Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Fanny and Stella: The Men Who Shocked Victorian Society

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

In 1870, two young women were arrested after leaving a theatre in London. These women, so-called Fanny and Stella, were in fact Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, and they were charged with ‘buggery’.So who were Boulton and Park? What was the evidence against them? And why did this create such a stir across the front pages and the world?Neil McKenna joins Kate Betwixt the Sheets to share Stella and Fanny’s extraordinary life stories and trial.*WARNING: There are adult themes, explicit descriptions of sex and suicide references in this episode*Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Thomas Ntinas.Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit.This episode includes music by Epidemic Sound. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, it's me, Kate Lister, jumping in once again to forewarn you that this episode will contain descriptions of sex, some fruity language and the odd swear word dropped when nobody was looking. So if that's not your cup of tea, you may want to skip this one. Ernest Bolton and Frederick Park, two young middle-class Victorian fellas who were absolutely hopeless that clerking jobs their parents got for them. There's not much of a story there,

but today on betwixt the sheets, we're not hearing about their dreary admin jobs. We're hearing about their alter egos, witnessed in the streets and on the theatre circuit, winking at gentlemen, and generally upsetting the establishment. Today, betwixt the sheets, I, Kate Lister, want to introduce you to Fanny and Stella.

What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when another. don't speak to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the button. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful done. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Terry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the History of Sex Scandal and Society, with me Kate Lister.

In 1870, two young women were hauled in front of a Bow Street magistrates court, charged with the abominable crime of buggery. These girls, were Fanny and Stella. But how did they get there? When did they start to dress in women's clothes? And did the judge who charged them have any legal leg to stand on? There is only one man

who can help answer these questions and that is Neil McKenna. And thank you so much to Neil McKenna for joining me today. This is an absolute treat to talk to you betwixt the sheets. Thank you. I could talk to you about your work for forever,

but the one I really want to talk to you about is Fanny and Stella, the young men who shocked Victorian Britain. Yeah. Okay. For those of us who don't know, who may be listening and thinking, who are these people, can you tell us a little bit about who Fanny and Stella were? Well, Fanny and Stella were two rather silly young men, and they were running around London in the late 1860s,

and at a time where gay men or men who have sex with men, homosexuals, barely dared to show their face, but Fanny and Stella were completely outrageous. They didn't see anything wrong with their sexual orientation, and they loved to drag up, they love to go to theatres, they loved picking up men, they weren't averse to taking a few pounds from a gentleman if it was on offer, who isn't. They performed in theatres. They did amateur theatricals. Fanny was the son of a judge, so lived in central London. So I would say he was upper middle class. Stella was the son of a stock broker, which we tend today to associate with money, but it wasn't. It was more like a salesman in those days. And their family was beset by financial problems and they kept having to move.

So they were two very silly boys and they were running around London, flirting madly with everyone and everything they came into contact with. Fanny was unlucky in love, but Stella was very beautiful and met Lord Arthur Clinton, who was the son of of a government minister. They lived together as man and wife, or as man and man. Sometimes Seller would be in drag, sometimes he wouldn't be.

So that was the setting. And then one evening outside the Strand Theatre, they'd gone to meet a rather foolish young man called Hugh Mundell, who was what we would call today's straight. But he met Fanny and Seller in drag, and was bewitched and bewildered by them. And they arranged to meet.

And they told him that we are not women, we are men. By that point he didn't seem to care. He was so in love with Stella particularly. So they met and they went to the theatre and it was lovely. And then as they left the theatre, suddenly, policeman appeared and attempted, not attempted, but in fact succeeded in arresting them. and taking them down to both street station

and charging them with all manner of terrible crimes. And it emerged that actually the police had been watching Fannie and Stella for some months, not just a few days, but for some months. And this was a kind of targeted intelligence operation. Quite why they were targeted, we don't know. Was it because Stella was going out with a lord who was the son of a government minister. We don't know.

But anyway, they'd been watched, followed, observed, and finally they were arrested. And not only were they arrested, but they were charged and tried in Westminster Hall, which is part of the Houses of Parliament. Now, that's the place where King Charles I was tried for treason. It's the place where exceptional state-crimin. crimes were charged, and they were before the Lord Chief Justice of England, and the Attorney General

and the Solicitor General prosecuted. So it was taking a sledgehammer to crack a very small nut. So this book is the story of their arrest and trial. But it's also the story of them, because when I started looking for another book to do, which is actually a hard thing, as you probably know, Kate, I couldn't find anything. My publisher who has wanted me to do Lawrence of Arabia again. And I said, look, I can probably make something of the Turkish gang rape scene, but it's all been done. There's nothing left to do.

