by Neil McKenna
John Safford Fiske’s attitude to marriage was modelled on that of the Ancient Greeks. Marriage was a duty and a necessity. The world must turn, children must be born and the sacred cycle of nature perpetuated. Men needed wives for dynastic purposes and for domestic harmony. But he would reserve his love and his lust for boys and for young men, as he had done, carefully, discreetly and quietly, throughout most of his adult life. Women for duty, but boys for pleasure.
Of course there would be curbs on his freedoms. As a married man, he would have responsibilities towards his bride, but as soon as the children came, he hoped that he might be left alone to pursue young men. ‘After we were married I could do pretty much as I pleased,’ he mused. ‘People don’t mind what one does on £30,000 a year, and the Lady wouldn’t much mind as she hasn’t brains enough to trouble herself about much beyond her dresses, her carriage etc.’
From the moment of his arrival in Edinburgh he had sought out ‘adventures’, as he called them, and had established a delightful network of charming and handsome young men, including the brothers Donald and Robbie Sinclair. It was Robbie to whom he felt closest, Robbie with ‘his smiling face’, his ‘clear gray eyes’ and the ‘vivid roses’ in his cheeks – or so it was until the fateful moment when Stella Boulton swept into Edinburgh like the devouring North Wind and turned his world upon its head.
There were women and there were men and then there was Stella. John Safford Fiske had never before met anyone like her and he knew for a certainty that he would never do so again. She was fascinating. She was compelling. She seemed to him to be half-man and half-woman, but more, infinitely more, than the sum of her two parts. Stella was, he wrote, ‘Laïs and Antinous in one’. An amalgam, a coalescence, of Laïs the Corinthian, the most famous, the most beautiful and the most expensive courtesan of the Ancient World, the muse of Demosthenes, and Antinous, the most beautiful and most beloved boy of the Emperor Hadrian. It was, he wrote, ‘a ravishing thought’.
Who could fail to fall in love with two such beings, united in one perfect body? Fiske knew he was powerless to resist. It was more than love, more than lust. It was a kind of madness. A rapture. He could not sleep and he could not eat. Thoughts of Stella, in drag or out of drag, as a man, as a woman or as a hermaphrodite, filled his waking and sleeping hours. His chambers became a secret shrine to Stella, where he would worship her votive images in the privacy of his bedroom and hold her four carelessly written little notes about inconsequentialities in a bundle to his heart and feel a terrible joy and exultation.
He wanted her. More than he wanted anything else. More than he wanted a wife and a fortune. More than he wanted power and glory. More, perhaps, than life itself. He knew only too well that the more he wanted her, the more he risked all. But he was prepared to give up everything for her.
‘Come love,’ John Safford Fiske hastily wrote in pencil to Stella. ‘Always for ever thine.’ Despite its brevity, despite its drunken scrawl, this torn and crumpled half-sheet of paper was nonetheless as ardent and authentic a declaration of enduring love as Stella had yet received, which was perhaps why she treasured this brief note so much and kept it clasped to her breast.
18
Un Souvenir d’Amour
All Cracks are found so full of Ails
A New Society prevails
Call’d Sodomites; Men worse than Goats,
Who dress themselves in Petticoats.
John Dunton, The He-Strumpets:
A Satyr on the Sodomite-Club,
1707
M iss Fanny Winifred Park, also known as Mrs Fanny Graham, as Miss Vivian Gray (and by a variety of names unfit for polite ears), was beginning to feel decidedly worried. The sore on her bottom which had first appeared in January had not gone away. If anything, it was getting worse and becoming more painful. At first she had assumed, quite naturally and quite reasonably, that it was a mere wound of love; a passing soreness and discomfort; a consequence of being rather too energetically sodomised. In any event, she had decided to rest up for a few days and be deliciously hors de combat. She would allow things to settle, to right themselves, before venturing forth again with renewed vigour and renewed appetite. Not that her appetite in that department could ever be described as feeble. Quite the reverse. But the soreness had not gone away, and now she was feeling extremely uncomfortable and very low.
