Biographies
George Cecil Ives (1867-1950)
George Cecil Ives (1867-1950) was raised by his grandmother in England and France and educated at Cambridge. He met Oscar Wilde in London in 1892, by which time Ives had come to terms with his own homosexuality and was committed to the ‘Cause’ of ending homosexual oppression. In the early 1890s he founded an underground society for homosexuals, the Order of Chaerona, with its own system of passwords and initiation rites. Ives studied and wrote numerous books on the history of penal systems and he also developed an interest in the field of sexual psychology which put him into contact with writers such as Havelock Ellis, Lombroso and Edward Carpenter. Together with Carpenter, Magnus Hirschfeld and others he founded the British Society for the Study of Sex Psychology in 1914 to pursue rational attitudes to sexual conduct and examine medical and juridical approaches to sexual issues. In 1931 this became the British Sexological Society.