He put the half empty glass down. His manners were perfect and I noticed that each time he had called Jill mommy, just like a little girl. a significant moment in the history of the hesitant emergence of a public discourse of the homosexual as an identity. Perhaps more importantly, the base is significant in its revelation of a "pre-homosexual" subculture which was obviously extensive, varied and flourishing, involving, in differing roles and degrees, men of all walks of life. [137] When asked in court how sodomy could have enlarged their penises and testicles, he said that it was because of the "traction" involved in anal sex. [64]

After about two months of the boys being petticoated every day, it became clear that they had not only become accustomed to dressing as girls, but had come to like looking pretty and girlish and had become quite girlish in how they behaved. For instance, when they walked and sat, they moved like girls, smoothing their skirts as they sat and being careful when they knelt down so as not to flash their panties too much. They also started to hold their hands in a girlish way and moved their hands as they talked in a very feminine manner. For me, I think that kind of change is really what it's all about. Mattie Stacey helps her mother run a lodging house in Kings Cross, London, in the latter half of the 19th century. It is a respectable house, but when two of their lodgers, two young men who often dress as women, for performance or just fur fun, are arrested, scandal taints it, much to Mattie's fury, and she tries what she can to set things right... Stewart, William (1995). Cassell's Queer Companion: A Dictionary of Lesbian and Gay Life and Culture. London: Cassell. ISBN 978-0-304-34301-0. Fanny and Stella's story is studded with moments of recognition and also with aspects that are barely comprehensible today, and I want to argue that those points of apparent incommensurability with current thinking are just as valuable in helping us understand transgender people as having a history, albeit one that is sometimes fractured and non-linear. [136] Legacy [ edit ] Henry Labouchère, author of the Labouchere Amendment, which made gross indecency a crime in the UK The Petticoat Men is a flawed book. Its structure is unbalanced and unconvincingly weak, the quality of the writing is inconsistent at best, and, perhaps most importantly, the story is not really about Bolton and Park, the cross-dressing duo, known as Fanny and Stella, at the heart of an infamous Victorian scandal.And is that what Tom likes? Wearing dresses?" My cross-examination continued. It seemed a little odd for a 13-year-old boy to dress as an eight-year-old girl. Male correspondents constantly wrote voluminous letters to this highly feminine magazine, and their favourite topics were tight-lacing, high heels, the use of spurs by lady riders, and the whipping of children - particularly young girls. . . . Many of the men confessed to wearing corsets themselves and experiencing 'most pleasurable sensations in being laced tight.' Robin Adair went to the trouble of having 'fashionable ladies' boots with high heels made for his own feet so that he could feel what it was like to wear them. . . . Witnesses of this type, spending their leisure gloating over these unmanly topics in a ladies' paper, are surely not to be relied on when they tell us of the sixteen- or even fourteen-inch waists achieved by their sisters and nieces . . . " (pp. 17-8)

Ernest got on my nerves too. He was exceedingly arrogant and needed a clip round the ears for his cheek and entitlement. Any other public knowledge about Victorian drag balls came from similar cases of regulation and persecution eg a raid in Manchester in 1880 where a man dressed as a nun unknowingly let the police into a fancy dress party. All 47 attendees were men, 20 of whom were attired in character as females. Alas the patterns of regulation and prosecution dominated historical knowledge of same-sex relations and sexual deviance, especially prior to the evolution of more coherent sub-cultures and the coining of the term homo-sexuality at the end of the C19th. But the 1850s was a golden age of theatre and pantomime, so if Challis and other men wanted costumes for a drag ball, what were the police doing invading dress-up parties. Rosenman, Ellen Bayuk (2018). Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-1-5017-1870-0.

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Rowbotham, Judith (27 March 2015). "A Deception on the Public: The Real Scandal of Boulton and Park". Liverpool Law Review. 36 (2): 123–145. doi: 10.1007/s10991-015-9158-7. S2CID 144502598. with your next door's neighbour's two girls. Is this true, Peter?” Well, what could I say? I could only hang my head and mumble that I was sorry for what I'd Barbara Ewing is a UK-based actress, playwright and novelist. Born in New Zealand, she graduated from Victoria University of Wellington with a BA in English and Maori before moving to Britain in 1965 to train as an actress at RADA (the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) in London. Kaplan, Morris B. (2005). Sodom on the Thames. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ISBN 978-0-8014-3678-9. The other characters were all well done. It was refreshing to have a lower-class Victorian mother that wasn’t indifferent toward her children or an absentee parent.