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PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   33246 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 10, 2025

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I don’t think it’s quite true that gay topping was even remotely socially acceptable in Victorian England.

Who ever said it was acceptable? It wasn’t: sodomy was a sin and a crime, both for the sodomizer and the sodomized. It’s just that the sodimizer wasn’t considered to be homosexual. He’s just a guy who stuck his penis in the wrong place, like someone who commits beastiality. They wouldn’t consider someone who shtups sheep a zoophile with a sexual identity, he’s just a guy who did a sex crime.

The most famous case, Wilde, involved someone who was probably a top (impossible to prove from the historic record, but my impression is that he was relative to Lord Douglas).

Unacceptable like cannibalism, or "unacceptable" like adultery?

Turing was sterilised, wasn’t he? Although I never heard of that happening to anyone else.

I think it was a case of ‘unacceptable like adultery’ unless it was absolutely proven in the public eye in which case it became ‘unacceptable like paedophilia”.

I think OP’s point is that Turing was sterilized specifically for being a bottom and not for being “gay” in general. In other words, had he been a top or celibate he might’ve been considered an oddity but that would’ve been the extent of it.

Take this for what you will but I’ve never heard anything about him being a top or bottom. I’ve never seen or read anything that would indicate this was a factor in Victorian Britain.

If he’d been celibate that would have been fine as long as he didn’t go on about it.

I'm pretty sure I could find a Victorian committing suicide over the fallout of their adultery if I worked at it. "Much closer to adultery than cannibalism" would be my intuition, at any rate.

Dudley and Stephens were shipwrecked mariners who killed and ate the ship’s boy after he fell gravely ill. They got six months’ imprisonment and this was widely felt to be far too harsh.

By which I mean you can find different treatments for all sorts of things, but I have never heard any evidence that points to OP’s “Victorian society didn’t think you were a sodomite as long as you were on top”.

And wasn't Oscar Wilde imprisoned because he sullied the marquess of queensbury's lad? Maybe it's just the height and age and my own ignorance of gay customs but I assumed Wilde was the top. Unless he was a power bottom.

IIRC confirmed victorian executions for sodomy were usually of tops with a much younger partner.

I seem to recall somebody looking into some specific cases behind the "N Victorians executed for gayness" statistic and finding that a high percentage would be more aptly framed as "child molestation" than "executed for being gay" -- no source that I can recall at the moment, but I definitely read it somewhere -- and the English are very good about court records...

I remember Naomi Wolf's book that looked into this getting pulped, because she made some embarrassing error, thinking she found many cases of gay people sentenced to death, but it turned out she misunderstood some legal term that meant the sentence was never carried out.

Don't remember if the other part of this was that the sentences that were carried out involved child molestation, but maybe this puts you on the right track.

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