Abstract: In the second half of the nineteenth century Spain experienced exponential growth in the public discourse devoted to the history, description, and critical analysis of and moral commentary on sex labor, reflecting the concern that it generated for society as a whole. Hygienists, novelists, moralists, legislators, educators, and criminologists increasingly turned their attention to prostitution, considered by most of them to be an evil if inexorable practice. The late nineteenth-century public hygiene discourses on sexual labor in Spain avoid male trade or include it as an aside in discussions of female sex work. Male prostitution aimed at men, often associated with male homoerotic subcultures, formed only a relatively small part of public discourse starting in the 1870s, normally within publications centered on forensics, hygiene, criminology, and history, such as, among numerous others, the informative texts of the prolific writer, editor, translator, and publisher Amancio Peratoner y Almirall. Based on previous scholarship on Peratoner, this study is the first that foregrounds non-normative males in his informative texts due to their perceived significance as part of a carnal trade. Taking as a point of departure Patricia Ruiz Fernández's erotic approach to Peratoner's medico-anthropological and historiographical writings, this paper argues that in the descriptions of male sex workers in these texts, Peratoner conflates pederastia with male-male prostitution, resulting in a fantastical construct that undermines the credibility of his works as products of observation and fact and reveals their moralist and sensationalist underpinnings.
Mehl Allan Penrose (Wed,) studied this question.