PIONEERING MEN AND WOMEN WHO DARED TO BE DIFFERENT
JESSICA WALFORD introduces some remarkable men and women who had the courage to be themselves during a very strait-laced era in Wales
NOT much is known about lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history in Wales. There were everyday people – and some rather more famous ones – who helped blaze a trail leading to the gender and sexual orientation equality we have today.
Now, in a new book called Forbidden Lives, author and activist Norena Shopland introduces some of these figures, who stood up for being different at a time when same-sex relationships were frowned upon.
Stories about LGBT people were often told, if even they were told, with shame, embarrassment and guilt. After all, homosexuality was only decriminalised in 1967.
In her book, Shopland finds a rather different story – of people who wanted to be seen for who they really were. People who lived their lives openly. And people who loved the people of their choice, despite what others may have thought of them.
These are just some of the real people who helped shape Wales’ LGBT history, paving the way for future generations and breaking down barriers.
Peggy Evans (Margaret uch Evans of Penllyn)
ONE of the earliest gay icons was Peggy Evans.
Living in the 1770s, the main reason we know about Peggy is through the work of Thomas Pennant, a prolific writer and traveller. He described Peggy as an “extraordinary female” who “was the greatest hunter, shooter, and fisher, of her time”.
At the age of around 90, Peggy also kept a dozen dogs. At the age of 70 she was apparently the best wrestler in the country, as well as a blacksmith, shoe-maker, boat-builder and maker of harps.
Katherine Philips
A POET from England, Katherine spent most of her life in Cardigan. Although she was well-known in her time, it was not until the 20th century that she was recognised as one of the most influential women poets in the English language.
Most discussion about her life and work focuses on whether she was a lesbian, because her writing focused on women and the passionate relationships she had with them. They were the first British poems which talked about same-sex love between women.
Today, Katherine’s poems would be defined as lesbian or homoerotic – but how far her actual relationships went, we don’t know.
King Edward II
KING Edward II, also known as Edward of Caernarfon, is one of the more famous gay historical figures. Much of King Edward’s reputation as a gay king stems from his relationship with his favourite at court, Piers Gaveston.
Numerous depictions show them both in a way which we would see today as homosexual. As early as 1593, in Christopher Marlowe’s play Edward II, a sympathetic and complex portrayal of the king is given. But in the 1991 film by Derek Jarman his sexuality is much more explicit.
Other works, however, depict him in a much more negative light. The 1995 blockbuster Braveheart depicts Edward as camp and stereotypical.
After Gaveston was murdered by barons who wanted him out of the king’s life Edward began a relationship – with Hugh Despenser – that would destroy his life.
Hugh was involved in a series of controversies, including executing someone in Cardiff, seizing lands, and wielding absolute power. He was a man who guarded access to the king – and that wasn’t liked by everybody. And when Edward chose Hugh over his wife Isabella of France, when she wouldn’t return from France, it ultimately led to his downfall.
The Ladies of Llangollen
PERHAPS the most famous lesbian couple in history, the Ladies of Llangollen are featured in almost every timeline in LGBT history or book on gay history. Born in 1739 in Dublin, Lady Eleanor Butler was part of an ancient Irish family. Described as one of the most remarkable women of her age, she was “manlike and tall of stature, liberal and bountiful, a sure friend and a bitter enemy”, according to Alfred John Webb’s A Compendium of Irish Biography.
Described as too masculine to attract men, Lady Eleanor’s family feared she would end up alone, when a woman’s goal in life at that time was to marry.
When she was 23, a neighbouring family wrote to Lady Eleanor’s family asking if she could watch over their niece. The 13-year-old Sarah Ponsonby and Lady Eleanor got on well and their friendship grew.
Sarah was also from a prominent Irish family but her mother had died when she was three and her father when she was seven.
They tried to escape on multiple occasions, each time being caught by their families, but after Lady Eleanor’s family finally stood aside they eventually found themselves in Llangollen and remained in the place they would be associated with in history.
