Queer City

by Peter Ackroyd

  The Buggery Act of 1533 survived the turmoil of centuries in its various interpretations. It was eventually replaced in 1828, but sodomy remained a capital offence until 1861. Buggery in fact remains as part of the Sexual Offences Act of 2003.

  So a new and brutal reality had entered the consciousness of Londoners. You could die for deeds done in the dark. A rap on the knuckles was replaced by the tug of a rope. One of the first to go was Lord Hungerford. Although he was formerly an associate of Henry VIII and of Thomas Cromwell, he was made to suffer as an example. He was accused of buggery with his male servants and, after a formal trial, was beheaded upon Tower Hill on 28 July 1540. Accusations of state treason against him may have muddied the waters but sodomy or buggery, call it what you will, was itself a form of treason.

  It was fortunate that very few were prosecuted for buggery and that, of all the penal statutes, it was the one least used. The common understanding may have been that it was directed against the Catholic clergy, and once they had all but disappeared, there was no further use for it.

  The visitations of the monasteries by the cohorts of the Crown, however, netted a great many more of those who were considered to be criminals. The reports of Cromwell’s agents, the contents of which were often elicited by threats and punishments, were so scandalous that they provoked universal condemnation. Monks were sleeping with monks, monks were sleeping with boys, boys were sleeping with whomever. Hugh Latimer, Protestant Bishop of Worcester, wrote that ‘when their enormities were first read in the Parliament House, they were so great and abominable that there was nothing but “Down with them!”’ That was of course the purpose of the exercise, and down they went. In 175 entries, the commissioners refer to 180 monks who were ‘sodomites’. In 1546 John Bale’s The Acts of the English Votaries accused the whole body of the clergy as ‘none other than sodomites and whoremongers all the pack’. They have ‘burned in their own lusts one to another … man with man … monk with monk, nun with nun, friar with friar and priest with priest’. This was ‘abominable sodometry’. Bale groped far back, to the occasion of Pope Gregory complimenting the English slave boys. ‘See how curious these fathers were,’ he wrote, ‘in the well eyeing of their wares.’

  In The Anatomy of Melancholy Robert Burton specifically mentioned the year of 1538 when officials inspected the cloisters and dormitories where they found ‘gelded youths, debaucheries, catamites, boy-things, pederasts, sodomites (as it saith in Bale), Ganymedes etcetera’. He added that ‘I do not speak, meanwhile, of those obscenities, the true scarcely nameable self-defilement of the monks, those masturbators’. Richard Morison, in A Remedy for Sedition (1536), described ‘how young novices may stand instead of young wives. I have said enough. It stinks too sour to be stirred so much.’

  It was taken for granted that the Jesuits, in particular, practised and condoned sodomy. Ephraim Pagitt, in his Heresiography (1645), claimed that ‘these are the most pernicious and dangerous sort of all others. These are not ignorant sots like the Anabaptists, and others, but educated and brought up in all manner of humane learning, and so more able to do mischief. These take upon to justify all the error and abominations of Antichrist: yes, their idolatries and sodomitical uncleanness they will defend and maintain.’ Roman Catholics could conceal their uncleanness, also, in the solemn secret of the confessional when no voice could be divulged to another. It was said that some men made a confession of buggery to the priests who had actually taken part in it with them, thus providing a double seal of silence. The act of confession itself was reported to be the occasion of seduction, and from the 1560s in Europe arose the closed and divided confessional box. It was no longer needed in England, where after the Reformation the tribal rites of confession and expiation were treated with horror.

  Secrecy was no deterrent in London. Suspicion and rumour swirled about the streets of a locality, and one of the common phrases of the courts mentions that sexual irregularities provoked ‘the great offence of the neighbours’. It has always been so in the city where sex, of various kinds, was a hot topic. Same-sex activity does not in fact often appear in the judicial or administrative records but was known to be a problem threatening the peace of the city and the integrity of the family. In 1563 Casiodoro del Reina, who ministered to a Spanish Protestant refugee church in London, was forced to flee the city with his seventeen-year-old lover after being accused of sodomy. He may have been the victim of a whispering campaign among the Lutheran community.

