HistoryExtra Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast 2026-10-16T10:31:04.000Z https://www.historyextra.com/topic/lgbtq-history/feed/atom Jonny Wilkes <![CDATA[Is Madfabulous based on a true story? The real history of ‘Dancing Marquess’ Henry Cyril Paget]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/edwardian/is-madfabulous-based-on-a-true-story-the-real-history-of-dancing-marquess-henry-cyril-paget/ 2026-10-16T10:31:04.000Z 2026-10-16T10:30:30.000Z To call Henry Cyril Paget, fifth Marquess of Anglesey, an eccentric would be an understatement. A flamboyant, scandalous hedonist with a lust for big spending and showmanship might be more accurate.

Although an embarrassment to the Edwardian era, albeit an endlessly compelling one featured heavily in the press, his legacy is now under re-evaluation. His lifestyle, his exuberant personality and his possible homosexuality have seen the so-called ‘Dancing Marquess’ compared to the likes of Freddie Mercury and David Bowie.

Who was Henry Cyril Paget?

Born in 1875, Paget seemed destined for scandal from the beginning as rumours spread that his father may not have been the fourth marquess at all, but a French actor. After his mother died when he was a toddler, he spent his early years being raised by relatives in Paris before, at the age of eight, being summoned to the family estate of Plas Newydd in Anglesey.

There, he could have an appropriate upbringing for a nobleman’s son, including an education at Eton and a stint in the military. His family had a revered military heritage: the first marquess had been with the Duke of Wellington at the battle of Waterloo, being hit with a cannonball and famously remarking in true British stoicism, “By God, sir, I’ve lost my leg!”

The ‘appropriateness’ of Paget’s life ended in 1898, however, upon the death of the fourth marquess. At the aged of 23, he inherited the title along with estates in Anglesey, Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Dorset, and a fortune sufficient to make him a multi-millionaire today.

What did Paget spend his money on?

In just five years, Paget had blown through his entire fortune and wracked up debts sufficient to make him the opposite of a multi-millionaire today. The ultimate spendthrift, he bought the most expensive clothes and jewellery in bulk – once emptying the whole front window display of a Parisian jewellers in a single spree – hosted lavish parties and coveted any outrageous or sparkly thing he saw.

He had underwear woven with gold thread and a collection of cars that he had converted so that the fumes came out as rose-scented perfume.

It was in his love of theatre, however, that Paget truly indulged every single desire. Having renamed his estate as Anglesey Castle, he replaced the chapel with a 150-seat theatre, dubbed the Gaiety, and hired professional troupes to put on shows for guests and locals, free of charge.

How did he become known as the ‘Dancing Marquess’?

Of course, Paget always put himself in the lead of his plays, in which he wore jewel-encrusted costumes and often women’s dresses. Every performance, he would do his “butterfly dance”, moving his body in sinuous motions while waving silk robes as wings. The newspapers soon called him ‘the Dancing Marquess’.

He even took his productions on tours across Britain and Europe, and never shied away from causing a stir. He staged Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband only a few years after the famed Irish playwright had been convicted of ‘gross indecency’ for his homosexuality.

Was Henry Cyril Paget homosexual?

Over the years there have been many questions about Paget’s sexuality. He had married his cousin, Lillian Chetwynd, the same year that he inherited his title, but the relationship ended after a couple of years with an annulment having never been consummated. Supposedly, Paget was most excited at seeing his wife’s naked form only when covered in jewels.

There is no evidence, though, that he ever had a same-sex relationship or lover. As performance historian Viv Gardner put it, he may have been a “textbook narcissist” instead: “The only person he could love and make love to was himself.”

Regardless, many still believe that Paget should be celebrated as a LGBT+ icon.

What happened when the money ran out?

By 1904, the well had run dry and tens of thousands of Paget’s belongings had to be sold off to pay his colossal debts. The resulting set of auctions, known as the Great Anglesey Sales, lasted 40 days.

Having absconded to France – in possession of a still-generous pension – Paget died in Monte Carlo on 14 March 1905, aged 29, from complications of tuberculosis.

“His example will remain one of the strongest arguments against our hereditary system that the most ardent revolutionist would wish for,” read one newspaper. Another described his as a “wasted life”.

His family attempted to expunge all memory of the fifth marquess. As he had no heir, the title went to his cousin, who set about turning the Gaiety Theatre back into a chapel and renaming the estate as Plas Newydd. Paget’s diaries were destroyed, leaving much of his character up to speculation.

In recent years, Paget has inspired a musical, How to Win Against History, and the 2026 film Madfabulous.

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[This sex poem sparked outrage in 1970s Britain – but who triumphed in the courtroom?]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/this-sex-poem-sparked-outrage-in-1970s-britain-but-who-triumphed-in-the-courtroom/ 2026-06-15T10:34:56.000Z 2026-06-12T16:30:08.000Z Though debates relating to sexuality, gender identity and the limits of tolerance continue to rage, contemporary Britain seems a broadly accepting place. In historical terms, LGBTQ people are legally safer and freer in the UK than ever before. For most of the period from 1533, when the first civil sodomy law was passed, until the second half of the 20th century, same-sex acts between men were illegal in England. The last men executed for sodomy were hanged in 1835. And even in the mid-1950s, more than 1,000 were being imprisoned for homosexual acts each year.

By the 1970s, homosexuality was gradually becoming accepted within British society. The tide seemed to be turning with the 1957 Wolfenden Report (officially entitled the Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution), paving the way for the legalisation of homosexuality in 1967.

That landmark moment was far from the end of the fight for equality, however. And this year marks the 50th anniversary of a court case that severely challenged society’s acceptance of homosexuality – as well as testing legal definitions of blasphemy.

On 3 June 1976, Gay News published a poem by James Kirkup entitled The Love That Dares to Speak Its Name (a nod to “the love that dare not speak its name”, a line in the poem Two Loves written in 1892 by Lord Alfred Douglas, a lover of Oscar Wilde). This fortnightly newspaper, edited by Denis Lemon, had been founded four years earlier as a collaboration between former members of the Gay Liberation Front and members of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality to campaign for gay rights. It also explored gay culture of the past as well as more contemporary art, hence the decision to publish Kirkup’s poem.

Written in the voice of the centurion present at Christ’s crucifixion, the poem portrays a promiscuous Jesus who had sexual relations with John the Baptist, his disciples and other men including Pontius Pilate. It culminates with a quite graphic description of the centurion performing sex acts with Jesus’s broken body after it was taken down from the cross. The verse was illustrated by a picture of the crucified Christ, his genitalia clearly evident. It’s worth noting that Kirkup was by then an established and respected poet, travel writer, novelist and playwright, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1962 – not just a provocateur. Yet even today his verse still has the power to shock.

• Read more | Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain

Cross the line

But what was Kirkup’s intention and that of those who published his poem? Did they aim to create offence or to suggest the possibility of Christ’s offer of salvation to all people? Was the poem a niche item for a niche audience? There is no doubt that it was a serious piece of work. It did not make light of Christianity, nor did it scoff at religious ideas or doctrines, nor undermine the beliefs of others. This issue of intention proved crucial to the progress and outcome of the ensuing court case.

Soon after the poem’s publication, Mary Whitehouse – for more than two decades, Britain’s leading campaigner against what she saw as Britain’s moral decline – became aware of the verse. For many years it was believed that the relevant copy of Gay News had been sent to her by “a concerned probation officer”. Later anecdotal evidence suggests that it may have been posted to her by an atheist seeking to provoke her.

Whitehouse was a logical choice of recipient. A social conservative and founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, she had long led campaigns against what she saw as the creeping tide of permissiveness engulfing the media. Those who had attracted her attention included a Danish filmmaker, Jens Jørgen Thorsen, who tried unsuccessfully to enter Britain at a time when he was trying to get a film entitled The Sex Life of Christ into production. Even Doctor Who, “teatime brutality for tots”, attracted her ire. Whitehouse also spoke out against homosexuality, claiming to dislike it but not to have anything personal against gay people.

Seeing the poem as an affront both to her own Christian faith and that of others, Whitehouse wondered whether legal action could be taken. This sent lawyers scurrying to antique texts on blasphemy law, where they found the relevant 1697/98 statute had been repealed in 1967, but that the common law offence of blasphemous libel remained in place. Lawyers would also have learnt that the last person prosecuted for blasphemy was socialist campaigner John William Gott, who in 1921 had been sentenced to nine months of imprisonment with hard labour for publishing satirical attacks on Christianity.

Scrutinising the law also revealed that a key case in 1883, against George William Foote, found that criticising Christianity was not in itself illegal. Instead, the test of blasphemy was the manner in which this was done. If an individual felt threatened or reacted strongly, that would be the essence of a crime, indicating an intention to offend.

Lawyers eventually decided that Gay News had a case to answer, and Whitehouse launched a private prosecution for blasphemous libel. But what did the accusation of blasphemy mean exactly? Was the poem blasphemous because it was unscriptural? The events described were fictitious, invented many centuries after the gospels, and did not satirise the crucifixion nor the salvation that Christ appeared to promise.

Given wider societal mores of the time, it’s likely that the factor found offensive by some was the association of Christ with homosexuality. That conclusion seems supported by the defence’s eventual attempt to show that the poem’s sentiments were in keeping with the contemporary world’s imaginings of religion and sexuality.

Blasphemy through the ages

British blasphemy laws have been updated and contested many times over the past six centuries

1401: De Heretico Comburendo, an act of parliament intended to suppress heresy in England, is passed under Henry IV 1676: As judge in a blasphemy case, Sir Matthew Hale decides that religion is “part and parcel” of the law 1697: Student Thomas Aikenhead, who had called theology “nonsense” and denied the Trinity during debates, is executed in Edinburgh – the last individual hanged for the crime of blasphemy in Britain 1697/98: Modern blasphemy statute is enacted, making it an offence to deny the Holy Trinity, for example 1819: Richard Carlile is convicted of blasphemy and seditious libel after he published Thomas Paine’s (banned) The Age of Reason and eyewitness accounts of the Peterloo Massacre 1857: Thomas Pooley, likely suffering with mental illness, is prosecuted and imprisoned for blasphemy, having daubed profane and libellous words in places around his neighbourhood 1883: George William Foote is convicted of publishing blasphemy – including a comic-strip ‘Life of Christ’ – in his secular humanist journal The Freethinker

1921: Atheist and socialist John William Gott (pictured) becomes the last person imprisoned for blasphemy in Britain, having published satirical attacks on Christianity 1967: The 1697 blasphemy statute is repealed 1976–79: Denis Lemon and Gay News are tried for blasphemous libel 2008: All remaining blasphemy laws in England and Wales are abolished

Moral conflict

Whatever the nuances of different arguments, it seemed as if liberal, progressive Britain was facing off against conservative forces that wanted retrenchment and the protection of traditional morality. The case came to court around the same time as the silver jubilee, the summer when punk broke and the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’ was high in the charts.

