I

Since the publication in English translation of Michel Foucault's The history of sexuality (1978), it has been axiomatic in the history of sex to distinguish between sexual acts and sexual identities.Footnote ¹ Modern sexuality moved from a situation where same-sex activity was merely excessive sex (sexual acts) to a regime where sexuality was linked to self (sexual identities). It was shift that also saw the division into heterosexual and homosexual, a split that has been assumed in modern sexual paradigms, an axiom reflected in the teleology of some influential gay histories.Footnote ²

But there has been a more recent turn towards a rather more complex history of homosexuality, encompassing a variety of categories or sites for the location of same-sex desire. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick wrote in 1990 of the limitations in thinking of a unitary homosexuality rather than ‘overlapping, contradictory, and conflictual definitional forces’ – though gave little sense of what such histories might involve.Footnote ³ Diversity is certainly the theme of George Chauncey's Gay New York (1994), John Howard's Men like that: a southern queer history (1999), and Matt Houlbrook's Queer London (2005), three historically grounded studies that have located divergent forms of queerness in twentieth-century rural and urban America and Britain.Footnote ⁴ Howard hypothesizes ‘that throughout the twentieth century, queer sexuality continued to be understood as both acts and identities, behaviors and beings. It was variously comprehended – depending in part on place and race – along multiple axes and continuums as yet unexamined by historians.’Footnote ⁵ Both defenders of old paradigms and those celebrating new frameworks have highlighted this shift in historiography to the point where, as one recent commentator has put it, ‘there is no such thing as a unitary history of homosexuality, sexuality, or of the self’.Footnote ⁶

Two recent histories of English homosexuality demonstrate the dangers in attempting a grand narrative in such uncertain historiographical times. On the face of it, there is a topic consensus for homosexual histories. The chapter headings of Rebecca Jennings's A lesbian history of Britain (2007) follow one template: the early modern renaissance of representations of female same-sex desire; female husbands; friendships; sexology; early-twentieth-century sapphism; bar life; and lesbian political and social activism.Footnote ⁷ Given that she has just published a study of lesbianism in post-war Britain that managed to combine sexual fluidity with identity formation, Jennings is well equipped to write such a survey.Footnote ⁸ Yet the problem is that general histories provide a synthesis based on a developing, uneven, and contested historiography. Not only can they smoothen the creases of current interpretation but can elide the complexities of shifting readings: the historical archaeology of queer approaches to the past captured in the responses of successive critics to just one text, Radclyffe Hall's iconic The well of loneliness (1928), gives some idea of the immensity of the task confronting any wider historical synthesis.Footnote ⁹ It is also somewhat misleading for Jennings to write that her book favours the modern because we ‘have a much more detailed knowledge’ of that period when the situation is that we have different histories for different periods: Valerie Traub's cultural/literary history of the early modern, for example, and Jennings's own social history of the modern.Footnote ¹⁰ Moreover, historical sophistication varies. Lesbianism's relationship with sexology is a somewhat underdeveloped area, while, as we shall see, early twentieth-century sapphism is the subject of more complex analysis.Footnote ¹¹

The problem of varied historical refinement is even more noticeable in the joint-authored A gay history of Britain: love and sex between men since the middle ages (2007) where the multi-faceted sexual histories of Robert Mills (medieval) and H. G. Cocks (nineteenth century) contrast with the somewhat inflexible approach of Randolph Trumbach (early modern). Cocks's chapter is a fine short history of nineteenth-century, male same-sex interactions and desires: Trumbach's chapters, ironically, given the sophistication of the early modern literature on homoeroticism, are certainly not the best guide to that period.Footnote ¹²

But the conceptual quandary is deeper (and relates to the distinction between sexual acts and identities referred to in the opening sentence of this article). The difficulty starts, quite literally, with the titles of these two historical surveys. The lesbian of the ‘lesbian’ history does not appear until chapter 7. The gay in the ‘gay’ history (as indeed its authors point out) is not applicable until the book's closing pages. The tension between the ‘gay history’ of the latter's title and ‘the love and sex between men’ of its subtitle continues throughout the volume. Even the normally anti-teleological Cocks refers to the nineteenth-century ‘beginnings of a modern gay movement’.Footnote ¹³ The danger of writing general homosexual histories is that the very nature of the exercise, the act of naming in the book's title – ‘A gay history’, ‘A lesbian history’ – imposes modern meanings and interpretations, when the very purpose of the writing and research may have been to work against such assumptions. Writing of ‘looking for lesbians in the past’ or employing the terms ‘lesbian-like’ and ‘lesbianisms’, whatever authorial intent, risks restricting interpretation before it begins.Footnote ¹⁴ As a historian who has done much to unpick such meanings expresses it, ‘our reliance on the identity category of “lesbian” has led to a conceptual impasse’. The focus on sexual identity, Laura Doan continues, ‘makes it difficult to think more imaginatively about sexual subjects of the past who may have been less attuned to such modes of interiority’.Footnote ¹⁵

