London: The Biography
Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination
The Collection: Journalism, Reviews, Essays,
Short Stories, Lectures, edited by Thomas Wright
Thames: Sacred River
Venice: Pure City
The English Ghost
London Under
The Great Fire of London
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
Hawksmoor
Chatterton
First Light
English Music
The House of Doctor Dee
Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem
Milton in America
The Plato Papers
The Clerkenwell Tales
The Lambs of London
The Fall of Troy
The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein
Three Brothers
Ezra Pound and his World
T. S. Eliot
Dickens
Blake
The Life of Thomas More
Shakespeare: The Biography
Chaucer
J. M. W. Turner
Newton
Poe: A Life Cut Short
Wilkie Collins
Charlie Chaplin
Alfred Hitchcock
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1 Sappho, from Les Vrais Pourtraits et vies des Hommes Illustres, Andre Thevet, 1584. Image: Glasshouse Images / Alamy Stock Photo
2 Radish, English school, c. 19th century. Image: Private Collection / © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images
3 Early mounted Knights Templar in battle dress, Italian school, 1783. Image: Bibliotheque des Arts Decoratifs, Paris / Archives Charmet / Bridgeman Images
4 ‘Piers Gaveston and the Barons’, 1872. Image: 19th era / Alamy Stock Photo
5 The Pardoner, from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Image: University Library, Cambridge (Photo by Culture Club / Getty Images)
6 Ganymede, 1878. Image: ZU_09, iStock images
7 George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, after Cornelius Johnson, c. 1623. Image: Hulton Archive / Getty Images
8 Frontispiece for T. Dekker and T. Middleton’s The Roaring Girle, 1611. Image: Culture Club / Getty Images
9 Aphra Behn, after John Riley, c. 18th century. Image: Chronicle / Alamy Stock Photo
10 Captain Edward Rigby, after Thomas Murray, 1702
11 A male brothel, La prostitution contemporaine, 1884. Image: Wellcome Library, London (CC BY 4.0)
12 View of Newgate prison, c. 1760. Image: Guildhall Library & Art Gallery / Heritage Images / Getty Images
13 Hannah Snell, c. 1745. Image: MPI / Getty Images
14 A macaroni, from Social Caricature in the Eighteenth Century, Emily Morse Symonds, 1905. Image: The Print Collector / Print Collector / Getty Images
15 ‘Trying & Pillorying of the Vere Street Club’, c. 1810
16 Frontispiece for Jack Saul’s The Sins of the Cities of the Plains, 1881
17 ‘A Night in the Cave of the Golden Calf’, The Daily Mirror, 1912
18 Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, 1971
1 Greek red figure pottery, c. 500 BC. Image: Ancient Art and Architecture / Alamy Stock Photo
2 ‘Costume of a Saxon Chief’, Charles Hamilton Smith, 1815. Image: The Protected Art Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
3 Statue of the Emperor Trajan, London, 1959. Image: View Pictures / UIG via Getty Images
4 Seventeenth-century map of London, C. J. Visscher, c. 1650. Image: British Library, London (CC Public Domain Mark 1.0)
5 William Rufus, Historia Anglorum, c. 1259. Image: British Library, London © British Library Board. All Rights Reserved / Bridgeman Images
6 ‘Death of Piers Gaveston’, c. 1850. Image: The Print Collector / Print Collector / Getty Images
7 ‘Knights, Templars’, English School, c. 19th century. Image: Private Collection © Look and Learn / Bridgeman Images
8 ‘Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrims’, William Blake, c. 1810
9 Sixteenth-century map of London, Frans Hogenburg, c. 1570. Image: National Library of Israel, Jerusalem
10 The Droeshout portrait of William Shakespeare, 1623. Image: The Bodleian First Folio (CC BY 3.0)
11 Christopher Marlowe, c. 1585. Image: Parker Library, Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
12 King James I of England and VI of Scotland, Daniel Mytens, 1621. Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London
13 Ann Mills, c. 1740. Image: Rischgitz / Getty Images
14 Christina Davies, aka Christopher Welsh, c. 1706
15 Mary Ann Talbot, c. 1800. Image: Three Lions / Getty Images
16 Ann Bonny and Mary Read, c. 18th century. Image: Stefano Bianchetti / Corbis via Getty Images
17 ‘A Morning Frolic, or the Transmutation of the Sexes’, after John Collet, c. 1780. Image: Yale Center for British Art
18 ‘This is not the thing: or, Molly exalted’, 1762. Photo © The Trustees of the British Museum
19 Edward Kynaston, Richard Cooper and R.B. Parkes, c. 19th century