John Mortimer, probably the leading radical lawyer of the day, led the defence. Mortimer had been defence counsel in the 1971 obscenity trial of the editors of counterculture magazine Oz, following its publication of a composite image of a highly sexualised Rupert Bear. He was also famous for his fictional creation Rumpole of the Bailey, a lugubrious defence barrister later played by Leo McKern in a long-running ITV series. Alongside Mortimer was a younger barrister, Geoffrey Robertson, subsequently a high-profile human rights lawyer, but who was then just making his mark on the legal profession.

The duo aimed to establish that Gay News was a legitimate and responsible publication whose output was genuinely in the public interest. They planned to bring in a range of expert and heavyweight witness testimony to prove this assertion, and to state that Gay News was a central part of modern culture.

The defence argued that Whitehouse and her team were defending a passing morality, now firmly out of step with the modern world. In essence, they framed the case as a belated rerun of the Lady Chatterley’s Lover obscenity trial of 1960, when the sexual acts described and swear words uttered in the text led the prosecutor to ask – to the amusement of suburban Britain – whether one’s wife or servant should be allowed to read DH Lawrence’s novel.

As in the Chatterley case, the Gay News defence team poured effort into establishing the credentials of both author and publication, hoping that the last vestiges of censorship would collapse. The moralists would, they hoped, appear silly and out of step with the ‘spirit of the age’. All Britons had earned the right to escape a stuffy, repressive past. With hindsight, it could be argued that painting the case as an act of attempted censorship was a mistake, as was liberal overconfidence in the sensible rationality of the contemporary British mind.

Evangelical Christian barrister John Smyth led the case for the prosecution and acted as a mouthpiece for the argument that permissive liberalism had gone too far. As a result, society was being damaged by immorality. If texts such as the Kirkup poem were shared with the populace, Britons would be led towards poor choices and moral danger. Ultimately, this would sweep away Christian, moral England and individuals might lose the possibility of salvation. Such ideas echoed previous complaints about the danger of blasphemy stretching back to the 1920s. These Anglocentric views rested on an argument that Christianity had preserved Britain from the turmoil and revolutions that had engulfed swathes of Europe in the preceding century.

The case saw these opposing viewpoints locking horns in what could be characterised as a struggle between the literary and the literal. The defence argued that free expression should be allowed to the artist, whose responsibility was to the imagination. The prosecution suggested the meaning of language and expressions was literal, and texts could thus be an unacceptable challenge to beliefs cherished by individuals and whole societies.

Unfair fight

In the event, the case as it played out in court proved to be far from a fair fight. From the outset, judge Alan King-Hamilton seemed visibly to favour the prosecution. When the trial commenced, he departed from the usual practice of allowing both defence and prosecution to address the jury. This enabled the prosecution case to be heard in one go, without the break or balance of counterargument.

When the defence was eventually allowed to speak, King-Hamilton’s judgment also severely damaged its argument. To prove the seriousness and acceptability of Gay News, the defence produced famous witnesses in the shape of widely respected journalist and broadcaster Bernard Levin and Margaret Drabble, a similarly renowned author. But both were allowed to speak only as character witnesses rather than to testify about the poem’s literary merit. He also refused leave to consider theological arguments that the figure of Christ could now be interpreted in different ways. Instead, he suggested that, because the jury had all sworn on the New Testament, they were unlikely to be sympathetic to such arguments.

In his summing up, King-Hamilton claimed the poem was simply blasphemous “on its face”. Such a judgment ignored all potential arguments about intention and audience, even going against previous precedents back to the 19th century. In essence, he suggested that, because the case had come to court, the jury should treat the matter such that the literal trumped the literary.

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Denis Lemon and Gay News were found guilty of blasphemous libel. Gay News Ltd was fined £1,000, while Lemon was fined £500 and sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment (suspended). It had been touch and go, said the judge, whether he would send Lemon to jail. Gay News Ltd and Lemon were ordered to pay Mary Whitehouse’s legal costs of £7,763.

Gay News Ltd and Lemon appealed against this conviction and sentence. On 17 March 1978, the Court of Appeal quashed Lemon’s suspended prison sentence. However, it upheld the conviction on the basis that the law of blasphemy had been developed before mens rea (literally, a guilty mind – the idea that the mental state or intention of a defendant should be considered in assessing their guilt) became an essential element of most crimes. In other words, the fact that printing the poem wasn’t intended as a criminal act of blasphemous libel provided no defence.

Gay News readers voted by a majority of 20 to one in favour of appealing to the House of Lords. The law lords delivered their judgment on 21 February 1979. At issue was whether or not the offence of blasphemous libel required specific intent of committing such a blasphemy. By a majority of three to two, the lords concluded that intention was not required – proving publication was all the law had to do.

Wider consequences

This confirmation of the conviction struck many among the gay community as a massive setback. Moreover, the case had a passing but nonetheless chilling effect on campaigns to secure gay rights. While Gay News didn’t suffer financially because its legal costs were covered by a fighting fund, its staff seemed to suffer a crisis of confidence. Gay culture suffered, too. A season of Gay Cinema was cancelled by the National Film Theatre whose director, Brian Baxter, considered it prudent “in the present circumstances”.

Nevertheless, there were push-backs against the judgment, too. The Tom Robinson Band’s 1978 song ‘Glad to be Gay’ referenced the hypocrisy of the Gay News prosecution being pursued at a time when The Sun daily published photographs of topless girls on page 3, and Playboy was routinely stocked in newsagents.

Though the case was seen as a blow to the quest for recognition and equality for gay people, subsequent human rights legislation has harmonised the age of consent for gay and heterosexual acts. Similarly, despite setbacks along the way such as the controversial Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988 – which banned local authorities from “promoting” homosexuality – sexuality itself has become a protected category within the law, providing firm legal protection against discrimination and hate crimes. Many Christians have embraced the broadly defined Gay Christian movement, and worked hard to promote inclusiveness within churches. Meanwhile, those campaigning for trans rights have, despite recent controversies, won notable victories.

• Read more | Are some LGBTQ histories being overlooked?

The prosecution and its arguments have fared less well in the intervening decades. In his autobiography, Alan King-Hamilton expressed regret about giving Denis Lemon a suspended sentence, leaving the impression that the conservative response to Gay News had been an overreaction.

A much darker shadow hangs over the prosecution case, particularly John Smyth’s insistence that the poem was vile and glorified “repulsive” homosexual sexual acts. Smyth himself was later unmasked as a decades-long serial emotional, physical and sexual abuser of adolescent boys at his evangelical camps to which victims were lured. That scandal, and the cover-up around it, rocked the Church of England, leading to the resignation of the archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, in late 2024.

While Mary Whitehouse would have been appalled to discover Smyth’s activities, her own star waned somewhat after the Gay News case, which was arguably her last major triumph. In truth, her style of moralism and crusading was already falling out of fashion. It’s telling that, as early as 1979, while some councils banned screenings, Monty Python’s Biblical satire Life of Brian was the UK’s fourth-highest grossing film. More generally, in the years since the Gay News case, campaigning against media deemed to have ‘gone too far’ has ceased to use the language of morality and corruption. Instead, it has reached for the more rational and accessible language of ‘safety’, aiming to minimise harm for the vulnerable. Despite the failure of Mortimer’s defence, the literary has, by and large, won out against the literal.

David Nash is senior research fellow in history at Jesus College, University of Oxford

This article was first published in the June 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> Charlotte Vosper <![CDATA["It wasn't very open about its queer connections": the hidden history of the National Trust]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/it-wasnt-very-open-about-its-queer-connections-the-hidden-history-of-the-national-trust/ 2026-08-19T11:43:43.000Z 2026-03-06T15:30:11.000Z Charlotte Vosper: In A Queer Inheritance, you explore histories of sexual difference connected to the National Trust. What drew you to those historical figures and their stories?

Michael Hall: That goes back a long way. For quite a few years I worked for Country Life magazine, and in that role I wrote articles about country houses. I actually began with one of those I mention in my book: Packwood House in Warwickshire. It was acquired in 1904 by an industrialist for his son, Graham Baron Ash, who spent years renovating and transforming the property. It struck me that he never got married – and the idea that a bachelor might do up a house and then give it to the National Trust to look after seemed quite intriguing. I didn’t really spot that it was part of a pattern until I wrote a similar article on Anglesey Abbey. That’s when I realised that there was a story about the National Trust that hadn’t really been told before. It’s important to mention that I’ve never worked for the Trust, and A Queer Inheritance isn’t an official National Trust book in any way. I don’t speak on the Trust’s behalf – and indeed they may very well disagree with a lot of what I say.

The National Trust was founded in 1895, when homosexual acts of ‘gross indecency’ were still illegal in Britain – yet in your book you suggest that the Trust had queer connections from its very beginnings. Can you expand on this?

That’s actually quite a complicated question. The origins of the National Trust were rooted in an anxiety about London’s urban poor and how they could be morally improved. Its founders thought that if the urban poor could be given access to architectural and natural beauty, this would do away with what they saw as their worrying vices – of which homosexuality was a rather prominent example. Yet several people on the Trust’s original council and executive committee were in fact queer. They included the 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was worried that he might be named in the Oscar Wilde trials of 1895, and Octavia Hill, who had a long and loving relationship with Harriot Yorke.

Can you tell us about some queer landowners connected to the Trust’s estates?

William John Bankes, who inherited the great estate of Kingston Lacy in Dorset, had to go into exile in 1841 after he was caught having sex with a guardsman in London’s Green Park. He then redecorated and remodelled the house remotely, while living in Venice. It’s a very interesting story about a gay man shaping a house even when away from home.

In the book I also talk about Clumber Park, site of a lost house that was demolished in 1938. Several generations of the Dukes of Newcastle were based there. One of the 5th Duke’s sons, Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, enjoyed relationships with a famous pair of young Victorian men who cross-dressed as Fanny and Stella; later, the 7th Duke, ‘Linny’, was friends with Oscar Wilde.