Taxonomy or classification has played an ambivalent role in this recent historiography – unsurprising given sexology's equally conflicted place in homosexual history with its will to classify sex in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁶ David Halperin has argued that rather than assuming a single history of homosexuality, it is useful to consider a variety of categories of male same-sex desire in the period leading up to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when homosexuality was actually used as a word and became more closely related to what we mean by the term. The genealogy of male homosexuality consists of the five categories of effeminacy, sodomy, friendship, inversion, and homosexuality itself. Like Sedgwick, he gives little empirical sense of what this rethinking might entail, yet provides a significant theoretical reconceptualization of the history of homosexuality. Halperin allows for ‘transhistorical continuities’, writing of ‘accumulation, accretion, and overlay’, but these categories are historically situated and he maintains a conceptual distinction between modern homosexuality and what he terms pre-homosexual discourses.Footnote ¹⁷ Hence it could be argued that the structuring of his argument – with the focus on ‘homosexuality before homosexuality’Footnote ¹⁸ – risks masking the multiplicity of homosexualities, the complexity and blurring of acts and identities contained in his important last category. This reading is not unassailable; in the pages of this journal, Cocks has written approvingly of Halperin's ‘flexible account of modern identity’, where ‘present homosexuality, with its variety of identities, ways of being, and sexual preferences, simply testifies to the traces of its past’.Footnote ¹⁹ And we will see shortly that the category friendship is not incompatible with a complex discussion of layered, same-sex desire. However, one recent critic has indeed charged that Halperin's taxonomies produce a somewhat ‘totalizing impulse’, with his final category ‘homosexuality’ precluding modern multiple forms of same-sex sexual expression.Footnote ²⁰ Presumably, similar motivations lay behind Alan Sinfield's Freudian-inspired ‘lesbian and gay taxonomies’ (2002), a somewhat inconsequential effort to widen the category ‘homosexuality’ to include androgyny, transgender categories, and the desires provoked by power differentials in class, race, and age.Footnote ²¹ The historian of homosexualities has to tread carefully.

Arguably, the most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence; and without forcing taxonomies. This article will examine attempts to write such histories – what has been termed the ‘new British queer history’.Footnote ²² Halperin's influential taxonomy is of the homosexuality of men. Yet we will see that some of the more significant rethinking of sexual categories and mapping of historical diversity involve lesbianism and pre-lesbianism.Footnote ²³ We will focus on recent histories of some strands of male and female same-sex desires and their expression in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

II

We can start with friendship, a category of varied inflections, influential in the history of female same-sex desire and also included by Halperin in his taxonomy because it traces the expression of love and passion between men, an important aspect of the history of homosexuality.Footnote ²⁴

Male friendship has an earlier history as one of the sites of homoeroticism in the early modern world. Early modern English men were expected to have close male friendships – what Alan Bray terms the ‘masculine friend’ – and to express that bonding, closeness, and friendship in ways that can seem sexual to the modern observer but that were not necessarily so for premoderns.Footnote ²⁵ Seventeenth-century discourses on gentlemanliness referred to friendship as ‘marriages of the soul’, or that ‘where two hearts are so individually united, as neither from other can be well severed’.Footnote ²⁶ Friendship was a central ingredient of elite male culture. Friendship was brotherhood felt deeply, indeed of more import than a man's marriage, and declared in a series of public gestures: the embrace, the shared meal, the shared bed, the passionate letter, and, very occasionally, a joint burial or memorial.Footnote ²⁷ It was a culture where it was acceptable for men to express open physical affection for one another and to use homoerotic language without aspersions of effeminacy or sexual involvement. Mario DiGangi has stressed the normality of homoeroticism in the early modern period, before such things were proscribed for ‘normal’ men: ‘early modern gender ideology integrated orderly homoeroticism into friendship more seamlessly than modern ideological formations, which more crisply distinguish homoeroticism from friendship, sexual desire from social desire’.Footnote ²⁸ Such early modern male bonds were so strong that George Haggerty prefers the term love for the ‘emotional intensity and erotic attachment … in many eighteenth-century relationships between men’.Footnote ²⁹

Friendship was also ubiquitous in the Anglo-American bachelor world of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote ³⁰ We can see it visually in the tantalizingly intimate, nineteenth-century photographs of male friends – who may, or may not, be what we would call more than friends.Footnote ³¹ It is there in the ‘atmosphere of hugging’ that surrounded the famous writer Henry James in the 1900s, the restrained yet intense homoeroticism of both his writing and his personal relations.Footnote ³² We have James's remarkably flirtatious letters to young male friends. His editors note that ‘references to the body, to holding, to touching, to caressing, and to gazing permeate his letters … It is impossible to read them and not recognize that James yearned to touch these men through language if in no other way.’Footnote ³³ James's personal erotics are best interpreted in terms of homoerotic friendship. Though he was most comfortable with erotic silence and linguistic caress, he was by no means adverse to physical contact – the hand on the back or shoulder feature in his repertoire, what he termed touching as ‘a brother & a lover’ – but recoiled from what was, for him, the grosser side of male longing.Footnote ³⁴

