Q: Mm. Maybe. All the photos of the era are black-and-white, so we’ll never know for sure.
A: Oh, you stubborn gender-bender. Dig out that old three-hundred-dollar, seven-hundred-page history of art textbook you had to buy in college and have been lugging around ever since, on pure principle that something that expensive must be useful. Look at the last few centuries of children in paintings. Rich children in portraiture, poor children sketched by starving artists. Find me the boy in manly pink. Girls in blue, sure; blue is as gender neutral as the sky. And sure… you’ll find boys in flossy shades of brown that have a reddish tinge, you’ll find them dressed in silks and velvets, embroidered with flowers that might even have a drop or two of coral in them, but you will not find a true pink. And if you’re still not convinced, consult the actual clothing itself, as kept by the many museums that have collected children’s wear over the centuries. You’ll find red and even purple that has faded, since dyes of previous centuries were not as adherent, but a peek inside a seam not exposed to sun and wear will show you the intended hue. He might be wearing a dress… but it won’t be pink!
Q: Okay! Aside from dressing him in not-pink dresses, what else can I do to shape my son into a strong but kind young man?
A: See, this neediness of yours, this is what makes boys grow up into monsters. Give him space, Mother, that’s what you do! Nature has equipped your son with an animalistic nature for a reason. Your job is to direct it, temper it, but not squash it. (Save the squashing for your daughters.)
He will need discipline, fairly and consistently delivered. Says Cabot Abbott, “If, you cannot summon resolution to punish your child when disobedient; if you do not curb his passions; if you do not bring him to entire and willing subjection to your authority; you must expect that he will be your curse. In all probability, he will despise you for your weakness.”
But not the same kind of discipline as you give your daughter. Because your daughter wasn’t created by God to, and I quote the deity Himself, “rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth” (Gen. 1:26).
World domination, that is literally Man’s job. And it ain’t a job for no mamma’s darling, mollycoddled milksop. Lydia Howard Sigourney explains in 1838’s Letters to Mothers,
Let [mothers] ever keep in view, the different spheres of action allotted to the sexes. What they blame as obstinacy, may be but that firmness, and fixedness of purpose, which will hereafter be needed to overcome the obstacles of their adventurous course. Perhaps, it is hardly to be expected that they should be reduced to the full degree of feminine subordination.
So, what you see as being an obstinate little turd is actually your son claiming his natural birthright. The key for you, Mother dear, is to act quick, while he is young. He won’t tolerate your feminine goosiness for long, says Sigourney; it’s an unnatural relationship: “By the constitution of society, he must be earlier removed from the influence of home, than his pliant sister, and by the innate consciousness of being born to bear rule, will sooner revolt from the authority of woman.”
Your job, while he is still small, is to “enthrone yourself” in his heart. Teach him to submit to your will out of devotion and love. As a queen is defended by her generals, in turn they dine at her table and reap her benevolence. If she’s angry with them for snagging a piece of cake… or a few villages that she was saving for a special occasion, she doesn’t shriek and squawk and paddle their bottoms in front of the whole court. She either punishes them by withdrawing her benevolent affection, or by execution (telling Father when he gets home). That is to be your relationship to your son.
“I can SO dominate Earth! Just first kiss my boo-boo.”
Q: He’s not a general! I don’t want him brawling and fighting! Violence never solved anything.
A: Violence never solved… Lord give me strength. Madam, violence solved Hitler. He didn’t surrender the Third Reich and commit suicide because the Allied Forces had gently discussed their way into Berlin. No, they’d laid waste to it, because they had to. Violence has solved slavery. Violence has solved oppression. Violence has solved… angry bears! Violence causes problems, yes, and that’s not going to change. So it’s fitting that sometimes only violence can fix them. Mothers of old understood that. You might think, as Margaret Sangster put it in “Shall Your Boy Fight?,” that it is noble for your son to meet violence with peace, but if he looks weak to everyone else, he will never know actual peace. She says:
“My queen has refused me ice cream for my insolence. I shall endeavor to regain her favor.”