So I wanted something fresh, and I woke up one morning, and I thought of Fanny and Stella. So I started researching, and I actually enjoy the research part of it more than anything else, and discovered that there was a full trial transcript in the National Archives, which is extraordinary. I mean... It really is. Very few Victorian trials were recorded, and when they were recorded, they were done in shorthand, and then the shorthand got lost.

This trial had been recorded in shorthand and then transliterated into longhand, and the transcript was that thick. It was about 12 inches thick. Wow. Which was extraordinary. So I spent a year going to the National Archives transcribing this. And what I realized was that not only did I have the story of the trial, but in all the surrounding evidence from Stella's mum, Mrs. Bullton,

Mrs. Mary Ann Bolton, I had a window into the lives of two men who had sex with men in the 1860. And that was extraordinary. I had a window into the life of Fanny who had syphilis on the anus and went to get treatment, which was an extraordinary record of Fanny going to Charing Cross Hospital, seeing a doctor, being treated for this shanker of the anus. And not only did we have that tale, but we had the doctor's reaction. We had the doctor's comments. We had his testimony in court. So suddenly, I could be catapulted into the life of young men who had sex with men in the 1860s.

And that seemed to me extraordinary, partly because I started life as a sort of gay activist. I was a journalist. I worked for the pink paper and capital gay. And my career started the same week that Clause 28 was started. Oh, wow. I've always been someone who is cares about history, about the truth, about our world. I've seen it as my job up till now to somehow try and reconstruct and reclaim gay history, which, of course, has been willfully decimated, willfully destroyed, suppressed, you name it.

I've talked long enough. No, I want you to keep talking forever. I think the thing that really shocked me when I read your book was I was expecting to sort of hear the story of lives lived in the shadows of shame and about how it would all be secret. But it wasn't. Fanny and Stella were really loud and proud and there was nothing subdued about what they were doing.

Yeah. I mean, there was no mistaking them either. I found that, did you find that quite shocking? I found it extraordinary. I found their exuberance. Good word. And their joy in their lives, wonderful and refreshing. And you use the word shame, which is a very good word,

because 20 years later, Lord Alfred Douglas, Oscar Wild's lover Bozzi, wrote a poem called In Praise of Shame, which of course came up at Oscar Wilde's trial, which was all about shame being love between men, sex between men. And it was extraordinary that these young men were exuberant. They did not walk with downcast gays. They were not self-oppressed. If anything, they felt entitled. And it's an extraordinary thing.

I remember being in a gay club in London in about 1993. So most of the battles had been fought and won, cause 28 had been won. We had successfully resisted that invasion of our civil rights. And I was in this club and standing there, sipping my bottle of beer or whatever, and this young queen, aged about 18, flamboyantly dressed, just walked straight past me, knocked me over, my bottle of beer fell to the ground,

and not even an apology. There was a toss of his mane. And I thought, I could be angry about this, but actually I'm not. I'm kind of thrilled because this young queen doesn't have to go through what I went through as a young gay man. Of all the shame, all the impression. And the accreted weight of two or three thousand years of homophobia, hatred, persecution, imprisonment, torture, execution. all that has gone.

And I felt happy and pleased that that had happened. And that's how I felt when I read about Fannie and Stella, although the ending was not 100% happy. They lived in the moment. They did. And there's descriptions of them. They first came to the police's attention when they, as I get this right,

is they weren't dressed as women, but they were walking around the streets with a lot of makeup on and winking at men. Yes. Well, of course, Stella had been arrested for a fray in the haymarket, and this affray turned out that Stella had dragged up, had gone to the haymarket, which was the centre of London's prostitution. So if you can imagine the British Empire with perhaps half a million more men in uniform, sex swept under the table. So the Haymarket and Coventry Street in London were. absolutely the prostitutes were 10 deep. Stella had gone to the hay market and got into an affray with a female prostitute who had accused her of trying to steal her pitch. Stella was arrested and as the policeman who arrested her said it was more for her protection

than for the affray. Oh, Stella. And Stella must have been about 18 when this happened. So it was wonderful. Rookie error there, Stella. So, and they did walk around. They went to a theatre repeatedly, which was a known kind of cruising area. And the manager, who had been part of a circus act many years before, he had a very interesting history, called the police because he was fed up of young queens coming in and trolling for trade and upsetting his customers. They were on the radar of the police. Yeah, I think that one of the things that I really loved about your book and I know that this is something that there have been critics who have been a bit snooty about it. I love the fact that it is joyful, that you