20 King William III, studio of Sir Peter Lely, 1677. Photo © National Portrait Gallery, London
21 A ‘molly house’ interior, 1874. Image: Interim Archives / Getty Images
22 The Bishop of Clogher arrested for a homosexual act with a soldier, George Cruikshank, 1822
23 Charles Bannister as Polly Peachum, James Sayers, c. 19th century
24 ‘The St James’s Macaroni’, James Bretherton, 1772. Image: Guildhall Library & Art Gallery / Heritage Images / Getty Images
25 The Chevalier d’Eon, c. 18th century. Image: Photo12 / UIG via Getty Images
26 Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, aka Fanny and Stella, Fred Spalding, c. 1870. Image: Essex Record Office, Chelmsford
27 Oscar Wilde, Napoleon Sarony, c. 1800. Image: Universal History Archive / Getty Images
28 16 Tite Street, London, c. 1910. Image: Hulton Archive / Getty Images
29 E. M. Forster, c. 1920. Photo © Hulton-Deutsch Collection / CORBIS / Corbis via Getty Images
30 Radclyffe Hall, 1928. Image: Planet News Archive / SSPL / Getty Images
31 Map of London’s public urinals, from Paul Pry’s For Your Convenience, Philip Gough, 1937
32 A policeman silhouetted against the lights of Piccadilly, Ernst Haas, c. 1955. Image: Ernst Haas / Ernst Haas / Getty Images
33 Sir John Wolfenden, 1957. Photo © Illustrated London News Ltd / Mary Evans
34 Quentin Crisp, 1948. Image: Popperfoto / Getty Images
35 Joe Orton, c. 1965. Image: Bentley Archive / Popperfoto / Getty Images
36 John Gielgud in a stage production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, 1947. Image: Bettmann / Getty Images
37 Biograph Cinema, Victoria, London to Hell and Back, c. 1950. Photo © Ronald Grant Archive / Mary Evans
38 Women dancing together at the Gateways club or ‘The Gates’ in Chelsea, 1953. Photo © Alan Vines / reportdigital.co.uk
39 OutRage! protest, Steve Mayes, c. 1994. Photo: Steve Mayes, OutRage!
40 Protest against the Blasphemy Law, Mick Gold, 1978. Image: Mick Gold / Redferns
41 Protesters ride a pink tank past Trafalgar Square, Richard Smith, 1995. Image: Richard Smith / Sygma via Getty Images
42 A couple celebrate at Pride, Tom Stoddart, 2007. Image: Tom Stoddart / Getty Images
43 Madame JoJo’s, Ben Pruchnie, 2016. Image: Ben Pruchnie / Getty Images
44 Equal Love campaign for marriage equality, Paul Hackett, 2011. Image: Paul Hackett / In Pictures via Getty Images
45 Soho vigil for victims of the Orlando shooting, Tolga Akmen, 2016. Image: Tolga Akmen / Anadolu Agency / Getty Images
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The love that dares not speak its name has never stopped talking. If it was once ‘peccatum illud horribile, inter christianos non nominandum’ – that horrible crime not to be named among Christians – it has since been endlessly discussed.
‘Queer’ was once a term signifying disgust, but now it is pronounced with a difference. It has become the academic word of choice, and ‘queer studies’ are part of the university curriculum.
‘Gay’ comes from who knows where. It can be construed as a derivation from ‘gai’ in Old Provençal, meaning merry or vivacious, or from ‘gaheis’ in Gothic, meaning impetuous, or from ‘gahi’ in Frankish, meaning fast. Whatever the language, it used to connote frantic fun and high spirits. In English, ‘gay’ was originally attached to female prostitutes and the men who chased them. All the gay ladies were on the market. Its twentieth-century same-sex sense seems to have been invented by Americans in the 1940s. There was a long period of incubation before it made its way to England; even in the late 1960s, there were still many who did not understand the phrase ‘gay bar’.
Sodomy was, from the eleventh century, a catch-all term that could mean anything or everything. It was applied to heretics and adulterers, blasphemers and idolaters and rebels – anyone, in other words, who disturbed the sacred order of the world. It was also associated with luxury and with pride, and was regularly connected with excessive wealth. It was of course also employed for those who had different ideas about the nature of sexual desire, and was sometimes thrown in as a further accusation with other crimes including buggery.
The ‘bugger’ was originally a heretic, specifically one of the Albigensian creed which had come from Bulgaria; but since part of that creed condemned matrimonial intercourse, and indeed any kind of natural coupling, the connotations of the word spread beyond the grounds of religion. It is derived from the French bougre, as in pauvre bougre or poor sod.
