Boulton and Park

When they appeared at Bow Street Magistrates' Court the morning after the arrest they were still clothed in the women's dresses from the previous evening; a crowd of several hundred people were there to see them.

The arrest and trial have been interpreted differently over time, from innocent Victorian sentimentalism to a wilful ignoring of the men's sexuality by the courts to ensure they were not convicted.

The case was a factor that led to the introduction of the 1885 Labouchere Amendment which made male homosexual acts punishable by up to two years' hard labour.

[8] This burgeoning homosexual culture was aligned with effeminacy and cross-dressing, according to the literary scholar Joseph Bristow, in his work "Remapping the Sites of Modern Gay History".

As examples he cites those associated with the 1889 Cleveland Street scandal, who remained in positions in society, except one, who left the country; similarly, when Boulton and Park were cleared of the main charges against them, they continued acting in Britain and abroad.

[37] In drag, they watched the 1869 Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race, went shopping in London's West End, ate at restaurants and went to the theatre and music halls.

In addition to private houses, they appeared on stage in the Egyptian Hall, Chelmsford; Brentwood and Southend, Essex; and the Spa Rooms at Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

[35] They always took the female roles and dressed accordingly; in the theatre programmes, their names were listed as Boulton and Park, and audience members knew the parts were played by two men.

[50][51] On the evening of 28 April 1870 Boulton and Park—both in drag—went to the Strand Theatre where they had reserved a box; they were accompanied by two friends, Hugh Mundell and Cecil Thomas, both of whom were wearing male attire.

When the group left the theatre and ordered a cab, Boulton and Park were arrested; Thomas ran off and Mundell accompanied the pair to the police station in Bow Street.

[56]The court heard from four policemen, one of whom had visited the Wakefield Street flat that morning and showed the magistrate a series of photographs of Boulton and Park in male and female attire.

Witnesses who came forward to the police included John Reeve—a manager at the Alhambra Theatre of Variety—and George Smith, the beadle of Burlington Arcade; both men reported that they had ejected Boulton and Park from their respective premises on numerous occasions.

[79] The police investigation continued and, in addition to Boulton and Park, charges were brought against Clinton, Hurt, Fiske and three others who were found to be connected: William Somerville, Martin Cumming and C. F.

He made a deathbed denial against the accusations of sodomy and dictated a note to his solicitor: "Nothing can be laid to my charge other than the foolish continuation of the impersonation of theatrical characters which arose from a simple frolic in which I permitted myself to become an actor.

[94] Both Boulton and Park dressed in male clothing for the trial and both had grown facial hair in the year since their arrest; Davenport-Hines considers this was probably at the direction of Lewis.

[100] The prosecution presented and read out in court examples of the correspondence involving the accused men, the defence argued that these were shows of affection between the writers—albeit with language exaggerated by "theatrical propensities"—and not evidence of a physical relationship.

According to Morris Kaplan, in his history of homosexuality in the late nineteenth-century, Boulton's mother "portrayed the group of cross-dressers and their admirers as a cozy domestic circle of young male friends".

[92][105] He considered that Paul's physical examination was improper,[106] and he doubted that the police had made a sufficiently strong case that proved homosexual activity had taken place.

[15] Park also travelled to New York and appeared on stage under the name Fred Fenton, where he had some limited success in character parts and was a resident performer at the Fifth Avenue Theatre for a time.

[119] The arraignment hearings and trial were widely reported in national and local press in Britain, and most of the London papers had provided extensive space for the coverage.

[120] Boulton's and Park's private lives—and those of their known friends and associates—were scrutinised and publicised in the press; they appeared under sensational headlines, including "Men in Petticoats", "The Gentlemen Personating Women", "The 'Gentlemen-Women' Case" and "The 'Men-Women' at Bow Street".

Park's costume consisted of a dark green satin dress, low necked, trimmed with black lace, of which material he also had a shawl round his shoulders.

In the early publications, Boulton and Park are portrayed as attractive ladies; by four weeks into the magistrate's hearing, they are shown as a "distinctly more grotesque masculine cast".

[129][h] Kaplan observes that many of the penny pamphlets carried "ritual condemnation" of the accused men, not in keeping with the sensational nature of the images and details in the publications.

[132] Cocks identifies the following themes: the lawyer William Roughhead thought the relationship to be largely innocent and sprang from the sentimental romanticism that the Victorians adopted; the barrister H. Montgomery Hyde wrote that Boulton and Park were homosexuals who were not imprisoned because there was insufficient evidence presented in court.

He observes that one of the major British newspapers—and some of the hearings in the magistrates' courts—use feminine pronouns in describing the accused, and of Mary Boulton's evidence that her son "has presented as female since the age of six".

Perhaps more importantly, the base is significant in its revelation of a "pre-homosexual" subculture which was obviously extensive, varied and flourishing, involving, in differing roles and degrees, men of all walks of life.

[139] According to the historian William A. Cohen, at the time of the Boulton and Park case, homosexuality was "identifiable within a sociomedical sexual taxonomy, but was not yet recognized as a juridical subject".

[142] Boulton and Park appear as characters in The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, an 1881 work of homosexual pornographic literature by John Saul, a male prostitute.

[144] According to Cohen, the work "provides a piquant complement to the other narratives of their lives, valuable both for radically shifting the perspective and for highlighting the tendentiousness of any report about 'sodomitical practices'.