In the first episode of our second season, Megan shares the story of Fanny and Stella: two gender non-conforming young people from Victorian England who presented female (and sometimes male) while carousing the exciting streets of 1860s/70s London. That is, until their antics got them in hot water with the law in what would be one of the most significant trials in British queer history. In this first part of our two part episode we learn about their lives leading up to their arrest.
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images:
1
#FannyandStella
2 Fanny
#FrederickPark (right) and
#ErnestBoulton as Fanny and Stella, 1869
3 Stella and Fanny (back right, holding mallets), dressed in character for the drawing-room entertainments they toured to small country houses and market-town assembly rooms
4 Park, in male attire, 1868
5 Fanny
6 Stella
7 Boulton, in male attire, 1875
8
#BurlingtonArcade, 1870s
9 Park (standing) and Boulton (on the floor) with Clinton, c. 1869
10 John Safford Fiske
#transhistory #lgbtqia2sphistory #queerhistory #queerpodcast #queerhistorypodcast #theseoldqueers
!['Nor did he sometimes scruple, in his governor's company, to visit the famous-est bordellow, whither resorting out of bare curiosity, he retained there an unblemished chastity, and still returned thence as honest as he went thither, protesting that he never found any such sermons against them as they were against themselves; the impudent nakedness of vice clothing it with a deformity description cannot reach and the worst of epithets cannot but flatter. But though Philaretus were [Robert Boyle was] no fuel for forbidden flames he proved the object of unnatural ones; for being at that time in the flower of youth and the cares of the world having not yet faded a complection naturally fresh enough, as he was once unaccompanied diverting himself abroad, he was somewhat rudely pressed by the preposterous courtship of two friers whose lust makes no distinction of sexes, but that which its preference of their own creates. And not without difficulty and danger [he] forced a scape from those gowned sodemites, whose goatish heats served not a little to arm Philaretus against such people's specious hypocrisy, and heightened and fortified in him an averseness for opinions, which now the religious discredit as well as the religion.](https://files.mastodon.social/cache/media_attachments/files/115/997/397/935/751/585/original/81833ff9313e62ad.jpeg)