Friendship, then, was a highly ambiguous term that covered a range of sexual and non-sexual expression. J. A. Symonds's homosexuality involved periods of married celibacy, and male friendships that consisted of looking, kissing and physical contact short of ‘any of those things … which people think inseparable from love of this sort’. ‘In his company’, he wrote of his nineteen-year-old friend, Christian Buol,

Symonds distinguished between the ‘friendly love’ directed at wife and children and the ‘passionate sexual love of comrades’.Footnote ³⁶

Given the impact of the emerging sexological awareness of homosexuality, and the publicity surrounding certain court cases, the borders between turn-of-the-century male love and friendship proved difficult to negotiate. In Oscar Wilde's The picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the artist Basil Hallward experiences ‘far more romance … than a man usually gives to a friend’ in his feelings towards the beautiful Dorian Gray. ‘Somehow, I had never loved a woman’, is the next revealing sentence in a passage changed in the book version of the original story.Footnote ³⁷ A few years later, this passage and others were made much of by Queensberry's libel defence against Wilde in a trial that became the latter's prosecution. The imputed sodomy in a literary text was used to imply the tendencies of its writer in an argument that hinged on the meanings of friendship in both the novel and Wilde's correspondence. Wilde used friendship to undermine any sexual connotation, whereas his opponent, the lawyer Carson, implied more from the word ‘friends’. Lawyer and writer tussled over whether ‘friendly’ or ‘intimate’ best described the latter's relationships with young men.Footnote ³⁸ While Wilde's legal predicament concentrated his mind somewhat, the topic was of more than a passing interest: Joseph Bristow has alerted us to the preoccupation with the problematics of male friendship found in several of his writings.Footnote ³⁹

It is important to grasp that the homoeroticism of the Victorian period, the languages and imagery of male-to-male love and friendship, was no marginal discourse. The children of the elite and upper middle classes spent large sections of their pre-married lives in all-male environments at boarding school and university. Teachers and dons formed close friendships with the future elite, and that future elite formed close attachments with each other. These relationships survived after marriage and extended into political life and public service, networks of influence forged earlier in declared or undeclared homoerotic passion.Footnote ⁴⁰ Morris Kaplan has unravelled some of these links between Harrow and Eton and Oxford and Cambridge and future ministers, prime ministers, viceroys and lords. These were romantic friendships that lingered long into life. At the time of the trials of Wilde, more than one observer said that if everyone guilty of Wilde's offence were to be imprisoned there would be a mass exodus from the public schools and universities.Footnote ⁴¹

The homoerotic elements of the Greek classics are a recurring thread. Hellenism provided an aesthetic and moral justification of male love.Footnote ⁴² The most celebrated statement about the spirituality of male-to-male love, of course, is contained in the transcripts of Oscar Wilde's 1895 trial speech about the love that dared not speak its name. He spoke powerfully of

Yet the irony and tragedy of Wilde's situation was that this declaration of purity was juxtaposed against less elegant allegations of Vaseline and excrement-stained bed-sheets, assignations with male prostitutes, sodomy, requested fellatio, and mutual masturbation (‘tossing … off’) – what the judge called ‘this most unpleasant part of this most unpleasant case’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Henry James's friendships with young men were with those of his own social stratum. However, cross-class friendships are a marked feature of this era's male homoeroticism. One such example involves Oscar Browning, Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, and one-time chairman of the council of the Royal Historical Society, a man who also features in Kaplan's discussion of upper-class public school/university friendships. A literary historian observed wryly the absence of contemporary comment on Browning's sleep-in male servant, or his propensity to fill his rooms with young, uniform-clad, working-class males. His ‘addiction to boys of the working class was put down to his kind heart or his general oddity of character’.Footnote ⁴⁵ In its inimitable style, the original Dictionary of national biography observed that Browning ‘assisted young Italians, as he had done young Englishmen, towards the openings they desired’.Footnote ⁴⁶

It was relatively common for age and class difference to combine in what must have represented – for one, perhaps both parties – the erotic appeal of the ‘other’. Seth Koven is persuasive in his reading of the homoeroticism of Victorian slumming, the coded references to the mingling of bodies in the nighttime accommodation of London's down-and-outs, and to the upper- and middle-class fascination with the bodies of the poor. His account is supported by Symonds's own explicit erotic reaction to the Pall Mall Gazette's sensationalist ‘A night in a workhouse’ (1866) which was one of many formative influences on his homosexual development; he took to writing verse about working men as the ‘safety valve for my tormenting preoccupations’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Such desires provide an added dimension to the motivations of some of those university men involved in the class-bridging, all male settlements in the poorer areas of London during the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote ⁴⁸

The working-class partner often benefited financially in what was, after all, an unequal relationship. Xavier Mayne's Intersexes (1908) referred to young men who used their earnings from selling their bodies to men to pay for their own sex with women. He thought that although scarcely visible to the uninitiated, male prostitution in the large cities was as common as its female counterpart, and he was aware that, as with female prostitution, large numbers of the working class used sex to supplement other income. Waiters, petty officials, servants, young mechanics, shop assistants, and students were particularly susceptible to semi-prostitution.Footnote ⁴⁹ Mayne was extremely knowledgeable about the sexual accessibility of the military and listed the cruising areas of the 1900s; British garrison towns were known for the sexual availability of their soldiers, what he termed ‘soldier-harlotry’.Footnote ⁵⁰ The sexual appeal of guardsmen is a recurring theme in modern homoeroticism.Footnote ⁵¹

