Review by New York Times Review
the first generation of lesbian and gay scholars after Stonewall compiled tomes of evidence proving that men had gone to bed with men, and women with women, early in history and often. Because the social stigma against homosexuality was still potent in the academy in their day, these writers armored their books against condescension, brandishing complex theories about representation and identity, and thorning their texts with source notes. Despite the care the authors took to be sophisticated, however, they offered a rollicking thrill that depended in large part on an intellectual tool that was quite simple: the list. That thrill is reprised in Peter Ackroyd's "Queer City," which inventories two millenniums of lesbians, gays, trans people and other queers who have lived in London. Ackroyd starts with a list of words for nonheterosexuals, including "catamite," "sapphist," "ingle," "pathic," "mollie," "jemmy," "tribade," "tommy," "indorser," "fribble" and "madge," and quickly moves on to names, famous and forgotten, like George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, addressed by his king, James I, as "my sweet child and wife," and Mary Frith, also known as Moll Cutpurse, a cross-dresser, fortuneteller and pimp so hard to pin down that contemporaries described her as slipping "from one company to another like a fat eel between a Dutchman's fingers." Unlike his predecessors, Ackroyd doesn't knot up his lists with philosophical puzzles about the nature of sexuality, or its lack of a nature, and he dispenses with source notes. Queer history apparently no longer has anything to prove. Ackroyd, unburdened, is free to be droll. "Who would want to be called an 'urning'?" he complains, for example, of a term invented by a 19th-century sexologist. "It sounds like some sort of gnome." The breeziness does have a cost. Google searches quickly unearth sources for many tidbits in the book but not all of them. Where is the reader to turn for more information about the travesty birth, staged in a public house in 1810, in which, with the assistance of a pair of bellows, a man was delivered of a Cheshire cheese? Which "contemporary" wrote the description, quoted by Ackroyd, of the public urinals of early-20th-century London as "the most important places for homosexuals of all and every kind"? This is a guided helicopter tour, not a research seminar. Still, it's impressive how much detail can be seen even at this elevation and speed, like the varying signs that gave away a male homosexual across the centuries: white leather boots in Roman Britain, long hair and pointy-toed shoes in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest, padded codpieces in the 16th century, sticking one's thumbs into the armpits of one's waistcoat in the 17th, wagging fingers under one's coattails in the 19th and incompetence at sports and at spitting in the 20th. Ackroyd has a sharp ear for the queer voice. "Oh, you bold pullet, I'll break all your eggs!" was, he records, an insult typical of mollies, the effeminate homosexuals of the 18th century, in whose slang sex outdoors was referred to as giving a man "a green gown upon the grass." A man arrested for a lewd overture in 1726 made a poignant defense, which has become famous in the scholarly literature: "I think there is no crime in making what use I please of my own body." And a young woman arrested for stealing men's clothes in the early 20th century pleaded that she thought she could stay out of trouble "if I could go to sea." Ackroyd reports on a few suggestive funerary monuments and quotes from literary works satirizing queers and, from time to time, allowing their love to peep out, but most of his early evidence comes from criminal trials. English law ignored lesbian sex; most of the women in Ackroyd's catalogs were in trouble not for disorderly love but for breaking gendered norms of dress and behavior. Penetrative sex between men, however, was punishable by death between 1533 and 1861 - the last hangings took place in 1835 - and "gross indecency" between men was punishable by prison terms and hard labor between 1885 and 1967. The severity contrasts strangely with the lightness with which it was sometimes received. "Poor sods!" the Gothic novelist William Beckford, himself homosexual, commented in 1810, of gays sentenced to the pillory, where exposure often led to death. "I don't mind the beastly raid," a gay man sassed, in 1934, to the police arresting him, "but I would like to know if you can let me have one of your nice boys to come home with me." In contrast, the law today is milder to nonheterosexuals than ever, but much queer talk has turned dour. "New orthodoxies of expression," Ackroyd notes, in closing, are being more and more rigorously enforced, especially online. 'Oh, you bold pullet, I'll break all your eggs!' was a typical 18th-century insult. CALEB crain is the author of "American Sympathy: Men, Friendship and Literature in the New Nation" and a novel, "Necessary Errors."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 17, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
