Fanny & Stella: The Victorian Drag Queens Who Shocked England (feat. Neil McKenna)

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Why are gay men so loud?

Science may never know. But history offers some clues.

Could it be because we were monks and priests for so long?
Could it be that the simple joy of discovering anal makes you want to shout?
Or maybe it's because straight people have been telling us to shut up for thousands of years?

Actual gay people have reacted to straight society's shushing in a number of ways. Many retreated into themselves and hid their desires. But a select few refused to silence themselves.

Ernest "Stella" Boulton and Frederick "Fanny" Park were two heroines of this kind.

While most Victorian British men kept busy colonising the East and procreating with their stiff-lipped wives, Fanny & Stella took to the streets, stage, and sheets to live their loud, gay lives.

They wore silk dresses some nights, tight-fitting suits on others; they wore rouge and wigs; they pearl-powdered their bottoms for their gentlemen sex guests, as every lady did, and they kept a bottle of chloroform on the nightstand to get shy punters in the mood (a trick of the working girl's trade).

They were STARS, baby! Of Victorian London's "sizzling underbelly," its increasingly visible queer subculture full of rent boys, pimps, "Mary-Anns," drag queens, and boring old gays like you and me.

Fanny & Stella were eventually arrested on a Big Night Out, and later tried in the highest court in the land. Their crime? Interestingly, this time it wasn't sodomy or buggery, but a "conspiracy" to commit the "unnatural vices." Such was their fame in Britain at the time that the real threat the authorities saw in these flouncy young fops was their ability to "turn" the rest of society.

Our guest this week wrote the book on Fanny & Stella, and as a self-professed 150-year-old queen, has all the Victorian goss we could possibly guzzle.

So get ready to come on in! The cholera water is an absolutely singular...human temperature.

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Episode Credits
Written and hosted by Bash
Edited by Alex Toskas
Produced by Dani Henion
Guest: Neil McKenna

© Sebastian Hendra 2026

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