Nameless Offences

About This Book

"What did the Victorians know about desire between men? Was it really 'the love that dare not speak its name'? Nameless Offences argues that even before Oscar Wilde and the rise of sexual science there was an open, public and concerted discussion of same-sex desire that went to the heart of Victorian notions of masculinity, civil society, class and identity." "How did homosexuality come to be known as a 'secret vice', consigned to a secret place - 'the closet' - when contemporaries regularly described its existence as widespread, threatening and even notorious? Nameless Offences asks where the closet came from and how the English learned to describe that which was 'nameless' and indescribable in this way? The closet was a paradoxical set of practices and intentions that had specific and obvious uses. Attempts to keep the secret of sodomy protected privacy, and stalled speculation about who did it and why no more was being done about the 'crime'.^ Secrecy not only guaranteed the order and civility of the masculine public sphere, but also screened the sexual privileges of men more generally. Yet scandalous trials and slanderous newspapers brought details of both 'aristocratic lust' and equally shocking forms of low-life depravity to public attention on a regular basis. In spite of this increasing visibility, desire between men retained its contradictory status as a secret in ways that were to have a profound impact on the lives of individual men. In particular, the 'sodomite' came to be seen as an equivocal, obscure and mysterious figure, a ghostly presence in the urban landscape. Another effect of this economy of secrecy was an obsession with transcendence among homosexual men themselves. The closet might even have paradoxically liberating effects.^ For those inspired by late-Victorian notions of comradeship, and especially by the homoerotic verse of Walt Whitman, homosexual desire became literally 'unspeakable' and was often displaced on to a higher, spiritual realm which transcended desire, body and even speech itself."--BOOK JACKET.