AustLit

'One night in 1865, some men at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal created a disturbance by noisily paying court to married women in the dress circle. A journalist present that night subsequently attacked these “men-poodles” in print. This article examines the models of masculinity that lay behind the different actions and responses of the participants that evening—the normative, domesticated masculinity espoused by the journalist, and dissident models, such as the cavalier-servant, which may have inspired the men-poodles. The article proposes that the incident offers a rare glimpse of queer men creating and exercising a sociability beyond the criminal paradigm that dominates accounts of homosexuality in the colonial era.' (Publication abstract)