A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between
Men Since the Middle Ages
by Matt Cook with Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach, and H. G. Cocks Greenwood World Publishing
256 pages, $49.95
The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750: Volume 2: Queer Articulations
by Thomas A. King University of Wisconsin Press
583 pages, $65.
THE FRAUGHT legal and social history of same-sex male relations in Britain over the last thousand years should naturally be of interest to us. Much of American law and cultural practice derive from the mother country. The Puritanism that crossed the sea from England remains a deeply embedded strain in the American psyche.
To be sure, the traffic in queer mores and legal proscriptions has more recently run in both directions. England’s Wolfenden report of 1957 advocated the decriminalization of homosexual acts between adults over 21. This did not immediately lead to parliamentary reforms (that would wait for the Sexual Offences Act of 1967), but the nascent American “homophile” movement would have kept close watch on progress across the Pond. As for issues on the ground, the influx of American “Yanks” during World War II “exposed British men to … the sexual ease of some of the American GIs,” as we learn in the first of Matt Cook’s two articles in A Gay History of Britain. No less an expert than Quentin Crisp “waxed lyrical about the availability of the North American soldiers: ‘…words of love began to ooze from their lips, sexuality from their bodies and pound notes from their pockets.’”
Edited by Cook, A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages covers a lot of territory in little more than 200 pages.
Three additional contributors—Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach, and H. G. Cocks—join him in providing six essays that limn a timeline from 1000 CE to 2006. Each one assesses evidence of same-sex relations and their diverse contemporary meanings.
The most obvious asymmetry among the essays results from evidentiary limitations. As Cook himself indicates, court transcripts and newspaper articles provide rich evidence from the 18th century onward. Earlier centuries depend on somewhat more obscure diaries, chronicles, and poetry or tracts of an ecclesiastical nature.
Robert Mills, however, covering the years 1000 to 1500, is quick to point to the linguistic and geographic breadth that his documents encompass—Middle English, French, Welsh, and Latin. Much of this material seems both fresh and foreign. Mills sees the rhetoric of same-sex intimacy in medieval rites of “voluntary kinship,” “adoptive brotherhood and peacemaking,” and “expressions of homosocial bonding, physical closeness and loving union between males.” In these he detects elements of public ritual allied to political or diplomatic purposes and, at least on the surface, having “nothing whatsoever to do with sodomy.”
He nevertheless provides textual excerpts about two famous same-sex liaisons that come down to us through the ages: Richard the Lionhearted of England’s relations with the young King Philip Augustus of France beginning in 1187, and Edward II’s liaison with Piers Gaveston starting at the close of the 13th century. In the former instance, a chronicler described how Richard and Philip negotiated peace between their countries and ate “every day at the same table and from the same dish, and at night their beds did not separate them.”
Mills does not impose a simple contemporary construction on this remark, for he’s interested in exploring “the blurred spaces between brotherhood, friendship, love and marriage in medieval society.” As for truth about Edward II and his minion, in light of Christopher Marlowe’s own homoerotic account of their relations well after the fact,* Mills stresses how their relationship was sometimes viewed in “the language of ritualized love and friendship,” and concludes that they probably “entered into a compact corresponding to … wed brothers, a mode of voluntary kinship formed through a ritualized promise rather than relations of blood.”
With Randolph Trumbach’s two essays covering 1500 to 1800, we enter more familiar territory, though from today’s perspective, perhaps less sharply defined in terms of its sexual identities. Here we have the first secular proscriptions against sodomy dating back to the reign of Henry VIII, which moved jurisdictions from the ecclesiastical courts to the state courts. Trumbach emphasizes the age structuring of male-male sex during this period: young men could be passively available to older ones without imposing a permanent sexual identity as the young men matured. Indeed, “men and the boys who had sexual relations with each other were also sexually attracted to women and often had sexual relations with both males and females in the same period of life.”
Trumbach provides colorful evidence about no less noteworthy a figure than King James I, who had a favorite even before ascending to the throne: Alexander Lindsey was reported to be his “nightly bed-fellow.” He also explores a significant cultural figure, Edward Kynaston, perhaps the most famous boy actor of the mid-17th century, who played women’s roles on and off the stage.† In addition, the author gives a lively account of court cases involving village life where a man could regularly make passes at boys or achieve his aims “over many years before the complaint of a boy brought to official light what the man’s neighbours had clearly long known.”
He also delves into the tavern society of the “molly houses,” where working-class men could let down their hair—or their wigs—and engage in gender inversions of a kind that we might classify as butch and femme role-playing. Documentary evidence from trials of this period provide a window onto the clientele’s camp debauchery and the lavish “birthing” rituals in which a man en travestie would play a woman in labor while others would midwife the delivery, including an infant doll presented to the “mother” at the finale.
In covering the 19th century, H. G. Cocks describes a period that witnessed “an unprecedented rise in the numbers of men punished for simply having sex with each other.” Indeed, sodomy remained a capital crime until 1861. Yet there were well-known cruising areas in London near Drury Lane and Covent Garden, the city’s molly houses persisted until 1820, and a new slang called Polari came to be used by same-sex cognoscenti. Among the paradoxes of this age, as Cocks explains, was the judiciary’s desire to punish miscreants, assumed to constitute a distinct minority, accompanied by a fear that openly acknowledging the existence of these kinds of offenses risked attracting larger numbers of curious men willing to give it a go.