It was a nuisance that both Stella and Harry – the two people who might best advise her – were in Scotland: Stella selfishly still ensconced in Edinburgh with her former paramour, Louis Hurt, and Harry officially still in disgrace and in hiding, though Stella had confidentially informed her that Harry was being very indiscreet. Short of travelling all the way to l’Ecosse, she had no one to give her counsel. One or two friends, though, had bravely hazarded a look at her bottom, and amid some extremely vulgar and very unwelcome general observations, the particulars of which she need not enter into, said they thought that her poor cunny looked very sore.
What was she to do? If it was – horror of horrors – the pox, she could hardly go to the family doctor, explain that she had been sodomised to the point of insensibility and was now suffering from un souvenir d’amour. She was not sure she could trust him to keep quiet, and if it got out it would kill her poor Papa. Even if she went to another doctor, there might well be tiresome questions, and there was no guarantee that the police would not be dragged in.
C hancre of the anus or a pox in the arse was rather more common – at least in women – than most doctors either knew or cared to admit. It was a distasteful aspect of an already disagreeable branch of diagnosis. National honour no less than national decency was at stake. William Allingham, a doctor specialising in diseases of the rectum, was, like many others, convinced that anal sex (and in consequence, anal syphilis) was altogether a Continental, and specifically a French, phenomenon. ‘In France this cannot be uncommon,’ he asserted. ‘I trust it is not common in America. I cannot say that in this country it is altogether unknown, but I hope and think it is infrequent.’
William Acton, the most celebrated venereologist of the age, agreed. Appearances were deceptive. The ‘immense prevalence’ of anal warts in female prostitutes in the metropolis of London might lead some to conclude that there was an equally immense prevalence of anal sex. ‘Foreigners noticing these appearances in our foul wards go away fully convinced that unnatural crimes are very common in London,’ he wrote. But ‘a greater error than this cannot occur’. According to Acton, anal warts in female prostitutes were simply vaginal warts that had migrated.
This theory of migration was equally useful to Acton and his colleagues in explaining away those cases of anal syphilis which did present themselves. Syphilis in the vagina migrated to the anus either by discharges from syphilitic chancres in the vagina ‘running down’ to the anus, or through menstrual fluids following the same route. Sometimes anal syphilis might be the consequence of accidental or stray contact between the penis and the female anus, of the sort that might reasonably be expected to occasionally occur in the throes of passion. But the most obvious explanation, that anal syphilis was a consequence of anal sex, was an unwanted and unwelcome truth, a truth better buried than bruited abroad.
In a break with tradition, George Drysdale, a doctor and pioneering sexologist, was considerably more frank than most of his English colleagues when he stated that anal syphilis was ‘frequently to be seen in the female venereal hospitals’. Anal sex was, he said, commonplace among female prostitutes. ‘There are very few of the older prostitutes’, he said, ‘who do not lend themselves to these practices, as well as many of the younger ones; however, they always maintain an obstinate silence when questioned on this point.’
There was a long-held suspicion that some men turned to sodomy as a way of avoiding venereal disease. As early as 1707, in The He-Strumpets: A Satyr on the Sodomite-Club, the playwright John Dunton attributed the growing popularity of sodomy to an epidemic of the clap among female prostitutes. The poem ‘Don Leon’,
a paean in praise of sodomy supposedly written by Lord Byron, suggested that sodomy with boys was a specific against being ‘infected with rank disease’. And the anonymous author of Extraordinary Revelations, the penny pamphlet about Fanny and Stella, described sodomy as an ‘abomination by which lust defies disease’.
Although reports of rectal syphilis and gonorrhoea in men were uncommon, they were not unheard of. In 1851, the French syphilologist Philippe Ricord recounted the cautionary tale of ‘G—’, a young man of twenty-five, ‘of a good constitution, and enjoying excellent health’, who consulted him about ‘a recent cutaneous eruption’ of ulcers around his anus ‘for which he pretended he could assign no cause’. Ricord was convinced that these ulcers were syphilitic chancres. He cross-questioned the young man who finally confessed that:
after a dinner party, when too liberal a quantity of generous wine had made him lose his reason and forget his manliness, he had slept with a friend, to whose beastly appetite he had sacrificed himself. He remembered having suffered greatly during the connection, and having passed blood on the following and subsequent days.