A boy who is known to be ready in the art of self-defense is not often molested by the bully, the latter being generally a coward. A mother hates to see her little man of ten disfigured by a black eye, though there are many worse things that may come to him, and she should not too hastily condemn him if he stand up for himself at need in a fair fight.
The schoolyard fight is a microcosm of the world.
Our boys are preparing for life in the larger world. We want them to be morally and physically fit for the conflict. In settling for ourselves the question, Shall the small boy fight, or shall he refrain from fighting? we must think of his future. The one thing he cannot do is to run away. He must not show the white feather. If he declines a fight, he must be strong enough to show in other ways that he does it through no lack of courage.
Shall your boy fight?
Q: Speaking of schoolyards and fights, should I send my son away to school? I want him to have the finest education, but I’ve heard horrible things happen at boys’ schools.
A: You want to know if your boy is in danger of becoming someone’s fag, right?
Q: N… no, not like that… I mean… I’ll support him no matter what his orientation, but…
A: Because you should be worrying about what will happen if he doesn’t behave like a proper fag. A well-managed system of faggery is a good way to avoid unneeded violence.
Ostensibly, the fagging system in British schools prevented this sort of bullying. Or at least reduced it to acceptable standards of the day.
Q: I don’t think you’re allowed to say “fag” that many times.
A: Pish. It’s a rude word today, but it wasn’t always so! Edmund Routledge published “Recollections of an Old Boy” in an 1869 edition of Every Boy’s Annual that detailed the fagging system at Victorian boys’ schools.
The arrangement was somewhat after this fashion. The sixth form, or prefects, were allowed so many fags; the fifth form so many; the fourth form could neither fag or be fagged; and all the rest of the school were liable to be fagged.
It was determined that fagging should go by seniority, and not by brute strength. This plan succeeded admirably. Everybody liked it except the third-form bullies. The little fellows were delighted.
You’ve never seen that word used as so many parts of speech in one paragraph, have you? Well, English is a thriving language.
Granted, Americans are and were less keen to embrace fagging; our macho bravado makes our boys think they’re too good to heat up another boy’s sausage.
Q: Nice. Subtle.
A: In fact, American derision accounts for “fag” becoming a term intended to be sexual and demeaning.
But in England, where classicism was an inculcated tradition, fagging was a matter of course. “To fag” for another boy was to be his manservant, shine his shoes and fetch him treats. This is probably a slang corruption of the word fatigue, mixed with an interpretation of flag as it was used for many hundreds of years to mean “running out of energy.” Or course you might also want to include faggot, referring to the small branches that were often used to flog misbehaving boys—that seems to fit in there… somewhere—as in, “My interest in shining my own boot is beginning to flag. I find it fatiguing work. But I’m one of the oldest boys in the school and shall use my seniority to have my fag, a younger, weaker boy, do this tiring,
ungratifying fagging work instead. If he doesn’t do it properly I’ll give him such a fagging with my bundle of birch faggots because… he… there was… he fagged out in the end.”
I’m sorry, I’m getting tangled.
It’s… it’s not a straight etymological line. English is thriving but it is also a greedy and ill-mannered little language and when you mix it with schoolboys and spankings, everything just goes sideways.
Q: That’s okay. I’m caught up now on fa—on that system. In fact, we could actually completely move on if you’d like.
A: Shhh. It’s important to understand that this sort of servitude would have been a comfortable concept to boys wealthy enough to attend English boarding schools. Their fathers would have had butlers and valets to aid them in their day-to-day living; why shouldn’t a growing boy procure his own servants? And this was not, writes the Old Boy, meant to be a form of bullying, but a way to prevent it.
I will still venture to assert that the non-fagging system encouraged bullying instead of stopping it. Mothers have an idea that fags are bullied by their boy-masters. This is a great mistake. Masters, as a rule, expect their fags to fag for them, and in turn protect them from being bullied.