Cocks also provides a delicious summary of the famous Boulton and Park case, a.k.a. Fanny and Stella, two Victorian young men famous as theatrical cross-dressers who took to going about in drag on the streets. Most damning to their case was documentation of their relationships with upper-class men. Yet the defense presented their drag as “no more than a fascination with private theatricals taken to foolish lengths.” Indeed, they had performed at charity events and been invited into private homes in their womanly regalia. They were acquitted.
Later same-sex scandals, one of which shadowed the fight for Irish Home Rule, would have significant political import as it was broadcast to the world by what Cocks calls the “new journalism,” which involved “sensational revelations, banner headlines … and the use of scandal to make political points and sell papers.” Indeed, the infamous Cleveland Street scandal, which involved uniformed messenger boys whose “principal sideline was prostitution,” gave rise to whispered claims that the Prince of Wales, second in line to the throne, was one of their customers. Cleveland Street was in some ways a rehearsal for the Oscar Wilde trials and the massive publicity they produced.
By the time we reach Matt Cook’s penultimate chapter, which runs from the Great War to the early stirrings of gay liberation in the mid-20th century, the charge of “homosexuality” has become a neat adjunct to claims of treason or lack of patriotism. Yet the two World Wars, as Cook documents, would also provide occasions for deeply honored male bonding at the front and increasingly forthright, if condemned, forms of cruising and opportunistic homosexuality at home. He points out that during World War II, “the blackouts in major cities provided cover for casual sex.” In addition, an increasing number of subcultural centers marked by class differences began to flourish beyond London, while already in the 1920’s and 30’s, undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge “were insulated by relatively open and fashionable homosexual fraternities.” That said, Cook provides testimony that working-class gay men, although on the short-end of much police and employment tracking, “often enjoyed more support from their families and immediate communities in the interwar period.”
The 1967 Sexual Offences Act undoubtedly passed as a consequence of a more open social climate, yet the campaign for reform “took a conservative route in [its]lobbying … and touted an image of the homosexual which revolved around middle-class respectability, discretion and conformity.” As in the U.S., and in some measure following the lead of Stonewall, more radical agitation would eventually follow in the UK. Cook is good if almost overwhelmed in his last chapter, which attempts to summarize and colorfully depict various waves of social and political change, the race and class divisions within gay circles, and the calamity of AIDS. And despite the diversity and success of many gay centers throughout Britain today, Cook concludes on a decidedly ambivalent note, for he acknowledges how entrenched homophobia remains and how, among both an older generation of gay men and a younger generation of queers, there is often disappointment with the relentless orthodoxies of body presentation and attitudes that persist in GLBT culture and leave a great many by the wayside.
This anthology is gratifying for its coherence. The authors have read each other’s work, acknowledging arguments that precede their own or come later, lending the text a sense of unity. There is a general evenness of tone, and Matt Cook is to be applauded for pulling together disparate authors while emerging with a consistent narrative, without sacrificing individual points of view. And then there is the rich web of documentary as well as literary evidence, peppered with personal testimony, which gives the history under review the feel of real experience lived by men with different understandings of their relations and the circumstances in which they were played out.
It would be nice to report that Thomas A. King’s The Gendering of Men, 1600-1750: Volume 2: Queer Articulations is the perfect complement to the Cook anthology, but it is written in a vastly different register. King’s language is that of the queer theorist, not the social historian of gay and lesbian lives. The theorist depends on a convoluted syntax of abstract terms aimed at experts in the field (other academics fluent in this jargon), while the historian can reach a diverse audience of lay readers as well as colleagues. While King expatiates at great length upon several gendered phenomena of the 150 years in question—including such phenomena as the arms akimbo stance, the molly houses, and the boy/man Edward Kynaston in female performance—and while he writes with obvious passion, it would be overly charitable to say that the clarity of his ideas matches the density of his prose. An example:
The emergence of gendered privacy and companionate domesticity—what we have come to call “heteronormativity”—required the consolidation of a position of autonomy from the courtly and pederastic, the effeminate and the sodomitical (a position that could nonetheless recuperate elements of the effeminacy and display it had disavowed) and accordingly depended on the relocation both in discursive and in concrete and specifically urban social spaces of a wide array of residual and resistant practices and their resignification as properties of “mollies.”
One may need to come up for air at this point, but chances are the next sentence will be equally freighted. There are some more plainly written sentences from which meaningful insights can be derived, but they are few and far between.
There is also solace, at times delight, to be found in the book’s many illustrations, particularly in the first chapter, which show the various ways in which the arms akimbo stance—elbows bent, hand(s) on hip(s)—served to represent, first, the prerogatives of a sovereign and, later, a highly suspect effeminacy. The illustrative sources range wide, from a painting of Charles I by Sir Anthony van Dyck to one of Sir Walter Raleigh and his son by an unknown artist, stills from the 1956 film Tea and Sympathy, and a couple of campy cartoon postcards showing urban street fairies, circa 1910. However, while the illustrations are apt and do enhance the text, they can not rescue King’s academic prose, which at its worst reads like an unintentional parody of postmodern scholarship run amok. If that is your pleasure, you are welcome to it.
* See my essay, The Marlowe in Edward II, in the March-April 2008 issue of the G&LR, pp. 12-14.
† Whatever its factual fancies, I recommend the film Stage Beauty (2006) starring Billy Crudup, which presents an account of Kynaston’s life at just the moment when real women were permitted to tread the boards in women’s roles. It can’t do any more harm than Shakespeare in Love if it piques curiosity. And it does give us some sense of the sexual/gender arrangements of the age.
Allen Ellenzweig is the author of The Homoerotic Photograph (1992) and a frequent contributor to this journal.
