The Routledge Handbook of Male Sex Work, Culture, and Society

John Scott, Christian Grov, Victor Minichiello, John Scott, Christian Grov, Victor Minichiello, John Geoffrey Scott, John Geoffrey Scott, Christian Grov, Victor Minichiello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000373110
• Subtopic: Public Health, Administration & Care
• Index: Social Sciences

Panoramic and provocative in its scope, this handbook is the definitive guide to contemporary issues associated with male sex work and a must read for those who study masculinities, male sexuality, sexual health, and sexual cultures.

This groundbreaking volume will have a powerful impact on our understanding of this challenging, elusive subject. While the internet has brought the previously hidden worlds of male sex work more starkly into public view, academic research has often remained locked into descriptions of male sex workers and their clients as perverse. Drawing from a variety of regions, the chapters provide insights into the historical, popular cultural, social, and economic aspects of sex work, as well as demographic patterns, health outcomes, and policy issues. This approach shifts thought on male sex work from a hidden "social problem" to a publicly acknowledged "social phenomenon." The book challenges myths and reconceptualizes male sex work as a discrete field. Importantly, it provides a vehicle for the voices of male sex workers and new and established scholars. This richly detailed, humane, and innovative collection retrieves male sex work from silence and invisibility on the one hand and its association with scandal and stigma on the other. The findings within have profound implications for how governments approach public health and regulation of the sex industry and for how society can make sense of the complexities of human sexualities.

A compelling scholarly read and a major contribution to a commercial sector that is often neglected in policy debates on sex work, this handbook will be of great interest to scholars of criminology, sociology, gender studies, and cultural studies and all those interested in male sex work.

Part I

Male sex work in popular culture

1
Reframing the Cleveland Street Scandal in England

Telegraph boys, the service economy, and compensated sex

Katie Hindmarch-Watson

In the summer of 1889, the Confidential Enquiry Branch of Britain’s General Post Office (GPO) discovered that telegraph boys from London’s Central Telegraph Office were selling sexual favors to elite men in a house of assignation at 19 Cleveland Street, a Victorian townhouse just off Tottenham Court Road. The brothel’s owner, Charles Hammond, had obtained a supply of teenage boys through various contacts at the GPO to service those gentlemen who arrived at his house without having already procured an escort. Chief among Hammond’s suppliers was Henry Newlove, a former telegraph boy who had recently been promoted to third-class clerk and “tracer” in the telegraph secretary’s office. According to unpublished statements taken by GPO constables, at least four telegraph boys had admitted to sexual encounters with Newlove in the basement lavatories of the Central Telegraph Office. After a series of these clandestine hook-ups, Newlove suggested to each of them that they could make money “going to bed with gentlemen” at 19 Cleveland Street. They took up his offer. When this came to light in July, Newlove was arrested and went on to implicate some of his more illustrious clients, including Lord Arthur Somerset, the son of the Duke of Beaufort and equerry to the Prince of Wales. This revelation set off a chain of events that led to the public exposure of one of London’s most secretive cross-class underworlds.

As details of the confidential investigation into telegraph-boy rent with aristocrats were leaked to the radical Liberal press in September, scandalized commentators reinterpreted these sexual acts as vestiges of ancien régime debauchery forced upon respectable civil servants (the telegraph-boy lavatory encounters went unmentioned in the press). The Cleveland Street or “West End” Scandal generated three trials and countless headlines throughout the fall and winter of 1889, finally winding down in the spring of 1890. The scandal resulted in the permanent exile of Somerset and jail time for one of his lawyers, along with Newlove, an additional Cleveland Street procurer, and the radical journalist Earnest Parke, who publicly accused the Earl of Euston of being another Cleveland Street client and lost the resulting libel trial. The telegraph boys were dismissed but weathered the storm relatively well, depicted as innocent victims sacrificed to rich men’s vices.

