Profs & Pints Baltimore: The Victorians' Sexual Underground

Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: "The Victorians' Sexual Underworld," on sex workers and queer communities in nineteenth century cities, with Andrew Israel Ross, associate professor and chair of history at Loyola University Maryland and author or editor of several books and articles on the history of prostitution, homosexuality, and policing in nineteenth century Paris.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating. Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://www.ticketleap.events/tickets/profsandpints/victorians-sexual-underground .]

We are living through a moral panic about the presence of sexual and gender diversity in our society, as evidenced by attacks on Pride month, calls to ban drag queen story hours, and governmental efforts to redefine sex and gender. Underlying such actions is a sense that the increasing prominence of queer and trans people in American society represents something new and unexpected, a deviation from a clear history of heterosexual and gender stability.

The reality, however, is that queer life—and sexual life broadly—used to be much more central to social life than it is today, especially in growing cities during the Industrial Revolution.

Come to Baltimore’s Guilford Hall to gain an eye-opening understanding of the history of sexual communities often seen as marginal in history–female sex workers, gay men and lesbians, and transgender people.

Dr. Andrew Ross, a historian of sexuality, will explain why public sex was so important to nineteenth century urban culture and how Victorians wrestled with evidence of sexual and gender diversity. Drawing from his intensive study of the history of Paris but also from research on London, Berlin, and New York during the Industrial Age, he’ll discuss the sexual ideology of the Victorians and how it gave substantial opportunities to people who faced a great deal of discrimination then and continue to face it now.

You’ll learn about the practice “regulationism,” which sought to manage the business of sex work so that heterosexual men could always have access to sex.

Then we’ll look at the queer male world – one that often intersected with that of female prostitutes – and the spaces where men found one another quite publicly. Dr. Ross will discuss the emergence of the first gay bars, which were opened (perhaps surprisingly) by women, and talk about how people who did not identify as either men or women navigated this world.

What happened to these cultures? The talk will conclude by focusing on a period between the World Wars characterized by incredible experimentation with sexual identity, community building and politics, and how it came to an end with the rise of the Nazis in Europe and the Red Scare in the United States. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image: Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, a gay couple in Victorian England who cross-dressed as Fanny and Stella, in an 1869 photo by Frederick Spalding (Wikimedia Commons).