I should emphasise that the book is not primarily about country houses. The National Trust manages a wide range of buildings, one of which is Clouds Hill, a little cottage in Dorset that was home to TE Lawrence (of Arabia). His sexuality has been hugely debated, and I draw my own conclusions about this in the book.

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A site that’s much less controversial is Smallhythe Place in Kent, home of the great 19th and early 20th-century actress Ellen Terry. Her daughter, Edith Craig, was a theatre director of considerable eminence who lived next to that early 16th-century house with two close lesbian friends. They welcomed lots of their likeminded friends there, so you can discover a lot of lesbian history in the 20th century just by visiting Smallhythe.

How do we know that these people were queer? Would the historical figures you discuss have understood themselves in that way?

Not particularly as queer, I don’t think. But as a historian, you have to look at the story and ask: how can I best interpret this? I think the advantage of the term ‘queer’ is that it avoids attaching very precise labels to people.

The word itself goes back to the 16th century, when it just meant odd or unusual. Around the end of the 19th century, though, ‘queer’ was becoming a term of abuse, meaning homosexual. But by the 1980s, ‘queer’ was very much taken back by gay activists, particularly during the Aids crisis, as a way of reclaiming their identity. Today, ‘queer’ is the term preferred by most historians.

One of the issues historians face is how to talk about people who didn’t have access to the terms we would use now, such as ‘gay’ or ‘bisexual’. I think ‘queer’ is quite useful because a modern audience knows what that means, but it’s also not imposing something on the past. I also think that the fact it’s clearly anachronistic is actually rather helpful, because it emphasises the difference between the past and the present.

There is an amazing amount of argument about these terms, and you can debate these things forever, but as a historian you just have to get on and do the history. And when you do, there’s a lot of anxiety about finding evidence that people were gay – but I think the response must often be, well, what’s your evidence that they were heterosexual?

How have National Trust estates been influenced by the queer people who lived in them or were connected to them?

I wanted to write about places that queer people had shaped in some way – by building them, decorating them, furnishing them or making them part of their life history. This isn’t always obvious. Today, lesbians visit Knole, a country house in Kent, because our contemporary perception of the building is shaped by our knowledge of the relationship between Vita Sackville-West, who lived there, and Virginia Woolf. Yet there’s almost no evidence of Vita’s influence that you can see on the property, other than the original manuscript of Woolf’s Orlando, which she inspired.

Returning to TE Lawrence’s Dorset cottage, Clouds Hill, there are just two rooms upstairs, one of which he used as a guest bedroom. In the 1930s, he curiously lined that room with metal foil – a rather art deco look. I became intrigued by the fact that Siegfried Sassoon, a gay writer who was a friend of Lawrence, visited Clouds Hill with his lover, Stephen Tennant. Now, one of the best-known photographs of Stephen (shown above), by Cecil Beaton, shows him in his own bedroom – which he had lined with silver paper. I thought it was an interesting queer link which, as far as I’m aware, hasn’t been made before. It says something about Lawrence’s own sense of identity in terms of sexual orientation, and also about networks. Early on in my research, I began to realise that many of these houses and people linked up.

A lot of the queer people associated with the Trust’s properties were connected, and many came from a privileged background. Is there a relationship here between class and queerness?

Yes, definitely – though I don’t write only about elite people in the book. The 5th Marquess of Anglesey, Henry Paget, who lived at the family seat of Plas Newydd on that island, is a good example of such privilege. On the death of his father in 1898 he inherited a huge fortune, which funded his love of dressing up. He liked to put on theatrical productions and go to fancy-dress parties in a very gender-bending way. This got him into the newspapers, and he was laughed at and ridiculed relentlessly. Eventually, he went bankrupt.

In a sense, Paget was able to dress up and perform because he was very, very rich. But the downside of his wealth was that he attracted an enormous amount of public curiosity. Endless stories about him appeared in the press. He wouldn’t have suffered such a blow to his reputation if he had been an obscure commoner. Clearly, although privilege could facilitate queer experiences, it could also attract much unwanted attention and expose scandal.

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When exploring past queer experiences, we are often dealing with the feelings and emotions of historical figures. What sources did you use to explore these?

Sources pose a massive question for any historian, but queer topics have always been particularly hedged with problems. Prior to 1967, all homosexual acts between men were illegal in England and Wales [even then, they were permitted only between two consenting adults over the age of 21], and this creates obvious issues with the sources from before that period. But what struck me was that if you go back to the original sources – the contemporary biographies and letter compilations of these late 19th and early 20th-century figures – it seems that many people probably knew what was going on. The Victorians weren’t fools. You just have to tune in when reading the sources, and you’ll learn a lot.

The National Trust has faced some backlash for trying to reclaim minority history more widely. How has its attitude towards queer people evolved?

Traditionally, the Trust wasn’t very open about its queer connections – but then nobody was terribly open about these issues for many decades. Homophobia played a role in the modernisation of the National Trust. From the 1950s, it began trying to run its houses on a more professional basis, appointing curators. There was a bit of a standoff between the land agents – the traditional men in tweeds who dealt with forestry and estates – and the curators, who dealt with hanging the pictures and arranging the furniture.

This division reflected an essential binary within the Trust: whether it should be concerned primarily with places of historic interest or of natural beauty.

One of the ways that people who thought the National Trust wasn’t paying enough attention to nature directed criticism against the curators was through homophobia. This made life rather tricky for any gay men within the organisation, and by the 1960s and 70s the Trust attracted considerable criticism, accused of being run by queer aristocratic men. To be fair to the critics, there was considerable truth in that.

Beyond its employees, the Trust remained coy about queer connections to the houses it acquired. For example – and it’s extraordinary to say now – it wasn’t until 2008 that any official publication by the National Trust about Sissinghurst, Vita Sackville-West’s later home, also in Kent, mentioned her same-sex relationships.

So it’s only pretty recently that the organisation has been open about this kind of history. In 2017, it made a big effort to catch up and tell these stories, and I think generally there was a feeling that this was going in the right direction. It did, however, bring up an interesting dilemma. Objections were raised by relatives and friends of some of the people who were being described as queer, criticising the National Trust for ‘outing’ them.

• Read more | From the ancient world to the 1969 Stonewall Riots: a brief guide to LGBT+ history

I don’t think that it makes any sense to talk about historical figures in terms of ‘outing’ – because, really, if you object to somebody in the past being described as queer, or raising the question about whether or not they were what we would now call gay, that might imply that you find homosexuality shameful.

It’s interesting that the controversy around ‘outing’ these historical figures hasn’t applied so much to queer women. I don’t think people find women’s sexuality as threatening as they find men’s sexuality. And it’s most often men who get upset about other men being described as gay. Look at Lawrence of Arabia: dozens of biographies have been written about him, almost all by men and almost all hostile to the idea that he was gay.

What impact do you hope A Queer Inheritance will have?

I hope that people will realise that queer history is a very rich subject, and that there’s a huge amount more that can be said about the queer lives connected to the National Trust.

Everyone I’ve spoken to about my book says: “Oh, but you haven’t said anything about X.” So, there’s lots more to explore, and different approaches that could be taken. A woman or a young person would have written a completely different book, I think.

This article was first published in the February 2026 issue of HistoryExtra Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[Aids: the epidemic that changed Britain]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/aids-hiv-epidemic-changed-britain-how/ 2025-12-05T14:38:54.000Z 2025-12-05T13:47:11.000Z In the early 1980s, reports of a strange new disease began emerging from the United States. It was picked up in the British gay press – Gay News ran a story in November 1981 under the headline “Gay cancer or mass media scare?” – but relatively few people noticed. Even among those who did, confusion and doubt reigned: weren’t these tales of a “gay cancer” just fear-mongering, a backlash against the gains of the fight for gay liberation in the 1970s? How could a disease target gay men, anyway?

Such suspicions were not without good reason. The medical profession had a difficult history with people who didn’t conform to heterosexual norms: less than 10 years earlier, homosexuality had still been categorised by the internationally influential American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder. And when it came to Aids, the lack of knowledge about its cause or mode of transmission led to wild speculation. One theory linked Aids to the use of “poppers”, a recreational drug popular on the gay scene; another proposed that Aids was the end point of too many sexually transmitted infections.

The picture grew still more complex as the symptoms associated with this new illness were also identified both among injecting drug users and people with the blood-clotting disorder haemophilia, including women and children. By July 1983, there had been 14 reported cases of Aids in Britain, all among men. Most were gay, including one man who also injected drugs, but the group included another who had been receiving treatment for haemophilia in the form of blood products. Just two months later, the number had risen to 24, and included a woman and a second man with haemophilia.

As numbers of diagnoses in the United Kingdom started to rise sharply, the deaths began. Many people died very soon after diagnosis, as an array of opportunistic infections took advantage of their weakened immune systems. Terrence Higgins died in July 1982, one of the first deaths in the UK attributed to Aids. His partner, Rupert Whitaker, recalled asking the doctors whether Higgins’ death could have been caused by the strange “American disease”, but was dismissed out of hand: he was not family, so they couldn’t tell him anything. It wasn’t until a few years later that he found out they expected him to die soon, too.

In the aftermath of Higgins’ death, his friends joined with Whitaker to set up a trust in his name to provide information and education in this information vacuum – and to provide support and services for people affected by Aids. In those frightening early years, charities such as the Terrence Higgins Trust led the charge. Men and women who had begun to see the impact of this disease first-hand devoted themselves to taking action. As well as fundraising, they gathered and shared the latest information, often looking abroad for insights from countries with more advanced epidemics. Volunteers and activists also campaigned for accurate media coverage and government attention, and ran phone lines and community centres to provide counselling and advice.

Dread of infection

Given the uncertain and rapidly changing state of knowledge about Aids, it was often difficult to know what advice to offer. If this really was a sexually transmitted disease, then perhaps abstinence was the answer – but with a newly self-confident gay community and a flourishing scene in many of Britain’s cities, this hardly seemed realistic. There was an idea that condoms might reduce the risks, but it was far from certain, and there were fears that condoms might give a false sense of security. Campaigners and volunteers struggled to decide on the best line to take.

Even so, given the paucity of medical knowledge, many of these volunteers were better informed than the average doctor or nurse. In fact, many people with Aids in the 1980s knew more about their condition than their own clinicians, and some clinicians were willing to listen and learn. The idea of patients as participants in or even consumers of healthcare, whose experiences and views should be valued by biomedicine, had been building since the 1950s and was given a huge boost by patient expertise and advocacy during the first decades of HIV and Aids.

