Flaming and raving : appendix B of Havelock Ellis’s ‘Sexual Inversion’

The Labouchère amendment, section 11 of the British Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, made public or private male homosexual activity of any kind a criminal offence. However, not long after the Act was passed renowned scholars were arguing for the —at least, partial— decriminalization of homosexual acts: that is the case of Marc-André Raffalovich (471), Richard von Krafft-Ebing (573-4) and Havelock Ellis (349-50). That this should be so is in keeping with the wider tendency of the late nineteenth century to consider that matters of sexual deviance1 are the concern of psychiatrists rather than of legislators: the last third of the century generated an enormous amount of medical texts which attempted to taxonomize perversions, as Foucault (101) and Weeks (20-1) have pointed out. A work such as Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia sexualis largely derives from a forensic impetus: the psychiatrist is posited as the authorized professional opinion in those court cases where the accusation involves sexual deviance of any kind, including homosexuality.