Queer theatre in the 19th century was a place of codes, cross-dressing and blackmail

In today’s theatre industry, you don’t have to look far to find queer representation. Although the theatre has long been seen as an accepting place for LGBTQ+ people, in the 19th century, examples of queer lives from the stage profession are difficult to find.

I’m a theatre historian at the University of Warwick, and for queer history month in February, I worked on retrieving histories of LGBTQ+ men.

The best-known queer icon from the theatre prior to the 20th century is Oscar Wilde. Details of his arrest in 1895 for gross indecency, the notorious trials that followed and his imprisonment are well-documented.

Yet there were other high profile court cases involving members of the theatre’s queer community in this period. Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park were actors, performing in semi-professional and amateur shows. In some amateur settings it was common for female roles to be played by men and Boulton and Park had established themselves in this line of acting.

However, their cross-dressing extended beyond the stage. They lived much of their lives as women and in 1870 were arrested in the audience of the Strand Theatre in London while dressed as women. A trial accusing them of the “abominable crime of buggery” took place the following year.

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These two examples highlight a common problem that queer historians encounter in our research – that much of what we know about the lives of LGBTQ+ people, before the mid-20th century, has only survived because of the criminalisation of male homosexuality.

I’m one of many historians working to find alternative methods for recovering these histories by attempting to unlock the systems that queer people were forced to use to communicate with one another. These include codified actions, gestures, behaviour, spaces, places, visual motifs and fashions.

Boulton and Park had identified the theatre as the one place in society where it was acceptable to cross-dress and had used it to safely experiment with their gender and sexual identities. With amateur dramatics becoming increasingly popular in the 19th century, in my ongoing research I propose that by looking sideways at other men who exploited this opportunity, a whole range of new queer narratives may be found.

One example I have discovered through this approach is Orlando Bridgeman, who performed female parts at the University of Cambridge in the 1890s. While some men chose to contrast these roles with their masculine features, Bridgeman performed them realistically.

This approach was considered harmful to young men following the Boulton and Park scandal. While performing female parts may not be enough to pinpoint a lost queer history, by widening the scope, other clues come to the fore. In a production of Jupiter in 1894, Bridgeman performed the role of Ganymede – a figure who, since the Renaissance, was associated with homosexual love.

Blackmail and codified queerness

Another young man who cross-dressed in amateur theatricals was Charles Cotsford Dick. He became embroiled in a homosexual blackmail network in the 1890s at a time when the blackmailing of queer men was widespread.

As the theatre has always tackled contemporary social issues, this criminal activity soon became the topic of a play, The Blackmailers, in London in 1894. Besides being the first known time that a homosexual character was seen on stage, it is also likely the first opportunity for a queer actor, Charles Colnaghi, to perform some of their own realities.

One of the most fascinating case studies I’ve been working on is Willy Clarkson – the leading theatrical wigmaker and costumier in Britain.

He was frequently described in the press as “eccentric”, “strange”, “peculiar” and “queer” and had his effeminacy and bachelor status stressed. These were common ways to allude to queer men. His biographer, Harry Greenwall, wrote in The Strange Life of Willy Clarkson in 1936 that while he “lived and died a bachelor … His morals were not my business”.

Meanwhile the gay actor John Gielgud recalled in Plays and Players magazine in 1983 how male customers had to “avoid too close physical contact with [Clarkson], in case his hands should become unduly familiar”. His queerness was seemingly known but not openly discussed.

Close analysis of Clarkson’s life illuminates several possibilities as to how queerness was codified in the 19th century.

When photographed or caricatured, the viewer’s attention is often drawn to his hands and rings. This is also true of images of Wilde and other queer men of the period. It may not be coincidental that the queer actor, Cecil Crofton, retired from the profession to become a ring dealer.

There is ample evidence to propose that there was a codification of rings and hand gestures that enabled men to signal their sexuality to one another. Similarly, handheld fans appear repeatedly in these images.

In a staged photograph of Clarkson, an ostrich-feather fan is placed behind him. While it is well-established that fans were used to communicate, this language was likely extended by queer people.

For over a decade I have been asking whether it might be possible to use what I call a “historical queerdar” to locate queer stories of the past. That is to suggest that the historian may be able to use their own queer identity to read subtle signs in the historical record to aid the identification of queer narratives.

Though legal provisions have been put in place to protect queer people in Britain today, attitudes have been slower to change and queer people continue to be forced to behave differently. As a result, there remains an embodied knowledge within the queer community. I believe that analysis of these unspoken languages may help us to find new queer histories.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

David Coates receives funding from the European Research Council.