With no known cause, no certainty over the mode of transmission, and all early signs indicating that Aids was invariably quickly fatal, the dread of infection was overwhelming. Nurses recalled being scared of their patients, caring for them in isolation while wearing two sets of gloves and gowns, using disposable cutlery and plates and burning bedsheets after use. “Nurses didn’t even touch a patient’s notes (which had ‘Infectious’ written at the top) without gloves,” one recalled. “It was just horrendous.”

Life and death on the margins

The virus causing Aids, now known as HIV, was identified in 1984. Soon thereafter a test for HIV antibodies – indicating exposure to the virus – was approved for use in the UK. The ability to test individuals, including those showing no symptoms, was transformative in terms of gathering data about the epidemic, but the results were alarming. Initial testing revealed that perhaps as many as three-quarters of people with haemophilia already had HIV, as did some of their sexual partners.

Haemophilia was commonly treated with products generated from blood donations from large numbers of people, and around 1,200 people in the UK with haemophilia were infected with HIV in the 1980s. For the press, they were the “innocent victims” of the virus.

That label naturally also served as a reminder that there were supposedly “guilty” ones, too, and fear quickly turned into hostility and discrimination. Those affected by Aids were mostly gay men, with drug users the second-largest group. These were already marginalised communities who could easily be blamed for their own misfortune, and Aids soon became deeply stigmatised: a marker of deviant living. Some of those with Aids were glad to be informed that their condition had finally led to a form of cancer, because at least cancer was something that you could tell people about without shame.

In Edinburgh, heroin use had become particularly prevalent in the early 1980s; testing carried out by one doctor, Roy Robertson, revealed that more than half of his patients were HIV positive. The scarcity of needles and syringes, which were often seized by police, meant that drug users shared and repeatedly reused their injecting equipment, and infection had been spreading rapidly.

Public health policy regarding drugs in Scotland underwent a dramatic shift in response, with attention turning to ways of minimising the harms of drug use instead of insisting on abstinence. It became a priority to reduce injecting drug use as much as possible, for example by prescribing methadone to those addicted to heroin, and for those who continued to inject, to provide sterile equipment. The anxiety surrounding HIV/Aids and its high profile made such radical policy changes possible.

The availability of a test for HIV brought its own problems, though. Many people were tested without their knowledge and permission, misinformed of the meaning of their test result, or not told at all. Eighteen-year-old John Campbell, who would later set up the Coalition of People Living with HIV and Aids and advise the government on HIV in prisons, had been arrested in 1986 for “male importuning” and was tested on arrival into prison. But the charges were dropped, he was released, and he had no idea that he had tested positive for another 10 months.

Fear and loathing

The profile of HIV/Aids increased in the second half of the 1980s. Many people in the UK had remained entirely or mostly oblivious to the unfolding disaster, but this soon changed. Although emerging research indicated that HIV could not be transmitted by casual contact, such as a handshake or a shared cup, a lot of the media coverage became increasingly hyperbolic. “I’d shoot my son if he had Aids, says vicar” ran one lurid headline in The Sun in October 1985. Such coverage often quoted the extreme views of people from all walks of life, from publicans seeking to ban people with Aids from their establishments, to the chief constable of Greater Manchester who said that people with Aids were “swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making”.

The fact that people with HIV or Aids might hold down jobs seemed particularly horrifying. Newspapers anxiously reported that people with HIV or Aids might work as airline cabin crews, bus drivers, teachers – or most worryingly of all, as doctors and dentists. Many people with, or suspected of having, HIV or Aids were fired: the Terrence Higgins Trust dealt with about 100 cases of employment discrimination each year.

This period has been characterised as one of “wartime emergency”, with mounting panic finally leading to government action. The Conservative government appointed a cabinet committee to tackle Aids in autumn 1986, and on 21 November there was an emergency debate in the House of Commons. Opinions diverged dramatically, between those favouring regulatory measures such as quarantines and compulsory testing, to those who preferred a more liberal approach, including the promotion or provision of condoms and guarantees of confidentiality for those testing positive.

Perhaps most memorable, in terms of government response to the crisis, was the nationwide health education campaign launched in January 1987. In the face of a significant lack of enthusiasm from then prime minister Margaret Thatcher, this included television spots, billboards and a leaflet for every household. Actor John Hurt lent his voice to the now-notorious television advert. Over footage of the word “Aids” being chiselled into a tombstone, he intoned: “If you ignore Aids, it could be the death of you. Don’t die of ignorance.”

This campaign has often been remembered as a success. It was a clear sign of action, and expensive too, costing around £20m. Polls afterwards suggested that viewers felt more confident of their understanding of Aids, and ultimately, the worst predictions for the epidemic in the UK did not materialise. However, the campaign also relied heavily upon generalised impressions of death, disaster and doom, doing little to dispel rumours or to educate and help those already affected or most at risk. Artist and activist Leigh Neal received her diagnosis just as these adverts aired; she remembered their clear message that Aids meant death, and the environment of fear and hostility that this created towards her – including bricks thrown through her window.

For those who were not white gay men, this lack of information and support could be particularly acute. The later 1980s saw the creation of more specialist advocacy and support groups to fill these gaps. One of the founders of Positively Women, a group set up in 1987 by and for women with HIV, remembered feeling “doubly isolated” in most HIV/Aids support groups, as a woman and a former drug user. Mainliners, a support group run by and for HIV-positive drug users, was founded in the same year.

So, too, was the Broderip Ward at Middlesex Hospital in London: a specialist ward for those with HIV and Aids. It was opened by Princess Diana, who took pains to shake hands multiple times with patients at the ward before the cameras, without wearing gloves. Garnering huge press coverage, many recalled this as a vital moment, helping to dispel some of the myths swirling around Aids at the time.

This ward and others like it represented greater resources and medical expertise dedicated to HIV and Aids, but also many more people suffering and dying. Specialist wards could provide a sense of community and even fun, in dark times. HIV nurse Barbara von Barsewich described one patient, “a tall, Italian, glamorous man who came out of a side room [in the ward] at night-time in a blue ball gown and six-inch heels... he swung around and just looked so gorgeous. And then he started coughing up bits of his lung... It was just so hard. It was so painful. You knew exactly what was happening.”

Love and loss

For the most severely affected communities, the extent of the loss in the late 1980s and early 1990s was overwhelming. Julian Hows recalled the deaths of four lovers over these years. One was passionate about cars and was eventually driven to hospital by Hows and friends in a Mercedes-Benz, borrowed for the occasion. As they arrived at the hospital and opened the car door, Hows remembered: “A really nice nurse said, ‘You realise your friend has gone.’” He had died on the journey.

Gay men and their friends experienced years of countless funerals, with social circles of young people all but obliterated. At many of these funerals, it remained taboo to mention Aids. Many families felt, as writer and activist Simon Watney put it, “condemned to silence, to euphemism”.

In the mass media and popular discourse, Aids stubbornly remained something that happened to “other people”. Generalised fears became more deeply racialised, as news emerged of the epidemic’s disastrous spread and possible origins in Africa. Continuing the tradition of self-help and community organising among those affected by HIV and Aids, volunteers set up the Black HIV/Aids Network in 1989 and began to deliver literature, films and services specifically addressing black and Asian people in the UK.

Towards the end of the 1980s, activism surrounding Aids reached a high point. Members of the newly formed London branch of ACT-UP – the Aids Coalition to Unleash Power – organised a series of eye-catching protests designed to attract headlines. Targets included Australia House, in response to new laws requiring immigrants to take an HIV test, and Pentonville Prison, where helium-filled condoms were released to carry leaflets about Aids over prison walls.

• Read more: From Sappho to It’s a Sin: 9 LGBT+ histories, chosen by experts

The London branch of ACT-UP soon disbanded, though, and in the 1990s Aids gradually disappeared from the headlines. The arrival of much more effective drug treatments from the mid-1990s onwards transformed HIV into a chronic but manageable condition. And, although there had previously been a great deal of interest in deploying insights from history to understand and contextualise responses to Aids, historical attention to the epidemic also waned.

HIV/Aids had transformed attitudes, practices and policies around sex and sexuality, drug addiction, activism and community-building, as well as hospital hygiene, clinical research and doctor-patient relationships. As the sense of urgency and, later, the memory of the epidemic began to fade, not all of these changes were sustained. Roy Robertson, still working in addiction studies in Scotland, reported that HIV had reappeared in a vulnerable population of injecting drug users in Glasgow in 2015, in a political and policy context that bore striking similarities to that of the early 1980s.

Four decades on from the first diagnoses and deaths, there is now a resurgence of interest. Oral history projects are springing up, and new research is beginning to investigate less well-known experiences. There is a campaign for a public memorial to the lives lost to Aids, and a clear desire to ensure that all the losses and gains of those years are not forgotten. After all, a generation of people diagnosed in the 1980s are now the first people with HIV to reach retirement age. The history of HIV/Aids in the 1980s is still unfolding.

A global concern: 7 key moments in the world’s battle with HIV/Aids in the 1980s

United States 1981

Clinical reports began to describe clusters of a rare type of pneumonia and other unusual infections among gay men and then injecting drug users, in California and New York. News of this novel disease was picked up by the gay press. Different names and possible explanations were floated and the term “Aids” was coined in 1982, but the original idea of a “gay plague” proved difficult to dislodge.

Cuba 1983

The government set up a National Aids Commission and ordered the destruction of all blood products imported from overseas. Law 41 was passed, giving the Ministry of Public Health power to enforce the quarantining and mandatory treatment of anyone affected by diseases deemed to pose significant community risk. The first case of HIV was diagnosed three years later, and the quarantining in sanatoria of anyone diagnosed with HIV or Aids began. This remained in place until 1993.

Zaire 1984

Research in Kinshasa provided strong evidence of the transmission of HIV between heterosexual couples. Here, there were just as many women with HIV or Aids as men. These findings were not easily accepted by the scientific community but were finally published in The Lancet. The prospect of a global epidemic affecting not only gay men, drug users and haemophiliacs, but also heterosexual couples, began to stir more governments to action.

