“For a Few Bob”: Rent Boys and the Judicial and Economic Systems of 20th-Century Dublin

This paper considers the movement of boys in and out of the same-sex sexual-economic  marketplace in Dublin in between 1930 and 1950. Though still considered minors by the state and society, boys between the ages of 14 and 21 were released from compulsory schooling and expected to find employment to support themselves or to contribute to the household income. For those who could not find passage overseas, Dublin was the destination for many seeking work. Some boys were fortunate enough to have letters of recommendation from their parish priest to facilitate apprenticeships and assistantships in dairies, tailors, shoemakers, and the like. More boys found temporary and meager work as messengers, delivering messages for the telegraph service of the General Post Office or running messages for specific shops and businesses. Messenger work employed some 7,000 individuals of various ages, mostly boys. Unsurprisingly, the few pence that a boy earned for delivering a message was rarely enough to support him alone, let alone a family if he had one. Some boys—though it is difficult to determine exactly how many, as many likely avoided detection—turned to the sale of sexual favors for additional spending money. A quick public lavatory session of mutual masturbation could furnish a boy with enough money to kill an afternoon in the cinema. Other boys in even more desperate situations, usually those who arrived in Dublin in search of work and who found none, did find shelter, food, and spending money that came with a sexual price. Through these cases this paper examines the legal thresholds created to both punish boys for their participation in that market and to protect them from the corruption of same-sex desiring men, and the economics of youth and desire in urban Ireland.