The Book Guy

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

Asweltering August day in London in the mid-1990s. I stop with my parents at a shop on the Charring Cross Road to pick up some water. Beside the shop is a bar called 79CXR, the outside of which is thronged with men in cropped white t-shirts. We are only there for 45 seconds max but, to me, it feels like a lifetime. 79CXR is long gone now, but I brought a piece of London home with me that summer, and I clung to it.

I’m proud to have a gay London story that can sit among the many millions in Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day. More concise and personal than his previous works, it’s a timely look back, given that 2017 marks the 50th anniversary of the Wolfenden Report.

The book starts back in Celtic and Roman times and then moves forward at breakneck speed through the Middle Ages, via the Great Fire of London, the Victorian era, to the throbbing modern-day metropolis so many of us now know and love.

The stories that Ackroyd unearths are truly fascinating: gay royals, illicit same-sex marriages, and countless banishments and exiles abroad. Like almost anything to do with the English, class is never far from the surface. Aristocrats caught in compromising positions manage to escape, while the working classes find themselves humiliated and beaten to a pulp in pillories; the last two men to hang for buggery in 1835 were both poor and married.

Religion (what else?) is largely responsible for the hatred and violence towards gay men and women from the 12th century onwards, and the all-consuming spectre of shame gradually begins to cast a shadow over those who sought to live their lives in same-sex relationships. It’s startling that there was an acknowledgment of gay people from as far back as the 1500s, and yet it is only recently that Western Europe and London itself have openly accepted its gay citizens.

If I had one complaint, it’s that the atmospheric stink and crush and bedlam of London doesn’t fly offthe pages as it should, but that’s a small grumble in what is otherwise an essential slice of gay history.

If you like this, you might also like…

Fanny and Stella: The Young Men Who Shocked Victorian England

by Neil McKenna (Faber & Faber)

A famous case referenced in Ackroyd’s book, I recommend seeking out Neil McKenna’s fantastic true-life tale of Miss Fanny Park and Miss Stella Boulton, two extraordinary women who were the subject of a sensational trial in the 1870s. Extraordinary insofar as they weren’t actually women, but young cross-dressers who took on the establishment and miraculously won. Having given up their day jobs, they formed a popular theatrical double act that toured around some of London’s most notorious cabaret venues.

Good As You : From Prejudice to Pride – 30 Years of Gay Britain

by Paul Flynn (Ebury Press)

Journalist Paul Flynn’s Good As You is roughly 100 pages longer than Peter Ackroyd’s book, but deals with just 30 years of recent British gay history. The book opens in 1984 with the release of Bronski Beat’s seminal anthem ‘Smalltown Boy’, and travels via the AIDS crisis, Section 28, to the advent of civil marriage in 2014. If you’re looking for an in-depth look at a burgeoning gay world through a distinctly popular culture prism, then I can’t recommend this highly enough.