The ‘ingle’, or depraved boy, was well known by the end of the sixteenth century. Is there a phrase – every nook should have an ingle? Ingal Road still survives in east London. ‘Pathic’, or the passive partner, came to the light of day in the early seventeenth century; ironically the pathic did not need to be aroused, but the male agent did. Yet only the pathic was punished. It was a question of social, rather than sexual, disfavour. The pathic was following his own path in defiance of convention and in dereliction of his social duty. He was like a cat among sheep.
‘Catamite’ was coined in the same period as pathic. A ‘chicken’ was an underage boy, hence the term ‘chicken hawk’. Such words might have had an underground existence for many decades before becoming common currency since, of course, the activity was still not to be named. The prototype of slang terms for all boy queers was the young and beardless ‘Ganymede’, often portrayed with a cockerel in his hand and also known as kinaidos.
In the eighteenth century ‘mollies’ were singled out for attention. ‘Jemmy’ was an abbreviation for James I whose appetites were well known, although a less common term was ‘indorsers’ from the boxing slang for pummelling the back of an opponent. In one Newgate transcript a pickpocket is advised to ‘leave these Indorsers to their beastly Appetites’. A more polite term was ‘fribble’ after a character invented by David Garrick. Other eighteenth-century terms included ‘madge’ and ‘windward passage’ as well as ‘caudlemaking’ or ‘giving caudle’ from the Latin cauda for tail. Queers were often called ‘backgammon players’ or ‘gentlemen of the back door’, sometimes engaged in ‘caterwauling’. They might also engage in ‘gamahuche’, or the act of fellatio, which was applied to females as well as males.
Effeminacy has always been part of what David Garrick, as Mr Fribble, called ‘ooman nater’. It was not entirely reserved for queers, and indeed was also applied to men who loved women too dearly for their own good. In John Wycliffe’s biblical translation of the late fourteenth century, ‘effeminati’ is rendered as ‘men maad wymmenysch’. They were considered self-indulgent and silly. They were soft or weak. To complicate matters still further, they may have been asexual.
‘Effeminate’ is not to be confused with ‘camp’ which implies a deliberate intention to divert, to shock, or to amuse; camp suggests a flourish, or a display, and it is supposed to come from the Italian verb campeggiare, to stand out or to dominate. The sovereign of camp was, perhaps, the ‘queen’ or ‘quean’. The word was first applied to immodest or bold women, the strong ones of their sex, but by the early twentieth century it was equally applied to extravagant queers who could out-female the females.
A Hungarian, Karl-Maria Benkert, coined the term ‘homoszexualitás’ in 1869, thus becoming one of the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. It was for him not a question of morality, but of classification. The subject needed a clinician rather than a priest. Flowers are still placed on Benkert’s grave. Twenty-three years later, Charles Gilbert Chaddock rendered his term into English where it has remained ever since. Havelock Ellis described it as a ‘barbarous neologism, sprung from a monstrous mingling of Greek and Latin stock’ but he may have been mistaking the word for the deed.
When in 1918 J. R. Ackerley was asked whether he was ‘homo or hetero’, he did not know what the question meant. Another English memoirist, T. C. Worsley, recalled that in 1929 homosexuality ‘was still a technical term, the implications of which I was not entirely aware of’. Even in the 1950s elderly gentlemen were flummoxed by the word. It did not arrive in the Valhalla of the Oxford English Dictionary until the supplement of 1976.
Another term emerged in 1862, in the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. ‘Uranian’ or ‘urning’ was derived from Plato’s description of same-sex love in the Symposium as ‘ouranios’ or ‘heavenly’. (‘Ouranos’ literally means ‘the pisser’, opening up a further line of enquiry.) Whatever its celestial origins, the term did not quite catch on. Who would want to be called an ‘urning’? It sounds like some sort of gnome. An ‘urnind’ was a queer female, while ‘uranodionings’ were bisexual. Further awkward nomenclatures were found, ‘similisexualism’ and ‘homogenic love’ among them. The ‘invert’ was also discovered in the late nineteenth century, but he did not prosper as much as ‘pervert’.
Various euphemisms were in use among the mixed band of brothers and sisters in the late nineteenth century. Is he earnest? Is he so? Is he musical? Is he theatrical? Is he temperamental? Is he TBH? Or, in other words, is he to be had? A pair of young men, in the 1930s, might be asked whether they ‘share a flat’. Less euphemistic terms included ‘fairy’, ‘shirt-lifter’, ‘pansy’, ‘nancy boy’, ‘pervert’, ‘bone-smoker’, ‘poof’ which had once been ‘puff’, ‘sissy’, ‘Mary Anne’, ‘fudge-packer’, ‘butt-piler’, ‘pillow biter’ and, in the American tongue, ‘faggot’ or ‘fag’. Faggots were the sticks of wood on top of which accused sodomites were burned to death. That is, at least, one explanation. It may equally derive from the schoolboy drudge of a senior prefect. More complicated words came out of thin air. A ‘dangler’, in the nineteenth century, was one who pretended to like women but in reality did not.