haven't subscribed to this idea that these must have been tragic, terrible lives. And I think the reason that I empathised with that a lot is because in my last book that I wrote about the history of sex work is the major criticism that got back from some feminists, it wasn't sad enough. It wasn't like, it wasn't miserable. I hadn't accurately portrayed the horror of it. And I've always felt that like, but that's a part of it, but it doesn't capture everything. And what I was really refreshed about reading your book, there's this thriving subculture, and there was a lot of joy. Mustn't forget the awfulness as well, but that really leapt off the pages at me. They were having a damn good time. They were having a ball, and they literally had a ball. Several.

They had a ball at what is now a hotel on the Strand, and they had a drag ball, which, which was quite wonderful. And as to critics, yes, I mean, I think as someone who writes about the history of sex, which is what I've done in two books, you are always going to be torn particularly by heterosexual critics who do not want the narrative to be disrupted. When I wrote the Oscar Wilde book, I disrupted the narrative because the narrative of Oscar Wilde was that he was a happily married, heterosexual man with two sons. Then he was seduced, criminally seduced into homosexuality by Robbie Ross in a public lavatory. And that action led to his downfall, syphilis,

imprisonment, and early death. And that natural history, a lot of heterosexual critics are invested in that. They're invested in the fact that gay men, lesbians, sex workers all had terrible lives and that somehow or other we've come to more enlightened times. And I don't want crumbs off the table of heterosexuals. I've occasionally had other things in my mouth from heterosexuals, but I don't do crumbs. You know, I remember I got the worst review in the world. I remember I got the worst review in the world. And I think it was because I had dared to write a book about gay men who were happy, who were positive, who had a life, and who didn't conform to this awful, sad, natural history. And I think people saw me as uppity. I found that all my life, actually. People have found me

uppity and difficult and problematic because I don't tow the part of it. I don't know. line. Because you don't present the history as tragic victims who should be pitied by heterosexual society. Well, Voltaire wrote that the one duty we owe to history is to tell the truth. So I'm actually quite concerned with the truth. I think, you know, I'm not saying that there isn't an epic, galactic sea of sadness, persecution, misery and awfulness. I'm not saying that most prostitutes thrived and survived, but some did. You know, some female prostitutes were good at their job. They found punters. They made money. They bought little businesses. They had children. They raised their family. It's not always a kind of monochrome depression. And I just wanted to mention in this

podcast that if you go back to 1710 to the Mollies of London, the Mollies were fantastic as well. They were effeminate gay men, effeminate men who had sex with men, who established a subculture in about 1700, less than 40 years after Cromwell's Commonwealth was overthrown and Gioritans were gone. And we had these men who had bars who camped around, who had a sense of humour. Anyway, let's move on. I love that. One of the things I think that surprised me about Fanny and Stella as well is that, and again,

this is where the stigma and the stereotype comes in, is they weren't from impoverished backgrounds. They were from quite affluent, middle-class backgrounds. And I know that the case where I sort of explode onto the scene and then vanish again, have you been able to find anything about their early lives? Where did they come from? How did they, when did they start dragging up? Is there any sense of that?

Well, we know from, I could only include a fraction in the book of what was in the archives. But we know that from Mrs. Maryam Bolton, who is, every gay man should have Mrs. Maryam Bolton as their mum, because she was fiercely wonderful. And she encouraged Stella, who was called Ernest, in amateur theatricals. I mean, Ernest slash Stella, was introduced to Lord Arthur Clinton at a dinner party at Mrs. Maryam Bolton's house. And reading between the lines, she sort of practically, threw them together and allowed them to flirt.

I mean, she was a fantastic mother. A wing mother. So I think a lot of Stella's joie de vivre, her exuberance, her jubilation in life, comes from the fact that her mother, his mother, was totally supportive and totally pro-men having sex with men, and used to help with the theatricals and would help with the costumes

and would talk about little disagreements, i.e. screaming rouse between the queens that she tried to smooth over. So that was wonderful. And Fanny, who was called Frederick, Freddie, had an older brother who was gay called Harry, who had also been arrested four or five years earlier for soliciting a policeman in a muse in central London. Now, we know from other sources that the police used the men who had sex with men,

community in London, for sexual relief. There's a fantastic letter from an Irish male prostitute called Malcolm, I think, Sinclair, who's writing to his par, not his, his real par in Dublin. Daddy. I'm having a fabulous, I'm paraphrasing, I had a fabulous time in London. The police are so sort of sexy and handsome. I had a sucking one the other night and a fucking one the night after,

and I don't know whether I'm coming or going. And so we know that there was a kind of, you know, symbiotic relationship between the police and the sex working community. and Harry had approached this policeman. He suggested that the policeman was inviting him to suck him off. And that may well have been the case. And we don't know what happened. But then he was arrested.

