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England
Criminalizes "Gross Indecency"
England, 1885. In the Summer of 1885, Britain's
House of Lords sent a bill designed to protect women and girls to the House of Commons for
discussion and a vote. The bill was intended to eradicate child prostitution and
"white slavery" mostly by raising the age of consent for heterosexual
intercourse from 13 to 16, but Henry Labouchere, a Member of Parliament, wanted to expand
its reach. Labouchere, usually called by his nickname Labby, proposed another
section that read: "Any male person who, in public or in private, commits ...
any act of gross indecency with another male person, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and
being convicted thereof, shall be liable ... to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding
one year with or without hard labor."
When the bill came up for a vote, one member questioned whether Labby's
amendment had anything to do with the original intent of the law, but the Speaker answered
that under procedural rules any amendment at all was permissible if Parliament
approved. The Attorney General raised another objection, but not out of
disagreement. The punishment seemed too lenient, and he insisted that the maximum
sentence be increased from one year to two. Labby agreed, and the bill passed.
Nearly sixty years before, the Criminal Law Amendment Act
had tightened the law against anal intercourse, but the Labouchere Amendment went further
because it criminalized all sex acts between men for the first time in English history.
No one seems to have objected to the main body of the law - it's hard to
argue in favor of sex with 13 year old girls - but Labouchere's amendment stirred a minor
controversy in the press. The main objection was that the phrase "in public or
in private" could expose decent folk to extortion. One commentator dubbed the
law "The Blackmailer's Charter" since an enterprising blackmailer could concoct
an incriminating story about anyone. The law required no witnesses to the act, so a
man could be convicted on the strength of a blackmailer's spurious accusation
alone. On balance, though, the public liked the law's effort to protect girls more
than it feared extortion, and the discussion faded away.
White Slaves and Nasty Men
During the brief parliamentary debate over Labouchere's amendment, no one
explained why a law against the corruption of girls had anything to do with men touching
each other's genitals. Labby's amendment created a law that seems to combine
two unrelated statutes into a single absurd package, but the conjunction made sense in the
England of the 1880s because of the influence of a new group of reformers.
The Societies for the Reformation of Manners that tormented the
mollies during the 18th Century were long gone, but their aversion to
sodomites was reborn at the hands of a new group in the 1880s: the feminists.
The Societies had campaigned against sodomites on Puritan religious grounds and even
though the 19th Century feminist movement had more secular roots, the two groups had a
common enemy: male lust.
The feminists joined forces with religious social purity crusaders who
warned that "Rome fell; other nations are falling; and if England falls, it will be
this sin [the sins of lust], and her unbelief in God, that will be her ruin."
As the feminists and their allies understood it, lust is like a demon that can possess a
man. A visit or two to the local brothel or mutual masturbation with a buddy
can easily unleash the demon until a man is consumed by his baser instincts and abdicates
his position as head of the family, the building block of society. The best way to
handle male lust, so powerful that it threatens the Empire, is to domesticate men and
prevent them from ever yielding to their inner beasts.
The social purity feminists are easy to dismiss as man-hating prudes, but
they had some legitimate beefs. Prostitution was endemic in England at the middle of
the 19th Century, and though claims that underworld crime rings held hordes of "white
slaves" were exaggerated, many lower class girls and women were forced into
prostitution for want of the most basic necessities. The feminists were right when
they complained that a double standard existed that left a man's reputation unblemished
when he visited a prostitute, but labeled the woman who served him a whore.
Against the backdrop of the social purity feminists' war on male lust, the
combination of a law to prohibit the abuse of girls and another that prohibits sex
between men made sense. "Gross Indecency" was, after all, just another in
a variety of expressions of male lust, an evil so great that it could destroy mother
England.
Notes and Further Reading
For the facts of the Labouchere Amendment, see Hyde, 1970 p. 134 ff;
for its meaning and relationship to early feminists, see Weeks, 1990, p. 11 ff.
The text of the Labouchere amendment is printed in Hyde, 1970, p. 134 and
in Weeks, 1990, p. 14. The phrase "The Blackmailer's Charter" is from a
citation in Hyde, 1970, p. 136. "Rome fell ..." is cited in Weeks, 1990,
p. 16.
Hyde, H. Montgomery, The Other Love: An Historical and
Contemporary Survey of Homosexuality in Britain. London: Heinemann.
Pearson, Hesketh, 1937. Labby (The Life and Character of Henry
Labouchere). New York: Harper and Bros.
Weeks, Jeffrey, 1990. Coming Out: Sexual Politics in
Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Present, Revised Edition. London:
Quartet Books.
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© 1999
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved |
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