Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform [Hardcover]

Charles Upchurch (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 22, 2009 | ISBN-10: 0520258533 | ISBN-13: 978-0520258532 | Edition: 1

This book examines changing perceptions of sex between men in early Victorian Britain, a significant yet surprisingly little explored period in the history of Western sexuality. Looking at the dramatic transformations of the era--changes in the family and in the law, the emergence of the world's first police force, the growth of a national media, and more--Charles Upchurch asks how perceptions of same-sex desire changed between men, in families, and in the larger society. To illuminate these questions, he mines a rich trove of previously unexamined sources, including hundreds of articles pertaining to sex between men that appeared in mainstream newspapers. The first book to relate this topic to broader economic, social, and political changes in the early nineteenth century, Before Wilde sheds new light on the central question of how and when sex acts became identities.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"This is a very important book. It may even be a historic book. . . . One reads this book with grateful amazement. . . . Breathtaking."--Huffington Post

"Fascinating and informative. . . . Upchurch has set a standard for depth and originality of research and creative social analysis."--Gay City News

"A meticulous study. . . . Illuminating."--Victorian Studies

"A powerful and persuasive account of male-male sexual relations in the age of reform."--Men & Masculinities

From the Inside Flap

"This is a work of great originality that fills a huge gap in the history of homosexuality."--George Robb, author of British Culture and the First World War

"This book fills an aching gap in the history of male homosexuality in Britain, the mid-years of the nineteenth century. Charles Upchurch shows the importance of this period in foreshadowing what was to come in the greater dramas of the late century, signaled by Wilde's disastrous fall. But more than this, the book refuses to see homosexuality as a thing apart. Its history is firmly located in a dense history of families, communities, rapid change, new forms of policing, and social reform. The result is a compelling account that illuminates dark corners, and throws new light on the familiar. It is a major contribution to our understanding of sex between men in a period of dramatic change."--Jeffrey Weeks, author of The World We Have Won: The Remaking of Erotic and Intimate Life

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (April 22, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0520258533
• ISBN-13: 978-0520258532
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 5.9 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #538,316 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Important piece of civil rights puzzle, October 17, 2009

By 

J. Soard (nyc) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (Hardcover)

Civil rights are a relative issue. Time, place and socioeconomic environment define context.

"Before Wilde" delivers a specific topic in that context with a clear eyed, thoroughly referenced point of view; crime, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. What U.S. citizens have in their bill of rights was still in debate in early 19th century Britain -- after all, the French and American revolutions were just a few years earlier. Things like class distinction and it's priviledge, religious judgement and a sense of privacy of any sort were being redefined. Things, of course, that we tend to take for granted now.

Upchurch has written a definitive book on a time and in a place where the U.S. Founding Fathers' sense of civil rights was born. He looks at it through a thin slice of that culture, sex between men, and has fleshed it out into a full piece of the civil rights puzzle. His descriptions of court documents and newspaper clippings of the day are the stuff of "historical novels", but the clear eye stays clear and the story tells itself without embellishment.

This book successfully sets the stage where Oscar Wilde was able to play out the part of advocate/martyr. It should be required reading for any thorough understanding of our current culture.

Jonathan Soard

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MAJOR STEP FORWARD FOR GAY HISTORY!, June 10, 2009

By 

Always hopeful reader (New York, N.Y.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (Hardcover)

This is a very important book. It may even be a historic book, one with which gay history can arm itself with more sufficient factual veracity as to start vanquishing at last the devil known as queer studies. Queer studies is that stuff that is taught in place of gay history and which elevates theory over facts because its practitioners, having been unsuccessful in uncovering enough of the hard stuff, are haughtily trying to make do.

Well, here is a healthy dose of the hard stuff. Charles Upchurch, an assistant professor of history at Florida State University, and an American, has spent ten years of his life researching this book. It shows it. It overflows with case after case of hard, factual, irrefutable evidence that Englishmen did with other Englishmen pretty much what same-sex couplings do with each other all over the world to this day. The big difference here is that Upchurch begins his extraordinary documenting of these cases with the early nineteenth century, i.e. 1800 onward, heretofore not known as a time in history where such undeniable facts have made themselves known in such a crystal-clear way. (Upchurch reports to have collected over 1000 published newspaper articles documenting cases.)

Certainly nothing like this has appeared in America, thus allowing queer and gender studies to pretty much swamp, nay drown, the gay history field with their goobledegook theorizing of what might have happened. This ludicrous state of affairs prohibits making statements such as: "they did then what we do now," without the wrath of queer theorists raining down insults of an uncommonly vitriolic nature. You don't have a right to say that! say they. You can't prove it! say they. We've been here all along since the beginning of history, say many others of us. Well now it can be said, and proved, in Britain at any rate, thanks to Upchurch. Indeed, "an aching gap has been filled," British sexual theorist Jeffrey Weeks, proclaims in one of the blurbs on the back cover. Indeed.

One reads this book with grateful amazement. Here is a scholar, an academic, who has really done his homework. He has read, it would seem, almost every applicable British newspaper and court record from the early 1800's until about 1870. The amazing thing, of course, when his "findings" are exposed to the bright air of daylight, it can be seen that all this information has been there since it was created, in the files of The Times, in the court records of cases that The Times and other papers reported, quite often rather non-judgmentally, it is also interesting to note. Men accused of sodomy, attempted sodomy, of "indecent assault," at various times punishable by death, of cross dressing, of hustling, of cruising, of trying to set up house, of cohabiting in any way, of trying just to say Hello, oh all those things that gay men know all about and take for granted today.

It is not only breathtaking to read this all in a work the likes of which so many Americans long to have written about our own gay history, but when one finishes reading it, one utters an audible huge sigh of relief. Of course this is how it was! Why did we ALL not know and accept this instinctively without having to create and/or buy into the Foucaultian and Butlerian (to name but two) nightmares with the obtuse vocabularies they invented and demanded be utilized to pierce their dark inchoate spectacles of a world of their own imaginings. Homosexuality did not exist because there was no word for it, say they. What bushwa.

Well, one hopes, those days are fading fast. With more books like this one and more scholar/academics like Upchurch, we might one day even be able to say, unapologetically, and very out loud, that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, to name but two, were our brothers in love. Would that American academics would hit those stacks like Charles Upchurch did.

(For futher elucidation on these arguments, see my essay on Huffington Post "Homo Sex in Colonial America" and my essay on The Daily Beast, "Yale's Conspiracy of Silence.")

Larry Kramer

5.0 out of 5 stars Development and Enforcement of English Laws on Gay Sex in the 19th Century, January 1, 2012

By 

Dawn - See all my reviews

This review is from: Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain's Age of Reform (Hardcover)

An impressive book, it sets the English laws against sex between men in the context of the 19th century's prejudices and views on masculinity, new forms of policing and social reform (not always for the better). Based on a careful reading of 19th century newspapers, court reports and other government documents, Charles Upchurch creates a full picture of the enforcement of laws against sex between men in the context of social class. Not surprising, in a variety of ways, those of the upper class were able to protect themselves from punishment by the law.