In this talk Charles Upchurch creates a narrative of the 19th century that puts same sex desires closer to political events and actors than has previously been the case. By looking at Don Leon, a 19th-century poem celebrating same sex love, Upchurch puts this work in its historical context of a growing liberal humanitarianism within Parliament. Upchurch believes that the creators of Don Leon were individuals that had inside knowledge of parliament and directed the poem to those in both the House of Commons and the Lords. The arguments for same sex relations in Don Leon made heavy use of the language of humanitarian reform, employing the same language as that used to formulate arguments against slavery and conditions of the imprisoned and animals. Upchurch takes the poem as an example of how a small group of individuals who believed same sex desire was inborn and natural used such arguments to challenge British Sodomy laws in the early 19th century.

Upchurch notes that the general tide in English criminal law reform during the early 19th century was that the death penalty was becoming less prevalent as a punishment for other crimes, but remained so for the offence of sex between men.  When the Whig Party came to power in 1830, they did so with a mandate to carry out a range of liberal reforms ranging from Poor Law reform to prison reform. The role of the state was under review. The Whig’s liberal tradition meant they were not constrained by inherited tradition and had a more rational relationship to crime and punishment. So in 1833 the Whigs set up a Royal Commission to review British criminal law. One of the five legal authorities on the Commission was John Austin, a noted legal theorist close to the famous Liberal Philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who argued that there was no necessary connection between law and morality but it should be constructed in an empirical and value-free way. This liberal interpretation of how the state should construct laws, following the work of the commission, came to bear on the 1841 Punishment of Death draft legislation, which had a provision to remove the death penalty for sodomy. It passed by 123 votes to 61 in the Commons but was defeated in the final reading in the Lords by the Earl of Winchilsea, in which he described same sex relations as ‘utterly abhorrent to human nature’. This proved only a temporary setback as work towards liberal reform prevailed, and continued to be inspired by the work of Jeremy Bentham who had argued for sexual freedom and self-expression.

The history of liberalism and same sex desires is not the only thing covered in the lecture, as the idea of homosexual identity is also examined. Upchurch supports Anna Clarke’s argument that individuals make judgements based on the cultural texts available to them, and that a timeless homosexual identity does not exist. Sexual identities are subject to their time, place and culture, and most significantly for the lecture is that any statement of identity is necessarily political, an argument that Upchurch borrows from contemporary queer theory. In the early 19th century, the individuals that fuse same sex desire and the self as inseparable are embedded in politics, as a new kind of politics created within a liberal framework of rationality and reason was gaining traction. It is the quality of reason that Don Leon used to describe same sex desires as something inseparable from the self and worthy of art that helped bring about the eventual removal of the death penalty for sodomy. Upchurch points out that liberal political change from Hobbs, Locke, and Rousseau involved a certain type of individual, one that was educated. The liberal framework was one that would only work for a type of individual that could show a reasoned case for same sex desire rather than for a person that could not control their passion. It was  the private and sensual depiction of same sex desire in the literary form of Don Leon that highlighted the injustice of Sodomy Laws in Parliament. The two stories, of Benthamite logic of rational reform in British political debate ending the death penalty and the development of the works of Don Leon in parallel, suggests to Upchurch a potential link between the two.