Q: Like… like in all those horrible prison movies? Because that sounds just like what stronger inmates do to weaker ones in all the prison movies—
A: Ehh ehh ehh… I said “Shhh,” dear. Let the Old Boy continue.
I was at Marlborough both in the fagging and non-fagging days, and I pronounce entirely in favour of the former system. When there is no organized plan for fagging, the biggest and strongest boys—very frequently those incorrigibly idle, dull, and stupid fellows who stick in the third form for everlasting—fag the whole school.
So hep hep for the good old fags! When left to their own devices, civilized boys needed no coddling. They established their own fiefdoms and hierarchies, where all benefited.
Of course, not all parents believed the hierarchies of public school a healthy environment for boys. (By the way, when British writers say “public school,” they mean “private school,” as in a boarding school the parent pays for. When they say “college” they mean “high school.” When they say “sixth form”… I don’t know. I think it means you’ve earned full rights to drink butter beer in Hogsmeade with Ron and Hermione and cast low-level enchantments without permission from the Ministry of Magic. The English. Pfft. Honestly, just because a language is named after your civilization doesn’t entitle you to use it however you wish.)
Some saw the boys’ school as a dangerous playground for humanity’s most vicious, including Lydia Howard Sigourney, who wrote: “I compare, the sending a boy to a publick school, or college, says a judicious writer, to the act of the Scythian mothers, who threw their new-born children into the sea: the greater part, were of course, drowned, but the few who escaped with life, were uncommonly strong and vigorous.”
Hmm. Now… that’s what the mother of a sinker kid would say. Something we might call, in any century, loser talk. No. You are forewarned by reading this book, and you are going to be the mother of one of the survivors. Toss him in. If you’ve done your job right, he’s going to be just fine.
Q: But… isn’t there a high occurrence of… improper intimacies… between boys at these schools?
A: Yes! A lot!
Q: Shouldn’t it be stopped?
A: I suppose. I’d also like to stop lightning from striking at inopportune times and places and igniting flash fires. But lightning, like an adolescent boy’s sexual development, is simply too powerful a force to completely contain.
Adolescent boys have brains, but they are so very underdeveloped. Except for the part that tells them Orgasms are terrific and you ought to have lots! That part of the brain is possibly the most active it will ever be at the exact same time Victorians removed most female contact from wealthy boys. It was generally understood that some boys would just have to… make do with what they had. Or what the boy sleeping in the same bed with them had.
That sort of experimentation was present, fairly expected, and not talked about for most of the nineteenth century. And probably every century. But around the 1880s, there developed the relatively fresh idea that homosexuality was a psychological illness, not a naughty diversion for boys at bedtime nor the desperate act of a sex-starved shanghaied-ship-bound swabbie. Boys’ boarding schools figured prominently in the new psychologists’ attempts to decode what made a man homo- or heterosexual.
When describing homosexual patients, doctors always noted the parentage of the man in question. Without fail, the natural-born, or congenital, homosexual had deviant parents. Criminals, madmen, whores, thieves, actors, artists. All the reprobates of society were capable of spawning congenital (since birth) homosexuals.
There was a far more interesting and genial term for the homosexual man in this century, a Uranian, coined by an early crusader of the idea that homosexuals were not only decent, but uniquely gifted people, Karl Ulrichs. He took the word Uranian, or Urning, from… ah… Uranus.
Q: Oh, I’m sorry. Could you repeat that?
A: No.
Q: No, no, you were saying? Uranus is responsible for homosexuality in men?
