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The setting for the Michael's House series is loosely based
upon the first decade of the twentieth century, known in England as the
Edwardian Era and in the United States as the Progressive Era. Because
this is a fantasy world, I have not adhered slavishly to the details of
life in that era; rather, I've used them as inspiration, much as Edwardian
painters used ancient imagery as inspiration for paintings about worlds
that existed only in their own imaginations.
One of the major changes I have made was determined by the plot requirements of another of my fantasy series, The Eternal Dungeon, which is loosely based upon the late Victorian Era. In the West, up until the twentieth century, sex between two grown men was considered more problematic than sex between a man and a youth. Accordingly, in The Eternal Dungeon, I created a Vovimian society that tolerated man/youth sex but condemned any grown men who acted as "wives" for other men. In Michael's House, I have further suggested that the fear of adult homosexuality was so great in this society that the authorities went to the length of legalizing boy brothels in order to offer what they considered to be a less harmful form of male/male sex. As in our world throughout most of history, it is the boys who are condemned for the subsequent flourishing of prostitution, not the men who buy them.
In this respect, the two series are united. Bringing the society into the Edwardian Era, though, caused there to be a strikingly different atmosphere in Michael's House. In our own world, the first decade of the twentieth century had a deceptive stability about it: Despite the concern common to every era – that society's moral structure was about to come crashing down – it seemed, for a while, that society had become fixed in the form known during the Victorian Era. The faint whispers of psychologists were not yet loud enough to make most people realize that their views on sexuality – and on many other subjects, such as culture, religion, and class status – were about to be turned topsy-turvy.
Michael's House echoes this deceptive stability, showing a world where the commoners already realize that the society is highly unstable, but the richer classes continue to stroll in their old places of pleasure and recreation, oblivious to the changes that are taking place around them.
These changes will extend far beyond sexuality, and the question faced by the characters in this series – particularly Michael – is to what extent change is to be embraced or even considered possible. No simple answer can be found to this question, and I have not tried to present simple answers in this series. Rather, I have tried to show a variety of individuals – with radically different backgrounds, philosophies, and goals – each struggling, in his own way, to confront the demands of a changing world, which is mirrored within each individual by the pressures of his conscience.
o—o—o
A bibliography for Michael's House and related series is available at http://duskpeterson.com/toughs/bibliography (though it does not represent all of the sources I consulted; I lost some of my bibliographical notes at one point). Unfortunately, I had to draw heavily on secondary sources in writing this series, because so few primary sources about turn-of-the-century homosexual prostitution are available. (Late Victorian pornographic novels about homosexual prostitution, such as Teleny, probably bear as much resemblance to reality as porn novels usually do.) The most valuable resource I was able to consult was Steven Maynard's June 1997 article for the Canadian Historical Review, "'Horrible Temptations': Sex, Men, and Working-Class Male Youth in Urban Ontario, 1890-1935." Although not entirely concerned with prostitution, the article provides a wealth of information on what sort of social conditions could allow youth prostitution to flourish. In particular, Maynard agrees with other scholars that class differences played an important role in many sexual encounters between turn-of-the-century men and youths. To my surprise (for this element had already entered into my novel before I read the article), I learned from Maynard and others that turn-of-the-century theaters were believed to be places where boys were persuaded to engage in dark deeds.
Maynard found that turn-of-the-century boys had sex with men for diverse reasons, and reacted to sexual contact in diverse ways. Researchers of modern youth prostitution (most of whom are motivated by a desire to wipe out child abuse) often provide valuable quotations from the prostitutes themselves; these quotations show that, while certain social factors have changed radically, youth prostitutes today also hold a variety of motives and undergo a variety of reactions. I have tried to reflect this variety in Whipster, for to suggest that all Edwardian youth prostitutes were seduced or forced into prostitution would be to distort reality and oversimplify a complex matter. As Maynard puts it, "The dialectic between vulnerability to sexual harm and turning that vulnerability around to one's own purposes . . . characterizes much about boys' sexual relations with men in early twentieth-century urban Ontario." In this regard, I would especially like to thank the former street prostitute (a citizen of another country) who sat down with me one afternoon and gave me his perspective on the dangers and rewards of his old profession.
A great many social reform documents were issued during the late nineteenth and early twenties centuries. While these documents touch only lightly on the subject of "unnatural immoral acts" between men and boys, it is clear that the reformers were greatly concerned with two problems: the prostitution of girls and the delinquency of boys. Because of that, it did not take much imagination for me to be able to envision a world where the great reform issue was the prostitution of boys.
Sadomasochism was part of the stock-in-trade of heterosexual pornography during that era, and it is therefore not at all surprising to find sadomasochistic passages in Jack Saul's homosexual pornography novel, Sins of the Cities of the Plains (1881), such as this one: "Their blows never relaxed . . . Still, it was not so awful as one would imagine. The pain soon became dulled, and then was succeeded by a beautiful flow; such a lovely sensation – it is almost impossible to describe – pervaded my whole frame."
This passage reveals that, at the very least, homosexual sadomasochism was part of the fantasies of one nineteenth-century pornographic writer. The novel, incidentally, is attributed to a young man who would later became involved in the Cleveland Street scandal, an 1889 case in which aristocrats bought the sexual services of working-class youths. If the attribution is correct, then Jack Saul evidently knew what type of erotic imagery would arouse his clients.
To what extent did these fantasies play themselves out in reality? Historians have shown scarcely any interest in pre-1950 homosexual sadomasochism, so I had no luck in turning up scholarly information on whether sadomasochism played a role in Edwardian homosexuality. However, men were begging to be beaten by women as early as the sixteenth century. By the period I write about, "flagellation brothels," where men could pay to be beaten by women, were well known in London. It seems not unlikely, then, that willing sadomasochism would likewise have taken place in any homosexual brothels at the time.
In our world, the study of psychology developed somewhat differently than in the world of my novel, but this was certainly the period when psychologists (including sexual psychologists) began to be a social force. Because "new" mental illnesses are discovered periodically, I have not tried to make Michael's condition correspond with any real-life condition, though I did draw somewhat upon writings about modern autism, particularly the debate over whether autism should be regarded as a disorder or as a non-standard condition ("neurodiversity").
The theater traditions in the novel are a mixture of my own creation and actual turn-of-the-century theatrical practices. For information on the latter, I am especially indebted to Jerome K. Jerome's Playwriting: A Handbook for Would-Be Dramatic Authors (1888). I learned about Progressive Era slum life, transportation, lunch rooms, etc., from a variety of sources, mainly turn-of-the-century writings.
As these writings reveal, turn-of-the-century literature, while it contained
all the grave sentimentality of early Victorian literature, was also capable
of being wryly humorous. The black humor in Whipster – such as the
prologue of the novel – is intended to try to recreate the blending of
light and dark moods that is so characteristic of late Victorian and Edwardian
writings. I trust that readers to whom the subject matter of Whipster
is a serious topic – as, indeed, it is to me as well – will take into account
that sometimes the only way in which to address a very serious topic is
sideways, through humor. Jonathan Swift showed this in "A Modest Proposal";
I am the heir of him and the Edwardian satirists.
Whipster is part of the Michael's House series. To receive notice of book publications and free online editions, subscribe to one of Dusk Peterson's e-mail lists or blogs.
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