Netherlands 1984

A drug users’ “union”, known as a junkibonden and active since 1980, began to provide sterile needles and syringes to injecting drug users in Amsterdam. Initially introduced to tackle the spread of hepatitis B through shared needles, the scale of needle provision was stepped up considerably in light of HIV and Aids and eventually received government funding. The union published literature by and for drug users, and offered peer support and advice on safer injecting.

Senegal 1986

The first cases of Aids were reported. This was a different and less virulent strand of the virus, first identified in West Africa by Senegalese researchers the year before. It brought international recognition and encouraged national political attention to HIV and Aids. Rates of infection remained consistently low, thanks not only to the different viral strand, but also factors including the legalisation and regulation of sex work and high safety standards concerning blood products, both of which pre-dated the epidemic.

USSR 1987

The first Aids-related death was recorded, a few years after Russia’s health minister declared that it was a “western disease” that would have no impact on a country without drug addicts or prostitution. There were more than 500 known cases by 1990, but the Soviet authorities emphasised that most of these were foreign nationals. A few years after the collapse of the USSR, reports of rapid HIV spread emerged: by the mid-1990s Russia was said to be on the brink of a vast epidemic.

Japan 1989

Haemophiliacs infected with HIV filed lawsuits in Tokyo and Osaka, demanding compensation from the government and pharmaceutical companies. Contaminated blood products imported from the US meant that around 40 per cent of Japanese people with haemophilia were infected with HIV. This “tainted blood” scandal dominated headlines and perceptions of HIV and Aids in Japan: plaintiffs and their families finally received a formal apology and compensation in 1996.

Janet Weston is assistant professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. An episode of the BBC Two series Saved by a Stranger covered the HIV/Aids crisis. You can catch up with that on the BBC iPlayer

This article was first published in the June 2021 edition of BBC History Magazine

]]> Elinor Evans <![CDATA[Sexuality on trial in colonial America]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sexuality-on-trial-in-colonial-america/ 2025-04-07T10:56:19.000Z 2025-02-25T17:04:51.000Z In 1774, as Britain’s colonies in America teetered on the brink of revolution, one regiment was torn apart by the trials of a British army chaplain – Robert Newburgh – who was accused of having sex with another man. In this episode, John Gilbert McCurdy examines evolving attitudes to sexuality and liberty in the colonies on the eve of revolutionary war, and explores how Newburgh's trials became a flashpoint for wider fears of moral and political disorder.

(Ad) John Gilbert McCurdy is the author of Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024). Buy it now from Amazon

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[How Georgian and Victorian same-sex couples co-opted marital traditions and made them their own]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/same-sex-couples-victorian/ 2024-12-11T20:22:43.000Z 2024-12-11T09:00:12.000Z When Gabriel Lawrence, a milkman, was apprehended at the notorious Margaret Clap’s molly house in 1725, he was subsequently tried at the Old Bailey for “the heinous and detestable Sin of Sodomy”. A ‘molly’ – a mostly derogatory term used mainly across the 18th and 19th centuries to describe men who had sex with other men – could be found at various molly houses. These were something akin to 18th-century gay bars, with the provision of lodging rooms. There, men might meet similar men for drinks, conversation, and, according to one witness, “marriages”.

Samuel Stevens, a witness for the prosecution against Lawrence, was called to give evidence and in his damning account he shocked those assembled with what he recalled of his visit to the molly house. Stevens stated that the mollies spent time “together kissing and hugging and making love (as they called it) in a very indecent manner… they used to go out by couples into another room, and when they came back[,] they would tell what they had been doing, which in their dialect they called marrying.”

Despite numerous appeals from friends and family on Lawrence’s behalf, Stevens’ account of the ‘marriage-making’ at the molly house proved ruinous. In April 1726, the jury found him guilty of sodomy and on 9 May 1726 Gabriel Lawrence was hanged at Tyburn.

• Read more | What are the challenges of telling LGBTQ history?

Soon, we will mark 10 years since the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill was introduced to parliament in England and Wales, in January 2013. This went on to provide the legal framework through which same-sex couples could access the benefits, comforts, and marital status already available to others within legally recognised marriages.

But before this legal framework was extended to include them, people who we might now recognise as gay, lesbian, or bisexual had long been co-opting and adapting the traditions and language of marriage for their own relationships. As shown in the recorded testimony against Lawrence, and others, there are examples of 18th- and 19th-century ‘marriage-like’ unions that allow us to trace the history of same-sex marriage beyond the 21st century.

In the same year as Lawrence’s trial, one Edward Courtney provided evidence against another man, George Whittle, who ran the Royal Oak, a molly house at “the Corner of St. George’s-Square in Pall Mall.” Courtney testified that: “He [Whittle] had a back room for mollies to drink in private betwixt that and the kitchen. There is a bed in the middle of the room for the use of the company…[to] be married; and for that reason they call that room the Chappel.”

A threat to Georgian society?

The proceedings from the Old Bailey show us that the language of, and certain customs associated with, marriage had been adopted by the mollies at Margaret Clap’s and the Royal Oak, and presumably further afield too, certainly by the 18th century. For many contemporaries – such as commentator Ned Ward, who published The Secret History of Clubs n 1709 – and for historians since, the molly custom of ‘marrying’ demonstrated a contempt for the traditional institution, an undermining of customs and values which threatened Georgian society as they knew it.

However, many mollies, including Lawrence, were married to women. Marriage was an important part of their everyday lives. In this way, while molly-marrying language might have reflected the boundaries that some same-sex attracted men were willing to cross to explore their sexual identities, they were forced to use this language to reflect their experiences of intimacy with men too.

Intimacy and companionship

For other Georgian men, they never married women and performed the significant emotional intimacies of their lives with other men. These relationships may even be known to their closest friends, as was the case for John Chute (1701–76) and Francis Whithed (c1719–51). Chute had inherited the Vyne in Hampshire (now under the care of the National Trust) in 1754, and the two men had travelled extensively together across Europe. On their return to England, Whithed was warmly welcomed amongst Chute’s wider circle of bachelor friends, and their relationship was embraced with a marriage-like naming ritual.

On 13 May 1747, the poet and scholar Thomas Gray informed the writer and collector Horace Walpole of his intention to leave his mother’s house and “call at your Door, & that of the Chuteheds, if possible”. Walpole would then write to another of their friends, Horace Mann, on 26 June 1747 about Lord Middlesex’s loss of his lordship stating: “I intend to laugh over this disgrazia with the Chuteheds, when they return triumphant from Hampshire, where Whitehed [sic] has no enemy.”

This compound naming ritual lent a formalised status to the Chuteheds’ companionship. It positioned them beyond friendship and elevated their intimacies above the sex acts recounted at the molly houses. Their union was explicitly referred to by this coterie of “Finger-twirlers”, as the writer Hester Thrale Piozzi had called them, in domestic terms. These friends visit with both Chuteheds, they call at their shared door, and they spend their time idling with the couple at Chute’s homes in Hampshire and London. Their unofficial, new shared surname marked the public acknowledgement of their union, and echoed the fashion for hyphenated surnames across elite families who found themselves newly connected through legal marriage.

The example of the Chuteheds further demonstrates the legal ‘work-arounds’ that were available to elite, same-sex attracted men. If inheritance and property exchange could not be granted directly through marriage, then Chute harnessed the possibilities afforded him within another system to reflect the legal status of his relationship with Whithed. He adopted the younger man, thus situating him firmly within his family and ensuring his inheritance – although this did not materialise as Whithed died before Chute. By co-opting marital naming rituals and harnessing legal benefits associated with the institution in other ways, these men demonstrated a proficiency beyond (but inspired by) the traditional matrimonial frameworks that were not available to them.

Perhaps the most famous historic same-sex ‘marriage’ occurred between two landholding women from Yorkshire, Anne Lister and Ann Walker (the subject of the popular TV series Gentleman Jack). Today, visitors to Holy Trinity Church on Goodramgate, York, will notice a plaque commemorating the ‘blessing’ of their union which would, as Lister saw it, “be as good as marriage”. The plaque states that, “Anne Lister 1791–1840 of Shibden Hall, Halifax, Lesbian and Diarist; took sacrament here to seal her union with Ann Walker, Easter 1834.”

• On the podcast | Angela Steidele explores the life of 19th-century gay pioneer Anne Lister

If Chute and Whithed manipulated the law to overcome their exclusion from the legal benefits of marriage, Walker and Lister privately harnessed certain religious elements of the ceremony to formalise their own companionship. This was later legally enhanced as they each named the other their primary beneficiaries in their respective wills.

Similarly, the American actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–76) had multiple intimate and sexual relationships with women across her lifetime. Some of these she and, crucially, others assigned marriage-like status to. For example, in 1852 Elizabeth Barrett Browning grappled with the idea of Cushman’s relationship with Matilda Hays when she recalled, “I understand that she & Miss Hayes [sic] have made vows of celibacy & of eternal attachment to each other – they live together, dress alike… it is a female marriage. I happened to say, ‘Well, I have never heard of such a thing before.’ ‘Haven’t you?’ said Mrs Corkrane [sic]… ‘oh, it is by no means uncommon.’”

For same-sex attracted women, elements of traditional married life might be more readily reflected in their relationships than was the case for men. Similarly, these relationships were more widely discussed and proclaimed than those between men. In the first instance, this was likely due to the fact that sex between women has never been a criminal offence. Secondly as ‘home life’ was more readily associated with women, it was accepted that single sisters, female cousins, and other ‘spinsters’ might combine households and share their domestic burdens on the basis of financial practicalities. For same-sex attracted women, these expectations provided welcome opportunities.

• Read more | Who were the Ladies of Llangollen?

These, of course, are only a selection of the cases from which we can extract marriage-like patterns across the archive. We might only begin to imagine the true number of unions shared by same-sex attracted men and women that have, thus far, escaped the eye of the historian. Yet these small number of case studies serve to demonstrate that LGBTQ+ people have co-opted, adapted, and circumnavigated traditional elements of marriage long before the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill in 2013. The likes of Gabriel Lawrence, John Chute and Anne Lister indicate that LGBTQ+ histories, specifically the history of same-sex marriage, did not begin with legislation. It is a history that transcended legislation, while ultimately shaping it; a history that challenged marriage from within, while acknowledging and adapting its structures from without. Here, then, is a history of union. A history of tumult and triumphs, stories of lives lived together, of love and loss – a history of marriage indeed.

