Ep. 8: On the Wilde Side
from Stephen Fry's Victorian Secrets
This episode takes us to Victorian secrets ‘on the Wilde Side’ – although Oscar Wilde, often seen as a central character, only has a small part to play in our look at male same sex love (don’t worry, we’ll also have an episode about female same sex love as well). The single unifying identifier of male same-sex activity was its criminality. Until 1861 – that’s 24 years into Victoria’s Reign – buggery was punishable by death. Thereafter, it could carry a prison sentence of penal servitude for life. And the ambiguous ‘Gross indecency’, a crime dreamt up in 1885, meant almost any kind of affectionate or so called effeminate male-male activity could be regarded as criminal. Sex between men is the secret-ist secret of life in Victorian England. Yet we can reveal that were it not for an act of fate, the throne on which Victoria sat might have been later occupied by a secretly gay monarch.
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