Then he was in court and he did a runner. So he was living under an assumed name in Scotland. And partly because of Fanny and Seller's arrest, the police found him. Oh, okay. And he died. We don't know what he died of, but we think it was probably syphilis as well. So those two brothers had a very unhappy time. And in a very extraordinary time, your older brother is arrested, went on the run.

It lives under an assumed name and then please catch him and put him back into prison. So it was extraordinary. Neil and I will be back in just a few moments. Hi, it's Kate. I'm just barging in here for 30 seconds to tell you about a new podcast which I think you might enjoy. When two Financial Times reporters started digging into the porn industry, they made quite the discovery. Porn quite literally relies on its performers to bear it all. Yet information about the people and businesses who run the industry is kept like some kind of state secret.

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but certainly Fanny and Stella, I mean, this was headline news, wasn't it? were obsessed with this? It was headline news around the world. Around the world, yeah. Around the world. You know, I mean, it was all over the newspapers in America. It was in European newspapers and it was in every single newspaper in Britain. And there were little booklets, little penny dreadfuls about the trial were published and sold for a penny outside the court. There were images of Fanny and Stella and the principles in the case in newspapers. There were also photographs of them, but they couldn't be reproduced in newspapers,

but there is a collection of photographs of Fannie and Seller in drag with Lord Arthur and out of drag. And they're so beautiful, those images as well. They are absolutely beautiful. I'd urge anybody to go and look them up. What were they charged with? Because this is quite a crucial point, isn't it? So they're arrested at the theatre,

you're dressed as women, what's the charge? They were charged with conspiracy to commit buggery. And the charge sheet is extremely long and extremely repetitive. And basically they, the American consul in Edinburgh and a man called Louis Hurt and various other people in absentee were charged with conspiracy to commit buggery. Now, you know there's a problem with the problem. British state when it starts doing conspiracy charges. It's a weird charge, isn't it, that one? It's a weird charge. You've got the Birmingham Six, they were charged with conspiracy.

Conspiracy is a kind of state charge. It's not really a charge about the crime itself. It's about the conspiracy to commit the crime. And I think this was a very bad decision by the prosecuting authorities. They thought that we need to stop this. We have young men who have sex with men openly, exuberantly, joyfully going around. It wasn't the actual acts of gross indecency, although that wasn't yet a crime, but of sodomy that they seemed to be worried about. It was the fact that it was like a plague, a contagion. If you go through the newspapers, of the time, as I've done until I'm almost blind. I mean, people think I'm half blind because of masturbation, but it's not good. It's reading Victorian newspapers. You will find dozens,

hundreds, perhaps even thousands of cases that come up in the courts of men accused of having sex with men in other, in public lavatories, in public places. Those crimes are punished. but they're not punished in the same way. There's never a question of conspiracy. So I think this was a British state decision to somehow turn Fanny and Stella and their associates into a state show trial, to hold them up to public exposure

and to say, this is awful. This is what happens. This is a public. decision. And of course, the problem with conspiracy charges is they're very notoriously hard to prove. They had to prove that Fanny and Seller willfully conspired with Louis Hurt and with John Fisk, the American Consul and various other people, to, I think the phrase they use is combine and confederate to commit buggery. Well, that's a very hard charge to prove, particularly when there was no evidence if they had just gone and they'd said, right, we're charging you with buggery,

we've had your bottoms examined by six eminent medical men and they are all agreed that they show, you know, very obvious signs of being sodomized. So this is one of our pieces of evidence. They would have been convicted and they would have been sent to prison for 10 years to life, but they would have probably lasted three or four years and died in prison, which is what happened. Yeah. But because they went for this curious group conspiracy charge, which I think was entirely about, you know, the public interest,