  From the sixteenth century derives that loose association between Catholicism and same-sex love that was still invoked in the early twentieth century, when for example, mobs of the East End threatened newly established Catholic churches. In Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), Cousin Jasper gives advice to Charles Ryder on Oxford University. ‘Beware the Anglo-Catholics. They’re all sodomites with unpleasant accents.’ The wearing of beards in the sixteenth century was seen as a Protestant gesture, whereas the smooth-faced cleric was suspect. In another bout of alchemical combination, Catholicism and the theatre have also been aligned, with actors routinely suspected of secret sins. Like priests at the Mass, they dress up and flap their hands. Like priests, they play a part and are surrounded by boys.

  6

  Bring on the dancing boys

  Men dressed as raucous females, and boys dressed as demure young ladies, accompanied the greatest age of theatre in London’s history, which we may date from the last decades of the sixteenth to the early decades of the seventeenth century. They were as familiar and predictable as the trumpets and the tabors. In the mummings and moralities of the previous period, the cross-dressing of actors raised serious doubts about their sexuality. Some theatrical haunts were already notorious. In the mid-fifteenth century one drunken cleric, Master Robert Colynson, had burst into a doubtful tavern in Southwark where, according to the Patent Rolls, he wrapped his arms around a boy of eleven ‘and kissed him many times as if he had been a woman’. The marshal of the King’s Bench berated him, not for attacking the boy, but for drinking so early in the morning.

  London was a site of erotic theatre. The codpieces were padded so that the cods looked plumper; the pointed tips of men’s shoes were stuffed with sawdust so that they stood more erect. There was an old belief that the larger the feet, the longer the penis. The hose was tight, for the sake of the legs, and the doublet was short. This was the perfect costume for what were sometimes known as ‘the young Ganymedes’ who had learned to parade their wares upon the stage. Stephen Gosson wrote, in the School of Abuse (1579), that these boys employ ‘effeminate gesture, to ravish the sense; and wanton speech to whet desire to inordinate lust’; the theatres of the period ‘effeminate the mind, as pricks unto vice’.

  Filth was piled on filth when the boys dressed up as girls so that ‘in that vice the putting of women’s attire may kindle in men unclean affections’. When these transvestite boy actors ‘do but touch men only with their mouth, they put them to wonderful pain and make them so mad: so beautiful boys by kissing do sting and pour secretly in a kind of poison, the poison of incontinence’. And the madness is this: the male lover does not see or care whether the object of his lust is male or female. His is an undifferentiated lust, raging and advancing, that poses one of the greatest threats to the commonwealth of citizens.

  Two boy actors, playing Sly and Sinklo, are part of the introduction to John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603).

  SLY: Oh cousin, come, you shall sit between my legs here.

  SINKLO: No, indeed, cousin: the audience will then take me for a viol-de-gamba, and think that you play upon me.

  SLY: Nay, rather that I work upon you, coz.

  The great London playhouses, including the Theatre and the Curtain, were little better than pickup joints for queer men. The acting companies were, therefore, schools for scandal. In Ben Jonson’s Poetaster (1601) Ovid learns that his son is to become an actor. ‘What? Shall I have my son a stager now, an ingle for players?’ Edward Guilpin, in Skialet
heia (1598), describes a sodomite as one ‘who is at every play and every night sups with his ingles’.

  Some male members of the audiences came especially to watch a favourite boy, perhaps in a woman’s part. The playwright Thomas Dekker invites the gallants in the audience to pay a little more in order to come upon the stage where ‘you may (with small cost) purchase the dear acquaintance of the boys’.

