Male Prostitution and the London GPO: Telegraph Boys’ “Immorality” from Nationalization to the Cleveland Street Scandal

A third staple of British queer history is the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889, the revelation that a number of higher-class males had bought the sexual services of Post Office messenger boys in a London brothel. Here, Hindmarch-Watson, using records in the British Postal Heritage Museum and Archive also previously neglected by historians of sexuality, unearths an earlier episode linking the telegraph boys to sex work. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press. © All rights reserved