A Curious History of Sex
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* Some online sources identify Miss Fernande as Fernande Barrey (1893–1960), but there is no evidence to support this beyond a coincidence in age. Christian Bourdon, Jean Agélou: De L’Académisme À La Photographie De Charme (Paris: Marval, 2006).
1 Irina Metzler, A Social History of Disability in the Middle Ages (Hoboken: Taylor and Francis, 2013), p. 23.
2 John Keble, The Life of the Right Reverend Father in God, Thomas Wilson (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1863), p. 296.
3 ‘Post Office Act 1953’, Legislation.Gov.Uk, 2018
4 Caroline Archer, Tart Cards (New York: Mark Batty, 2003).
5 ‘Criminal Justice and Police Act 2001’, Legislation.Gov.Uk, 2018
6 Jack Harris, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies or Man of Pleasure’s Kalendar for the Year, 1788 (London: Ranger, 1788), pp. 72, 112, 36.
7 Hallie Rubenhold, Harris’s List of Covent Garden Ladies (London: Doubleday, 2005), p. 144.
8 Hallie Rubenhold, The Covent Garden Ladies: Pimp General Jack and the Extraordinary Story of Harris’s List (London: History Press, 2006), p. 71.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid., p. 216.
11 Nocturnal Revels: or, The History of King’s Place and Other Modern Nunneries (London: M. Goadby, 1779).
12 The Gentleman’s Bottle Companion, 1st edn (Edinburgh: Harris, 1979), p. 55.
13 Pamela D. Arceneaux, ‘Guidebooks to Sin: The Blue Books of Storyville, New Orleans’, Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association, 28.4 (2018), 397–405, p. 397.
14 Ibid., p. 401.
15 Ibid., p. 403.
16 Al Rose, Storyville, New Orleans (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979), p. 206.
17 E. J. Bellocq et al., E. J. Bellocq: Storyville Portraits, Photographs from the New Orleans Red-Light District (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), p. 14.
18 L’étude Académique, 1 February, 1911.
19 See Ferruccio Farina, Die Verbotene Venus: Erotische Postkarten 1895–1925 (Stuttgart: Deutscher Bücherbund, 1989).
20 ‘Tart Cards Exhibition’ at Birmingham Institute of Art & Design, 2014, and Plymouth College of Art, 2012.
21 Teela Sanders and others, Beyond the Gaze: Summary Briefing on Internet Sex Work, 2018
22 ‘“This Bill Is Killing Us”: 9 Sex Workers on Their Lives in the Wake of FOSTA’, Huffpost, 2018
Feasting with the Panthers
A History of Male Sex Work
Writing to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas from a prison cell in 1897, Oscar Wilde reflected on the crimes of ‘gross indecency’ that had resulted in his serving two years’ hard labour at Reading Gaol. Wilde described the young male sex workers he would entertain at dinner as ‘the brightest of gilded snakes’. He recalled being intensely aroused by the danger of having sex with these ‘delightfully suggestive and stimulating’ creatures, and likened his time in their company to ‘feasting with the panthers’.1
Assumptions around sex work are staggeringly heteronormative: women sell sex, men buy sex, and that’s that. Only that’s not that. It’s not even close. Sex work involves a vast spectrum of gender, sexuality, services, providers and clients. Sex work is a notoriously difficult subject to research. Criminalisation and stigma means that many sex workers are unwilling to speak to researchers. As a result, gathering reliable data on sex work demographics is tricky and estimates can differ significantly. For example, according to the 2016 Home Office Affairs Committee report on prostitution, about 20 per cent of UK sex workers are male.2 Yet statistics released by the data collecting website Import.io in 2014 suggested that 42 per cent of all UK sex workers are male.3 We may never have an exact figure, but one thing we know is true is that there are a lot of fellas on the game and this has been true throughout history.4
Oscar Wilde seen here in a photo with his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde lost a defamation lawsuit involving his relationship with Douglas and was imprisoned as a homosexual. He died shortly after his release. Photographed by Gillman & Co. (1882–1910).
