Much of the work of gay liberation in the twentieth century involved digging a trench between sexual diversity and gender nonconformity. Self-styled respectable cis men and women refuted the sissy or mannish stereotypes or slurs pervading popular and scientific discourse with the unequivocal claim: apart from our sexual orientation, we are just as normal as you. Their bid for acceptance was predicated on a de facto divorce, the insistence that the one must not be mistaken for the other. For sure, the breach was never complete, and some radical voices, for example in the Gay Liberation Front, were committed to so-called gender fucking and challenging the gender binary; but, by and large, the mainstream lesbian, gay, and bisexual components in the supposed alliance had little time or room for the transgender and the intersex, casting doubt on whether they were part of the same cause at all. Only in the last quarter century, with transgender issues roaring to life, has the need to understand the relationship between gender and sexuality within the alliance become pressing.
Enter Simon Joyce in the guise of marriage counselor. His engrossing study, LGBT Victorians: Sexuality and Gender in the Nineteenth-Century Archives, is unapologetically present-minded. He candidly admits that living with a trans child has transformed the way he thinks about the intersection of sexuality and gender. And the current stand-off between advocates for trans rights and gender-critical feminists, weaponized for political gain by anti-woke culture warriors on both sides of the Atlantic, has deeply informed his approach. The point of departure for his discussion is a heated debate over a rainbow plaque to Anne Lister unveiled in the city of York, England, by the local civic trust (2). The trust's initial description of Lister as a “Gender-nonconforming entrepreneur” generated a petition protesting lesbian erasure. In response, a replacement plaque described her as a “Lesbian and Diarist,” which was equally controversial and potentially misleading. Given this confusion with one of the nineteenth century's best-documented sexual/gender nonconformists as she strove to understand herself, Joyce's main proposition in this book is bold and, at first blush, strongly counterintuitive: the Victorians (broadly conceived) can teach us a thing or two about sex.
This might sound eccentric, an attention-grabbing rhetorical flourish, presumably not intended to be taken too seriously. Equally contrarian is his decision to eschew the use of queer, which has swept the field since the 1990s, on the grounds that it obscures the differences that he is attempting to highlight by the use of the LGBT initials. But the real purpose of this book, a forensic examination of the vexed historical relationship between sexuality and gender, is long overdue, and Joyce's contribution to the debate is strikingly intelligent and thought-provoking.
Joyce builds his case through a series of highly perceptive close readings, beginning in part one with “Coalescing Concepts”: the possibilities of lesbian identity and expression around 1820 (through case studies of Anne Lister in Yorkshire, Jane Pirie and Marianne Woods in Edinburgh, and Charity Bryant and Sylvia Drake in Vermont) and an interrogation of the role of gender in Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ pioneering defense of homosexuality in the dozen pamphlets he wrote between 1864 and 1880. In the second part, “Victorian Sexology and the Problem of Effeminacy,” Joyce moves squarely to Britain and a focus on the writings of John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Steeped in the asymmetrical, masculine, pederastic tradition of ancient Greece as filtered through the English public schools and Oxbridge but tempered by the ideals of manly comradeship propagated by Walt Whitman, both authors resisted and revised the assumptions of the continental European sexologists that cross-gender expression and identification necessarily accompanied same-sex desire. In part three, “Gay Men/Trans Women,” Joyce revisits the notorious trial of Fanny Boulton and Stella Park in London in 1871 and teases apart notions about sexuality and gendered bodies in key late Victorian British and French pornographic texts: Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), Letters from Laura and Eveline (1883), The Romance of Violette (1891), and Teleny (1893). A coda discusses Oscar Wilde and the question of his alleged effeminacy.
Throughout these case studies, Joyce is building a cogent case: that modern understandings of homosexuality cannot be understood independently of the presence of trans and intersex people; that gender expression and sexual orientation are, and always have been, intrinsically linked; that any attempt to treat them separately (let alone antagonistically) is inaccurate and unhelpful; and that the submerging of gender variance in the creation of the modern homosexual, which endured for the best part of a century, denied trans people a significant part of their own history.
In addition, Joyce provides significant and compelling rereadings of some key moments and figures in British queer history. Just to give three examples: first, influenced by New Woman thinkers in the 1890s, Edward Carpenter's reversal of his repudiation of male effeminacy and partial rapprochement with European sexology represented a break with Oxford Hellenism that scholars have not fully acknowledged; second, historians have too readily accepted the prosecution case in the trial of Boulton and Park that the defendants’ crossdressing disguised their real nature as sodomites, whereas a trans narrative fits the facts more coherently; and third, that Oscar Wilde did not consider himself as effeminate, and the treatment of him as such in historical literature and popular culture is simply mistaken.
Whether or not scholars agree with all that Joyce has to say, this is a book to be reckoned with, one of the most important to be written in British LGBT or, indeed, Queer history in recent years. Scholars, advocates for trans rights, gender-critical feminists, and culture warriors may not learn much from the Victorians themselves about sexuality and gender, but they would certainly benefit enormously from engaging with this rich, nuanced, and deeply humane study.