The female variants of same-sex passion included ‘sapphist’ and ‘lesbian’ after the peerless poet of Lesbos, the latter term first appearing in the 1730s. ‘Sapphist’ often became ‘sapph’ in the early twentieth century. There are also allusions to ‘tribades’ or ‘tribadic women’ that come from both Latin and Greek sources. There is the ‘fricatrice’, one who rubs, and ‘subigatrice’, one who works a furrow. A ‘tommy’ is to be found in eighteenth-century England, and is first mentioned in the Sapphic Epistle of 1777. ‘Butch’, ‘femme’, ‘dyke’, ‘bull-dyke’ and ‘diesel-dyke’ can still sometimes be heard.
The use of the word ‘queer’ signifies defiance and a refusal to use Karl-Maria Benkert’s clinical neologism – homosexuality. ‘Queer’ can also be construed as being beyond gender. It is an accommodating term, and will be used as such in this study. But it does not preclude the use of other words in this volume, such as gay, where they seem to be more appropriately or more comfortably placed. ‘Homoerotic’, another refugee from the twentieth century, may be useful in an emergency. It might also be necessary to invoke ‘LGBTQIA’, beginning with lesbian and ending with asexuality with transgender somewhere in the middle.
So queer people stream out of space and time, each with his or her own story of difference. Some may consider this to be a queer narrative, therefore, but the queerer the better.
Of London, before the Romans came, little has been recorded. Yet it may be possible to peer into the suppositious Celtic twilight in order to glimpse unfamiliar passions. The name of the city itself is presumed to be of Celtic origin. It is easy to imagine that the male members of these early tribes were avowedly active in manner and nature, tearing out the heart of a stag with one hand while beating the taut animal skin of a drum with the other. In fact many of their leaders dressed in female clothes and, in ritual ceremonial, imitated the female orgasm and the pains of labour. Aristotle observed that the Celts ‘openly held in honour passionate friendship between men’; he uses the Greek word synousia for that passion, literally meaning ‘being together with’ or ‘of the same nature as’, but in more vulgar terms alluding to sexual intercourse. The Celts were known for their dark complexions and dark, curly hair. Oil was the lubricant of choice. ‘They wear their hair long,’ Julius Caesar wrote, ‘and shave all their bodies with the exception of their heads and their upper lips.’ You can still see them walking in the streets of London.
Strabo, the Greek philosopher and geographer, declared that Celtic youths were ‘prodigal of their youthful charms’. His near contemporary, Diodorus Siculus, commented in his universal history that the Celts paid little attention to their women but were instead greedy for male embraces; he recorded that it was considered to be a disgrace or a dishonour if a Celtic youth rejected an adult male’s sexual advances. The men lay on animal skins with a young male bed-mate on either side. His observation is repeated in Athenaeus of Naucratis, but he may just have been passing on a sexy story which could be applied to the Germanic as well as the Celtic peoples. It may be better to investigate individual tribes, many of them dating to the Mesolithic period, rather than denominate ‘Celtic’ or ‘Germanic’ peoples, but the subject is thoroughly confused. We can only speculate on activities rather than origins.
In the fourth century, Eusebius of Caesarea noted that among the tribes young men were ready and eager to marry one another according to custom. Bardesanes of Edessa wrote that ‘handsome young men assume the role of wives towards other men, and they celebrate marriage feasts’. Sextus Empiricus wrote of the Germanic people that sodomy was ‘not looked upon as shameful but as a customary thing’. The sources, fortunately, all agree.
These handsome young men were not unusual in a predominantly military culture, and the references are so frequent that they suggest an identifiable part of the population who took on the passive role as part of their transition to adulthood. Slaves, the clergy, and those who did not aspire to military honour were also of their number. From the evidence of the scholars, therefore, an alternative to conventional procreation was readily available and much in demand. This has remained throughout the history of London.
In Roman London we are on well-documented foundations. When the conquerors brought their brick and marble, they also brought their social customs. In the beginning two principal streets of gravel ran parallel to the river on the eastern hill. A military camp was established in the north-western quarter of the city. Taverns and brothels grew around them as naturally as wild grass. London was at this time a relatively new settlement, and therefore more receptive or more vulnerable to new practices and influences. By the time it had become a city, and a capital, it had grown out of all proportion. It also had become a rich city, filled with merchants and businessmen (or negotiatores) who no doubt purchased bodies as well as goods. It is one of the few settlements on earth that began as a city and has always remained one, with all the commercial and financial entanglements this history implies.