Although there is considerable evidence of men selling sex to other men, the history of women buying sex from men proves far more elusive and unreliable. The Roman poet Martial, for example, mocks an ‘ugly and old woman’ who wishes to ‘receive services without paying for them’. Elsewhere, he jokes that ‘Lesbia swears that she has never been fucked for free. It’s true. When she wants to be fucked, she usually pays for it.’ But this may be a snide dig at older women, rather than evidence that women paid for sex.
Likewise, many powerful female rulers were smeared as insatiable nymphomaniacs by their enemies, which makes teasing out the facts particularly difficult. For example, Queen Ana Nzinga (1583–1663) of the Ndongo and Matamba Kingdoms in Angola was alleged to have kept a harem of fifty men to pleasure her at will. ‘She also maintains fifty to sixty concubines, whom she dresses like women, even though they are young men.’5 The problem with this account is it was written by Dutch geographer Olfert Dapper, who had never actually visited Africa. Given the arse-kicking Queen Nzinga handed out to the Portuguese, this may be nothing more than slanderous rumour.
One of the few historical accounts of an all-male brothel catering to a female clientele comes from Mary Wilson, a London bawd who owned a string of brothels in the early nineteenth century. In 1824, Mary published The Voluptarian Cabinet where she described her creation of an ‘Eleusinian Institution’. There, for the right price, a woman could be pleasured by a gentleman of her choosing.
I have purchased very extensive premises, which are situated between two great thoroughfares and are entered from each by means of shops, devoted entirely to such trades as are exclusively resorted to by ladies … In these saloons, according to their class, are to be seen the finest men of their species I can procure, occupied in whatever amusements are adapted to their taste, and all kept in a high state of excitement by good living and idleness…6
The problem with this account is that it comes to use through the work of sexologist, Iwan Bloch, who wrote about Mary Wilson’s brothel in his A History of English Sexual Morals (1936). Not that I would want to suggest Bloch is lying, but corroborating evidence of Miss Wilson’s premises, and indeed her writing is rather hard to find.
But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, and women almost certainly will have been paying for sex throughout history. Even today, women buying sex is a taboo and under-researched subject. But this is changing. In 2016, criminologists Dr Natalie Hammond and Dr Sarah Kingston completed one of the first research projects into UK women paying for sex.7 Dr Kingston recognised her preconceptions were challenged by ‘just how similar women’s motivations for buying sex are to men’s’. Dr Hammond found that women pay for sex for a range of reasons, ‘such as wanting to experiment or having a mismatched sex drive with their partner – wanting sex, but not an affair. This parallels what we know about male clients – they come from all walks of life and pay for sex for a range of reasons.’8 Thankfully, research is now shedding light on the women who pay for sex, but it remains a hidden history.
François Villain, Ann Zingha, Queen of Matamba, 1800.
