Jack Saul

Jack Saul (c.1857–c.1904) was an Irish-born male sex worker who became the most celebrated and documented figure in the Victorian trade of male prostitution in London. His name appears in two of the defining scandals of late nineteenth-century queer London – the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 and the Dublin Castle affair – and he is the attributed author of The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), one of the earliest and most important documents of gay life in Victorian England.

Saul was born in Dublin and had arrived in London by his early twenties, working the streets, bars, and venues of the West End. The London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus, whose balcony promenade was one of the most active meeting places for men seeking men in Victorian London, was among his regular haunts.

The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann was published in 1881, purportedly as Saul's own memoir dictated to the fictional narrator "Mr Cambon." Whether the text is genuinely autobiographical or largely invented by its publisher is disputed, but it describes in explicit and historically specific detail the world of male sex work in 1870s–80s London – the venues, the clients, the prices, the argot, and the social geography of queer Victorian life. It is one of a tiny number of first-person accounts from inside that world, and for that reason alone it is an irreplaceable source.

In 1889 Saul was called as a witness in proceedings related to the Cleveland Street Scandal, in which a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street was discovered to have employed telegraph boys from the Post Office. The scandal implicated a number of aristocrats and raised questions – never fully resolved – about the involvement of Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence. Saul testified frankly about his own activities and those of others, apparently without legal consequence to himself – a pragmatic tolerance that speaks to his usefulness as a witness and the selective nature of Victorian prosecution.

He appears in the historical record intermittently after 1889 and died around 1904.