David Boyle - Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime

Here you can read online David Boyle - Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2015, publisher: BookBaby, genre: Detective and thriller. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

Book:
Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime
Author:
David Boyle
Publisher:
BookBaby
Genre:
Books / Detective and thriller
Year:
2015
Rating:
5 / 5
Favourites:
Add to favourites
Your mark:
- 100
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5

Description
Author's other books
Similar books

Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

A journey back in time to find out why legislation was passed so unexpectedly in the UK in 1885 to make homosexual behaviour illegal - a law that led to the prosecution of tens of thousands of men until it was repealed eight decades later, but not before the prosecution of Oscar Wilde led to a moment of fear, unprecedented in modern British history, for those whose lives made them vulnerable.

This is not just an important work in an emerging gay history, it is also a fascinating glimpse of a society remarkably like our own, coming to terms with massive social and technological change in the 1880s and 1890s. It explains some of the background to this massive social shift - a clash between purity campaigners and those, like Wilde, who believed he could live a new kind of life. It also finds the origins of the new law in the ferment of politics in Dublin, and the first fully-fledged sex scandal that erupted in the summer of 1884.

Scandal is also a voyage of discovery for the author into the secret world of his own great-great-grandfather, who fled Dublin at the height of the scandal - only to find himself forced to escape a second time, this time from London, ten years later. It was the revelation of this second escape, and just how widespread it was, that led to the research into this book.

David Boyle: author's other books

Who wrote Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

SCANDAL

Published as print on demand and in various ebook formats in Great Britain in - photo 1

Published as print on demand and in various ebook formats in Great Britain in 2016 by the Real Press.

The moral right of David Boyle to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Acts of 1988.

Some rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise for commercial purposes without the prior permission of the publisher. No responsibility can be accepted by the publisher for action taken as a result of information contained in this publication.

ISBN: 978-0955226373 (print)

eISBN: 978-1682228951

Cover design by Hodge Creative Ltd.

In memory of my Irish forebears

Contents

It was Saturday 6 April 1895. The weather was windy and drizzly as the passengers packed onto the quayside at Dover to catch the steam packet to Calais, due on the evening tide. Perhaps it was packed that night because of Easter the following week. Perhaps it wasnt as packed as some of the witnesses claimed later, or the downright gossips who werent actually there. But it was still full. Those waiting on the quay wrapped up warm against the chilly Channel breeze and eyed each other nervously, afraid to meet anyone they knew, desperately wanting to remain anonymous.

Among those heading for France that night was an American, Henry Harland, the editor and co-founder of the notorious quarterly known as The Yellow Book, the journal of avant garde art and writing which had taken England by the scruff of the neck in the 1890s. Harland had come to Europe with his wife Aline, pretending to have been born in St Petersburg and planning to live in Paris, but had instead made his London flat, at 144 Cromwell Road, the very hive of excitement in the literary world. Henry James, Edmund Gosse and Aubrey Beardsley came and went. The parties were talked about with awe and excitement. Henry and Aline always spent the spring in Paris, so they were not leaving the country suddenly and in desperation, but it dawned on them that the reason the quayside was so packed that night was because many others were.

The name of the ferry the Harlands boarded has been lost to history. It was probably the Victoria her sister ship the Empress had been badly damaged in a collision the month before and was now in dry dock. There she heaved beside the sea wall, as the muffled passengers filed up the gangway, her twin rakish masts and her twin funnels belching smoke, her two paddlewheels poised to drive across the worlds busiest sea lane at 18 knots, her stern flag flapping in the wind with the insignia of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway.

Harland had a good idea why the ferries were full, though he was still surprised. He was also aware of at least some of the implications for himself. Oscar Wilde had been arrested for gross indecency that evening, having lost his libel action the day before. The news of the warrant for his arrest was in the evening papers, and included the information that Wilde had been arrested while he had been reading a copy of The Yellow Book (this was quite wrong, in fact; he was reading Aphrodite by Pierre Louys). Harland could only guess the motivations of those who were now suddenly crowding across the English Channel, but it looked remarkably like fear. They huddled in corners in the stateroom downstairs, out of the wind, damp and smuts, wondering perhaps whether they would ever see their native land again.

