Late Regency/Early Victorian terms of endearment, professions for a former aristocrat

[chibirhm]

Setting/Notes: I'm writing a story set in 1840's London (so late Regency/early Victorian era). It's slightly AU in that magic exists, though has not effected history all that much (think Sorcery and Cecelia), so while I'm wiling to play a little fast and loose with making things slightly outdated or ahead of their time, I'd rather they weren't

Comments

[felis_ultharus]

.Most people did not even consider men loving other men physically and, even men who did, generally didn't consider m/m eros exceptionally taboo unless it included sodomy. Sodomy at the time was only penis penetration of animals or another human (male or female) in the behind, which was considered "unnatural." All this began to change near the end of the nineteenth century.

Not taboo? Does this book seriously claim that? Not technically illegal, true, and sodomy was hard to prove without witnesses. But homosexuals (and we did exist before the term was coined) were quite despised, and had been getting killed off in Europe since the mid-12th century.

Most jurisdictions in Europe didn't restrict their definitions of "buggery" to anal sex. Men were getting burnt in the Italian states, Spain, and France for things other than that. In England, it was a reticence to talk about the subject - and the fervent denial that homosexuality existed in England - that kept the laws from getting tightened up to include oral and other forms of sex.

A refusal to talk about "the sin that cannot be named between Christians," of course, did not protect the molly houses in England - particularly Mother Clap's. If they couldn't use the sodomy law, they used other means. Public humiliation was an option (The Society for the Reformation of Manners was fond of this). For female homosexuality - not technically illegal - laws like "fraud" could be used (crime: impersonating a man)

But even as late as the mid 1800s, it was still mainstream to claim there was no homosexuality in Britain. It was only after they noticed that they made stricter laws.

The rare times the topic came up - in tell-all books, in news stories, when someone who couldn't get charged with sodomy was put in the pillory instead - the bigotry was vociferous and even violent. It was that homophobia that kept Shakespeare's sonnets from being reprinted for 200 years - until so much time had passed that the Victorians could plausibly claim that that's "just how men talked back then."

I've never heard of this Jonathan Ned Katz - he certainly doesn't loom large in the history of homosexuality like John Boswell, Louis Crompton, or Rictor Norton. Hell, he's not even a middleweight like Byrne Fone. I've heard the theories, though. If that book is as bad as described here, it'll be the silliest and least-nuanced mutations of the bad postmodern version of gay history that Michel Foucault came up with.

Sorry for the long rant, but this comes up a lot, it is very wrong, and it really gets my goat as a historian of homosexuality. It's not reflected in the historical record, and its practical political use as an approach to historiography is to deny gays and lesbians a history.

[felis_ultharus]

Jonathan Ned Katz is actually pretty well known in academic circles. His work is seminal in framing the medicalization of gays. He goes hand in hand with Michel Foucault in talking about how homosexuality was criminalized and medicalized in the 1800s and that this was not common throughout most of history.