they got off because the prosecution failed to make the case. And because Mrs. Mary Ann Bolton stood up in court and said, my darling, Ernest is such a lovely boy, he'd never do anything like that. You know, he's always been so good to his mother. And people were convinced. the prosecution failed to make the charge of conspiracy, so they were released. Because that's, it's really difficult to prove that. And they did, they failed to prove it, despite the fact that they did have their anus

examined by doctors and notes putting down, which is humiliating and terrible. And finally, I had a syphilistic shanker on her anus, you know, I mean. When I read that, I was like, that must have been so painful to have. Probably painful and a death sentence. Oh, not nice at all, is it? But they got off. And what I loved when I read about that in your book is there was a big cheer in the court when it was, because all of this kind of pushes back against the idea that everybody in the 19th century was horrendously homophobic,

that there was no toleration whatsoever. Because you've got these little examples of like, well, it can't have been unanimously like that. So it's the fact that there was a cheer in the court, the fact that Mrs. Mary Ann Bolton, which by the way, how good is that name? Anyone who doesn't know, Mary Ann was a Victorian slang for a male sex worker, so perfecto. That's right. She is fully supporting her son and willing to go into the dock and say,

oh, what a good boy is. There is evidently this subculture is known about, and although it was punished and criminalised, it just doesn't seem that it was, A, as hidden away as we might like to think it is, B, as roundly condemned as people like to think it was. And I think that's something really positive from the book. Yes.

I mean, you know, let's not go overboard. Yeah, just not get carried away. Half the population were supporting Fanny and Stella. I think most people who were reading the newspapers did not really understand what was going on. That's an interesting point. Okay. I mean, I think the widespread ignorance of the existence of male-to-male sexuality and the widespread ignorance that it was a crime.

I mean, my own theory is, is that that right up to modern time, sex between men, was far more common than anybody wants to imagine. And that people did it because they didn't really understand that it was illegal. And that men would have sex with other men and then be straight as well. It was possible to have two truths. I've met guys who've told me that they're heterosexual, but, you know, who want to have sex with another man. One of the best, early on in the AIDS epidemic, there was a huge University of Sydney study of the main cruising ground in Sydney, Australia. And they interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of men who'd visited these cruising grounds.

And they said, will you answer some questions? And they asked them to define themselves, are you gay, straight or bisexual? By far the most of the guys define themselves as heterosexual. and when they said, well, okay, you're defining yourself as heterosexual, but you've just been to a gay cruising gang where presumably you've had some kind of sexual interaction with another man, how do you square that? And they said, we didn't kiss.

Wow. And I think that illustrates a kind of phenomenon that's poorly understood, badly explored, and that we haven't really done, that lots and lots and lots of men right up to, let's say, 1940, would have sexual encounters ranging from mutual masturbation to oral sex to anal sex and didn't think anything of it. They saw it as a kind of, quote, normal behaviour, an abnormal behaviour, but also simultaneously normal, that they were always going to marry and have children, but they were always going to marry and have children,

but they could also find sexual relief. And I think that, and this is speculation, but I think in the 19th century, sex between men was quite commonplace, quite prevalent, particularly in all-male situations like the army, and also given the absence of available females to have sex with. I think it was commonplace. I think people saw it, but they didn't see it

as a kink, a perversion, an alternative. They just saw it as something that was. That's my own view. I mean, you have stories of soldiers in British India, and there would be boys who would go up to soldiers, and they would pull out a long white cloth from their anus to show how clean it was for the soldier. Wow. Wow.

So it was kind of preempting the idea that sexual sex equals dirt. So I think there was a lot of sex between men. I don't think people were aware of it. I don't think the people doing the sex were aware that they're committing some kind of crime. So I think there was a kind of low-grade toleration and acceptance that this went on between men. I don't think women knew anything about it. And I think the problem with Fanny and seller, as was the problem with Oscar Wilde, as was the problem with the mollies, is that they dared to put their head above the parapet and they dared to say, this is not just sex, this is identity. And that's the problem. And that was the problem, of course, with Clause 28 and the

Thatcher government. It wasn't the fact that gay men were having sex with other gay men. It was that they were creating an identity. Yeah. And when the Sexual Offences Act was passed in 1967, I think it was Lord Annen who made a speech in the House of Lord and said, you know, now that we've granted you some civil rights and some freedoms to live your life, in return, we ask that you will, quote, comport yourself with dignity. unquote.

So I think it's always being about identity. The flash points of persecution are when identity rears its ugly head, when the mollies had pubs and would define themselves as the mollies. That was crucial. The crucial fact was that they had created a molly identity. Fanny and Stella had created their drag identity. There was no shame. There was no hiding, there was no secrecy.