Urban life was conducted in the Roman fashion. The most ubiquitous practice of same-sex love occurred in the relationship between master and slave or between man and boy. The passive partner, in other words, had no political role. In what was essentially a city state, with its own independent government, the difference in status is important. Only the active could rule. Sexuality is not a free agent in society; society defines and dominates sexuality. Warriors who had been overcome in battle could be raped by Roman citizens. The defeated were sometimes instead penetrated by ‘radishes’; that may not sound too painful an ordeal but in fact the ‘long white icicle radish’ has always been grown in southern England to a length of just under six inches.
Paedophilia, or sex with a child, and pederasty, sex with an adolescent, were not condemned. The love between two free men was, on the other hand, considered undesirable and worthy of censure; this is not to say, of course, that it did not happen. But if a man were accused of such infamia, he might be stripped of his civic rights.
In the middle of a busy city such as Londinium, many opportunities were afforded by the various lupanaria or ‘wolf dens’ (public pleasure houses), fornices (brothels) and the thermiae (hot baths). The pleasure houses were expensive, and were no doubt largely patronised by the Roman administrators and Romano-British nobility. The brothels of a lower class might have curtained entrances, behind which a number of small booths were established. The wooden houses had roofs of thatch and brightly painted plaster interiors. The palaestrae, or sporting facilities, within the hot baths were well known for casual pickups.
But sex could be advertised in the open, for the delectation of passing trade. Sometimes a male prostitute might stand in front of his own stall or ‘cell’ waiting for custom. He might also haunt a tavern, a lodging house or a bakery. He might come from the lower classes, or he may have been a foreigner or a slave. Slaves or captured foreigners were disembarked in open spaces near the major quays known as ‘Romelands’, and may have been sold on the spot; ‘Romelands’ could be found at Dowgate, Queenhithe, Billingsgate and the Tower. Male prostitutes were prized for the tax raised from them, and they had their own public holiday.
A Roman apologist for Christianity, Minucius Felix, stated that homosexuality was ‘the Roman religion’ and the second century Assyrian scholar, Tatian, confirmed that pederasty ‘was held in pre-eminent esteem by the Romans’. It was considered to be an admirable activity, and was no doubt as common in London as in Rome. It hardly deserved notice or comment, no more than the ‘Herms’ or stone pillars which stood at the major intersections; they represented Hermes with an erect phallus, and sometimes the phallus alone. It has not been emphasised enough, perhaps due to the modesty of classicists, that Roman society was intensely phallocratic; the worship of the penis was only ever equalled in regions of India.
The queer man in Greek history, who bears some relation to his Roman or even English brother, was described in the anonymous Physiognomonics (c.300 BC) as having ‘an unsteady eye and knock-knees; he inclined his head to the right; he gestures with his palms up and his wrists loose; and he has two styles of walking – either waggling his hips or keeping them under control. He tends to look around in all directions.’ He was also homo delicatus in Rome and London who, according to Scipio in 129 BC, ‘daily perfumes himself and dresses before a mirror, whose eyebrows are trimmed, who walks abroad with beard plucked out and thighs made smooth’. He was soft, with mincing steps and shrill or lisping voice. He wore violet and purple rather than white, but he also loved light green and sky blue. He kept his hand upon his hip and scratched his head with one finger. In his discussion of Britain in his life of Agricola, Tacitus in the first century states that ‘the barbarians, as well, learn to condone seductive vices’. He also explains that the Romano-British soon imitated the vices and follies of their masters; in their ignorance they called it ‘civilisation’ but it was really ‘a part of their servitude’. New London became the mirror of old Rome.
Sartorial tokens of effeminacy were recorded in some detail by classical authors; you were what you wore. A mantle, made of soft wool, was worn by both sexes but for males had singular connotations. Boots of white leather, reaching to the knee or shin, were another sign. Garments dyed with saffron were worn by men with a difference. An ‘oriental’ headdress, resembling a turban, was considered effeminate as was a ‘soft shoe’ designed for wearing indoors. A sandal fastened to the sole by leather straps was deemed to be inappropriate, as were fine shawls or veils. Long and loose clothing, including the ankle-length tunic and the unbelted tunic, were not considered sufficiently male. Tattooing was also suspect. It used to be believed that graves containing jewellery were those of females, but that convenient illusion has been dispelled. It is now clear that men wore earrings, finger rings, or neck rings (torcs). An image of Harpocrates has been found in London; it is of a nubile boy god wearing a gold body chain, a device only previously displayed on goddesses.
