Would prostitutes in 1800s Britain service those of the same gender?

by arsonistSnowman

If a woman hired a prostitute in 1800s Britain, would she accept? Were there any gay male prostitutes working the street?

OwlOfDerision

This is a topic that's difficult to reconstruct completely, given the then-taboo nature of homosexuality and indeed of sex work in general. But yes, there were prostitutes who accepted clients of the same gender, either through sexual preference or coercion/economic survival. There were also sex workers who we might now read as transgender, although we need to be wary of retroactively imposing 21st century frameworks of gender onto the past.

Gay male prostitution is better documented than its lesbian counterpart, at least in the UK, primarily because gay sex between men was explicitly illegal and thus it shows up in legal proceedings when clients and workers alike are caught. I highly recommend this website - https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Gay.jsp - for further context, as it's a scholarly project dedicated to digitising and contextualising the trial proceedings of the Old Bailey in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Gay brothels, known in the 18th century as 'molly houses', become less frequent in the legal documentation by the middle of the 19th century, but it is inconceivable that they ceased to exist entirely. As a general trend, the culture of sexual libertinism and openness which characterised certain elite and male circles in the 18th century had gradually been undermined by around 1820-30, as society became generally more conservative (in part a reaction to the French Revolution and the associated sexual/social excesses of the early Napoleonic period). So it's not that 'deviant' sexuality ceased to exist, but it was much harder to express it. Bath houses, or wash houses, were potential male 'cruising grounds', as were the areas around army barracks; and the painter William Etty, who painted muscular male nudes which later critics have read as homoerotic, regularly picked up models from these locations. This, from the National Museums Liverpool project on LGBT art, has some more detail: http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/collections/lgbt/sex-and-eroticism/pleasure-and-pain/item-227818.aspx