And this has always been the problem for the British state, is that identity, sex is ill-advised, frowned upon probably, possibly, certainly criminal. But identity is dangerous. And that's the issue that we've always had the problem with, the gay identity. The men having sex with men identity is dangerous. We cannot possibly allow. identity to take off. So it needs to be chopped off. I think, yeah, that's a fantastic way of putting it. Is it sex is something you do, but identity is somebody that that's who you are. And that's very different. Is there a sense of

what happened to Fannie and Stella after they got let off? Do we know where they went, what happened to them? We know exactly what happened to them. Fanny went with Harry to America. Harry died and then Fanny died, presumably of that troublesome anal shankar. Not a nice death, but they both died and they're both buried in America. Stella, Ernest Bolton, changed his name to Ernest Bine. And for a good number of years, he went to America, he performed in America. And he toured Britain with his brother Gerard, who was married and had a child. The last chapter of my book is really about the death of Stella.

And it is a complete and entire camp fantasy where I see Stella dying and ascending into a sort of sodomitic queer heaven where all the sex offenders are. And people had problems with that. A lot of people had problems. of that. I mean, I've had hate mail. I'd love to keep talking to you about this, but I'm going to have to wrap it up. But one of the things I can't let you go without talking about, just because you're

talking about hate mail, is the first contact that I had with you, which was before the pandemic, I think it was 2019. And I emailed you about a student of mine. And this wasn't hate mail. This honestly, it broke me. I sat there crying in my office for a good long while. I teach on a range of modules and I was teaching on Victorian culture and it was third years and the students were invited to find their own text, find their own subject and you know, you do you. And it was a student who will just call J for this. And he'd been kind of quite quiet in the class.

And I was really surprised that he wanted to do Victorian sexuality. And then he'd found your book and he became really, really upset with like researching it and finding out about it. And he'd come to the office and he would sit and would talk about your book and about Fanny and stellar and about the court records and would go through it. And the whole time, I didn't expect him to do this, but I'm really glad you are. And then he got a really good grade, not off he went. And then it was a year or so later, he came into the office and he explained that, oh, it still gets me, you know, that he'd been suicidal at the time. He'd been struggling with not only his sexuality, but he wanted to explore drag. He wanted to cross-dress. And he hadn't been

able to articulate that and he had really, really struggled with it and it was finding your book and being allowed to read about these lives and because it was history and on a course, it was kind of a safer space for him to do it. And because he'd read your book, he had started to explore cross-dressing and he'd developed an alter ego. I think she was called Sasha and she was going out and doing performances at open mic night. And he was a whole different person. And I'd had no idea. I'd had no idea that he was going through that, that your work did that for him.

And I'm so pleased that it did. But what's it like to get that kind of feedback? To know that your book did that? Well, it's extraordinary because as a writer, it's basically a vow of poverty, probably chastity. It's lonely. And then you are torn limb from limb by critics who, have safe jobs and plenty of money. And there's not a lot of positives in being a writer.

Occasionally you get nice letters, which is lovely. But when you realize that your work has actually perhaps saved somebody from committing suicide and perhaps help them find a way towards happiness or towards self-acceptance, towards joy, it's wonderful. And it's wonderful. And it's It's humbling and very moving. It remains one of the most profound moments that I've had as a lecturer. It was just listening to his journey and he was a whole different person sat there talking to me. I'm getting misty eye, just thinking about it now. But I was so pleased that I was able to share that with you so you know what impact.

I was delighted and it was certainly one of the high points of my not terribly distinguished writing career, but it is lovely to know that you've had an impact and that you're, work means something. And if it means something to one person in that way, then that's wonderful. I mean, I hope it means something to more people. But I do it because I think our community needs its history. And we've been silenced and censored and our history has been decimated and burnt and destroyed, that it's quite important to have that history for people because we do need it. and we can't just live in isolation. No.

Oh, and on that note, Neil McKenna, thank you so much. You have been an absolute revelation. Thank you for talking to me today. Thank you, Kate. Thank you. Oh, thank you so much to our guest, Neil McKenna. You are an absolute juggernaut of information. I hope that you've enjoyed joining us.

If you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. In the next few weeks, we've got an episode from the Museum of Sex Object. and don't miss our previous chat about poppers, BDSM and Boob Jobs. All different episodes, I promise. Join me again betwixt the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal and Society,

a podcast by History Hit. This podcast includes music by Epidemic Sounds.