Fanny and Stella, the pioneer transvestites who fought Victorian anti-gay laws
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Version 0 of 1. In prudish Victorian England they were called the “he-she ladies” by the penny magazines and the newspapers that slavishly delivered every detail they could of their scandalous appearance, from the colour of their silk frocks to the frills on their handkerchiefs – and the stubble on their chins. Long before the word transvestite had been coined, and almost 25 years before Oscar Wilde was convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to hard labour as a result, two men who dressed as women were in the criminal dock at the Court of Queen’s Bench in London for a trial that they believed would start things moving towards eventual legal reform of the vicious anti-gay laws of the times. The story of Fanny and Stella, middle-class clerks Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton respectively, is being brought back to the capital in a stage play that its author hopes will revive interest in the two men he believes should be remembered as ranking among the country’s earliest activists for gay rights. The playwright, Glenn Chandler, is the creator and writer of Taggart, one of the world’s longest-running TV cop shows and known for its gritty portrayal of a tough man on the mean streets of Glasgow. It is the only television series to continue after the death of its titular character – actor Mark McManus, who played Inspector Taggart, died unexpectedly of pneumonia aged 59 in 1994 in the middle of filming. But only their five o’clock shadows link Chandler’s characters of stage and screen. “It might seem like a leap to some,” said Chandler, “but I wrote and produced a musical in 2010 about a male brothel in Victorian London that was frequented by bankers, members of the House of Lords and solicitors – nothing changes – and I came across these two when I was researching that. “I’d never heard of them, yet here were these hundreds and hundreds of newspaper cuttings about a trial that was over two decades before Oscar Wilde [in 1885]. It was fascinating. They were acquitted – it helped that the father of one was a judge and the mother of the other came to court and made a great impression. “The jury at the end of the day saw it all rather as a joke, light-hearted banter, and there was no proof of sodomy.” Fanny and Stella’s six-day trial, which was postponed for a year after their arrest – for “conspiring to incite others to commit unnatural offences” – at the Strand Theatre in 1870, when they appeared in Bow Street magistrates court the next morning still in their evening gowns, was seen as a farce by many. The jury took less than an hour to return not guilty verdicts, although the hoped-for changes to the law took far longer to come about. Chandler’s 15 years of writing Taggart, the show that spawned a catchphrase – “therrrre’s been a murrrder” – without the line ever actually being said, helped him develop a fascination with real-life crime and court tales. He trawled the cemetery at Maryhill in Glasgow to pick his characters’ names and used true life stories from all over the world to build the plots for the series. “You hit some strange ones sometimes,” he said. “My favourite is a guy in Ohio who held his wife’s head first in a bucket of rattlesnakes and when that didn’t kill her he lifted her out and put her in a bath and threw in an electric cable and still failed. All around the world there were stories that I injected into Glasgow, not so much the gory ones, more the intriguing ones that tell you a lot about human nature. “Ultimately, that’s the same interest that drew me to these two in 1870s London. In a tense atmosphere of homophobia they are young men having fun. Their lives were basically illegal. But also much was tolerated; people could get away with it as long as they didn’t frighten the horses too much, as it were. It was the blackmailers that they really had to be afraid of rather than the police.” But rightwing clergy were convinced there was a danger of London becoming the “new Sodom”, as its underworld of sex workers, opium dens and brothels became more obvious in an era where newspapers were becoming bolder in reporting scandal, albeit in couched and nervous terms. The police came under pressure to start looking into the sexual lives of citizens, bringing to court men who dressed as women, usually charged with soliciting or public order offences. But the line-crosser was sodomy, something the prosecution, despite sending six doctors to intimately and brutally examine the bodies of Fanny and Stella while they were in Newgate prison, failed to prove. “People thought they were women, especially Stella, he was the most feminine of the two. Fanny was a bit more like my grandmother and definitely the underdog of the two,” said Chandler. The transvestism that so scandalised the Victorians is not yet completely normalised, he said; it made headlines last year when potter Grayson Perry strode proudly into the heart of the establishment to pick up his CBE at Buckingham Palace wearing what he called his “Italian mother-of-the-bride outfit”. He was, he said, “probably the first tranny at the palace”. But transvestite comic Eddie Izzard, alongside the drag queens Dame Edna Everage (Barry Humphries), RuPaul (RuPaul Andre Charles) and Lily Savage (Paul O’Grady) have made cross-dressing far more mainstream. All the more important for us to remember Fanny and Stella, said Chandler. “Probably they were the gay activists of their time,” he said. “One of the main points of looking at the story of Fanny and Stella is how far we’ve come. We’re taking people back to 1871 and reminding them that back then you could go to prison for being gay. “It’s interesting to see how much fun Fanny and Stella and their friends were having. It’s probably why they were acquitted, as it was difficult to see them as anything but harmless. How different things were for poor old Oscar Wilde. He played the wrong cards really, although it’s likely Victorian society had got more, not less, hardline in the years between the two cases. “The sad thing is that they really thought their case would change things, they thought a change in the law was coming, but then in two decades we have the Oscar Wilde trial and it takes another two centuries for change to come.” Fanny and Stella: The Shocking True Story , 15 May to 14 June at Above The Stag in Vauxhall, London. |