Oscar Wilde's penchant for young working-class males was notorious. He famously referred to it in his long prison letter to Lord Alfred Douglas in 1897 in what became, in edited form, De Profundis (1905):

His tastes are also evident in the court transcripts – ‘Oscar does not care what he pays if he fancies a chap’ – as, in successive trials, the age and class gap between Wilde and his friends were taken to be markers of improper association: ‘What enjoyment was it to you, Mr Wilde, to be dining and entertaining grooms and coachmen?’Footnote ⁵³ After his release from Reading gaol, Wilde's correspondence from France and Italy (1898–1900) is crammed with knowing references to renters and boys. ‘Boys can be had everywhere.’ ‘I dined with Sarluis [Léonard Sarluis, a painter] last week. He introduced a wonderful boy with red hair like the hair of a Botticelli angel. His occupation by day is preparing the ingredients necessary for vol-au-vents, in a shop near the Halles. At night, attired in one of Sarluis's best suits, he looks wonderful.’ ‘The people here [Naples] – fisher-folk all – have beautiful eyes, crisp hair of a hyacinth colour, and no morals: an ideal race. I have two special friends, one called Raphael, the other Fortuné – both quite perfect, except that they can read and write.’ ‘I am practically engaged to a fisherman of extraordinary beauty, age eighteen.’ ‘Robbie [Ross] left me a legacy of a youthful guide, who knows nothing about Rome. Omero is his name, and I am showing him Rome.’Footnote ⁵⁴

Wilde's friends Robert Ross and Aubrey Beardsley also exchanged knowing banter about telegraph and messenger boys, generally acknowledged as sexually accessible.Footnote ⁵⁵ Horatio Forbes Brown, Symonds's literary executor, wrote yearning verse about young troopers, footmen, and sailors.Footnote ⁵⁶ John Maynard Keynes's several hundred recorded sexual contacts while he was a Cambridge lecturer in the period before the First World War included working-class pick-ups as well as members of the establishment, colleagues, and students.Footnote ⁵⁷ Lytton Strachey, Keynes's friend, seems to have spent much of the 1910s falling in love from a distance, moping about a friend's farmhouse, trying to catch sight of a lovely post boy or a desirable waggoner, or walking city streets and riding trains in search of mental images of young working-class men and men in uniform. A homosexual flaneur, Strachey constructed elaborate fantasies about meeting these young working-class men.Footnote ⁵⁸

Houlbrook's history of London, which starts in 1918, discusses these objects of homosexual desire, working-class men who had sex with other men – while continuing to have sex with women – and who did not consider themselves to be homosexual. These men, including sailors and the notorious guardsmen, might accept money or other forms of support, but their motivations could be more than mere prostitution. Houlbrook writes of friendship, cross-class attraction, and the ‘complexities’ of desires. For some, it was a phase that ceased once they married, but others continued with their same-sex liaisons.Footnote ⁵⁹ ‘The most remarkable thing about queer urban culture’, he notes, ‘is that it was, to a large extent, composed of and created by men who never thought themselves queer.’Footnote ⁶⁰

III

Though cross-class sexual attraction does not seem to be a strong feature of such attachments, friendship is also central to female same-sex histories.Footnote ⁶¹ It is no coincidence that Martha Vicinus's monograph on the same-sex interactions of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century English and American women is called Intimate friends.Footnote ⁶² A text from 1905 indicated both the existence of passionate friendship between young women, and the possibility that such affection could lead to something more.

The something more is hinted at as, first, self-abuse or masturbation, and, second, same-sex activity, suggested in the references to perversion and sex mania.

Close female friendships thrived in the homosocial female worlds of the nineteenth century. These same-sex attachments were simply accepted in society at that time, and had intensity not matched by more restrained, opposite sex interactions. (We are dealing with middle- and upper-class women.) Friendship was expressed both physically through hugging and kissing, and through passionate letters and diary entries. They ‘possess an emotional intensity and a sensual and physical explicitness that are difficult to dismiss’, writes Carroll Smith-Rosenberg. ‘Their ambivalent and romantic rhetoric presents us with an ultimate puzzle: the relationship along the spectrum of human emotions between love, sensuality, and sexuality.’Footnote ⁶⁴

Sharon Marcus's impressive new book, Between women: friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England (2007), which explores a variety of bonds between women in Victorian England, argues that these close relationships between women should not be seen as something separate to relationships with men but rather that they were part of a culture where they could be preparation for marriages between men and women. ‘I now grasped that our contemporary opposition between hetero- and homosexuality did not exist for Victorians, and that Victorians were thus able to see relationships between women as central to lives also organized around men.’Footnote ⁶⁵ Her exploration of female friendship includes mutual attraction and unrequited love, female homoeroticism as a prelude to marriage to a man, female marriages or life partnerships, and long-term passionate relationships between women where at least one of them was married. The languages of sex were complicated and Victorians had a variety of terms to refer to long-term female relationships that had all the attributes of marriage. The word ‘love’ was commonplace in the context of female–female relationships so its presence is not sufficient to indicate the difference between friendship and something more. Marcus refers to a contextual ‘tipping point’ separating friendship from sex.Footnote ⁶⁶

Marcus explains the advantages of such pre-marital homosociality in its nineteenth-century cultural context. It enabled women freedom in emotional entanglement, even experimentation, without compromising their femininity. It provided practice in the friendship that was the basis for a good marriage.

