Clients named went right to the top of society, most notably Lord Arthur Somerset, a friend of Prince Eddy. Officials were astonished at his frank answer: he and his buddies Henry Newlove and Charles Thickbroom doubled their income most nights at a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, one that specialized in bringing men together with delectable telegraph boys. The practice finally hit the fan in 1889 when one such, Charlie Swinscow, was seen carrying far more money than he was making at work. Memoirs and letters of the period are full of affairs with such boys Wilde’s boyfriend Lord Alfred Douglas practically specialized in collecting telegraph boys, and many of his friends followed suit. Victorians sent and received telegrams with the ease of emails, except that pickup and delivery came by means of comely young men who often didn’t mind a little extra income having sex with their male customers. So where did Prince Eddy go for fun? That’s the subject of this book. Prince Eddy was no more controllable than his father had been at that age, and had he lived he would have been, literally, the first openly gay Prince of Wales in English history. When he died suddenly of typhus at age 29, the entire Royal establishment heaved a sigh of relief–and then destroyed all his papers. Prince Eddy had all the skirt-chasing habits of his father, only for guys. Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, was the handsome, dashing eldest son of Edward VII–the gay eldest son. The Prince Eddy of the title is one of history’s great might-have-beens. This is where Theo Aronson guides us in his landmark study Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld (Barnes and Noble, 1994). So if you want a picture of London’s gay life around the 1895 trial of Oscar Wilde, you must descend into a shadowy underworld of protected spaces and passwords. In 1885, England criminalized all sexual relations between consenting adult males, no matter how private or quiet.
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