Cisgendered

The Cleveland Street Affair. A male brothel that offered cross-dressing as well as other services. Members of the establishment including the Heir Presumptive and Lord Arthur Somerset, an equerry to the Prince of Wales, were customers. The male prostitutes, who also worked as telegraph messenger boys for the General Post Office, were given light sentences and no clients were prosecuted.

1895. Oscar Wilde and Archibald Primrose/5th Earl of Rosbery (Foreign Secretary 1891-4, Prime Minister 1894-5; Britain's richest PM ever). Both Primrose and Wilde were lovers of sons of John Douglas/9th Marquess of Queensbury. Douglas threatened to expose Primrose if Wilde not prosecuted.

1902. Cyril Flower, Lord Battersea, one of the first to buy a peerage, was a ringleader in a network of around 30 upper-class gay men, some of them well-known, including the king's brother-in-law. Two young men were imprisoned. It was expected that Flower would flee abroad. However he and the others were secretly granted immunity from prosecution by the Conservative Government of Arthur Balfour backed by the king.

1963. Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, gay, Soviet spy discovered. In return for a full confession, the British government agreed to keep his spying career an official secret, though only for fifteen years, and granted him full immunity from prosecution. He was not stripped of his knighthood until 1979 when outed by Prime Minister Thatcher.

1964. The Daily Mirror ran a story about a Peer and a gangster (both unnamed) implying a sexual relationship. They were named by the West German magazine Stern as Robert Boothby and Ronnie Kray. Both Tom Driberg, a Labour MP and ex-chairman of his Party, and Robert Boothby, previously a Conservative MP and since 1957 in the House of Lords, were sexually interested in young men, and that interest had led to associations with the Kray twins, the most notorious of the East End gangsters. Boothby was in France when the story broke. The Conservative government was alarmed and feared a new Profumo scandal on the eve of the up-coming election- but had no idea what to do. However the Labour Party leaders – who wisely had not made capital from the Profumo affair a year earlier - were concerned that the story would spread to include Driberg. Boothby went from considering suicide to threatening to sue the Sunday Mirror. Labour put pressure on Cecil King the owner. The Mirror sacked its editor, apologized and paid Boothby £40,000 [over £800,000 today]. Other papers stopped covering the Krays and their criminal enterprises for 3 years – as also did Scotland Yard. There was also a secret agreement forbidding those in the know from discussing it in public.

1968. John Alexander Cumnock Forbes-Semphill, contested the inheritance of his cousin on the grounds that Ewan was female. The court case in May 1967 was technically in the Scottish Court of Session, although held in a solicitor’s office and no papers were filed. The result was that Ewan Forbes inherited the title and the estate. No decision or judgement was ever issued, and no Press report of the details of the case was therefore possible.

1969. April Ashley divorced from Arthur Corbett, the heir apparent to the Rowallan Baroncy, who was tired of his marriage, and sought to have it declared void ab initio.. As Ashley had not had her birth certificate amended, she was legally male, and nullification could easily ensue. Roger Ormrod, doctor and lawyer, presided and insisted on medical examinations and forbade any mention of the Ewan Forbes case even though some doctors testified in both cases. In many ways the event was a show-trial to establish that the aristocrat Ewan Forbes and the commoner April Ashley were not of a kind, and to change the legal definition of intersex.

1979. Jeremy Thorpe, the ex-leader of the Liberal Party and three others were charged with conspiracy to murder Norman Scott, Thorpe’s ex-boyfriend. Actually only Scott’s dog had been shot. The judge pushed the jury to dismiss the witness accounts (including those of the gunman and the intended victim) as unreliable. The defendants were acquitted on all charges. Thorpe lost his seat in the election later that year.