The pair became famous, with visitors and tourists wanting to know more about them. Their home, Plas Newydd, turned into a must-see tour-
ist destination. By 1801 the Ladies of Llangollen were international celebrities. William Wordsworth and the Duke of Wellington even paid them a visit.
Lady Eleanor eventually became almost blind and died in 1829. Sarah died two years later.
The ‘dancing marquess’ of Anglesey
HENRY Cyril Paget, the Fifth Marquess of Anglesey, was an eccentric character, best known f for his love of jewellery a and ostentatious disp plays. When he married his cousin, Lillian Florence M Maud Chetwynd, in 1 1898, he gave her an a abundance of jewels. B But she walked out of th their marriage not long afte after they wed. The pair were granted an annulment on the grounds they had not consu consummated the marriage. Hen Henry returned to his first love, a acting, building a theatre at his home in Anglesey, performin performing everything from Little Red Riding Hood to Aladdin. In one production he was said to have worn an outfit costing £10,000 and did a “butterfly dance”, gaining him the nickname The Dancing Marquess. Henry went on to perform in shows that toured, and left people spellbound by his extravagance. The Yorkshire Post wrote for one performance that “there was... an almost total absence of the masculine quality in his character”. One writer in the New Zea- land paper Otago Witness wrote: “I am driven to the conclusion from much that I have seen that there are men who ought to have been born women, and women who ought to have been born men.”
Thus, Henry becomes important in history as a figure of gender identity. Not much is known about Henry’s sexual orientation, apart from comments made about him.
John Randell
THE 2015 film The Danish Girl won Eddie Redmayne an Academy Award for his portrayal of Lili Elbe, a male-to-female transsexual, in the 1930s. Lili was one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment. Nowadays the operation is available all over the world, but here in the UK one of the first clinics to offer the operation was at Charing Cross Hospital. And it was all the brainchild of a man from Penarth.
John Randell was appointed senior psychiatrist at Charing Cross Hospital after World War II, when there had been a lot of discussions in Britain about homosexuality, with people trying to “understand” the issue. The view of psychiatry at the time was that it was a condition that could be cured through a variety of methods, including therapy, chemical castration or electric shock treatment.
Randell to an extent agreed with medical views that homosexuality was not natural, preferring to believe it stemmed from familial and societal pressures. He was also against locking up people who were gay.
It wasn’t until the 1950s that gender reassignment surgery techniques were perfected. Initially, Randell wasn’t in favour.
But, with a growing patient list, increased media interest, and more patients coming back from abroad with good results, Randell set up the Gender Identity Clinic in 1966.
By the late 1960s he was becoming convinced surgery was more suitable for some patients but they would have to be studied by him for at least a year, and have lived as their new gender for six months to a year before surgery.
Patients also had to be free from any mental disorders, reasonably intelligent, single and able to pass in public in the gender they chose. Anyone who didn’t accept the rules would be declared a transvestite and not suitable for surgery.
During the 1970s Randell was becoming the go-to doctor for the operation. But, despite the advances in thinking at the time, he did not believe that people could be assigned the wrong gender at birth and defined transsexual people as homosexual.
He also still clung on to the idea that families were responsible in some way for people wanting surgery, saying “mothers of transsexuals are often disturbed themselves” and transsexual men are “tomboys” with an “absent father”. He would also always refer to patients as their birth gender.
By 1980 around 15% of Randell’s patients had undergone surgery, with him performing one sex-change operation a month.
In 1982 he died suddenly of a heart attack, aged 63. Despite his flaws and thoughts on trrans-sexual people, he was a pioneer in an era where trans gender people were vilified, helping many people in his clinic in London.
In August 2017 the Welsh Government announced that Wales would have its first gender identity clinic in Cardiff.
Forbidden Lives, by Norena Shopland, is published by Seren Books and costs £12.99.