Neil McKenna
Faber priced £12.99
REVIEW BY NEIL MACKAY
IT’S an interesting historical coincidence that much of Britain’s first “trans panic” was centred on Scotland, just as much of today’s current panic finds its locus here too.
Back in 1870, John Safford Fiske, the debonair American diplomat who headed up the US consulate in Edinburgh, was right at the heart of the scandal of “Fanny and Stella”, known at the time as “the case of the funny he-she ladies” – a rather cruel phrase, which today would likely result in a dire cancellation upon public utterance.
In 2023, thanks to JK Rowling’s Twitter platform and the firestorm around SNP legislation designed to make changing gender easier, Scotland is again at the epicentre of outrage related to all things trans.
“Fanny and Stella” were born Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, in resolutely middle-class London. Their story is told with delicious verve in Neil McKenna’s Fanny and Stella: the Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England. Faber, probably Britain’s sharpest publishing house, has been savvy enough to re-release this 2013 book in the midst of our horribly divided culture war around trans rights. Ten years ago, the book was a gossipy historical curiosity. Few people had trenchant views around trans rights back then. Today, the book re-emerges into a much different Britain.
John Safford Fiske was the friend, and most likely lover, of Stella, aka Ernest Boulton. He was swooped up in the mass arrests which followed a determined campaign by Scotland Yard to clamp down on “immoral behaviour” by making an example of Fanny and Stella, who would strut their stuff around the theatres and bars of London dressed in the finest satin gowns money could buy.
Scotland – in particular, the small town of Lesmahagow – was also a bolthole for young men who dressed as women and needed to stay one step ahead of the London police. A quick dash over the Border in suit and tie, was seemingly enough to throw the Vice Squad off anyone’s trail.
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McKenna tells his tale in an arch, often mocking, style. He litters his chapters with innuendo. So this is a witty, not preachy, read. But his style is perhaps too light, as this is a deeply sad story, of a host of young lives shattered by an establishment which would not accept any breaching of social, sexual or moral norms.
What this book reminded me of most was the painful and melancholic sensation I was left with after watching the TV movie The Naked Civil Servant as a kid back in the early 1980s. I’m straight, but the agony which John Hurt’s character Quentin Crisp (a real historic figure who became a gay icon) endured for simply daring to be different had a lasting impact on me. Such cultural moments, and the consequence of having a gay friend at school nearly driven to suicide, taught me to walk in the shoes of others when it comes to the harsh judgement around sexuality in Britain.
Thus, McKenna’s tone seemed too flippant. However, the author has worked extensively in the gay press, campaigned for gay law reform, and helped lead the fight against Clause 25 in England, so maybe I should accept that he’s evidently much better attuned at how to write about this case than I. Perhaps, the truth is simply that in 10 years, attitudes have changed so much that McKenna’s arch style has just dated.
No matter, in truth, this book remains a scintillating gem: a cracking page-turner, historically illuminating, culturally fascinating, and a book which effortlessly passes comment on today. It’s a great British movie just waiting to be made: a modern Ealing comedy, or perhaps tragi-comedy would be a better way to put it.
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It’s impossible to say if Fanny and Stella were simply a pair of young gay men who liked to “drag up” and hit London’s hot spots, or if they were both trans women before the concept even existed. The fact that they dared walk into Covent Garden theatres in full make-up and dresses, though, makes them simultaneously heroic while almost crazily blind to risk. This was Victorian Britain after all.
But then half the joy of this book is the unveiling of Victorian Britain: its morality was just a hypocritical mirage. Forget the old story about Victorians covering up piano legs in case it shocked the maidservants. In the late 1800s, everybody seems to have been having sex with everybody else: men with men who dressed as women, women with women who dressed as men, men with men, men with women, women with women … threesomes, foursomes, orgies, drugs, drink, swingers’ parties. It makes 1990s Ibiza look like a quiet weekend in Troon.
However, once anybody dared to step out of the shadows, the guillotine would fall. If you kept your hijinks to the brothel or the bedroom, then all was well. But show the world that you were different and Newgate gaol beckoned.
Unsurprisingly, Lord Arthur Clinton MP, godson of then Prime Minister William Gladstone, seemingly faked his own death after it was revealed that he had “married” Stella and made her “Lady Clinton”.
Scotland Yard spent at least a year plotting the arrest of Fanny and Stella. They paid witnesses to fabricate evidence against them and hit them with a charge of conspiracy to commit sodomy, which could have cost them a life sentence with hard labour. Note that most people sentenced to hard labour died within three years, so brutal were the conditions.
When they were arrested, Fanny and Stella were subjected to the most degrading treatment. They were compelled to strip naked in front of a room of 19 other men so that the most intimate parts of their bodies could be inspected by quack medics who believed they could spot the “unmistakable signs of sodomy written on the body”.
Perhaps the reason so little is known about this case is that the little people won the day. Fanny and Stella beat the wrap. They walked free from court. It was the police who were shamed.
It’s impossible to reflect on the case of “Fanny and Stella” without one’s jaw swinging open in disbelief at how cruel society could be back then. One wonders how, 150 years from now, our great grandchildren will look back on the moral outrages and panics of today.