Same-sex relationships between men were widely accepted throughout the Ancient World, but they were still subject to strict sociosexual ‘rules’ that dictated what was decent, and what was not. In Greece, for example, an older man (erastes) could take a teenage boy (pais) for his lover, but he would also become his mentor, and tutor him in the ways of the world. Though today we would recognise this as child sexual abuse and institutionalised paedophilia, the Ancient Greeks n
ot only accepted it, but parents would happily offer up their sons to rich old men in the hope that it would give them a boost up the social ladder. The older man was regarded as the active, more masculine one, and the younger man would be expected to assume the passive role – this extended to the sex itself, where the pais would be the one being penetrated (the bottom), and the erastes would be doing the penetrating (the top). It was considered quite unseemly for a grown man to be a bottom. Similar pederastic arrangements were regarded as perfectly normal among the Samurai warriors in Japan, where an older warrior (nenja) would take an adolescent boy (chigo) as his sexual partner in exchange for training him in martial arts and social etiquette.9
During his 1895 trial for indecency, Oscar Wilde described his affection for Lord Douglas as ‘the love that dare not speak its name’. When pushed by Sir Edward Clarke to explain what he meant by this, Wilde referred to the erastes/pais relationships of the Ancient Greeks:
‘The Love that dare not speak its name’ in this century is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare … It is in this century misunderstood, so much misunderstood that it may be described as the ‘Love that dare not speak its name,’ and on account of it I am placed where I am now. It is beautiful, it is fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him. That it should be so the world does not understand. The world mocks at it and sometimes puts one in the pillory for it.10
All very noble this may have been, but for a man to simply sell sex, rather than exchanging sex for being mentored, did carry a certain amount of shame. For example, Greek men who sold sex were forbidden from entering temples, public speaking or taking part in official proceedings. In 346 BC, the Athenian politician Aeschines prosecuted fellow stateman Timarchus for addressing the assembly when he sold sex in his youth: ‘The man who has sold the right to his own body would be ready to sell the state as well.’11 Similar laws existed outside Athens too. In the city of Beroia, modern-day Veria, an inscription from the second century BC bans ‘slaves, drunks, madmen, and those who have prostituted themselves (hetaireukôtes)’ from entering the gymnasium.12
Greek ceramic dating to 480 BC, showing an erastes (lover) and his eromenos (beloved) kissing.
However, such shame was not universal. The Ancient Hindu sex manual, the Kama Sutra, describes how male sex workers, ‘imitating women’s dress’, give good head to their male clients, with no hint of shame. ‘When it is in precisely this state, driven halfway inside the mouth through the force of passion, he mercilessly presses down, and presses down again, and lets it go. This is called sucking the mango.’13
Attitudes to sucking the mango were not quite as permissive throughout medieval Christian Europe, but we know a lot of sucking went on. On the evening of 11 December 1394, John Rykener was arrested for selling sex to Yorkshire man John Britby in Cheapside, London. Rykener’s questioning and testimony before the mayor’s court are recorded in lurid detail in the London Plea and Memoranda Rolls. What makes this case so important is that Rykener then confessed to dressing as a woman and using the name Eleanor to sell sex to Britby, as well as to friars and members of the clergy. Rykener also admitted dressing as a man to seduce laywomen and nuns.
John Rykener further confessed that on Friday before the feast of St Michael [he] came to Burford in Oxfordshire and there dwelt with a certain John Clerk at the Swan in the capacity of tapster for the next six weeks, during which time two Franciscans, one named Brother Michael and the other Brother John, who gave [him] a gold ring, and one Carmelite friar and six foreign men committed the above-said vice with him … Rykener further confessed that [he] went to Beaconsfield and there, as a man, had sex with a certain Joan, daughter of John Matthew, and also there two foreign Franciscans had sex with him as a woman. John Rykener also confessed that after [his] last return to London a certain Sir John, once chaplain at the Church of St Margaret Pattens, and two other chaplains committed with him the aforementioned vice in the lanes behind St Katherine’s Church by the Tower of London. Rykener further said that he often had sex as a man with many nuns and also had sex as a man with many women both married and otherwise, how many [he] did not know. Rykener further confessed that many priests had committed that vice with him as with a woman, how many [he] did not know, and said that [he] accommodated priests more readily than other people because they wished to give [him] more than others.14
On first reading, this document appears to be a rare account of a transgender woman in the Middle Ages. So, why then have I included it in a chapter on men in sex work? Because the document is likely to be a satirical jibe at the Church, rather than a genuine case. When this document first came to light, historians were understandably excited at what this could tell us about sex and gender in the fourteenth century. It wasn’t until Jeremy Goldberg did a bit of digging that questions had to be asked about the reliability of the source. Not only are the charges, verdict and punishment missing, but cases of fornication, buggery (anal sex), etc., were not heard before the mayoral courts. Furthermore, the names John Rykener and John Britby appear elsewhere. A John Britby was a vicar in a Yorkshire parish and a John Rykener escaped the Bishop of London’s prison in 1399.15 Which makes it likely that the Church is the target of the satire. It has even been suggested that ‘Rykener’ is an allusion to ‘Richard’, King Richard II, meaning the document is mocking the king as whoring himself to the Church for money.16
A hoax it may be, but it still gives valuable insight into medieval male sex work. Clearly, it was widely known that men sell sex, and we can see the levels of stigma and shame attached to it. Whereas in the Ancient World, same-sex relationships were not only accepted and actively encouraged, in medieval Britain, they were subject to ridicule and scorn.
