THE SINS OF JACK BRANSON

Gay men in Victorian Britain fight homophobia by becoming sex workers in this historical novel.

In 1881, with gay sexual acts illegal in Britain, 24-year-old Jack Branson is exiled from his Irish village when his mother catches him in a gay “Incident”; he washes up in London. There, he works as a low-paid telegram courier, languishing in a nasty room and sending letters and money to his parents but never receiving a reply. His fortunes improve when he becomes a sex worker, visiting clients under cover of delivering fake telegrams. The money’s great, and the gay sex makes him “feel complete” in his “own skin.” He finds true love with Oliver Hawkett, a young thief with a vision of opening gay brothels as a way of normalizing gay sexuality “until the world gets so used to us that they toss those wicked laws and let us live as equals.” When police arrest Jack at a 30-man orgy, he flees to Ireland to spend two years as a footman until he’s outed and returns to London. He then joins Oliver’s newly opened brothel, arranges for protection payments to a Scotland Yard superintendent who is his client, and stars in group-sex sessions with aristocrats. Feeling as if he has found his true home, Jack writes about his adventures and the varieties of gay sexual experiences among his fellow sex workers, including a man who lost his leg in childhood when his mother tied him to a railroad track after learning he was gay. The resulting anonymously published novel, The Sins of an Irishman in London, sells well but precipitates a libel suit by a closeted Tory politician. Jack’s unapologetic testimony at trial—“I shag men for money”—sounds a clarion call for gay liberation.

Schulze’s yarn is a sentimentalized takeoff on the doings of real-life sex worker Jack Saul, who inspired a similar piece of Victorian erotica titled The Sins of the Cities of the Plain and testified in a libel case. Schulze’s depiction of the Victorian era is atmospheric and intense in conveying the persecution gay people faced. But it is studded with anachronisms both linguistic—“Gossip’s as viral as a blight,” Jack says several years before viruses were discovered—and monetary. (Jack sends his mother five pounds sterling every day for years, which in modern money is the equivalent of about $870 per day, while living in a slum.) The author’s prose is workmanlike, with explicit, fairly rote pornographic scenes—“ ‘Harder!’ Andy yelled at the blond. ‘Harder!’ ”—and some passages that are more evocative and lyrical. (“Have you ever been the only sober man in a pub of drunks? It’s exciting, like an opera. There’s music in their movements, their camaraderie, their sad stories.”) Unfortunately, Jack’s relationship with his sexuality doesn’t always ring true. He’s an emotionally volatile man, always agonizing over his relationship with Oliver and frequently breaking down in tears, but at the same time he’s a happy sex worker in a brothel so noble that he compares it to King Arthur’s Round Table. (François: “Don’t you want to save the brothel?” Jack: “I want to save it, François. I just don’t think I can.”) Readers may find this portrait of Victorian sex workers too blithely romantic to be convincing.

A vivid period tale of improbably edifying debauchery.