There’s an incoherence in our thinking about the intersections of gender and sexuality in the 1890s that is conditioned by an overemphasis on the Oscar Wilde trials. 1895 saw the coalescing of diffuse components (aestheticism, dandyism, effeminacy) that would establish a modern definition of male homosexuality. Yet we recognize that Wilde had little interest in the sexological notion of inversion, advocating instead for the pederastic model that depended on the repudiation of cross-gender expression. This chapter reconsiders the legacies of the 1890s by shifting focus from Wilde to two figures who differently adjudicated the merits of pederasty and inversion: John Addington Symonds and Edward Carpenter. Analyzing the revisions Carpenter made to his pamphlets in preparation for the publication of Love’s Coming-of-Age – delayed by Wilde’s trials – the chapter shows the influence of Continental thinkers such as Ulrichs and Hirschfeld, as well as New Woman writers of the 1890s, in defusing the antagonism between pederasty and inversion.

Visitors to resorts were enveloped in a new world that had the casino and its pleasures at its core. The novel forms that the institution assumed in the nineteenth century represent a change in the structure as a whole. The casino did important cultural work in the imaginations of nineteenth-century observers, recalling other social spaces, from the court to the church, and offered a contrast to other locations associated with nineteenth-century modernity. The architectural elements that were not directly related to gambling had the subsidiary purpose of keeping people within the physical confines of the building so that they would return to the gambling tables. Nineteenth-century casinos were anchored in attempts to generate and encourage certain forms of middle-class sociability. The casino produced an environment in which the emotions were unmoored, and new sensations attacked any previous emotional core that visitors possessed. Unlike other spaces that channeled emotion – the cathedral or the court – the nineteenth-century casino did so in the service of play, pleasure, and financial gain.

Chapter 1 demonstrates the centrality of ideas of ‘emotionalism’ in those sexological writings that consistently present the body of the male homosexual subject as peculiarly responsive to music. The contentious issue of the place of emotion and the body in music likewise informs debates in Victorian musical aesthetics. In this discussion, an examination of John Addington Symonds’s and Vernon Lee’s respective stances on such questions allows for a demarcation of divergent attitudes towards music, embodiment and queer desire in late Victorian culture. In particular, an examination of Lee’s writings on music allows for the exploration of what might be called ‘shameful listening’.

Chapter 3 is concerned with the place of desire and disembodiment in queer musical experience. Taking as its focus the writings of John Addington Symonds, this chapter examines the representation of the voice of the chorister in late Victorian literature. The fetishization of the chorister in pederastic texts by Symonds and John Gambril Nicholson forms part of a broader eroticization of childhood innocence in Victorian culture. An examination of Victorian vocal treatises shows how such vocal innocence is figured as arising from the renunciation of the body. In this respect, Symonds’s desire for the singing voice can be understood in the light of psychoanalytic models in which the voice is understood as a Lacanian ‘lost object’. The pederastic listening practices engaged in by Symonds and his contemporaries invite a reassessment of the frequent idealization in queer studies of the singing voice as a space in which sexual desire may be freely and unproblematically explored. The discussion draws upon recent work in queer studies calling for closer engagement with those shameful and embarrassing aspects of queer history that many in the queer community today might prefer to forget.