Martha Vicinus's study, Intimate friends: women who loved women, 1778–1928 (2004), already reviewed in this journal, has numerous case studies of women who formed close erotic relationships with other women. They include those who, she argues, conceived their same-sex attractions according to societal family models, referring to their female partners as husband or wife, daughter, sister, or aunt.Footnote ⁶⁷ They considered their relationships as marriages. As Marcus points out, same-sex unions go back to the nineteenth century when ‘the female couple was accepted as a variation on legal marriage, not treated as a separate species.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Women courted and exchanged rings like opposite-sex couples might. The nineteenth-century Yorkshire gentlewoman, Anne Lister, saw herself as a husband, and a long-time friend saw herself as Anne's wife; Mrs Barlow, Lister's lover in Paris, complained that she was more a ‘mistress’ than a wife.Footnote ⁶⁹ Vicinus's women include a group of sexually liberated American and British women in Rome in the 1850s to 1870s, around the figure of the actress Charlotte Cushman, who herself was involved with two women, one of whom was married to her adopted son. Others were Mary Benson, the wife of the archbishop of Canterbury in the 1880s and 1890s, who had a close friendship with another married woman, and then with the daughter of her husband's predecessor as archbishop of Canterbury, who lived with them, sharing Mary's bed.Footnote ⁷⁰

That friendship for women could involve something more than friendship is apparent in the journals of Lister, who wrote in 1822 of her suspicions that the friendship of two famous female friends was not merely platonic: ‘I cannot help thinking that surely it was not platonic. Heaven forgive me, but I look within myself & doubt. I feel the infirmity of our nature & hesitate to pronounce such attachments uncemented by something more tender still than friendship.’Footnote ⁷¹ When she later attested to the warmth of her own friendships but denied that they went any further (‘I don't, in reality, go beyond the utmost verge of friendship’), we know – indeed she tells us – that she was lying.Footnote ⁷²

As with male friendships, the scenarios of female friendship varied. Annamarie Jagose has warned against imposing modern lesbian identities on these early nineteenth-century texts. Lister had ample opportunity for same-sex seduction. Her diaries list her successes: the love letters, ‘grubbling’, breast and open-mouthed kissing, feeling of genitalia (what she calls the ‘queer’), the repeated mutual orgasms, the serial seductions of sisters, the love-struck widow, the maidenhead taking, the exchanged lockets of pubic hair, the continuous flirtations. Lister unofficially married a woman whom she lived with as a female companion, and knew of others in similar situations. She tried to make sense of what we (though not she) would call her sexuality, based on her reading of such behaviour in the classics, her interaction with similar women, and an awareness of her own same-sex desires: ‘I love, & only love, the fairer sex & thus beloved by them in turn, my heart revolts from any other love than theirs.’Footnote ⁷³ Yet Jagose's caution is entirely justified. Anne saw herself – and was seen as – masculine, man-like. Women flirted with her as they might with someone of the opposite sex. As Jagose notes, these were not relations between those of the same gender. Lister had affairs with young women who later married, a widow with a child, and a long-term lover, Marianna Lawton, who was married to a man but to whom she nevertheless considered herself ‘married’. When we focus on these women, as much a part of this history as Lister, it is clear that they, as Jagose has expressed it, ‘do not understand themselves, any more than she understands them, as sharing with Lister a sexual preference, let alone anything like a sexuality’.Footnote ⁷⁴ It is significant that in her declaration of attraction to ‘the fairer sex’, she does not describe them as her sex.Footnote ⁷⁵ She describes her desires in terms of gender rather than sex: ‘All this ordering & work & exercise seemed to excite my manly feelings. I saw a pretty girl go up the lane & desire rather came over me.’Footnote ⁷⁶