The cast of characters that drove the Cleveland Street Scandal—aristocrats, radicals, MPs, and telegraph boys—were actors in a political showdown between the radical Liberal press and the Conservative government (Hyde, 1976; Simpson, Chester, & Leitch, 1976; Kaplan, 2005, chap 3; Weeks, 1981, chap 5; Aronson, 1996; Fisher, 1995; Cocks, 2003, pp. 144–153). Media accusations based on leaked police reports ultimately became the subject of parliamentary debate when the radical Liberal MP Henry Labouchere accused the Tory administration of orchestrating a cover-up on behalf of Somerset, Cleveland Street’s most notorious aristocratic patron. Shortly after Labouchere’s parliamentary accusations in early 1890, all official sources pertaining to the Cleveland Street affair that had been kept out of the papers were rounded up and sealed by the government. No more leaked information appeared in the public arena, and “gross indecency” committed by debauched aristocrats became news again only in 1895, when Oscar Wilde’s own disastrous libel trial led to his incarceration. The 1889–1890 archives of police reports and evidence, government memos, trial transcripts, indictments, and correspondence remained closed to the public for 86 years, during which time commentators and historians who remembered the scandal or uncovered “Labby’s” accusatory speech were left uncertain of the validity of these claims.

Modern research on the Cleveland Street brothel began with the Public Records Office releasing the files. When the records were opened in 1976, the scandal was quickly taken up by scholars intent on documenting the truth behind the accusations. What H. Montgomery Hyde’s The Cleveland Street Scandal and Simpson, Chester, and Leitch’s The Cleveland Street Affair revealed was a conspiracy of foot-dragging and buck-passing on the part of Treasury officials, the attorney general, the lord chancellor, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, and the Department of Public Prosecutions (Hyde, 1976; Simpson et al., 1976). These studies were also published at a moment in historiography that outlined and heaped significance on an archaic Victorian sexual system, and Cleveland Street was proof positive of the era’s sexual prudishness, repression, and hypocrisy.

The characterization of Victorian England as a specific sexual epoch coincided with a growing interest in gay and lesbian history. As historians noted, the Cleveland Street or “West End” Scandal was the first widely publicized case subject to Labouchere’s contribution to the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act: he authored Section 11, which invented and criminalized a new, broad category of male homosexual behavior labeled “gross indecency.” Numerous studies have illustrated its significance for late-Victorian and twentieth-century sexual cultures (Weeks, 1989; for a revised analysis, Upchurch, 2009). Cleveland Street has most commonly been evoked both as an example of late-Victorian male prostitution and as the backdrop for Oscar Wilde’s fate six years later. More recently, historians of gay and queer sexualities have raked the sources of the Cleveland Street Scandal for further evidence of male homosexual subcultures and the processes of regulating sexual acts between men (Cook, 2003; Cocks, 2003; Brady, 2005; Kaplan, 2005).

The Cleveland Street Scandal has been analyzed as a government conspiracy, a case study in the efficacy of the Criminal Law Amendment Act, and a window into homoerotic London. However, two major aspects of the scandal remain underexplored: the bureaucratic mechanisms by which the Cleveland Street brothel was discovered and the telegraph boys’ contributions both to the contours of the scandal and to Victorian homoerotic markets.

Addressing the first issue exposes a significant distinction: Post Office authorities, not the Metropolitan Police, discovered the house of assignation at 19 Cleveland Street. This fact tends to be obscured in the existing literature; the different police forces that tracked down the brothel’s clients are conflated, thus representing a unified state response. By disambiguating the GPO police from the Metropolitan Police and other security forces, we can appreciate that a sophisticated network of GPO administrators, constables, and agents exposed the brothel and its patrons to pubic censure. This surveillance department, the Confidential Enquiry Branch, was a recent innovation in postal securitization. The GPO had been steadily expanding its internal police force since 1877, when the discovery of widespread prostitution among telegraph boys, and attendant conflicts with the Metropolitan Police, had prompted substantial administrative attention and more rigorous monitoring of both postal employees and information transferred through postal networks (Hindmarch-Watson, 2012). This leads directly into the second set of concerns. Telegraph boys were central not only in the Cleveland Street Scandal itself but also in the development of the means by which sexual markets between elite men and youthful urban workers were unearthed.

