15. Victorian attitudes to male homosexuality were actually quite complex, especially during the first decades of the era
Victorian Britain wasn’t exactly an easy time to be a homosexual male. Indeed, in the latter decades of the 19th century, a number of laws were passed criminalizing relations between men. Most notably, the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act made “gross indecency” a criminal offence in the UK. The most famous victim of the act was the playwright Oscar Wilde, while the same legislation would also be used several decades later to force the Second World War code-breaker Alan Turing to undergo hormone therapy. However, for large parts of the Victorian era, attitudes towards male homosexuality were far more nuanced.
According to one study into homosexuality and the law in Victorian England, while thousands of men were arrested for supposed ‘gross indecency’, only a relative few were hauled before the courts, and fewer still found themselves behind bars. Indeed, one scholarly estimate puts the number of full prosecutions for homosexual acts at fewer than 5 a year between 1850 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. At the same time, however, the official records show that upper-class gentlemen caught in compromising positions with other men were almost always treated more leniently than working men charged with similar offences.