IV

One of the more puzzling strands of the history of homosexuality is the link between same-sex desires and effeminacy in men and masculinity in women. The most famous association of homosexuality with effeminacy, of course, features Wilde. It has become something of an orthodoxy that ‘effeminacy came to be indissolubly bonded to the figure of the homosexual man’ only in the wake of the trials of Oscar Wilde.Footnote ⁷⁷ Homosexuality and effeminacy became ‘attached’, so the argument runs, primarily at that moment in the 1890s. The contention is that Wilde's work and life stood at a pivotal point in the queering of the effeminate male. In Wilde's iconic story, Picture of Dorian Gray, the dandy was not exclusively attracted to men. Rather, he was a misogynist whose main sexual impulse was towards women but who was also homoerotically inclined to men. Wilde and his dandies were effeminates rather than homosexuals. By the end of the Wilde trials in 1895, with their extensive press coverage, the effeminate male had become more exclusively associated with same-sex erotic attraction.Footnote ⁷⁸ In the initial libel trial, there was prolonged debate about whether ‘the sin of Dorian Gray was sodomy’; Wilde arguing for the indeterminacy of his fictional character's sins, and his legal opponents maintaining that his writings would lead people to infer that he ‘was either in sympathy with, or addicted to, immoral and sodomitic habits’. When Wilde's acts were demonstrated to have moved somewhat beyond mere inference – ‘Did you ever open his trousers?’ ‘Put your hand upon his person?’ ‘Did you ever put your own person between his legs?’ – his case was lost and the prosecutor became a defendant.Footnote ⁷⁹ Thereafter, homosexuality and effeminacy were firmly fastened in the public sphere. Wilde became the archetypal invert: indeed his ‘femininity’ is noted in the pictures of him as a sexual pervert in a text of 1905.Footnote ⁸⁰

The iconic status of Wilde may have been exaggerated in the history of the role of male effeminacy in homosexuality, and it would be a mistake to ignore the other links between homosexuality and effeminacy that were operating before this supposed turning point. One connection between same-sex desires and effeminate behaviour, dealt with in Kaplan's study, seems to be the world of male transvestism or cross-dressing.Footnote ⁸¹ And this world may well be linked, in turn, to male prostitution. The trials of Wilde were not the only famous Victorian trials. There was also the earlier, rather curious case of Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, or Fanny and Stella (their female names), tried in 1871 for conspiracy to commit sodomy. When Boulton and Park were arrested in female clothing, the men who followed them claimed that they thought that they were female prostitutes. One of these men said that when the two were in male clothes he saw them as women dressed as men. This claim for transvestite prostitution may seem strange, but we have an 1850s publication that refers to an increase in what it termed ‘these monsters in the shape of men, commonly designated margeries, poofs, etc … these monsters actually walk the streets the same as whores, looking out for a chance’.Footnote ⁸² Thus it seems that some men cross-dressed to appear as women in the hope of luring men to have sex with them: some of their clients, presumably, did not know that they were dealing with a man rather than a woman; some may not have cared.

The evidence that came out in the trial of Boulton and Park, mostly, though not always, publicized in the newspapers, was contradictory but raised several possibilities: that the cross-dressed men had spent the night with companions in, or not in, the same bed; had, or had not, been the recipients of anal sex; had, or had not, engaged in prostitution; had, or had not, lived as the wife (Boulton as Stella) of Lord Arthur Clinton; had, or had not, engaged in flirtatious correspondence with a series of young men; and had, or had not, worn make-up as well as cross-dressing on a permanent rather than temporary basis. The defence stressed the role of these young men on the stage (they were actors playing female roles), arguing that they were merely carrying their theatrics on to the street as light-hearted, innocent fun: most of the photographs associated with the case were theatrical photographs; their make-up was theatrical, not sodomitical. The use of female names was schoolboy behaviour rather than indicative of vice. And, finally, their correspondence showed the language of friendship rather than the language of lust, a spiritual rather than sensual love.Footnote ⁸³ Note the issue about friendship versus something more.

They were acquitted. But the highly publicized case made connections between same-sex desire and woman-like or effeminate behaviour. The prosecutor made these links when he alleged that the men's familiarity indicated that their relations were those only permitted ‘between men and women’; that their ‘studied’ effeminacy was to attract men; that they lived as man and wife; and that they corresponded ‘in the language of love’. This combination of woman-like associations, he concluded, could only suggest ‘the commission of unnatural offences’.Footnote ⁸⁴ While much of it was understated, or even unspoken, links were made between effeminacy and same-sex desire.Footnote ⁸⁵ It may be that the knowingness that I have referred to was more widely shared: the historian Sean Brady has referred to ‘a pervasive and tacit cultural knowledge’ of male-to-male sex.Footnote ⁸⁶

The history of male effeminacy remains fragmented. We know that the link between homosexuality and effeminacy was understood by the 1930s in urban culture.Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet the means of the arrival of such understandings is still unclear. It is likely that sexology played a role. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, generally acknowledged as the first scientist of homosexuality, saw males who were attracted to other males as the third sex, Urnings, a female soul or psyche trapped within a male body. Thus homosexuality was seen primarily in terms of effeminacy in men and masculinity in women.Footnote ⁸⁸ Richard von Krafft-Ebing represented homosexuality as loss of masculinity or effeminization. ‘Every case of genuine homosexuality’, he wrote, ‘must be reduced to an abnormal sexual instinct which is diametrically opposed to the physical sex of the affected individual’.Footnote ⁸⁹ So the association of homosexuality with effeminacy received powerful reinforcement from the sexologists, despite the more mixed messages of their collected histories. Edward Carpenter wrote in the 1890s that the essence of the intermediate sex was declared in its most pronounced examples, ‘the extreme specimens’. Its male form predictably included effeminacy, talkativeness, mincing, a penchant for women's clothing, neatness, a clinging nature, large hips, a high-pitched voice, and passivity in love; in other words, an exaggerated stereotype reflecting male attitudes to women.Footnote ⁹⁰ The problem with the role of sexology in England, however, is that it is fast becoming received opinion that sexology had limited impact there.Footnote ⁹¹ While historians who minimize sexology's role ignore the fact that those with an education had access to a wider European literature, it is true that sexology left little trace in the debate around the same-sex scandals of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁹² Its impact was from the 1890s onwards rather than earlier.Footnote ⁹³

