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The Victorian reordering of gender relations was associated with a growing interest in documenting and categorizing sexual ‘perversions’: deviations from the expected norm of sexually passive women and heterosexually oriented men and women. This endeavour marked the beginning of the scientific study of sexuality – gathering statistical data on sexual behaviour and collecting legal, anthropological and proto- psychological case studies – which came to be known as sexology. Not all sexology was necessarily anti- homosexual. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ work in the late nineteenth century focused on the natural basis for what he called Uranians – men who loved men in the manner of the god Uranus – and argued consistently for the decriminalization of homosexuality on this basis. The culture of the time, however, did not bode well for the reception of such ideas [7]. Partly this was due to the new prudery around sex during this time, driven by religion, the new middle- class ideology of asexual femininity and the more generalized concern of the middle classes with maintaining moral purity in the context of masses of people living crammed together in the newly urbanized industrial cities. In the minds of the middle classes, overcrowded housing raised concerns about the consequences of physical proximity for working- class sexual activity (Mort, 1987). The mass urban concentrations of population also led to the creation of many spaces where people could be anonymous to those around them and escape official scrutiny, creating the potential for lustful encounters and opportunities for men to use prostitutes (both male and female) in areas other than where they lived and worked. Such anonymity had not been possible in traditional, preindustrial small towns or villages. The essentialist characterization of male sexual needs also raised a concern that men’s potentially uncontrollable lust might lead to sexual perversion. As Weeks says in his comprehensive history of Victorian sexuality in Britain: ‘In the debates before the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act was rushed through Parliament [which redefined and broadened the legal definition of homosexual acts as well as tightening the regulation of prostitution and raised the age of consent for girls to 16] male homosexual behaviour was quite clearly linked with the activities of those who corrupted young girls’ (1989: 106).

Many of the major sexological studies published in the late 1800s and early 1900s were regarded as obscene, but this moral climate also meant that the ‘science’ of sexology was used to justify the contemporary social understandings of gender and sexuality. This, above all, meant the classification of a new type of person: the ‘invert’ or ‘homosexual’ as the antithesis of normal, moral, pure, natural masculinity. Many of the most influential works of the time focused on homosexual acts and, together with increased legal regulation, served to confirm homosexuality as a ‘perversion’ of the ‘natural’ order. The modern capitalist reordering of class and gender relations associated with the new middle- class morality also created a climate in which homosexuality was increasingly seen as a social problem and individual pathology, precisely as the ‘inversion’ of respectable heterosexuality. Moreover, this was focused on male homosexuality, with a lack of regulation of and public discussion on lesbianism (Weeks, 1989).