adagio in his recent concerto. Yet the journalist Weber, references the translation of Chopin’s letters published in 2016 by Warsaw’s Fryderyk Chopin Institute who have assigned the “ideal” in the letter a feminine pronoun, even though the Polish noun is clearly masculine in the letters. In 2018, a Chopin biography by English-Canadian musicologist Alan Walker described Woyciechowski simply as a mere “bosom friend”.
Weber says his research found no evidence of Chopin’s love for a women that he has long been closely associated with called Gładkowska, or the supposed engagement to a 16-year-old called Maria Wodzińska. He asserts that “these affairs were just rumours, based on flowery footnotes in biographies from the previous two centuries”. Asked about the content of the letters, a spokesperson for Chopin’s estate said their erotic language was a product of the Romantic age and Chopin’s educated social circle:
“If you read them in the Polish original, it sounds a little bit different…, the way Chopin uses language is so musical and complicated, to translate all that is madness.”
“The fact that Chopin had to hide part of his identity for a long time, as he himself writes in his letters, would have left a mark on his personality and his art,” says Weber. “Music allowed him to express himself fully, because piano music has the advantage of not containing any words.”As Chopin himself put it in one of his letters to Woyciechowski: “I confide in the piano the things that I sometimes want to say to you.”
So it is pretty clear here, that to understand his output fully, we need to be aware of the undercurrents in his emotional life, and that much of his celebrated output represented something that was repressed by society and only allowed publically in his music. Even if he was in fact bisexual, this surely has relevance? This, I would argue, is not uncommon in the output of (literally) hundreds of men and women in this period, some well known like Chopin, but many others also, whom history has forgotten or been less kind to. All this was hidden from us (and specifically from me), as we grew up in the sixties and seventies and indeed, as the example above shows, even more recently than that.
Of course, there were a few people about in the late Victorian period for whom it was simply not possible to completely cover up their emotional & sexual lives, of whom the playwright and wit Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) is perhaps the most well known.
His tempestuous and complex relationship with Alfred Lord Douglas or ‘Bosie’ (according to Bosie ‘The love that dare not speak its name’), the related public scandal and his subsequent trial in 1895 for indecent activity & imprisonment is very well documented. This I did know about when I was growing up as a teenager but only in so much as it was couched in terms of those red ‘danger’ lights: shame, scandal, and subsequent downfall (for both parties involved). Another, slightly less infamous person of that period, is the writer and poet AE Housman (link to podcast about Houseman) (1859-1936, the famous bookshop on the Caledonian Rd in London’s Kings Cross, above which Lesbian and Gay Switchboard had its offices for many years, still proudly carries his name).
He had published a collection of poetry in 1896, when he was thirty seven, just after the Wilde trial, entitled ‘A Shropshire Lad’. In fact the first publisher to whom the anthology was offered, had refused to publish it, on the grounds that it was too controversial, with a second publisher only doing so, on the condition that he self fund it. Housman was a deeply secretive character, who kept his life strictly compartmentalised but nevertheless used his poetry as an ‘outlet’ for strong feelings. In addition to clear homosexual undertones, the controversy was perhaps also related to some extent to those poems which focus of the tragedy of the useless waste of young lives during war (a theme that was also to become ever more pertinent to poets, just a few decades later).
For Housman, homosexuality had come to the forefront of public attention with the trial of Oscar Wilde. At that time the impact upon men like Housman must have been both devastating and frightening. In fact, the events leading up to Wilde’s trial coincided with Housman’s burst of creativity and his biographer Norman Page, suggests that he used the poetry to release a truthfulness about his life, that it was then impossible for him to show in reality. We also know, a touching gesture and in solidarity, that Housman sent a copy of A Shropshire Lad to Wilde when he was released from prison, before Wilde fled to Paris.
In fact he later wrote the poem “Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrists?“, (link to detailed exploration of the poem) in relation to Wilde’s trial, which addressed the prevailing attitudes towards homosexuals in that period. In the poem, the prisoner is suffering “for the colour of his hair”, a natural quality that, in a coded reference to homosexuality, is reviled as “nameless and abominable, the ‘horrible sin, not to be named amongst Christians.
So, again we find in Housman a man whose output was very clearly shaped by his feelings and what was going on in the world around him. Interestingly, Housman was one person whose life & narrative was not quite so overtly censored during the next few decades. It is tempting to think that this was because he became involved with a more progressive set of ideals, those prevalent in the fledgling Labour movement at that time. However, truth be told, the socialist movement was not especially comfortable with notions of the body politic at this time and generally, at least until relatively recently, always sought to underplay this aspect of his life.
In the UK, for men like Housman and Wilde at the beginning of the twentieth century, the potential consequences of sexual activity between men were clear, at least on paper. In civil law, ‘buggery and indecent assault’ were outlawed by the ‘Offences Against the Person’s Act of 1861′. This was followed by the section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 (the Labouchere amendment) which defined any act of ‘gross indecency’, whether in public or private, as a punishable offence. Sex between servicemen too for example, was a criminal act which carried severe and often, life changing consequences. So the law was quite clear (assuming you knew it, and there was no reason to suppose that many young men would of) about the potential consequences of activity between consenting men in the latter part of the 19th century and early half of the twentieth century.
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