Yet the men are only half of it. Some classical scholars have uncovered legal allusions to women lying together or even engaged in permanent or temporary relationships. To the evidence of the antiquarian can be added the discoveries of the archaeologist. In Great Dover Street have been found the remains of a female gladiator. This was within the Southwark district where social outcasts found their last resting place. She was in her early twenties. One of the objects buried with her was a lamp showing a fallen gladiator. The grave goods included stone pines (pinus pinea) which have only ever been found in the great amphitheatre of Roman London where they disguised the noxious smells.
She seems to have attracted wealthy admirers, despite her status as an outcast, and may be evidence of the popular fervour attached to the more daring contestants. Other female gladiators in the classical world are recorded with their own habits and customs. Many allusions were made to them and contests were sometimes held between women and dwarves. A marble relief, now in the British Museum, shows two women armed for combat.
Their sexuality, if such it was, can only be surmised. ‘How can a woman be decent,’ Juvenal wrote, ‘sticking her head in a helmet, denying the sex she was born with?’ There may be a further connection with London. Petronius writes of a female essedaria, a gladiatress, fighting from a British chariot. This is decidedly odd. Classical sources tell us also that in England women were as tall and strong as the men. Two females, in their mid-twenties, were found curled together in a burial site beneath Rangoon Street in the City of London. They were relatively sturdy with strong legs and feet; it is possible that they were accustomed to carrying heavy loads in building work or some other trade. Another joint female burial is recorded on the bank of the Thames at Bull Ward; one of them was older and had been killed with a blow to her skull. Beside her was a much younger and smaller woman, with a height of four feet and nine inches. They may have been sisters, but they may not.
It is pertinent to note that male gladiators often gave themselves effeminate names such as Hyacinthus and Narcissus, and it seems more than likely that they had as many male as female admirers. They dressed to kill, with tunics made up of tassels and threads of gold, and with elaborate armbands. Inscriptions set up in their honour have plausibly homoerotic explanations. They sometimes conducted tours of England like a band of thespians. Many statues and copper lamps and bowls, and even earrings, displaying Hercules are found in London; characteristically he is nude and beardless, with short and straight ‘Celtic’ hair; he holds his club in his right hand but, in a find at Walbrook, three cupids hold up this weapon. He was in any case a divine hero for some Londoners.
But divinity assumed another face. In the early fourth century the shadow of the cross fell upon Londinium. The change to Christian faith may not have been immediate but it was far-reaching. The bishops and their clergy came. The monks came. The missionaries continued to come. This was the century when the first laws were enacted against certain queer practices, although full prohibition of homosexuality was not enjoined until the sixth century.
As the cities of the Roman Empire declined, greater animus was directed against any and all minorities that had flourished in an urban setting. In the reign of the Byzantine emperor of the sixth century, Justinian, the sentence for sodomitical activity was castration of both parties, which in effect was a sentence of death. One law, promulgated in 538, warned the people of Constantinople that homosexual acts would ‘incur the just anger of God, and bring about the destruction of cities along with their inhabitants’. The example of Rome could be adduced but so might the decay of Londinium which had been left undefended by the early fifth century.
The earliest arrival of the Saxons has been dated to the beginning of the same century. According to the historian Gildas, the inhabitants of England were licked by a ‘red and savage tongue’. The archaeological evidence suggests that the city was thoroughly Saxonised by the middle of the sixth century, and Lundenwic emerged in what is now Covent Garden.
The Anglo-Saxons – essentially a collection of Jutes, Angles, Frisians and Saxons who had arrived at different times and in different regions – had not yet been recruited for Christianity and they maintained their indigenous sexual traditions. The Roman descriptions of their homosexual propensities are so similar to accounts of the Celtic and the Germanic tribes that for all practical effects they are indistinguishable. It is of course true that there are limits to what two men can do to, or with, one another. And it is also true that early historians often simply copied what they had read elsewhere.
It was a world of warriors governed by a rich and intense male culture. The young men of the noble class wore linen tunics, fastened at the wrist and waist by golden clasps; their clothes were ornamented with brooches and other jewels. Men as well as women dyed their hair; blue, green and orange were the colours favoured by the men. The early histories have their own salacious legends. When Mempricius, the fifth king of the Britons, turned to sodomy he was devoured by wolves. When Malgo, a sixth-century king of the Saxons, indulged in sodomy or ‘a sinne against kynde’ he died suddenly in his bath at the palace of Winchester.
