Same Sex Love 1700-1957

By Gill Rossini

Pen & Sword, £12.99, 192 pages

The aim of this book is “to be a straightforward account of the lives of those who loved others of the same gender” and in that, it succeeds. Intended for the general reader, the history section is a simplified amalgamation of recent research on homosexual and lesbian desire. Although the subtitle describes it as “A History and Research Guide”, the guide part is only 22 pages.

Rossini treads the well known path of 18th century and Victorian sexual subcultures, from molly houses (all-male brothels) through to romantic female friendships. She covers the court cases connected to the Vere and Cleveland Street scandals, where male prostitution was taking place and brothels were exposed at the trial. The book also traces the lives and experiences of some wellknown lesbians and homosexuals – Lady Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby (otherwise known as the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’), Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall (known to her friends as John), as well as more recent gay figures in the entertainment world such as Ivor Novello, Noël Coward, Kenneth Williams and Sir John Gielgud.

Her original research is restricted mainly to a short section that examines newspaper reports, one of which exposes The Masked Ball of 1880 in Manchester. Of the 47 male attendees, nearly half of them were cross-dressed as women. The party was raided and the men faced trial, with the judge declaring that “very disgusting practices were being carried on”. But rather than punish them with prison, the men were released on payment of a £50 fine.

Some of the advice in the book seems obvious – “Do not fall into the derogatory trap of thinking a woman was ‘too pretty’, or feminine, to be a lesbian, and likewise, do not assume a woman is a lesbian simply because she seems masculine”. Genealogists on their first foray into gay history might find this book useful.

Julie Peakman is a historian and author of The Pleasure’s All Mine: a history of perverse sex