By Dr. Bill Lipsky–
By the time George Cecil Ives (1867–1950) met Oscar Wilde at the prestigious Authors’ Club in London in 1892, he was deeply involved in what he called “the Cause.” A self-described “evolutionary anarchist,” he wanted to end the social rejection and legal persecution of “uranian love,” then the term for same-sex intimacy. Neither Wilde nor his lover Alfred Douglas—Ives had brief affairs, separately, with both of them—was much interested in campaigning to change the laws against homosexuals, but he persevered.
The next five years, however, were difficult for “the Cause,” especially after Wilde’s arrest, trials, and imprisonment for “gross indecency.” By 1897, the year Wilde was released from jail, Ives came to understand that the time was not right to crusade openly for either social acceptance or legal reform. Instead, he created a secret society to effect change, which he named The Order of Chaeronea, after the battle site where the Sacred Band of Thebes, which consisted of 150 loving male couples, perished in 338 BCE.
Possibly the first homosexual rights organizations in the world—the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee founded by famed sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld in Berlin the same year may or may not have preceded it by a few months— The Order of Chaeronea was to be “A Religion, A Theory of Life, and Ideal of Duty,” according to Ives. Its primary purpose was moving society forward. “We demand justice for all manner of people who are wronged and oppressed,” he wrote into its “Rules of Purpose.”
The Order was more than a radical political group. It was also a fraternal organization, with the rules, rituals, secret meetings, codes, and symbols typical of other Victorian societies, although the “Chaeroneans” could face up to two years in prison at hard labor if they were discovered being intimate with each other. Ives insisted that the Order was not a sex club. Sex “is forbidden On Duty,” he wrote, “and the Order is most ascetic.” He applauded sensuality, however, “so long as it is passionate. All flames are pure.”
The “Service of Initiation” emphasized this. With “the vow that shall make you one of our number,” new members swore:
• That you will never vex or persecute lovers.
• That all real love shall be to you as sanctuary.
• That all heart-love, legal and illegal, wise and unwise, happy and disastrous, shall yet be consecrate for that love’s Holy Presence dwelt there.
No one was allowed to join the group without the recommendation of two existing members, who usually referred to each other by their initials, if at all. “Thou knowest the two who received thee in the Order,” Ives wrote in words that sounded like he was quoting admonitions from the King James Bible. “Thou dost not need to know any others. Thou art forbidden to mention who belongs to anybody outside it.”
Everyone understood the need for secrecy. In the previous 10 years alone, three scandalous cases had brought tremendous attention to England’s uranian subculture, which the newspapers consistently described as a group of individuals who indulged in “abominable and filthy practices” that were “not to be named among Christians.” The first was in 1889, when police raided a homosexual “house of assignation” on Cleveland Street in London, where powerful men “preyed upon and corrupted” the innocent youth of the nation for “their degenerate pleasures.”
The revelations about Cleveland Street’s “den of iniquity” were followed in 1893 by the “The Newcastle Scandal.” Authorities accused Lionel Hamilton, a 45-year-old factory inspector, of having a long-term relationship with Henry Dady, 22, a clerk, during which they “feloniously, wickedly, and against the order of nature, did carnally know each other and commit the abominable crime of buggery,” the “worst crime known to humanity.” The Court sentenced Hamilton to 10 years in prison at hard labor. Dady received a term of 5 years.
Much worse for “the Cause” were Wilde’s three court cases in 1895, where uranians were described in the most salacious language possible. They were presented as nothing less than a criminal underground who wore dresses at all male parties, solicited and seduced upstanding young men for unspeakable purposes, performing all manner of sexual perversion with them and each other. Two years later, Ives created The Order, pledged to “the cultivation of a moral, ethical, cultural, and spiritual homosexual ethos.”
Many members of The Order later became deeply involved in the creation of the British Society for the Study of Sex-Psychology (BSSSP), co-founded—openly—in 1913 by Ives and pioneering homosexual rights advocate Edward Carpenter, Hirschfeld, writer and illustrator Laurence Houseman (a younger brother of poet A. E. Houseman), and other reformers; all were publicly known to be “that way.” There was immediate progress when the organization’s first meeting at the Cecil Hotel, London, in 1914, was open to the public.
The Society stated it was formed “for the consideration of problems and questions connected with sexual psychology, from their medical, juridical, and sociological aspects.” It was especially interested in homosexuality, pledging to fight legal discrimination with scientific understanding. The group also sponsored forums, presented speakers and published papers about sex education, women’s reproductive rights, marriage and divorce, obscenity, and sunbathing. Its “attitude of open-minded enquiry, and refusal to accept conventional dogma about sex and gender,” wrote historian Lesley Hall, “permeated the works of these writers and the BSSSP.”
Like many Victorian gentlemen, Ives was not only a great joiner of organizations, but he also was a sportsman. He played cricket with J. M. Barrie on the team the creator of Peter Pan named the Allahakbarries. He also captained a team representing the Authors’ Club, but resigned after he heard some in the group making derogatory comments about “the homosexuals.” In 1902, playing a single first-class cricket match for Marylebone Cricket Club, he became the world’s first openly gay first-class cricketer.
The future took longer to arrive than Ives or any of the other reformers had hoped, but across his life, whatever issues he championed—they included prison reform and a ban on hunting as a sport—he remained steadfast to “the Cause” and its vision:
• We believe in the glory of passion.
• We believe in the inspiration of emotion.
• We believe in the holiness of love.
Bill Lipsky, Ph.D., author of “LGBTQ+ Trailblazers of San Francisco” (2023) and “Gay and Lesbian San Francisco” (2006), is a member of the Rainbow Honor Walk board of directors.
Faces from Our LGBT Past
Published on February 27, 2025
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