A panorama of swashbuckling females who preferred to live on the wild side
13 Ann Mills, who dressed as a dragoon to serve on the Maidstone frigate in 1740. She lived and, apparently, killed as a man.
14 Christina Davies enlisted under the name of Christopher Welsh and served in many campaigns under the Duke of Marlborough.
15 Mary Ann Talbot ran the gamut of naval occupations as drummer, powder monkey, cabin boy and steward.
16 Ann Bonny and Mary Read were convicted of piracy in 1720; their apparent courage and solidarity nevertheless won them many admirers, not all of them male.
17 ‘A Morning Frolic, or the Transmutation of Sexes’ (c. 1780) is a satire upon the cross-dressing of the sexes which had a licentious appeal to those who wished to transgress.
18 A ‘molly’ is pilloried after being caught in flagrante. The aggression of the London mob was well known, and many of these victims died or were severely injured at its hands.
19 The great boy actor Edward Kynaston (1640–1712) who captured the hearts and minds (and other organs) of fashionable audiences.
20 William III, who had invaded England in 1688. Another great queer military leader, his amours with his Dutch commanders were matters of popular satire.
21 A sanitised depiction of a ‘molly house’ or male brothel. The interior would have been much less staged or staid, with foul smells, foul sights and the whole gamut of nineteenth-century sexuality. Male brothels were highly popular and even the children of the streets knew their locality.
22 The arrest of the Bishop of Clogher while engaged in dalliance with a soldier in the White Lion pub off the Haymarket. He fled to France but was known ever after as the ‘arse-bishop’.
23 Charles Bannister dressed as Polly Peachum in John Gays The Beggar’s Opera (1781). ‘Drag’ parts are as old as the theatre itself, and have always been a favourite of gay audiences.
24 A St James’s macaroni, one who dressed in a flamboyant and effeminate manner to emphasise his distinction from the rough male world.
25 The Chevalier d’Eon was a mystery wrapped in an enigma, sometimes appearing as a man and sometimes as a woman. He dressed as a young woman to act as a French spy at the Russian court but then on his return to France served as the commander of a company of dragoons. Bets were taken on the nature of his sex and money was inevitably lost when, on his death, he was discovered to be a male.
26 Two Victorian queers, Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park, were arrested outside the Strand Theatre in 1870. They were popularly known as Stella and Fanny and dressed in fashionable female attire in order to attract male attention in various places of gay resort.
27 Oscar Wilde, once the triumph of London society, became its pariah. His liking for lower-class boys, despite the fact that his predilections were widely shared, proved to be his undoing.
28 Tite Street, the home of Oscar Wilde and his wife Constance, which after his conviction was stripped of its books and furniture.
29 E. M. Forster did not care to assert his homosexuality in public, even though he practised it in private, but he left his own testament to gay love in a novel, Maurice, which was not published until after his death.
30 Radclyffe Hall wrote about gay women in The Well of Loneliness (1928), a novel which provoked immense public disapproval. The chief magistrate, at a subsequent trial, denounced it as an obscene libel’ but it was not clear where the libel lay. The novel itself is now regarded as one of the pioneering texts of lesbian literature.
31 A map of the locality of London’s lavatories for Paul Pry’s For Your Convenience: A Learned Dialogue Instructive to all Londoners and London Visitors, Overheard at the Theleme Club and Taken Down Verbatim (1937). It proved to be a Baedeker for gays, foreign and domestic, as they confronted alluring choices.
32 A shadowy Piccadilly in 1955, well known as the home of furtive sexual pleasures for unaccompanied men. It was a Mecca for London gays in the twentieth century and beyond.
33 Sir John Wolfenden was the principal author of the report, published in 1957, which recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality. It was one of the beacons for the wave of toleration in the sixties.
34 Quentin Crisp turned homosexuality into an art by playing himself on stage and television. He was the first modern queer who took great pride in his status.
35 The dramatist Joe Orton was the epitome of what came to be known as ‘rough trade’. He was an habitué of public lavatories and liked working-class encounters which he recorded in his enthralling diaries.
36 The actor Sir John Gielgud was one of the victims of police oppression when, in 1953, he was arrested for ‘cruising’ in a public lavatory. He was fined but, on returning to the stage a few days later, he was given a standing ovation.
37 The Biograph, or ‘Bio-Grope’, a cinema of first resort for London gays who now had the pleasure of soliciting in comfort. The film did not matter.
38 The interior of Gateways, the most illustrious and popular of all clubs for gay women. Its famous ‘green door’ did not close until 1985.
39 An OutRage! protest. The movement was established in 1990 to affirm the right of queer people to their ‘sexual freedom, choice and self-determination’.
40 A protest against the Blasphemy Laws in 1977 under which the publisher of Gay News was given a suspended sentence for printing a gay poem about Jesus.
41 Protesters ride past Trafalgar Square on a pink tank at Pride in 1995.
42 A couple celebrates at a Pride march in 2007.
43 The Soho nightclub Madame JoJo’s was shut down after a violent altercation in 2014.
44 The Campaign for Equal Marriage is dedicated to treating same-sex marriages as valid and equal under the law.
45 A Soho vigil held in the aftermath of the attack on the queer night-club Pulse in Orlando, Florida in 2016.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to my research assistants, Thomas Wright and Murrough O’Brien, for their assistance on this volume. I am particularly grateful to Murrough O’Brien for furnishing details of the contemporary urban scene.
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