Dr Anthony Delaney is a historian at the University of Exeter. He specialises in 18th century Britain, particularly histories of gender and sexuality. He also works as an actor; his screen credits include Hellboy, Penny Dreadful, and Harry Wild

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[The boy that emperor Nero made his ‘wife’: what the tragedy of the castrated Sporus tells us about homosexuality in ancient Rome]]> https://www.historyextra.com/period/roman/sporus-nero-wife/ 2024-10-08T12:43:59.000Z 2024-10-08T11:56:05.000Z To think about gender and sexuality in ancient Rome, there are several things that may spring to mind first. Would it be the oiled-up, Bacchanalian orgies so often depicted in movies? The heinous treatment that was so commonplace towards women? Or could it be the abuses endured by Roman slaves? If the latter, the name Sporus may already be familiar.

Sporus was a boy who caught the attentions of Nero. The notorious emperor had him forcibly castrated and then married him to be his empress, perhaps to replace his former wife.

Sporus isn’t someone we can ever hear from directly. We only know about Sporus through the writings of Roman historians, who had reason to depict Nero in as negative and debauched a light as possible. Sporus’s own voice has been completely lost; there is no knowing how he felt about what happened to him or if he considered himself homosexual in any modern sense of the word.

His life was short and tragic, and only recorded by posterity in relation to a more powerful man. Yet it can help to reveal the complex attitudes toward sexuality, gender and power in ancient Rome, especially the acceptance and perception of homosexuality.

Who was Sporus?

Sporus was a young boy of extraordinary beauty, though it is important to note that the young boy’s name may not have been Sporus at all. The Greek word σπόρος (sporos) means ‘seed’ or ‘semen’, so was likely a belittling epithet that seems to have been given to the boy after his abuse began.

It was said that Sporus bore a striking resemblance to Nero’s second wife, Poppaea Sabrina, who had died in AD 65. Suetonius has it that she had complained to her husband about how much time he spent at the races and, in a fit of rage, Nero kicked her to death, losing both his wife and his unborn child. Another possibility is that Poppaea died in childbirth.

Either way, Nero is said to have become deeply infatuated with Sporus upon seeing him. In AD 67, the emperor ordered the boy be castrated, turning him into a eunuch. There were several methods of castration in Roman times, including rubbing or squeezing the gonads to pieces. Sometimes, the penis would also be removed.

What was life like for Sporus as the ‘wife’ of Nero?

At this point, Nero already had a new wife – his third, a noblewoman named Statilia Messalina – as well as a ‘husband’, a freed slave named Pythagoras. In that, Nero took the role of ‘bride’.

With Sporus, it seems that he wanted to switch roles again. Suetonius wrote that Sporus was dressed in women’s clothing and decked out in jewellery befitting an empress, before being married “with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil”.

Dio Cassius corroborated this account, writing: “Though already ‘married’ to Pythagoras, a freedman, he formally ‘married’ Sporus… and the Romans as well as others publicly celebrated their wedding.”

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While it is impossible to say what Sporus thought of all this, Suetonius provides an intriguing clue from later on in the ‘marriage’. Sporus gave Nero a gift: “a ring with a stone on which was engraved the Rape of Proserpina.”

In Roman mythology, the goddess Proserpina was abducted by the god of the underworld and ultimately made to live with him for six months of every year. A ring depicting that scene hardly made for a romantic present: perhaps it expressed how Sporus really felt.

What happened to Sporus after Nero?

It would not be long before Sporus’s life was uprooted again. In AD 68, Nero was ousted from power and, fleeing Rome, committed suicide. Amidst the chaos that followed, Sporus taken by a Praetorian prefect named Nymphidius Sabinus, who treated him as a wife and called ‘Poppaea’.

When Nymphidius was killed – by his own soldiers as he bid to be made emperor – Sporus was passed on to Otho, the second to rule in the so-called ‘Year of the Four Emperors’. In a bizarre coincidence, Otho had been married to Poppaea Sabina before Nero.

After Otho came Vitellius, who ruled for eight months and heaped more woe upon Sporus. He decided to use the boy for public entertainment in the gladiatorial arena, planning a re-enactment of the Rape of Proserpina.

To avoid this abominable fate, Sporus killed himself sometime in AD 69.

Male homosexuality in ancient Rome

What can Sporus’s life tell us about homosexuality and gender in ancient Rome? The answer is quite a lot, particularly about the supremacy of the penis and the hierarchy of Roman relationships, which were about power, dominance and virility rather than the gender binary.

The accounts of Sporus and Nero demonstrate how the wider tolerance of male same-sex acts in Rome largely came down to social class. Romans had a ‘penetrator-penetrated’ binary model, where there would be a passive, inferior partner that would certainly have been of lower status instead of a fellow freeman.

• Read more | Violence, rebellion and sexual exploitation: the darker side of ancient Rome

For a freeborn Roman man to enter into a submissive sexual relationship with another freeborn Roman man would have been emasculating, shameful and, if the Greek historian Polybius was to be believed, dangerous. He reported that the punishment for a Roman soldier who willingly submitted to penetration by another freeborn man was fustuarium, or being cudgelled to death.

Masculinity was linked to dominance, both in social and sexual contexts. It was totally natural and acceptable for a Roman man to engage in sexual acts with both women and men, but only as long as he was the penetrative partner (the vir).

The status and gender of the passive partner (the cinaedus) were crucial too. The penetration of women, slaves and male prostitutes was acceptable. Male entertainers were fair game too, since their lifestyle placed them in a nebulous social realm called infamia, which led to a loss of legal and social standing.

For a freeborn man, to have a passive role in anal sex resulted in a loss of masculinity. Yet none of this means that equal, loving relationships between freeborn men did not exist; rather that negative societal attitudes combined with a fear of being clubbed to death ensured that they were conducted in secret.

As well as cinaedus, other terms were used for passive male partners, like Sporus. These included puer delicatus (‘exquisite’ or ‘dainty’ boy), pullus (‘chick’), mollis (‘soft’), tener (‘delicate’), debilis (‘weak’) and effeminatus (‘effeminate’).

How do we know about Sporus?

The fact that we know about Sporus, and Pythagoras before him, is proof of how negatively Nero’s subversive relationships were perceived by wider Roman society. Suetonius and Dio Cassius presented the boy’s castration and status as ‘wife’ as evidence of the emperor’s moral depravity; a grotesque parody of a traditional marriage that proved Nero’s madness and disregard for Roman values.

Taking a lowly slave as a cinaedus was one thing. Marrying them and publicly parading them around Rome as a facsimile of your dead empress was a step too far.

• Read more | Could Roman slaves buy their own freedom?

Sporus's feminisation reflected the Roman obsession with control over others' bodies. He wasn’t merely a eunuch, but a symbol of Nero’s power. The emperor could remake reality according to his desires and assert his imperial power over societal norms. Essentially, Nero wanted everyone to know that he could do what he wanted, and Sporus was the victim of his hubris.

His tragic story should continue to serve as a potent reminder of how, far more than things like sexuality and love, power and privilege defined the sexual and gender boundaries of the ancient world.

More from us

HistoryExtra members can explore this topic further with exclusive content from our archives

• The Invisible Romans: how the brutal lives of the enslaved shaped an empire
• Rethinking Nero: was the Roman emperor really so bad?
• The long death of the Roman republic
• The Pax Romana: how the Romans maintained peace at the point of a sword

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Hilary Mitchell is a journalist with a Masters degree in Classics from Edinburgh University, where she specialised in the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age of Greece

]]> Jad Adams <![CDATA[Challenging gender in the Victorian Age: the 'masculine' New Woman and 'effeminate' New Man]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/gender-history-new-woman-man-oscar-wilde/ 2024-06-10T14:22:14.000Z 2024-06-10T14:22:14.000Z In the 1890s, two new social identities emerged that represented the first widespread challenge to gender stereotypes in Britain. This was the time of the ‘New Woman’, who possessed levels of daring regarded as masculine, and of the effeminate ‘New Man,’ who loved ‘art for art’s sake’.

Her determined persistence to go her own way, and his foppish indifference to soldiering and other established notions of ‘manliness’, were both deemed equally appalling to Victorian elders. Indeed, to some commentators, it seemed as if men and women were losing their distinct characteristics.

As a Punch magazine writer noted in a verse titled ‘Sexomania’:

When Adam delved and Eve span,

No one need ask which was the man.

Bicycling, footballing, scarce human,

All wonder now “Which is the woman?”

But a new fear my bosom vexes;

To-morrow there may be no sexes!

Unless, as end to all the pother,

Each one in fact becomes the other.

This was a seismic shift, and one partly driven by changes in the UK population. By the 1890s, women outnumbered men by around a million, and by the 1901 census, the gap had grown to 1.25 million. There were not enough husbands to go around due to the higher death rate of men from their more dangerous jobs, their tendency to violence, and because of the number of men who had headed abroad with the armed forces or imperial administration.

In many middle-class families, the lack of men became a significant issue, because daughters were traditionally provided for by their fathers until their husbands ‘took over’. If they did not end up marrying and their parents died, they then became the responsibility of their elder brothers – leading in some cases to family tensions.

Yet this demographic shift also coincided with a high point in the social movement of women’s education and independence, which had been under way since the mid-19th century. For the first time, large numbers of women who had received a good or moderate education became more determined to live away from their families and earn their own keep. This blend of factors led to a continuing female advance, and new questions arose regarding women’s roles in the family, the institution of marriage, and the workplace.

The New Woman phenomenon

The idea of the New Woman developed slowly, but became widespread in the 1890s due to the expansion of urban employment opportunities for women caused by the new technologies of typewriting and telephony and the print industry, which needed writers and illustrators. The labour market was quick to recognise that women could do the same office jobs as men, but be paid less. These were young, middle-class women, often with some education. Some worked in accountancy and the law, though they were not permitted to take professional qualifications.

Thus the ‘New Woman’ was born. With her bicycle, cigarette, necktie, and dark jacket that hid the grime of public transport and office life, she looked and behaved markedly differently to women of previous decades.

Not everyone was enamoured of the New Woman, however. The term itself had been popularised by Maria Louise Ramé, an English novelist and French wine merchant’s daughter who went by the name of Ouida. She wrote scathingly of the archetype and her view of its proponents’ “fierce vanity, her undigested knowledge, her over-weaning estimate of her own value and her fatal want of all sense of the ridiculous”. Another commentator, meanwhile, referred to “a somewhat aggressive air of independence which finds birth in the length of her stride”.