V

Matt Cook has charted London's ‘homoerotic geography’ during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: Piccadilly Circus, notorious for its renters and cruising; the opportunities offered by the new public toilets and railway stations; Hyde Park with its soldier prostitutes and Serpentine bathers; West End streets; restaurants, bars, hotels, theatres, music hall; men's clubs and bachelor chambers; bookshops and the Hellenic galleries of the British Museum; sports clubs and swimming pools; and university settlements.Footnote ⁹⁴ David Doyle's account of the same-sex activities of Ogden Codman has demonstrated the ease with which the American could interact with those of similar desires in the 1890s in New York and Europe.Footnote ⁹⁵ Laurel Brake has explored the manner in which, in the late 1880s and early 1890s, Charles Kains-Jackson's The Artist and Journal of Home Culture provided a site for patently homoerotic literature and art, and a recent issue of the journal Visual Culture in Britain has showcased current research on the homoerotic elements in a wider range of Victorian visual culture.Footnote ⁹⁶ David Hilliard and others have located a link between homosexuality and Anglo – and Roman Catholicism, although the precise reasons for this connection are difficult to explain beyond stereotypes about celibacy, aesthetic appeal, and male fraternity.Footnote ⁹⁷ Paul Fussell has written eloquently of the merging of the themes of the Uranian poets with the homoerotic poetry and prose of the trenches during the Great War.Footnote ⁹⁸

However, it is another issue whether or not those who took advantage of Cook's ‘homoerotic geography’, the subjects and objects of the ‘knowing’ referred to earlier – the men who were engaged in sexual activity or who expressed sexual longing, male-to-male or male-to-feminine/male – were conscious of themselves as a distinct sexual grouping or groupings. We certainly cannot assume this earlier in the century. What is so significant about the Warrington and Manchester men prosecuted for attempted sodomy in 1806 is their lack of specificity. They were ordinary artisans and servants. They were not seen as, and did not see each other as, a special group. Their sexual activity, it appears mainly mutual masturbation, proclaimed no sexual identity.Footnote ⁹⁹

George Ives was able to trace those who were active for the ‘Cause’ or the ‘movement’ in the nineteenth century, those he was calling ‘homosexuals’ or ‘homosexual people’ by the 1920s. Indeed, his diary of the 1920s and 1930s recorded a retrospective outing of figures he had known in the previous century: ‘When homosexual people die (and never before) I like to furnish such evidence as I can in the interest of truth.’Footnote ¹⁰⁰ But this was from the vantage point of the twentieth century.

When, then, can we write of ‘homosexuality’? The terms used for same-sex male desire varied, and we cannot go into specifics here. The journalist and publisher Frank Harris did not use the word homosexual in his 1918 account of Wilde. He referred instead to ‘sexual inverts’, ‘sexual perversion’, ‘abnormal tastes’, and ‘abnormal vice’.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It is often cited that J. R. Ackerley claimed that he heard the word homosexual used for the first time at the end of the First World War; he was asked if he was a hetero or homo and had no idea what his questioner meant.Footnote ¹⁰² But the term was certainly employed before then both by critics and sympathizers. Mayne was referring to homosexuality, homosexual, and homosexualism, and distinguishing them from the heterosexual in a work published in 1908.Footnote ¹⁰³ As we saw of Ives's diary entries, the word was more commonly used by the 1920s, a decade in which a young teacher was told by a female date that he was ‘a homosexual’. The man, T. C. Worsley, later a drama critic for the New Statesman and Financial Times, mused ‘How was I to tell? Homo, I certainly did seem to be. Sexual I certainly wasn't.’Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, linguistically, the word was not in widespread, educated usage until the 1950s if that middle- and upper-class document of record, The Times, is any indication.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

We should resist any simple teleological account of a shift from ‘homosexuality’ as sexual excess to the homosexual as a species. To return to our period of interest, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Kaplan prefers to consider same-sex diversity rather than emerged ‘sexual taxonomies’ and sexual categories. His descriptors are ‘diffuse’ and ‘ambiguous’. ‘Perhaps ambiguity, vacillation, and opacity are inherent in desire.’ Like Doyle's assessment of Codman's world, he too writes of desires that resist present-day sexual assumptions – that are indeed ‘beyond the grasp of our own sexual imaginary’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

