Victorian England had a secret society for gay people, complete with oaths, initiation rites, coded messages, and a seal no one has fully decoded to this day. George Cecil Ives founded the Order of Chaeronea in 1897. He was a poet, prison reformer, and gay rights activist at a time when being any of those things, let alone all three, was genuinely dangerous. Two years earlier, Oscar Wilde had been convicted under the Labouchere Amendment and sentenced to two years of hard labor. Ives knew Wilde. He'd met him at the Authors' Club in London in 1892 and spent years trying to recruit him to what Ives called simply "the Cause." Wilde never joined. The Order's name came from the Battle of Chaeronea in 338 BC, where the Sacred Band of Thebes, an elite military unit made up of 150 male couples, was wiped out by Alexander the Great's Macedonian army. Ives chose the name deliberately. Gay people had been fighting and dying for each other for a very long time. He wanted members to remember that. The rituals were elaborate. New members swore oaths. There were passwords, initiation ceremonies, and a complicated seal bearing the letters "amrrhao" whose full meaning has never been deciphered. Members dated their correspondence from the year of the Battle of Chaeronea, so that a letter written in 1900 would be dated C.2238. If authorities intercepted your mail, they'd have a hard time figuring out what they were reading. Ives was clear that the Order was not a sex club. "Sex is forbidden On Duty," he wrote, "and the Order is most ascetic." The rituals were based on Walt Whitman's writings. The society also took on issues beyond gay rights, pushing for reform on birth control, abortion, and laws around sexually transmitted diseases. This was 1897. At its peak, the Order had roughly 300 members, the same number as the soldiers of the Sacred Band of Thebes. No membership lists were kept. That was the point. Ives lived until 1950. He never stopped working for the Cause. The Order was resurrected in the United States in the late 1990s and today has chapters in South Africa, France, and the United Kingdom. A secret society was founded in Victorian London, rooted in ancient Greek military history, operating on coded correspondence and unbreakable oaths, and it still exists today. We've always found ways to find each other.