In some cases, the New Woman was almost seen as another form of humanity. The journalist Eliza Lynn Linton characterised her as masculine not just in behaviour, but physique: “The bass voice, flat chest, and lean hips of a woman who has physically failed in her rightful development.”

The newspaper editor Frederick Greenwood also decided to publish his views on the subject, writing in an article entitled ‘Women – Wives or Mothers?’ that the redundant female birth-rate threatened “more revolutions than all the forces of the anarchists in active combination”. Greenwood chose to share his thoughts under the pseudonym ‘A Woman’ – a gender misappropriation partly driven by devilment, and partly to give the piece a sense of authenticity for his readers.

Indeed, while women were taking on postures and pursuits previously regarded as masculine, men were travelling in the other direction. Like Greenwood, the author Arnold Bennett wrote for the magazine Woman (of which he was assistant editor) under the names ‘Gwendolen’ and ‘Barbara’, and reviewed books in Home and Hearth under the name ‘Sarah Volatile’.

William Sharp or Fiona Macleod? Or both?

The Scottish author made a name writing as a woman, but this was no mere pseudonym

William Sharp (1855–1905) was a late Victorian author and mystic who wrote under his own name and as his female alter-ego, Fiona Macleod. Born in Paisley, Scotland, Sharp moved to London in his early twenties to pursue a career as a poet and art critic, before moving into magazine publishing. In 1892, he edited a oneoff periodical called The Pagan Review, calling for the widespread adoption of neo-paganism, which he believed would abolish inequality between men and women. The author’s interest in gender fluidity would become more apparent by 1893, however, when he began writing as the Highlander Fiona Macleod, whose lyrical novels contributed to the birth of Britain’s Celtic Revival movement. Inspired by tales from Scottish folklore, Sharp’s work as Macleod was not only better reviewed than his previous output, but more commercially successful, too. In fact, so devoted was Sharp to his alter ego that he would maintain a voluminous correspondence with publishers and fellow authors as Macleod, without revealing his true identity. Fiona Macleod was not merely a writer’s pseudonym, however. Sharp maintained that she had a separate existence, and as such, she was even given her own entry in Who’s Who. “I am tempted to believe I am half a woman,” Sharp wrote in a letter to his friend Catherine Ann Janvier in 1895. Sharp’s wife, Elizabeth, accepted her husband’s dual nature, calling him Wilfion. After his death, she wrote a biography split into two parts: ‘William Sharp’ and ‘Fiona Macleod’.

Aestheticism and the decadent movement

At around the same time, the advance of aestheticism – an artistic movement prioritising beauty above function – was giving men the opportunity of a ‘feminine’ creative outlet that drove them to create ‘the house beautiful’. As the character Gwendolen Fairfax declares in Oscar Wilde’s 1895 play The Importance of Being Earnest, “the home seems to me to be the proper sphere for the man”. Wilde had himself come to fame as editor of The Woman’s World and an as aesthete.

As the 1880s turned into the 1890s, however, aestheticism morphed into a new movement: the decadents, who revelled in the artificial to a degree the average Victorian considered abhorrent. The decadents drew inspiration from ancient Rome and from France, which was considered morally suspect by respectable people. While the movement’s theories of art were the preserve of elites in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and the university towns, their influence was widespread on fashion, advertisements and home décor.

A ‘New Man’ who came to prominence around this time was the poet, essayist and critic Richard Le Gallienne, the son of a Birkenhead brewery manager. He moved to London, changed his name (he added the ‘Le’ to imply a French connection) and took to sporting velvet knee breeches and long hair. Yet he was also evidence that the decadent man was not necessarily homosexual. In fact, he was undeniably what was called a ‘ladies’ man’, taking full advantage of his attractiveness to women and the sexual freedom that New Women allowed themselves.

In 1895, Le Gallienne declared that gender was a matter of custom and personal choice, and nothing more. Writing in his essay The Arbitrary Classification of Sex, he explained: “There is no such thing as looking manly or womanly. There is looking beautiful or ugly, distinguished or commonplace… The essentials of ‘manliness’ and ‘womanliness’ belong to man and woman alike – the externals are purely artistic considerations, and subject to the vagaries of fashion.”

It was a kind of thinking that upended conventional certainties. “I was bewildered, it sounded somehow as if there were three sexes,” wrote the novelist Henry James in a story for quarterly journal The Yellow Book in 1894. Set within Britain’s hedonistic literary scene, the narrator of the tale, Neil Paraday, is forced to ask whether a fellow author named ‘Miss Forbes’ is a gentleman, upon which he is informed, “it wouldn’t be ‘Miss’ – there’s a wife!”. Dora Forbes, it transpires, is a man with a big red moustache. “In the age we live in, one gets lost amongst the genders and the pronouns,” laments Paraday.

Such lifestyle changes went beyond literary circles, however. In March 1894, the month before the launch of The Yellow Book, the rigid, sanctimonious William Gladstone retired as Britain’s prime minister. He was replaced by Lord Rosebery, whose effortless style both inspired and irritated. Rosebery was a typical example of why respectable Victorians condemned the aristocracy as idle and decadent, with the Tory Lord Curzon criticising what he saw as Rosebery’s “feminine sensitiveness to criticism”.

There had also, in recent years, been numerous scandals touching the ruling class: Prince Albert Victor had been rumoured to visit gay brothels, and there were countless stories about the Prince of Wales’s dissolute lifestyle. Rosebery remained reticent about his private life, but he was widely rumoured to be homosexual – with commentators noting his preference for the company of “smart young men”. One such man was the 26-year-old Viscount Drumlanrig, son of boxing pioneer Lord Queensberry. Enraged by the duo’s close relationship, he followed Rosebery on holiday to Germany and had to be restrained from engaging the then foreign secretary in a fist fight.

Oscar Wilde and the downfall of the decadents

Famously, Queensberry later turned his wrath on Wilde because of his relationship with another of his sons, Lord Alfred Douglas. According to Queensberry, Wilde was a “damned cur and coward of the Rosebery type”. The story of Wilde’s downfall has been much told: he was involved in three scandalous 1895 trials before being convicted of homosexual offences and sentenced to two years’ hard labour in Reading Gaol.

Notwithstanding sporadic gestures of sympathy, Wilde’s trials crushed the nascent decadent movement in Britain. While there may have been feelings for him from many New Women, the debacle consigned male behaviour regarded as ‘effeminate’ to a cultural underworld.

If the 19th century had seen gains for women and men in a blurring of gender identities, the dawn of the 20th century would see a reassertion of ‘maleness’ in the exercise of that most traditionally masculine pursuit: war. In 1899, shortly after the Wilde trials and the backlash against the decadents, the Second Boer War began. It was a shock to the complacency of empire, and was the harbinger of a decline in the influence of the artistic imagination.

The traditional gender roles that had sustained the British empire – with clearly defined soldiers, housewives and mothers – may have been under attack, but now they fought back. As a 1905 book entitled The Decline and Fall of the British Empire admonished, “the emancipated Englishwoman of the age used her freedom for selfish rather than national ends”.

The Boer War hero Robert Baden Powell was similarly critical, noting that the Roman empire had “[fallen] at last, chiefly because the young Romans gave up soldiering and manliness altogether”. Through the creation of his Scouting Movement, he was going to make sure that the British empire didn’t follow a similar path.

• Listen | Joseph Bristow explores the court case against Oscar Wilde for “gross indecency”, and the dangers of living in a society where homosexuality was illegal

Indeed, from 1899 on, Britain entered a resolutely masculine phase in which the national effort was focused on trying to avoid, recovering from, or preparing for three major conflicts. In the world wars, women took on men’s roles in industry – but after those conflicts, they were expected to return to the domestic sphere. By and large they did, comforted by the peace of domesticity and the desire for family life as a counterpoint to the horrors of conflict.

In the 1920s, some women took advantage of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act and went into professions such as law or accountancy – but these were women in a man’s world, and there was no repetition of the erosion of gender stereotypes that had been apparent in the 1890s. It was in the post-1945 period that people born during and after the Second World War again started challenging strict gender classifications.

The era of peace, prosperity and renewal in the west led to a questioning of values in every area, with an explosion of new expressions in politics, music and the arts. Sixty years after the New Man and New Woman, gender again became more mutable, with men wearing their hair long and women wearing trouser suits and jeans. In the 1960s, drag and gender changing became acceptable once more, at first for comedians and then in music where performers wore make up and sometimes, like Mick Jagger in 1969, dresses. Soon unisex fashions became a familiar sight – as they still are today.

This article first appeared in the June 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> Matt Elton <![CDATA[Jason Okundaye on the Black gay community and its tensions: “The movement has always been a broad church”]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/black-gay-history-lgbtq-interview-jason-okundaye/ 2024-06-07T08:32:04.000Z 2024-06-07T08:31:23.000Z Matt Elton: Your book is based on interviews with a group of men from the London district of Brixton. Who did you speak to, and how did you meet?

Jason Okundaye: I was researching rates of HIV among Black gay men in Britain, and part of that involved exploring archive material about Black men who have sex with men. There didn’t turn out to be much of that material, but one name – Marc Thompson – kept coming up, so I knew I had to get in touch with him.

We met, and talked about his life in Brixton and the area’s history. And through Marc I met more and more people, until eventually I had a big cast of characters: a group of Black gay men aged between 50 and 70 based in and around Brixton who had been incredible activists, artists, poets and DJs.

Between them they had created a thriving subculture, so I wanted to bring their voices together and paint, from a minority experience, a broader, beautiful picture.

• On the podcast | Jason Okundaye on the social, sexual and political history of London’s community of Black gay men in the late 20th century

You get a real sense of the men’s characters. Was that important?

I’ve sometimes felt that Black British history has lacked texture and character: the details that reveal someone’s individuality and personality. We might focus on what a person achieved in the context of getting the law changed, for example, but miss a sense of who they actually were. This book is as much about the individuals as it is about the big events and changes in which they played a part.

I particularly wanted to communicate that the period between the 1970s and 1990s was a historical moment at which things were tense. People were facing racism, homophobia and the Aids crisis, and there was a nascent, growing gay activist and cultural movement.

They may have been united on the fronts of race or sexuality, but that didn’t necessarily mean everything was harmonious – and, anyway, that’s not the way I think we should look at queer history or Black history. We need to look at the conflicts, and the tensions, and the ways in which people felt let down or even isolated by their community, as well as the ways in which they came together to make each other’s lives better.