The earliest collections of Anglo-Saxon laws make no mention of same-sex activity; the oldest code, from Ethelbert of Kent in the early seventh century, punishes bestiality, rape, adultery and incest but does not even allude to homosexuality. In the ninth century, Alfred quotes the Bible on the punishment of death for men who have sex with sheep but lays down no penalty at all for men who have sex with men. The dog never barks.
Saxon men were taller and heavier than the Romans or the Celts; they were clean-shaven but often sported bushy moustaches. Many had short hair in the belief that cropped hair rendered their faces larger and therefore fiercer. They may not have varied greatly from the Angles and Jutes who had crossed the sea with them, but were they prettier when younger? Bede recounts how Pope Gregory saw some young Angles on sale in a market of Rome, with ‘fair complexions, fine-cut features and beautiful hair’. The Pope is supposed to have said: ‘Non Angli, sed angeli’; but the little angels were no doubt destined for a fate harsher than a heavenly choir. The remark was later held against Gregory on the grounds that he was also a sodomite. As he might have said, ‘Vincere non potest.’ You can’t win.
Christianity did not arrive formally in England until 597 when Augustine landed at Thanet to convert the Germanic, rather than the British, people. Soon enough the Church had become an instrument of government and the Christian penitentials offered stern guidance for the punishment of sin. Homosexuality may not have been mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon codes but in Christian documents it took an important role. In the penitentials the punishment for fornicating with another man was a penance of four years, and of ten or fifteen years for a further offence; a penance of seven years was applied to a ‘sodomita’ or ‘mollis’ for his general bearing in the world. It is clear enough that there was already a specific and recognisable group or community of queers which were given especial names by the larger society. One such name was baedling, which is derived from the Anglo-Saxon word for a boy or an effeminate man. It can also be interpreted as one who spends too much time in bathhouses. It has been suggested by some scholars that ‘bad’ derives from baedling, thus giving universal moral significance to a sexual difference. In a similar spirit of queer etymological conjecture, it has been surmised that ‘felon’ comes from fellare, to suck.
From another code (c.670s), associated with Theodore, Archbishop of Canterbury, comes the injunction that ‘If boys fornicate between themselves he judged that they are to be beaten’. It is also laid down that ‘who releases semen into the mouth, seven years of penance; this is the worst evil’. A boy who engages in intercourse with an adult male in holy orders is to fast for three periods of forty days. No punishment is assigned to the man. The boy was considered to be the temptor and instigator, perhaps, and it was a way of preserving authority in a male environment; it may also be that the period of fasting was a way of removing pollution from the child. Yet if it seems manifestly unjust it serves to emphasise the difference between early medieval and modern sexuality. One section of a penitential has a ringing introduction. ‘Let us Now Set Forth the Decree of Our Fathers before Us on the Sinful Playing of Boys.’
Another British penitential, compiled by Vinnian, also mentions fellatio. ‘Those who satisfy their desires with their lips, three years. If it has become a habit, seven years.’ He also denounces ‘in terga fornicantes’, having sex through the back, but leaves the punishment to the discretion of the priest-confessor. It is clear enough, however, that at no time did the canons of Christian law evince the slightest tolerance for same-sex love. It was always forbidden, even though it did not become a capital offence until the sixteenth century.
The presence of same-sex love among women is noticed in the penitentials as well. ‘If a woman has intercourse with another woman, she is to fast three years.’ Another penitential discusses the use of a machina or instrument, which sounds very much like a dildo. Transvestism by either male or female is not considered a sexual offence but is regarded as an aspect of witchcraft or some other pagan practice. It is not uncommon for a male corpse to be buried alongside grave goods normally associated with females, a phenomenon that has prompted some archaeologists to contemplate the existence of a ‘third gender’ among the Anglo-Saxons. This would correspond with evidence from other parts of the world, from the berdaches of Dakota to the Bhoota dancers of South India. The questions of why and when this sexual diversity was restrained or eliminated, if in fact it ever was, are part of the story of the queer city.
If men can be of ambiguous gender, so can women. There are many stories of religious women or holy women who dressed, worked and lived like men. They cut their hair, one of the prime tokens of femality. They might dress as monks in order to emphasise their double vocation. They have renounced their nature for service to God. Some of them were not discovered to be women until the time of their death.
Another Anglo-Saxon penitential refers to a married man who enjoys having sex with male partners, and an aggressive male known as waepnedman (waepned with connotations of arms or armour) who has intercourse with similarly masculine men. We might say, therefore, that some of the characteristics of modern gay life are to be found in the first and second-century city. Terms such as baedling or mollis also indicate some kind of permanent sexual identity, part of a passive subculture that may have flourished in Anglo-Saxon London despite the strictures of the Church. The connotations and explanations, however, were different from those of the twenty-first century. The participants may or may not have been ‘queer’ but no one could tell. The matter is irrelevant. The word and concept were unknown.