  The evidence suggests that there was a large conclave of queers who knew each other, if only by sight, and used the theatres as their meeting places. From the evidence of the plays themselves they shared jokes and puns and risky allusions. It might be going too far to suggest that they were a ‘community’, in any accepted sense of the word, but they were a strong and recognisable presence in the public spaces of London. Two of their favourite haunts, the theatres of Whitefriars and Blackfriars, specialised in boy actors or, as Middleton put it, ‘a nest of boys able to ravish a man’. Whitefriars, in particular, specalised in homoerotic plays which dealt in vulgarities and obscenities; a dedicated audience no doubt enjoyed the pun and the fun. The humour itself was broad and bawdy. ‘My office is italianated,’ one character in The Turke explains, ‘I am fain to come behind.’ References abound to bums and pricks, erections and dildoes, inches and bits, amorous dew and quick flesh.

  Whitefriars was run by playwrights, itself unusual, and was situated in a dubious area of London by the river; it was a ‘private’ or enclosed theatre. Two brothels nearby were known as ‘Sodom’ and ‘Little Sodom’. Ram Alley, of dubious reputation, was a thoroughfare in Whitefriars. It is easy to understand how such a theatre could attract a group of devotees. Plays with titles such as Ram Alley and Maids of Moreclacke were very popular and contained such stock characters as the randy virgin and the fat whore. Vulgar innuendo has always been part of English comedy.

  This was the essential reason why the Puritans detested modern drama. In Histriomastix (1632) William Prynne denounces ‘modern examples of such, who have been desperately enamoured of players’ boys thus clad in women’s apparel so far as to solicit them by words, by letters, even actually to abuse them’. He also reaffirms the idea of ‘secret conclaves’. But the Puritans’ rage against effeminacy is evidence that relationships in the theatrical world between men and boys were conducted openly and were characteristically treated tolerantly or casually. The nature of dual desire was taken for granted.

  Four years after the publication of the School of Abuse Philip Stubbes continued the attack on theatrical queerness in The Anatomy of Abuses (1583) by marking ‘the flocking and running to theatres and curtains, daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches: such laughing and fleering: such kissing and bussing: such clipping and culling: such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then these goodly pageants being done, every mate sorts to his mate, everyone brings another homeward of their way very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play the sodomites or worse.’

  The ‘secret conclaves’ that so exercised Stubbes were not necessarily in the household where prying eyes and ears might be alert. Stubbes intimates that ‘in the fields and suburbs of the city they have gardens, either paled or walled about very high, with their arbours and bowers fit for the purpose … And for that their gardens are locked, some of them have three or four keys a-piece, whereof one they keep for themselves, the other their paramours have to go in before them, lest haply they should be perceived, for then were all those sports dashed … these gardens are excellent places, and for the purpose; for if they can speak with their darlings nowhere else, yet they may be sure to meet them, and to receive the guerdon [reward] of their paines, they know best what I mean.’ Yet gardens were not the only ports of call. Prynne also notes that these ‘godless persons now swarm so thick of late in the streets of our Metropolis’.

  Lord Hunsdon was suspected of keeping a male brothel at Hoxton, not a million miles from the Curtain and other suburban playhouses. ‘Male stews’ are mentioned in John Marston’s The Scourge of Villany (1598). The writer creates the persona of Luscus who leaves his wife alone with a monkey and a porcelain dildo, a singularly unappetising scenario.

  At Hogsdon now his monstrous lusts he feasts,

  For there he keeps a bawdy house of beasts.

  In another of his works, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598), Marston (who betrays a close interest in such matters) describes a ‘Ganymede’ who ‘for two days’ space is closely hired’ – is, in other words, secretly hired for sex. The young male prostitute was a person of interest to contemporaries. As Thomas Middleton put it in 1599:

  But truth to tell a man or woman whether,

  I cannot say she’s excellent in either,

  But if report may certify a truth,

  She’s neither or either, but a cheating youth.

  An Italian/English dictionary, compiled by John Florio, has an example of ‘Catamito: one hired to sin against nature, an ingle, a Ganymede’. Pages in private households were sometimes hired for other than purely domestic purposes. A male prostitute was also known as a ‘dog’.

  Actors themselves were commonly suspected of sodomy. They were not ‘real’ men but posing as such. Some lines from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus catch the mood:

  … and I have nightly since

  Dreamt of encounters ’twixt thyself and me;

  We have been down together in my sleep,

  Unbuckling helms, fisting each other’s throat,

  And waked half dead with nothing.