There was an unnerving atmosphere of menace that evening. One item in the evening papers implied that the nation was perched on the edge of a scandal that would make the establishment teeter. If the rumours which are abroad tonight are proved to be correct we shall have such an exposure as has been unheard of in this country for many years past.

Did it mean the exposure would reach those who run the nation, or did it mean something even more terrifying that the exposure would spread downwards through society? As the passengers knew only too well, the combination of events which they had feared for a decade had now come to pass. It had been a few months short of ten years since the so-called Labouchre amendment had been rushed through the House of Commons, criminalising homosexual activity of any kind between men. It was never quite clear why women were excluded there is no evidence for the old story that Queen Victoria claimed it was impossible. For ten years now, they had watched the rising sense of outrage at the very idea of homosexuality though the term was not yet in common use and had realised that there might come a time when that law was enforced with an unsurpassed ferocity.

It wasnt that they necessarily had anything to be ashamed of quite the reverse but they had reputations to be lived down, some event in their past or some unfortunate relationship behind them. Now that public concern had turned to what looked like public hysteria, they clearly had to be vigilant. They did not want to be accused, as Oscar Wilde was accused, by a violent aristocrat of doubtful sanity, and would then have to respond in the courts or the press. They could not face the fatal knock on the front door from a smiling acquaintance who would turn out to be a dangerous blackmailer.

But now the unthinkable had happened. Wilde had been stupid enough to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for libel, and had lost. The public had driven each other into a crescendo of rage and it seemed only sensible to lie low in Paris for a while. Or Nice or Dieppe, or the place where the British tended to go in flight from the law Madrid. Anywhere they could be beyond the reach of the British legal system.

As we shall see, one of those who fled, as I discovered during the research that led to this book, was my own great-great-grandfather escaping for the second time in a just over a decade, in a story that my own family had suppressed for three generations.

It is no small matter to flee your home and go abroad, especially to do so within the space of a few hours to gather your belongings and make arrangements for your property or your money. As it is, escape was only a solution available to those wealthy enough to flee. It is even tougher perhaps for those in some kind of unconventional relationship, ambiguous to the outside world but perhaps not ambiguous enough aware that the decision to go was probably irreversible. It might look like an admission of guilt.

On the other hand, what might happen when the newspapers could unleash this kind of bile? What would happen when they had successfully gaoled Wilde with hard labour and turned on his friends, and anyone else who looked unusual? What would happen if the rumours were correct and the scandal would shortly engulf the government and royal family? Harland did not know at this stage that, when the news about The Yellow Book became clear on Monday morning, a mob would gather outside the offices of his publishers Bodley Head, and would break all the windows. It killed The Yellow Book and it nearly killed me, said publisher John Lane later.

We know now that, in the event, the threatened conflagration did not take place, but in the remaining 72 years while Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, the Labouchre Amendment, stayed on the statute books, 75,000 were prosecuted under its terms, among them John Gielgud, Lord Montagu and Alan Turing. Many thousands of lives were ruined Turing committed suicide not long afterwards, having been forced to undergo hormone treatment that made him grow breasts.

Light

Font size:

↓

↑

Reset

Interval:

↓

↑

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime»

Look at similar books to Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.

Hourly History

Oscar Wilde: A Life From Beginning to End

Oscar Wilde

The Artist as Critic: Critical Writings of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde: The Dover Reader

Oscar Wilde

The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

Delphi Complete Works of Oscar Wilde (Illustrated)

Wilde Oscar

The secret life of Oscar Wilde: [an intimate biography]

Jack Goldstein

101 Amazing Facts about Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

The Importance of Being Earnest and Other Plays: Salome; Lady Windermere’s Fan

Oscar Wilde

The Complete Short Stories of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde

The Soul of Man under Socialism

Friedman

Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity

Franny Moyle

Constance: The Tragic and Scandalous Life of Mrs. Oscar Wilde

Reviews about «Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime»

Discussion, reviews of the book Scandal: How Homosexuality Became a Crime and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.