Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day
Peter Ackroyd
Chatto & Windus
Peter Ackroyd has written extensively about his native city, from early poetry through novels like Hawksmoor via studies of Dickens and Blake to his masterly work London: The Biography. Now, aged 67, London’s “greatest living chronicler” has turned his attention to the lesser-known LGBTQ history of the city.
The book begins with an exploration of the etymology of various terms including “homosexuality” – coined by the Hungarian Karl-Maria Kertbeny in 1869 – and “queer”, which Ackroyd sees as an inclusive and accommodating catch-all. He proceeds on a fascinating account of early Britain, showing us that the Celts, the Romans, the Saxons, the Vikings and the Normans were a lot more tolerant of same-sex interactions than many of the island’s later inhabitants. The first rumblings of discriminatory lawmaking coincided with the arrival of Christianity some time around the 6th century but at that stage “the law was meant to bark rather than bite.”
As is often the case with historical records of a certain time, we are obliged to see London’s queer history through the prism of various ruling monarchs, there being no record of more ordinary lives. We learn about Edward II’s gay affair with Piers Gaveston which ended with the beheading of the latter by jealous courtiers. We read that Henry VIII used accusations of sodomy to justify the seizure of wealth from Catholic monasteries in the 1530s, but also hear of the widespread contemporaneous practice of marriage between males (“wedded brethren”) and joint burials. Later, James I ruled over a notoriously queer court and died caressing the head of his favourite, the Duke of Buckingham (“Christ had his John, and I have my George”). In the London of Elizabeth I “queerness was no great sin” and Ackroyd suggests that, proportionally speaking, there were as many gay bars then as now.
It becomes clear that public attitudes to same-sex attraction and interaction were historically neutral but changed over time depending on the monarch, their courtiers and a certain trickle-down effect. That said, this is my own inference as Ackroyd’s own analyses come at random intervals of several chapters: he prefers to present us with details of court cases and snippets from literary texts without drawing too many explicit conclusions. This is OK for earlier chapters but becomes an overwhelming barrage of anecdotes in and around the mid-17th century with the exponential increase in written sources. Ackroyd might have parsed the material a little more to give a more pleasing through-line employment of events.
This material is nonetheless compelling, with standout chapters on queerness in the Restoration theatre scene and the trials of Oscar Wilde. Ackroyd tells us that there was a male brothel on the grounds of what is now Buckingham Palace and that St. Paul’s Cathedral was once a cruising hotspot. We learn of the great popularity of dildos in 17th century monasteries: “everyone, from the abbess down to the last professed, handled them oftener than their beads”. We also learn plenty about the darker side of queer existence: rape, blackmail, entrapment, exile, the pillory, disease, the death penalty and so on.
All in all this is a very worthy book that charts queer experience onto the map of London from which it has been omitted for so many centuries. Historians like Donal Fallon of the Come Here To Me blog have made great strides in uncovering similar stories in our own fair city.
The queers have always been here and books like this help to solidify our place in the architecture of the city space. In the words of Oscar Wilde, “To regret one’s own experiences is to arrest one’s own development. To deny one’s own experiences is to put a lie onto the lips of one’s own life. It is no less than a denial of the soul.”
Words: Sam Ford