Understanding the relationship between telegraph-boy prostitution and the growth of communications policing demands a different set of theoretical approaches than those often relied on in queer history. The telegraph boys involved in the Cleveland Street Scandal left police statements but little other evidence of their thoughts on the matter. Questions relating to sexual subjectivity cannot form the basis of a thorough analysis of the telegraph boys’ contributions to the affair. We are left with the significance of the work telegraph boys did and what it represented to various administrative authorities and sexually intrigued men. These youthful telecommunications workers were the public face of Britain’s bourgeoning telegraph system, touchstones of technological progress and urban celebration. They were also youthful members of a rapidly expanding state communications bureaucracy. As Morris Kaplan has noted of telegraph boys’ contributions to Cleveland Street, “Much was made of the youths’ employment as uniformed messengers in the postal service; the implication was that their corrupters posed a threat to the nation itself” (Kaplan, 2005, p. 205). The GPO had worked hard in recent years to cultivate this respectable telegraph boy, one whose sexual corruption could actually pose a threat to a specific configuration of the nation (Hindmarch-Watson, 2012). But the potency of telegraph boys’ “corruption” at the hands of elites emanated from their particular labor regimes within modernizing information networks, and in many ways, the telegraph boys involved in Cleveland Street were “corrupting” agents in their own right, undermining assumptions about information transmission between consumer and worker.

Britain’s telegraph system depended on the cheap labor of these adolescent males. As telegraph wires went underground in urban spaces and the complex work of transmitting coded electronic language went on within grand GPO edifices, telecommunications developed as a state service whose cost-effective telegraph boys made the largely intangible electronic technology manifest and understandable. Telegraph boys were a new kind of working-class public servant. They were meant to be ubiquitous urban messengers, expected to cross boundaries between all kinds of public and private spaces as a matter of course. The vast majority of telegram deliveries took place between this young, economically vulnerable workforce and wealthy men. This intersection of space, class, and gender meant that telegraph boys had to combine established forms of personalized deference with new demands for accessibility, standardization, and expertise. Sexual encounters between teenage working-class messengers and elite information consumers were a direct consequence of this balancing act.

In engaging in and, more importantly, confessing to sexual acts with elite men, telegraph boys disrupted orderly flows of information. They conflated different forms of service, informational and sexual, and in doing so, they broke down carefully maintained Victorian boundaries between free intercourse and private discretion. They undermined assumed relationships between elites and personal service providers, and the force of this betrayal ushered in an increasingly authoritarian approach to communications surveillance.

Why was the delivery of telegrams so symbolically resonant to the late Victorians? Telegraph boys were key laborers in what Patrick Joyce has termed the “self-regulating city” of Victorian liberal capitalism (Joyce, 2003; Hindmarch-Watson, 2012, p. 595). Joyce has developed this concept by fusing a version of actor network theory—the attribution of agency to things as well as to people in complex “sociotechnical” networks—with Foucault’s “governmentality” to describe how nineteenth-century British state authorities conceived of, rationalized, and regulated their subject populations (Joyce, 2003, pp. 6–7; Law, 1994; Foucault, 1991). For Joyce and other British historians and political theorists receptive both to aspects of actor network theory and to governmentalities at work in physical as well as discursive realms, the material world has proven a fruitful lens for analyzing the indirect power and subsequent durability of Victorian liberalism, a system in which “rule [was] ceded to a self that must constantly monitor the very civil society and political power that are at once the guarantee of freedom and its threat” (Joyce, 2003, p. 4). This “liberal materialist” approach complements other recent scholarly enquiries into Victorian sociopolitics. Literary cr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Male sex work in popular culture
• Part II Male sex work in literature
• Part III Male sex work online
• Part IV Male sex work in public and community health
• Part V Male sex worker, escort, and client voices: “nothing about us without us”
• Part VI Male sex work in the Americas
• Part VII Male sex work in Europe
• Part VIII Male sex work in the Asia-Pacific region
• Index