Author of London: The Biography (2001), Ackroyd prolific historian, biographer, novelist, poet, and broadcaster here focuses his attention on the city's gay aspect and history. His work is highly anecdotal and near encyclopedic in its treatment, evincing, in its detail, prodigious research. Enlivened by occasional flashes of dry wit especially in its chapter headings (Bring on the Dancing Boys, Good Golly Miss Molly, etc.) the story is a straightforward one, though not without passion, particularly in the treatment of contemporary gay life in the city. The question at the heart of the book remains, as Ackroyd puts it, What is the connection between queerness and the city? The answer to that is not always clear; it seems that some of the events he describes especially in the earlier portions might have happened elsewhere than London. Regardless, the book is fascinating in its careful exposition of the singularities and commonalities of gay life, both male and female. Ultimately it is, as he concludes, a celebration as well as a history.--Cart, Michael Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
British historian Ackroyd (London Under) presents a scintillating history of homosexuality in London. He draws from literature, theater, laws and court cases, pamphlets, and gossip to present an informed yet impressionistic picture of how religion, decree, popular standards, and desire shifted the sexual dynamics of Londoners through the centuries. Ackroyd's primary focus is on the complexities of male roles, exploring the sexual dynamics in man and boy relationships and master and slave relationships in Roman London in the fourth century, and the flourishing of prostitution and secret meeting places in the 17th century. He also discusses stereotypes of each era, like the boyish or femme Ganymede of the 16th century or the upwardly mobile macaronis and the working-class "mollies" of the 18th century. There's also a short chapter on lesbian "rubsters" in the 17th century and one about cross-dressing women in the 18th century. Though Ackroyd delights in the lurid details of his anecdotes-such as the case of accusations of sodomy against Francis Bacon and a philosophical treatise Bacon wrote about "masculine love"-his coverage of the modern period is brief and notably more somber, focusing on moods of fear and discretion, and stating that "queerness, with all its panache and ferocity, is in elegant retreat." His focus is on the lesser known periods in the history of gay and lesbian culture in London, for which he offers a nimble jaunt through history. Color illus. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A history of the development of London as the European epicenter of queer life.In his latest work, Ackroyd (Revolution: The History of England from the Battle of the Boyne to the Battle of Waterloo, 2017, etc.), who has written numerous books about his home city, dives into a specific aspect of that history. The author begins with linguistics. In trying to sort out the origins of the words "gay" and "lesbian," Ackroyd launches into an etymological exploration of a variety of words associated with homosexuality. In his opinion, the term "gay," as we understand it now, took on its meaning in the 1940s in the United States. For decades and even centuries before then, homosexuality had a very different meaning in the U.K. Ackroyd describes the varied practices of the wealthy and powerful through the ages: sleeping with young boys with no consequences and a blind eye from the general public; an intricate linguistic and hand-motion code that only the "queers" could understand; the long and often overlooked tradition of cross-dressing to gain social advantages; and the ebb and flow of acceptance of same-sex marriages. The author also takes us through the many obstacles put in place to battle against homosexuality, though he describes a period in 16th-century London during which the effeminacy of men was celebrated (privately) and used publically in theatrical gestures and contributions to the cultural capital of the community. Spanning centuries, the book is a fantastically researched project that is obviously close to the author's heart. Rather than obsessively writing about the heterosexual perception of homosexual lifestyles, Ackroyd provides tangible anecdotes from members of the community, all with a light and engaging tone that will make most readers continue until the end--only to discover that not much has changed.An exciting look at London's queer history and a tribute to the "various human worlds maintained in [the city's] diversity despite persecution, condemnation, and affliction."
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