VI

The situation with female same-sex sexual interaction is equally intriguing. Those who have worked on concepts of lesbianism in the early twentieth century have been struck by the indeterminacy and incoherence of lesbian representations. The word lesbian was used in the famous 1918 libel trial where the actress Maud Allan took action against an MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing, for insinuating that she was lewd, that her performance in Oscar Wilde's play Salome was obscene and would encourage ‘unnatural practices among women’, and that her associates were ‘addicted to obscene and unnatural practices’. Salome, Pemberton-Billing alleged, ‘ministers to sexual perverts, Sodomites and Lesbians’. ‘The Cult of the Clitoris’ was the notorious phrase used to denote female same-sex activity. And the trial enabled the explanation that this explicit reference to the clitoris meant ‘the practice of this Lesbian vice’: ‘the practice of a filthy, enervating and degrading vice’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Yet the most noticeable aspect of the languages of the trial, and in reported reactions to it, was an inability to represent female same-sex desire, let alone something called lesbianism. Female erotics, as Deborah Cohler has shown, were conveyed not as sexual identity but by vague associations with male homosexuality (Wilde and Salome), references to ‘perversion’, and through lesbianism's rather strange anatomical stand-in, the clitoris.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Jodie Medd has referred to a combination of unrepresentability and suggestibility.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

Doan has argued that notions of lesbianism in England were unformed before the obscenity case in 1928 involving The well of loneliness, Radclyffe Hall's novel about female inversion. After the publicity of the trial, they focused on the style and persona of Hall – just as male same-sex desires had been associated with the persona of Wilde more than thirty years earlier. Doan argues that the female masculine style, a fondness for men's clothing, including military dress, short hair, trousers, berets, cigarettes, the monocle, and masculine mannerisms that we now associate with a developing lesbian style was in fact nothing of the sort in the period before the late 1920s. It actually represented modernity. These were stylish women. However, in the wake of the trial and the visual representation of Radclyffe Hall, this modernism became more clearly associated with female same-sex cultural expression: sapphic style. Photographs, once seen as icons of gender-ambiguous modernity, were now read as representations of lesbian masculinity.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In other words, just as we cannot assume that female friendship in the nineteenth century denoted modern lesbianism, we cannot assume that the masculine-styled woman of the early twentieth century was parading her same-sex desires. She may have been, and sexologists may have been tempted to interpret her dress and demeanour in this way, but there was no necessary link with her sexual identity.Footnote ¹¹¹

It is intriguing that the word lesbian was relatively rarely used in the early decades of the twentieth century. Though it takes us a little out of our ambit, Ruth Ford's study of the Australian woman Ethel May (or Monte) Punshon shows that in the 1920s and 1930s she negotiated her same-sex desires without employing the word lesbian. Her scrapbooks contained images of independent women, who engaged in masculine activities and who dressed in a masculine style. She also dressed in that manner: collar and tie, short hair pushed back, suits. We do not know how she described her relationships with other women in the 1920s, but as late as the 1980s she used the language of friendship, while making it clear that her friendships were something more: ‘As the friendship blossomed, Debbie and I spent more and more time together.’ ‘Debbie and I were very possessive of each other and never went out alone.’Footnote ¹¹²

The famous Colonel Barker, a biological female who assumed a male military persona, and who embarked on a series of marriages and relationships with women, traced in his intermittent appearances in the courts for petty infractions in the 1920s and 1930s, was hardly ever identified as lesbian.Footnote ¹¹³ Alison Oram has written of the ‘shifting, often opaque images of lesbian desire’ in interwar Britain. The lesbian was rarely named in the newspapers of this period. Desires were hinted at in notions of upper-class decadence. The female husband was an object of fun (for her gender crossing) rather than feared for her possible sexual perversion. ‘Female masculinity did not automatically signal same-sex desire even in the 1930s.’Footnote ¹¹⁴ It is this opacity that makes this period in the history of female same-sex desire so interesting. It was not until the 1950s that the word ‘lesbian’ occurred with any regularity in The Times.Footnote ¹¹⁵

VII

I have described the histories in the pages above as fragmentary and this may surprise some readers for we are certainly approaching thick descriptions of the homoerotic male worlds of the nineteenth century and with early twentieth-century sapphism. But the histories are fragmentary in their refusal to provide a grand narrative of homosexual making and in their denial of attribution of sexual identity. One recurring theme is the slippage between what would become known respectively as heterosexuality and homosexuality. Another is the late arrival of these categories. And we have confirmed the multiple axes and varied comprehensions hypothesized by Howard at the opening of this article.

Discussing the friendship between the Victorian critic Edmund Gosse and the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft, Michael Hatt writes of the homoerotic as situated on the border between the homosocial and homosexual. ‘Sexuality is both close and distant, pressing so near and yet falling so far.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ Medd has referred to the ‘discursive conjuring up of lesbianism as a ghostly possibility – incoherent, undefinable, diffuse, mobile, evasive, shaped by its invisibility’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Traub has sketched out the possibility of using the insights of such histories to form a ‘multilayered genealogy of sexuality’. It would be a history that would welcome disagreement. ‘I imagine such voices and the histories they articulate coming together and falling apart, like the fractured images of a rotating kaleidoscope.’Footnote ¹¹⁸ Such sexual fragmentation is unlikely to satisfy the publisher's perceived markets for A lesbian history of Britain and A gay history of Britain, but it makes for far more challenging history.