George Drysdale was once again out of step with his colleagues when, in 1861, he asserted that ‘sodomy is common enough, especially in the prisons, where the most uneducated and degraded of the community, being shut up together, and left in idleness, take this mode of passing the listless hours’:
Instances now and then occur of gonorrhoea and chancre of the anus, which the patients, when pressed hard, either confess, or tacitly admit to having been contracted by these unnatural practices, though at first they always deny that the disease has such an origin, and ascribe it to an unclean water-closet &c.
Henry James Johnson, a former surgeon at the London Lock Hospital, which specialised in treating venereal diseases in female prostitutes and among the poor, had come across a very severe case of chancre of the anus in a man which strongly suggested that it was a consequence of anal sex. ‘I saw one case which I did not doubt must have been a case of that description,’ he testified at Fanny and Stella’s trial. The state of this man’s anus could, he said, admit of no other explanation but that he had been ‘repeatedly’ sodomised. ‘At the time we were perfectly convinced of it.’
D esperate circumstances called for desperate measures. Miss Fanny Winifred Park was by now all but certain that she had contracted the pox. She still hoped for the best, at the same time fearing the worst. It was just conceivable that it might yet turn out to be some kind of local irritation, an ulcerating pile, perhaps, or something akin to Stella’s fistula. But Fanny had an awful feeling that it was syphilis. The pain from the sore was excruciating; she could not sit and she could not sleep. That she needed to see a doctor, and sharpish, was not in dispute. But which doctor?
She had heard from friends that sometimes the doctors in the hospitals and the dispensaries asked fewer questions when confronted by young men with problems in their bottoms. Getting the required letter of recommendation from a subscriber to the hospital’s charitable fund was the easy part. That was not difficult to obtain if you mixed in the right society and made up a story about some respectable young man of your acquaintance who had fallen upon hard times and could not afford to see a doctor.
Armed with her ticket-of-admission letter, Fanny would transform herself into that respectable young man. She would dress herself up in appropriate clothing, not her own well-cut suits from her Papa’s tailor, but the sort of clothes that would have come from a fripperer’s shop; second-, or third- or fourth-hand; frayed and worn and cheap, and probably none too clean. It was like dragging up, Fanny thought to herself, only in reverse.
Renowned as she was for playing ‘principally dowagers’ on the amateur and semi-professional stage, Fanny was convinced that she could give this particular role her all. After all, she had had plenty of experience of young men from the lower strata of society. Like her older brother Harry, she had a decided and definite penchant for the working men of London; a fascination, a reverence for their animal instincts, for their strangely hesitant and yet passionate approach to the business of fucking which so exactly coincided with her own needs. She knew them inside-out. She knew what clothes they wore, down to their undergarments; she knew how they spoke, how they acted, how they smelt. She would give the performance of her life.
She would become that shy young man, a mercer’s clerk, perhaps, who had unaccountably got this sore on his bottom. If the doctor asked point-blank how she – or rather, he – had acquired it he/she would blush and hang his/her head in shame and say that he/she had been drunk and could remember nothing at all. If there was any funny business, if there was the least sign of the police being called, she could leg it. All the hospital would have was a false name and a description of a shabbily dressed young man who might have been a clerk.
Fanny turned up at Charing Cross Hospital one afternoon in mid-February dressed in an old cutaway coat and ‘wearing a pair of shabby plaid trousers’. As part of her disguise she had not shaved for two or three days. The hospital was very busy, and clearly she would have to wait for a long time. She paced up and down, down and up the long stone corridor waiting to be called. She could not sit still on the hard wooden benches that lined both sides of the corridor, partly because of the pain of the sore on her bottom, and partly because of nerves. She was always nervous before a performance.
