ABSTRACT
The Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889 resulted from the discovery of a male brothel operating in a residence on London’s West Side. The discovery was sensationalized when it became clear that the establishment offered the sexual services of adolescent telegraph boys to wealthy and highly placed gentlemen, including a grandson of Queen Victoria. The scandal, which exposed late-Victorian homosexual subcultures, fueled a growing perception of sex between men as an aristocratic vice that corrupted working-class youths, and it inspired punitive legislation, including the Labouchere Amendment, under which Oscar Wilde was convicted in 1895. Most accounts of the protracted scandal have concentrated on the illustrious clients or the procurers involved in the incident. In this chapter, Katie Hindmarch-Watson approaches the scandal from a different perspective. She focuses on the telegraph boys and illuminates the relationship between queer urban encounters and the growth of clandestine communications surveillance. Hindmarch-Watson debunks the contemporaneous depiction of the telegraph boys as innocent victims sacrificed to rich men’s vices, instead presenting the boys as male sex workers. She explores two major aspects of the scandal: the bureaucratic mechanisms by which the Cleveland Street brothel was discovered and the telegraph boys’ contributions to both the contours of the scandal and to Victorian homoerotic markets. A new kind of working-class public servant, the telegraph boys were ubiquitous urban messengers who were authorized to cross thresholds between public and private domains. The vast majority of telegram deliveries took place between this young, economically vulnerable workforce and wealthy men. In engaging in and, more importantly, confessing to sexual acts with elite men, the telegraph boys disrupted orderly flows of information. They undermined the assumed relationships between elites and personal service providers. The force of their perceived betrayal ushered in an increasingly authoritarian approach to communications surveillance.