In some penitentials the punishments were relatively mild. Women were obliged to do penance of 160 days for same-sex love, and males incurred a year of fasting and prayer. But it was not condign punishment. A priest who went hunting, for example, was consigned to three years of penitence. It seems likely that same-sex activity was considered no more or less reprehensible than sex outside marriage. It was certainly favoured by the clergy. They may have taken their inspiration from the paired military saints, such as Juventin and Maximin, where fraternal love peeks over the borders of same-sex love. They may have been encouraged in England itself where, according to St Boniface in 744, the people were ‘lusting after the fashion of the people of Sodom’. One English cleric of the period, Alcuin, more associated with York rather than London, is very effusive in one letter to another man; he wants to lick his breast, and kiss his fingers and his toes. It has been suggested that this is part of an epistolary tradition but the language is so vivid that it is hard to know where custom ends and private passion begins. As C. S. Lewis remarked in The Allegory of Love (1936), ‘the deepest worldly emotion in this period is the love of man for man’.
This was also the characteristic of the various invaders who conquered and occupied London over succeeding centuries, among them the Vikings and the Normans. Two Old Norse words, ‘ergi’ and ‘argr’, expressed dark or angry hints of homoeroticism and communal betrayal. Norse words existed for active as well as passive roles in same-sex intercourse although, curiously enough, the person who made the original accusation of sodomy was in danger of outlawry or even death. There was no penalty for the incident itself. The Vikings, having the sea in their blood, may have had that sexual insouciance which is supposedly characteristic of sailors. Their sagas abound in references to koerleikr, which can be construed as love between men.
A medical compendium of the early eleventh century described ‘a disease which befalls a man who is accustomed to have other men lie on him. He has great sexual desire, and a great deal of sperm, which is not moved.’ It goes on to counsel ‘the men who try to cure these people’ that ‘their illness lies in their imagination. It is not natural. The only cure is to break their desire through sadness, hunger, sleeplessness, imprisonment and flogging.’ It is another example that sexual passivity was considered to be more troubling and disruptive than sexual activity. ‘Sadness’ can be interpreted as seriousness or gravity; the queers were guilty, among much else, of frivolity.
By the twelfth century same-sex love came to be considered as the prevailing vice of Norman nobles, princes and kings. How could it not be so in a military caste that relied upon masculine loyalty and friendship? The Normans were in fact notorious for their sexual preference. Willing boys were no doubt to be found by the military fortifications of Montfichet Tower, Baynard’s Castle and the south-east section of the Wall that later became known as the Tower.
William I, or ‘Conqueror’, was not of their number; but his son, William II or William Rufus, was inclined to the practices of Sodom. He never married and had no children, a startling circumstance for a king. Even those who disliked their wives usually did their duty and continued the line. Instead he surrounded himself with what the chroniclers call ‘effeminates’ with mincing step and loose or extravagant clothing. His friends loved soft clothes and soft bedding. They wore tight shirts and tunics. They wore shoes with pointed toes. They wore their long hair loose, with ringlets that tumbled down to the shoulders and were sometimes decorated with ribbons; crisping irons were in regular use, as they were in the later reign of John. The English historian William of Malmesbury commented that the youths were often naked and competed with each other for the softness of their skin; they ‘break their step with a licentious gesture’. It was said that at night the lamps of the court were extinguished so that sexual sins might be committed under the cover of darkness. Yet an alternative explanation is possible. The young men were called ‘effeminate’ because they loved women too much. That was one of the meanings of the word. It has been proposed that the allusions to homosexuality were really part of the propaganda against the Norman overseers. This proviso must always be kept in mind.
Nevertheless it was widely considered to set an unfortunate example to the subjects of the king, and it was constantly assailed by the more vigorous or courageous Anglo-Norman clerics. Anselm, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1093, preached against the male tradition of long hair at court and requested that William II should convene a conference on the evils of his reign, particularly ‘the most shameful crime of sodomy’. The king ordered his archbishop never to mention the matter again. It made no difference in any case. Anselm’s biographer, Eadmer, mentions that long hair became so much the fashion that short-haired courtiers were known as ‘country bumpkins’ or even ‘priests’. A question was asked: ‘If you don’t do what courtiers do, what are you doing in court?’
It was said that, after the Normans came, homosexuality spread in England like syrup through water. It was largely baedling