Unintended Networks and Tapped Wires: Male Prostitution in the Making of an Information Service Economy

“Unintended Networks and Tapped Wires” highlights the parallel growth of postal telegraph services and telegraph boys’ associations with male prostitution in Victorian and Edwardian London. On two separate occasions, Telecommunications authorities exposed telegraph boys’ homoerotic activities. From the paper trail left over from these two instances – an internal investigation in 1877 and a major public scandal in 1889 – we can glean that that an ongoing culture of telegraph boy rent was at work in the London telegraph service that depended upon and appropriated facets of telegraph work culture. Telegraph boys’ revelations to state authorities shook the foundations of the liberal status quo, compromising the divides of status and respectability implicit in their work of supplying the city’s important citizens with all the information and pleasures they could pay for.

Like sewage workers, park gardeners, or butchers in London’s newly covered meat markets, the youths on the front lines of information technology provision of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were essential to the discreet flows of the modern city. When they resisted work discipline and challenged cultural norms they revealed the coercive, stratified, and unruly side of modern city life. Their labor indicates how modern electronic communications - with all of its highly-touted effects on human life - developed as a poorly-remunerated information service industry.  Telegraph boys played broadly defined political and bodily roles as “public servants.”