One of the characters you open the book with is a man named Ted Brown. Can you tell us about his story?

Ted was born in New York. His parents were British Jamaicans: his mother was a civil rights activist who was deported during the 1950s era of paranoia about communism. The family eventually found their way to London in 1959, where they were met by the National Front shoving dog waste through their letterbox.

During this time, Ted was coming to know his sexuality. It’s important to remember that, at this time in Britain, there weren’t gay institutions, let alone Black gay institutions. So while people such as Ted may have realised they were gay, they wouldn’t necessarily have known of or had access to anywhere that they could go.

But, by the start of the 1970s, the Gay Liberation Front [an early gay activist organisation] had emerged, which marked the first point at which people in Britain were organising as out and proud gay men and lesbians. Ted first encountered its members in 1970, and through his story I wanted to communicate what it was like to have been a Black man working as an activist within the parameters of both race and sexuality. What did those differences mean for how you were treated within activist movements, and the way people were able to navigate those spaces?

You write that people such as Ted had to navigate such spaces with less buoyancy and more subtlety than, say, white counterparts. Why was that the case, and what impact did it have?

When I first started looking at Brixton, I found that plenty of narratives focused on the Black activism that took place there, and plenty of separate narratives explored its gay activism. I think this separation has historical roots.

Organisations such as the South London Gay Liberation Front hosted street parties, theatre productions and big public demonstrations, but the fact that Brixton had a strong Black community meant that, if you were a Black gay person, those activities might have taken place in front of your relatives or members of your church – who might not have been ready for that. The fact that you had these different groups witnessing and monitoring what went on meant that some Black gay men were not able to be open.

We should explore the fact that Brixton is the site for the stories in your book. Why were so many people drawn to the area?

Brixton was the place in which you really started to see an open Black gay scene develop, and that’s largely due to one man. Patrick Liverpool, who had come down from Huddersfield, bought a house on Morval Road in Brixton in which he started to host regular parties.

Word got out that there would be these fabulous parties attended by lots of Black gay men with music, DJing, and drag queen pageants, and a scene grew up in which people were really able to get to know each other. The news reached other parts of the UK, too: men would hear about the parties and decide they wanted to move closer.

All of this led, eventually, to the kinds of stories you hear of Brixton in later years: the guy who used to take a boombox and dance outside the police station wearing really short glitter shorts, and the drag queens who cycled down the street wearing wigs and full faces of makeup.

But I should also stress that Black people have long been attracted to Brixton and south London in general, because there’s always been a thriving community and food, music and art scene. Even today, it is still a crucible and a reflection of wider race relations in Britain.

What does the story of another interviewee, Dirg Aaab-Richards, tell us about being Black and gay in Britain in the 1970s and 80s?

Dirg was massively influential in educating young people about the issues surrounding being LGBTQ, and in setting up youth clubs around south London during the 1980s. These weren’t just for Black gay men, but all sorts of LGBTQ youth. This was at a time when the law [in England and Wales] said you could only have same-sex sexual relationships over the age of 21, so he was trying to create a space in which young people could build a family and community with each other.

An interesting discrepancy you highlight is that Dirg describes himself as a “modest revolutionary”, yet other people you spoke to talk about him as being a really central, pivotal figure.

Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t want to present the history of activism, and particularly Black gay men’s activism, only as pure pageantry, big demonstrations and confrontations with the state. Of course, it did include those things. But it was also about putting out chairs and locking the room at the end of the day, and communication: typing things up, sticking posters on walls and getting flyers out to mobilise people.

The experiences of another man, Alex Owolade, highlight the frictions between Brixton’s activists. What was his background?

I felt it was vital to include Alex’s story because it really shows that the Black gay movement has always been a broad church. People have come from such different backgrounds and political persuasions, and yet ultimately have been able achieve political goals together.

Alex’s mother was a nursery teacher who organised against the closures of nurseries, and he was always taught to be on the side of striking workers. By his teens, he was proudly and openly aligned with communist movements, which meant that when he joined the Black gay and lesbian movement he had a very different ideology from many of the other men I spoke to.

People were either really inspired by him or really repelled. This is one of the key ways in which I wanted to show that writing a history of a minority community isn’t just about togetherness, but also about conflicts, differences and frictions.

A key moment of tension within this community surrounded the Black newspaper The Voice, which had been founded in 1982. What happened?

The differences between people within Brixton’s Black gay community really came to the surface in 1990, when Justin Fashanu became the first footballer in the top tiers of the sport to publicly confirm he was gay. The interview he gave to The Sun newspaper that October was a bit of a seismic moment, because Fashanu was a popular Black sports star and an aspirational model for the Black community.

The Voice, a national Black newspaper published weekly at the time, ran an interview with Fashanu’s brother, John [also a famous footballer], in which he said he saw Justin as an outcast, disowning and disgracing him. There were a number of other articles, too, describing how homosexuals were apparently attention-seekers and all sorts of other homophobic drivel.

• Read more | Are some LGBTQ histories being overlooked?

Ted Brown and Alex had very different visions of how they should approach The Voice. Ted had set up a group, Black Lesbians and Gays Against Media Homophobia, and wanted to take a diplomatic route to challenging the newspaper: appealing to its advertisers, for instance, and trying to meet with the people in charge to force a right to reply. Alex took a more military approach: he wanted to campaign outside of its offices, be really loud and visible, and even shut the paper down.

Ted, in turn, didn’t want to be seen to be attacking the newspaper, this Black institution, because he knew that – despite the fact it had been homophobic – it was still a valuable resource for Black people. He didn’t want trying to shut it down to be seen by some people as indistinguishable from, say, a racist attack. Meanwhile, Alex’s argument was that it was pushing poison into the community and so wasn’t fit for purpose.

I was really interested to bring out those differences and show that, even within an activist movement with shared goals, different strategies can lead to conflict.

You stress in the book that Black gay men don’t lead solely political lives, and that it’s also important to look at their social and sexual stories – without sanitising them. Which aspects don’t get the attention they deserve?

I think, with queer history, we sometimes shy away from the fact that, ultimately, these people came together because they were sexually attracted to each other. I didn’t want to present a history purely about the activism with none of the sex, none of the desire and none of the pleasure. Omitting the cruising, the cottaging and the sex parties that went on would just have been dishonest.

When I talk about the importance of not sanitising things, I also mean that I didn’t want to skip over the fact that sometimes Black gay men might not be nice people to each other. A key example of that was Marc Thompson’s HIV diagnosis in 1986, at the age of 17. Rather than finding immediate solidarity and community with other Black gay men, he found that people were gossiping about him and revealing his HIV status to other people behind his back.

It’s uncomfortable to realise that these men weren’t necessarily supporting each other, particularly when you consider what the media, the police and politicians were saying about gay men diagnosed as HIV positive at the time. Sometimes community fails us, and we need to hold ourselves accountable for that. The ways in which gay men have treated other HIV-positive gay men has not always been supportive, and for some people, the Black gay community hasn’t always necessarily been a positive thing.

I want to talk a bit more about the social spaces Black gay men set up. How important is it to consider the physical environment?

We’ve talked about the way Brixton is central to this story. One of the reasons is that you can walk down a street and the public toilets you pass were where Black gay men used to have sex with each other, but also meet and become friends. Or, on another street, a house that has been carved up and turned into flats was where fabulous house parties went on. I wanted to show that you can walk through an area and not even realise just how much history is around you.

Black gay house parties were particularly important because they mimicked the spaces in which Black gay men had grown up: the family functions, the barbecues, the parties. They transposed them and gave them a new identity, offering an introduction to this community and a space in which people were really able to express themselves – and, in some cases, have sex for the first time.

The start of this Black gay party scene meant that there was now a demand for nightlife, which began in tiny little sweatbox venues. But those house parties and small early venues proved that there was demand – and as the new out Black generation started feeling happier and safer to enjoy themselves, demand increased until there was an entire Black gay entertainment ecosystem.

At the start, we touched on the fact that these stories don’t tend to exist in traditional, formal archives. Why do you think that is?

There are a couple of reasons. If people don’t see their lives as important to the national story, they’re not necessarily going to be that forthcoming about them. Some of the people I interviewed asked me, what are you interested in this for? If you aren’t used to seeing people like you in history or in the media, then you can’t imagine that someone in 30 or 40 years might be interested in asking about it. You might not necessarily expect, either, that a book on Black gay history might be something people want to read.

• Read more | What are the challenges of telling LGBTQ history?

We’ve got to talk about the commercial context: I’ve written a Black gay history book, now, in 2024. Could it have come out in 2014? I don’t think so. But times have changed, and people’s interests have changed too.

Something the men also told me is that they have not necessarily been the best at recording their own lives. That makes sense, because when you go on a night out, for instance, you’re not necessarily thinking, 'I’ll take a photo for history.' You’re just taking a photo with your friends, rather than thinking that in 20 years’ time someone might want it for a digital archive. These men just had less of a sense they were living through history.

You write that the act of researching and writing this book has not only enriched your life but also forever changed your perception of the Black presence in Britain. Why do you think it’s had such an impact?

The men I spoke to were so spirited and so proud to be openly gay, and had such incredible stories to tell. They achieved such amazing things but, strikingly, were so unassuming. They weren’t big public figures – you’re not necessarily going to find them on Wikipedia or even on Google – but that just proves you could be sitting next to an older Black person at a bus stop and have no idea about the amazing things they’ve done or witnessed.

It just shows that there is such a heritage, and such an inheritance, we can take from all Black people, not just Black gay people, and continue to pass it on. But that really depends on us being curious, and open, and willing to learn from them. I felt so inspired by that: even if you’ve gone through the worst and hardest of times, your story doesn’t have to end there.

Jason Okundaye is a London-based journalist and author of Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain (Faber & Faber, 2024)

This interview first appeared in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine

]]> HistoryExtra <![CDATA[A surprising history of sex between men]]> https://www.historyextra.com/membership/sex-between-men-podcast-noel-malcolm/ 2024-10-13T21:06:17.000Z 2024-05-15T06:00:32.000Z Until recently, the history of sex between men was a taboo topic. But by delving into the historical archive, historian Sir Noel Malcolm has uncovered a more complex story of same-sex relationships and encounters in early modern Europe and the Ottoman world. He speaks to Rebecca Franks about his findings.

Noel Malcolm is the author of Forbidden Desire in Early Modern Europe: Male-Male Sexual Relations, 1400-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2024).

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