The Cleveland Street Affair

After seventy-five years of strict secrecy, London's Public Records Office released the files on an extraordinary case - a scandal that occurred at the close of the nineteenth century and concerned the operation of a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, in the city's West End. Some of the gents dallying with the boys were supposedly a number of prosperous politicians, Lord Arthur Somerset, the Earl of Euston, officers of the Life Guards and an assortment of others from the aristocratic circle of the son of the Prince of Wales, Prince Albert Victor... Back then, the late 1800s, homosexuality was completely unacceptable - that was roundabout the time when Oscar Wilde was sent to prison for what they called indecency, also known as sodomy.