Same-sex Intersections of the Prairie Settlement Era: The 1895 Case of Regina's "Oscar Wilde"
2009; University of Toronto Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 83 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/his.0.0060
ISSN1918-6576
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes
ResumoA case involving three men charged with gross indecency in Regina in 1895 serves to illustrate aspects of male same-sex experience in Western Canada's settlement era. This microhistory study situates the case within both local and wider political, legal, and social contexts, including the growing visibility of same-sex subcultures in Britain in the late nineteenth century. Men made up the majority of the population of frontier Regina, creating a male social environment that established a space within which same-sex encounters could occur and that evinced greater permissiveness than did the subsequent intolerant social environment that had emerged by the First World War. Despite the advent of evangelical moralism by the 1890s, the principal defendant was tried with leniency. At the same time, the demonization of the defendant in the press as Regina's "Oscar Wilde" initiated a process of reification of same-sex experience and identities that subsequently became well entrenched in the twentieth century.
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