  Homosexual passion also comes to the surface in The Merchant of Venice, Twelth Night, Othello and in those plays where cross-dressing is of significance. It is a passion closely evinced by the author of the sonnets to his favoured boy. In Shakespeare’s work, too, there are a host of words for the penis as well as insistent references to sodomy, buggery and fellatio. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Armado declares that he allows his master ‘with his royall finger thus’ to ‘dallie with my excrement’. This may be an expression of Shakespeare’s interest in such matters, but it may simply have been a representation of the reality all around him.

  With the possible exception of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare may legitimately be considered as the greatest of English homoerotic poets, thus tying together drama and buggery with threads of gold.

  Christopher Marlowe himself had a reputation, if the phrase attributed to him that ‘all they that love not tobacco and boys are fools’ be true. Richard Baines, a double agent, accused him of stating that ‘St John the Evangelist was bedfellow to Christ and leaned always in his bosom; that he used him as the sinners of Sodoma’. It is widely supposed that the pastoral lyric opening ‘Come live with me and be my love’ is addressed to one of the boys of London, although its ambiguity in the matter is part of its power. Marlowe was less coy in an early passage of his play Edward II (1593), about the king who fell in love with Piers Gaveston:

  Sometimes a lovely boy in Dian’s shape

  With hair that gilds the water as it glides …

  And in his sportful hands an olive tree,

  To hide those parts which men delight to see.

  Queer drama is complemented by queer poetry. In his first published poem, The Affectionate Shepherd (1594), Richard Barnfield declares:

  If it be sin to love a lovely lad,

  Oh then sin I.

  In the same poem his thoughts are:

  Of that fair boy that had my heart entangled

  Cursing the time, the place, the sense, the sin:

  I came, I saw, I viewed, I slipped in.

  The last line is very crisp. It is at one with the allusions to back doors, back passages and postern gates that are frequently to be found in the verse of the period. The mysterious commentator of Edmund Spenser’s The Shepherd’s Calendar, known only as ‘E.K.’, notes of one passage that ‘in this place seems to be some savour of disorderly love, which the
learned call pederastic’. To which he adds ‘and so is pederastic much to be preferred before gynerastic, that is the love which enflames men with lust towards womankind’.

  In the context of Elizabethan London, queerness was no great sin. Young men at the inns of court, and the turbulent ranks of the apprentices, were merely the most rowdy members of a male culture that excluded any female presence and was therefore susceptible to what one contemporary described as ‘filthy and detestable loves, horrible lusts, incest and buggery’. Even the schoolboys who parsed and construed their Latin were exposed to sodomitical allusions in the pastoral poetry of Virgil and the elegies of Ovid. So in the ‘argument’ of Virgil’s Bucolics, translated in 1575, they would have found ‘Corydon, a shepherd unreasonably in love with a passing fair youth named Alexis, and seeking him up and down in wayless woods and places void of passage, rehearses all things which might or could obtain love and liking’. Such interpolations were part of the masculine culture that dominated school and university. It was literally beaten into the boys. ‘My master has beat me so,’ one boy wrote, ‘naked in his chamber.’ It was a simple question of power. Sex with a younger male was the instrument or expression of that fact.

  The relationships between masters and pupils were always suspect. Nicholas Udall, headmaster of Eton from 1534 to 1541, was called to London to be questioned on the rumours of scarlet sins. He was well known for inflicting severe corporal punishment on his boys and did indeed ‘confess that he did commit buggery’ several times with one of his pupils, Thomas Cheyne, who was accused of stealing silver. He had had sex with the boy on ‘the sixth day of this present month in the present year [March 1541] at London’. He spent a brief period in the Marshalsea prison, before eventually being appointed as headmaster of the school at Westminster in the reign of Mary. He is perhaps best known for his work with boy actors and for the composition of one of the first comedies in English, Ralph Roister Doister, in which a boy plays a rich widow under siege from suitors.