Abstract
On a Sunday evening in mid-1897, Wade and Walt were caught committing sodomy in a room at Cloughly’s Hotel, situated somewhere in the western reaches of Queensland.1 This discovery was nothing exceptional. In a frontier world disproportionately populated by young men in their sexual prime, ‘unnatural’ crime appeared regularly enough before the colonial courts in urban and regional areas. At first glance, this case appears similar to other matters involving men and boys heard before judges and juries. Walt, age unknown, but certainly an adult, had been working at the hotel for about six months when the offence took place; Wade was a boy of 11 who was visiting his aunt, the proprietor of the premises. One evening, the two residents ended up in a room together, partly undressed and in a compromising position.
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Notes
Sir Matthew Hale, Historia Placitorum Cronae: The History of the Pleas of the Crown: Published from the Original Manuscripts by Sollom Emlyn; with Additional Notes and References to Modern Cases Concerning the Pleas of the Crown by George Wilson (London: T. Payne, 1800), 629.
I have discussed the legal aspects of this case in Yorick Smaal ‘“An Imbecility of Body as well as Mind”: Common Law and the Sexual Incapacity of Boys’, Criminal Law Journal, vol. 36 (2012), 249–51.
Yorick Smaal, ‘Historical Perspectives on Child Sexual Abuse’, part 1, History Compass, vol. 11, no. 9 (2013), 702–714.
See Stephen Angelides, ‘Feminism, Child Sexual Abuse and the Erasure of Childhood Sexuality’, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, vol. 10, no. 2 (2004), 141–77.
See for example Stephen Robertson, Crimes against Children: Sexual Violence and Legal Culture in New York City, 1880–1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005);
Estelle Freedman, Redefining Rape: Sexual Violence in the Era of Suffrage and Segregation (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 2013);
Jill Bavin-Mizzi, Ravished: Sexual Violence in Victorian Australia (Sydney: UNSW Press, 1995).
David M. Halperin, ‘How to Do the History of Male Homosexuality’, GLQ, vol. 6, no. 1 (2000), 87–123.
For an excellent comparative British world account see Stephen Maynard, ‘“Horrible Temptations”: Sex, Men, and Working-Class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890–1935’, Canadian Historical Review, vol. 78, no. 2 (1997), 197–205.
See Maynard, ‘“Horrible Temptations”’, 191–235; Chris Brickell, ‘“Waiting for Uncle Ben”: Age-structured Homosexuality in New Zealand, 1920–50’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 21, no 3. (2012), 467–95;
Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–57 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 110–11, 124–25, and especially 182–86.
See for example Bruce Baskerville, ‘“Agreed to Without Debate”: Silencing Sodomy in Colonial Western Australia, 1870–1905’, in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (eds), Gay and Lesbian Perspective IV: Studies in Australian Culture (Sydney: Department of Economic History with the Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, University of Sydney, 1998), 113;
Adam Carr, ‘Policing the “Abominable Crime” in Nineteenth Century Victoria’, in David L. Philips and Graham Willett (eds), Australia’s Homosexual Histories: Gay and Lesbian Perspectives 5 (Melbourne: Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research and the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, 2000), 33; Moore, Sunshine and Rainbows, 65–66.
S. M. McInerney (ed.), The Confessions of William James Chidley (St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 1977), 14. Emphasis in original.
Clive Moore, ‘“The Frontier Makes Strange Bedfellows”: Masculinity, Mateship and Homosexuality in Colonial Queensland’, in Garry Wotherspoon (ed.), Gay and Lesbian Perspectives III: Essays in Australian Culture (University of Sydney: Department of Economic History with the Australian Centre for Lesbian and Gay Research, 1996), 30.
Chris Brickell, Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand (Auckland: Godwit Books, 2008), 35.
Randolph Trumbach, ‘London’s Sodomites: Homosexual Behaviour and Western Culture in the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of Social History, no. 11 (1977), 1–33.
Martha Vicinus, ‘The Adolescent Boy: Fin de Siècle Femme Fatale’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 5, no. 1 (1994), 91.
Henry Reynolds, North of Capricorn: The Untold Story of Australia’s North (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2003).
See for example Gerald W. Creed, Sexual Subordination: Institutionalized Homosexuality and Social Control in Melanesia, Ethnology, no. 23 (1984), 157–76;
Gilbert Herdt (ed.), Ritualized Homosexuality in Melanesia (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984).
Chou Wah-shan, Tongzhi: Politics of Same Sex Eroticism in Chinese Societies (New York: Harworth Press, 2000), 13, 27–42;
David Greenberg, The Construction of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 160–63.
Dorothy Scott and Shurlee Swain, Confronting Cruelty: Historical Perspectives on Child Protection in Australia (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2002).
Melissa Bellanta, Larrikins: A History (St Lucia, Qld: University of Queensland Press, 2012), 160–61.
George Chauncey, ‘Privacy could only be had in Public: Gay Uses of the Streets’, in Joel Saunders (ed.), Stud: Architectures of Masculinity (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), 225.
Robert French, Camping by a Billabong (Sydney: Blackwattle Press, 1993), 43.
Maynard, ‘“Horrible Temptations”’, 205. Also see Don Romesburg, ‘“Wouldn’t a Boy Do?” Placing Early-Twentieth Century Male Youth Sex Work into Histories of Sexuality’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, vol. 18, no. 3 (2009), 337.
Gary Simes, ‘The Language of Homosexuality in Australia’, in Robert Aldrich and Garry Wotherspoon (eds), Gay Perspectives: Essays in Gay Culture (University of Sydney; Department of Economic History, 1992), 41.
Kathleen Daly, Redressing Institutional Abuse of Children (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 21. For this concern in early twentieth-century Queensland, see Truth (Brisbane), 4 February 1906, 5.
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Smaal, Y. (2016). Boys and Homosex: Danger and Possibility in Queensland, 1890–1914. In: Robinson, S., Sleight, S. (eds) Children, Childhood and Youth in the British World. Palgrave Studies in the History of Childhood. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-48941-8_13
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