I explore the interplay between ascribed roles and modes of self-understanding that arose from practices associated with the desire for other men. Ascribed identities were taken up and transvalued by those they sought to stigmatize. As Foucault emphasizes in regard to modern sexual science, dominant discourses generate counterdiscourses. 3 Same-sex desire was subject to extensive social and legal regulation, which raises questions as to what threats it may have posed. 2 Some of these types manifest personal characteristics long familiar in the ethical discourses of early modern Europe, whereas others may mark the emergence of a distinctively modern homosexuality. I focus on the three decades prior to the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 to map an urban landscape of erotic life in which diverse human types interacted in a shared sexual underworld. This effort at social phenomenology is meant to explore connections among same-sex desires, fantasies, and practices personal identities and forms of association and public and legal responses to minority sexualities. In this essay I offer a “thick description,” drawn from personal memoirs and correspondence, records of court proceedings, press accounts of notorious sex scandals, and a pornographic novel, of distinctively urban forms of life shared by men who desired sex with other men. This period in England was also marked by agitation for reform associated with radical politics and a rigorous morality linked to a rising middle class. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has demonstrated a developing schism in norms of masculinity that required the construction of boundaries between a dominant male homosociality and a threatening homosexuality policed by increased displays of homophobia. Materialist historians underline the increased mobility and urbanization of capitalist industrial societies in Western Europe and North America, leading to the development of urban settings in which anonymous men could satisfy desires unrecognized by conventional social forms. Some follow Michel Foucault in emphasizing the shift from sodomy as a discourse of acts to homosexuality as defining a kind of person in the discourses of sexology.
Historians debate when modern homosexual “identities” and subcultures may be said to have appeared. London in the nineteenth century is a crucial site for the emergence of an ethos of individuality and of a milieu hospitable to male same-sex desire.
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