A: No, YOUR anus… is… no. I shan’t stoop. With a filthy mind and sass-mouth like that it’s no wonder you’re having trouble raising decent children. All right, yes, it is an unfortunate coincidence, but he had his reasons! First of all, I’m sure it’s not as punny in the original German. Second, Uranus was a Greek god, and when his mother-wife got mad at him she had their son-brother cut off his testicles and cast them into the sea, where one of them (the testicles) sprouted Aphrodite, Goddess of Love! Aphrodite Urania (daughter of Uranus), to be more specific. We take the last part of Aphrodite’s name and we get a Uranian: a person with a female psyche born into a male body! See? It’s actually very clever and rather sweet. If you can just not focus on the imagery of giant severed testicles falling from the sky in a blood storm and bouncing atop a roiling sea from which somehow, perhaps with much screaming and ripping flesh, escapes a fully formed sex goddess. If you can do that, it’s hardly terrifying at all. As psychology gained a foothold in the scientific world, those who studied homosexuals identified a second kind of “sexual invert.” The non-congenital homosexual. The man who had no inborn predisposition to the pleasures of Uranus (oh, shut up!), but had “acquired” homosexuality. These men were born heterosexual, but through exposure and environment in their youth, had decided homosexuality was just more kicky.
Uranus’s biggest mistake here was waiting to see how this would play out.
Q: And it was overexposure to other boys that spawned this “acquired” inversion?
A: Often, yes. By the end of the nineteenth century it became a point of contention that the most common way for boys to contract noncongenital Uranianism was all-boy boarding schools.
Havelock Ellis wrote in his 1901 Studies in the Psychology of Sex,
The school is undoubtedly the great breeding-place of artificial homosexuality among the general population. Its influence in this respect may have been overestimated, but it is undoubtedly large. It is very unfortunate that school-authorities do their best to ignore and conceal the facts. We probably have to recognize that the only way to render such manifestations wholesome, as well as to prepare for the relationships of later life, is to insure the adoption, so far as possible, of the methods of co-education of the sexes.
Q: For the record, I’m totally fine with my son being gay. I think I would have been in Victorian times, too.
A: Of course you would have! You’d have worn blue jeans, voted for increased public services, been Harriet Tubman’s bestie, and driven cars that hadn’t been invented yet too! Oh! Who needs cars when you could have just flown everywhere on the updraft of your superior social consciousness?
You don’t know how you would have felt. The first rule of loving history is that you can never judge it by the standards of today. If you thought yo
ur son was attracted to other men, you would have struggled much harder in Victorian times, because nearly all of society would have been against the both of you. At the very least, you would have wished to spare your child the pain of being so separate, so maligned.
In which case I would have comforted you by bringing forth the few examples of forward thought on the subject. Be proud that you’ve contributed a Uranian to this world. After all, on the whole, they’re reputed to be a very tidy and productive people! Albert Moll, writing The Sexual Life of the Child in 1912, enumerates the professions homosexuals often seek to fill, and they are fabulous.
The homosexual ladies’ tailor, the music-hall artiste who makes a specialty of feminine impersonations, the ladies’ hairdresser, and others in like occupations, will often tell us that the choice of their trade or profession was made while they were still children. In this connexion, I may also refer to the sexual life of Catholic priests. It is certain that some of these exhibit homosexual tendencies.
So you may have contributed an artist to the world! Or maybe even a… Catholic priest. Which is a high calling and quite respectable! I mean, a bit more… complicated, maybe… but you know what? If your Uranian son wants to be a priest, you raise him to be the best darn priest in the diocese and let God worry about his (legal, between consenting adults) sexual preference. A well-raised boy of any predilection can be virtuous and celibate if he believes God so desires it.
Q: I do like what my son did with my hair for our Mother’s Day formal, but I still want grandchildren. Isn’t there any available cure for sexual inversion?
A: Oh, don’t worry about grandchildren. Many homosexual men, perhaps most who lived in the Victorian era, preferred the status and comfort of a home and family. They would marry women and have babies all the time. Some still do, though now the options for Uranians to have children are far more varied. As for a cure… oh, no, I’m sorry. Really, they tried. They tried just everything.
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