In Anarchia Anglicana (1649), Clement Walker refers to ‘new-erected sodoms and spintries at the Mulberry Garden at S. James’s’.17 A ‘spintry’ is a Latin word for a male brothel, and the one at Mulberry Garden once stood where Buckingham Palace does today. We don’t know the names of the people who worked there, but they all took a terrible risk to do so. The Buggery Act of 1533 had been passed to punish ‘the detestable and abominable Vice of Buggery committed with Mankind or Beast’. Those convicted of buggery faced the death penalty. It wasn’t until the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 that buggery stopped being a capital offence in England and Wales. Lord Walter Hungerford had the dubious honour of being the first man convicted and executed for the crime of buggery under the Act on 28 July 1540. The last two men executed for sodomy in Britain were James Pratt, aged thirty-two, and John Smith, aged thirty-four, who were hanged together at Newgate Prison on Saturday 28 November 1835.
In 1710, John Dunton published ‘The He-Strumpets: A Satyr on the Sodomite-Club’ where he claims that the ‘he-whores’ (1638) have taken ‘all the Trade’ away from the ‘cracks’ (women):
He-Whore! The Word’s a Paradox;
But there’s a Club hard by the Stocks,
Where Men give unto Men the Pox.18
Any self-respecting ‘he-whore’ in eighteenth-century London would solicit for customers at one of the city’s ‘molly houses’. A molly house was not strictly a brothel, but rather a public house, such as a tavern, a coffee shop or an alehouse, where gay men could meet up. In 1709, journalist Ned Ward published an exposé of the goings-on at the capital’s ‘molly-houses’ (1726):
There are a particular Gang of Sodomitical Wretches, in this Town, who call themselves the Mollies, and are so far degenerated from all masculine Deportment, or manly Exercises, that they rather fancy themselves Women, imitating all the little Vanities that Custom has reconcil’d to the Female Sex, affecting to Speak,
Walk, Tattle, Cursy [i.e. curtsey], Cry, Scold, and to mimick all Manner of Effeminacy, that ever has fallen within their several Observations; not omitting the Indecencies of Lewd Women, that they may tempt one another by such immodest Freedoms to commit those odious Bestialities, that ought for ever to be without a Name.19
One of the most notorious molly houses belonged to ‘Mother’ Margaret Clap, who also provided beds for her clients. In 1726, Mother Clap’s establishment was raided, and forty men in various states of undress were hauled off in the middle of the night to Newgate Prison. Although most were released owing to lack of evidence, the resulting trial later that year saw three men executed, and two put in the pillory. Mother Clap herself was sentenced to be pilloried and did not survive the experience.20
The case largely depended on the testimony of two sex workers turned informants. Thirty-year-old Thomas Newton and eighteen-year-old Edward Courtney had been caught selling sex in London’s molly houses, and to save their own skins both agreed to testify at the trials following the raid on Mother Clap’s molly house. At the trial of George Kedger, Edward Courtney testified that Kedger had paid to bugger him at Thomas Orme’s molly house. Kedger denied this and claimed he had ‘advised him to leave off that wicked Course of Life; but he said, he wanted Money, and Money he would have, by hook or by crook; and, if I would not help him to some, he would swear my Life away’.21 Courtney very nearly did ‘swear his life away’ as Kedger was found guilty and sentenced to death, though he was later reprieved. Newton testified that he regularly sold sex in the molly houses, and had been sodomised by forty-three-year-old William Griffin, forty-three-year-old Gabriel Lawrence and thirty-two-year-old Thomas Wright. All three men were sentenced to death and hanged at Tyburn.