Greek to the Soul: George Ives and Homosexuality in Britain from Wilde to Wolfenden

George Cecil Ives (1867-1950) was a scion of the English gentry, a sexologist and a criminologist who founded a clandestine ‘gay rights’ organization, the Order of Chaeronea, in the 1890s. More significantly for the historian, he wrote a massive diary, observing and chronicling a sexual revolution: the period when new categories of sexual and gendered identity crystallized in a complex interplay between emerging sexological science and queer subjects. This lecture aims to capture the Ivesian bricolage, in context, during this time of momentous change.