‘He was walking backwards and forwards in the passages,’ the hospital hall porter, George Layton, recalled, ‘which is contrary to the rules of the hospital and I asked him to take a seat.’ Fanny was on the point of issuing the sharpest of sharp retorts, but recollecting where she was and why she was there, bit her lip and duly took a seat on a wooden bench.
S omething very strange had happened this year. Not one, not two, but three young men – three in almost as many weeks – had presented themselves in Dr Richard Barwell’s consulting room at Charing Cross Hospital with afflictions of the rectum. Was it a coincidence, or was there something more singular going on – something more sinister? He had dealt with the first case summarily. The young man – a rather common specimen and gaudily dressed – had turned up one afternoon in early February complaining of a sore on his bottom. Dr Barwell’s suspicions were aroused by the young man’s rather affected, effeminate way of speaking. Naturally he had enquired of this young man how long he had had this sore and how it might have come about. Was it some sort of injury? The young man hesitated. In a manner of speaking, yes, he said, it was a sort of injury. He smiled a confiding sort of smile. And then he admitted everything.
‘He confessed to the act of sodomy,’ Dr Barwell recounted indignantly in court. ‘He confessed how he had got this sore, so cynically – almost boastfully, or jauntily, I should rather have said – that I would have nothing to do with him. I drove him away.’
Dr Barwell rarely lost his temper, but on this occasion with this young man, he had lost his temper badly, very badly indeed. He had, quite literally, driven this young sodomite away, pushing the frightened youth out of his consulting room and propelling him down the corridor while people looked curiously on. He had thought about it many times since and always with revulsion. It was not so much the affliction that he objected to. He had seen dozens of cases of syphilis of the anus before, invariably in women, and he had shrugged his shoulders and treated them. Such things went on, and he would not sit in judgement. Even the fact that this was a case of syphilis of the anus in a young man, revolting as that was, rare as that was – for he had never seen another case – even that fact was not the cause of his loss of control. Nor was it simply the absence of any remorse, any sense of shame, on the part of the young man, shocking as that was. No, what had made him lose his reason, what had driven him over the edge, was this young man’s evident pleasure – pleasure which seemed to be commingled with pride – pride in the act of sodomy; a pleasure that he had the temerity to boast about; a pleasure that he assumed, that he presumed, others would understand and somehow share. That was w
hat had made Dr Barwell see such violent red.
In just a matter of days, another man had fetched up in his consulting room. Dr Barwell had asked what the matter was, and after some hesitation the man said he thought he was suffering from ‘a gonorrhoeal discharge, as he himself called it, from the anus’. Dr Barwell was taken aback. The man was nondescript; neither young nor old, not obviously effeminate, and he clearly had some education. Most of Dr Barwell’s patients would never even have heard of the word ‘gonorrhoea’, let alone use the word in front of him. The man was civil and had the grace to look somewhat ashamed of himself. Dr Barwell decided that he would treat him.
Dr Barwell could not now believe that yet a third man had turned up with a venereal affliction of the rectum. The young man sitting nervously in front of him was dressed in ‘rather common clothing’ which was a little too tight upon his slim frame. He had a sore bottom, he explained, or rather, a sore upon his bottom that would not heal or go away. Dr Barwell looked at him sharply. The young man seemed reluctant to meet his eyes and hung his head as if he were ashamed of himself. How had this sore originated, he asked, and for how long had he had it? The young man hesitated. About three or four weeks, he thought. And he had no idea how he came by it. Dr Barwell could tell he was lying but said nothing.
S o far, so good, thought Fanny to herself. The rather stern-looking doctor had given her one or two very penetrating glances before asking her to bend over and drop her trousers. That, at least, was something she was well practised in. She wanted to giggle but repressed herself sternly. At least he was examining her and would, presumably, treat her. It was all going according to plan. She winced with pain as the doctor parted her buttocks.
‘I examined him and found a syphilitic sore upon the anus, a primary sore,’ Dr Barwell recalled. ‘It was an open sore, called a chancre, and the anus gaped sufficiently to show the mucous membrane, and the sore upon it. The sore was at the back part of the anus, on the edge of the margin of the mucous membrane.’