THE ADHESION OF LOVE.

Stephen M Hornby gives a curious account of his dramatisation of a lost piece of our queer past, The Adhesion of Love, which tours this spring.

I can’t make any sense of why or how these two things connect. I’m stood in the gothic splendour of the John Rylands Library in Manchester. I’m being shown a collection of secret curios by a librarian who could easily stand in for Joan Collins. She extravagantly opens the archive box and reveals a shrivelled, greasy, petrol blue, ribbed sort of a thing. “What do you think it is?” I have no idea. Someone ventures that it might be a bookmark of some kind – good guess, given that we’re in a library “It’s the soiled headband from Walt Whitman’s hat.” “What, 19th century, visionary poet Walt Whitman? American Bard of Democracy Walt Whitman? Queer icon Walt Whitman?” I rather elaborately ask – you can tell I write plays. “Yes,” she says with more than a hint of triumph. But why does a library in Manchester have such a thing in its collection?

Joannie has been pursing her lips with delight at our puzzlement and questions, waiting to make her revelation. She holds up a picture of a group of smartly dressed Victorian men sat round a dining table in a garden. If you look closely and squint a little, you can just make out that the framed picture on the dining table is of Walt Whitman. Once we’ve all performed the required squint Joannie explains, “There was a Walt Whitman Fellowship in Bolton, founded in 1885. In 1890 and 1891 one member of the group went over to America and visited Whitman at his home. They each kept detailed travelogues and took photos of Whitman. To this day, every year on Whitman’s birthday there is a group that meets in Bolton. They all wear sprigs of Lilac blossom and take to the Lancashire hills to read each other Whitman poems and drink from the Loving Cup.” The Loving Cup? But, more mind-blowingly, Walt Whitman and the men from Bolton! Joannie has left my jaw dropped like a season finale from Dynasty or her karaoke turn in Benidorm.

I’ve been the Playwright in Residence to LGBT History Month since 2014. We aim to produce at least one new heritage premiere based on freshly unearthed LGBTQ history each year. We like to take the focus off London, off the wealthy and the privileged, fascinating as their lives can be, and look at working-class, lived experience, at how ordinary queers made sense of the world, fought back, resisted subtly or not I’ve developed a nose for unexpected stories.

In 2015, we had A Very Victorian Scandal, by me and Ric Brady, about the largest ever raid on a queer venue in the UK. It happened at a Temperance Hall in Hulme in 1880. Across three days, we re-created the raid and the trial and found out how filthy the lyrics of most music hall songs were.

In 2016, we had Mister Stokes: The Man-Woman of Manchester by Abi Hynes about a trans pioneer whose body was pulled from the River Irwell in 1859. And Devils in Human Shape by Tom Marshman, an immersive piece about sodomy trials in Georgian Bristol. We learnt a lot about veils.

In 2017, we showcased that Burnley had been the centre of the LGBTQ rights movement in the 1970s with The Burnley Bu¤ers’ Ball and Burnley’s Lesbian Liberator. And we learnt lots of unexpected things about Vanessa Redgrave.

Each piece was usually met with a first response of, “Well, who knew?” The fact that very few people did is, of course, why LGBT History Month exists and why we make popular dramas to bring the history to a wider audience. Stood in this library in Manchester, my nose is quivering. I am sensing that this might be one of those “Well, who knew?” stories.

I manage to get Joannie chatting in a tea-break. I know enough about Walt Whitman to know that he celebrated male intimacy openly in his poems and male sexuality privately in his diaries. I also know that 1885, the year the group was founded, saw the introduction of legislation creating the offence of “gross indecency” between men. This criminalised basically everything from the laudanum-based equivalent of a chem sex party to a fairly chaste peck on the lips. Given this level of hostility to all things queer, why were these men so interested in Whitman? Why had they crossed the Atlantic to express their admiration (an expensive and lengthy journey back in the day)? Had they found in Whitman some validation of a barely expressed part of themselves and a public language with which to speak about it in the one of darkest and most homophobic periods of our nation’s history? Joannie raises a knowing eyebrow. “I think they were, well, experimenting at least,” she offers. That was all I needed.

Three years later, and I’ve written a full-length play about the men, which is touring as the 2019 LGBT History Month heritage premiere. Big honour. The group called themselves the Eagle Street College. They were taking the piss. They met in a two-up two-down terrace house in a working-class part of Bolton, then a thriving part of the North West’s Cottonopolis. Their leader, Wallace, was known as The Master of the College, again taking the piss. Though Wallace was something of an autodidact and clearly a very intelligent, articulate and kind man. His visit to Whitman is over two months long. He offers a detailed account and one that is compelling for what it does not mention as much as what it does.

Historian James Wilkinson has this great concept of “unintended testimony”. He’s basically saying that people give themselves away in their diaries and journals, even when they’re trying not to. They sort of create the outline in absence of the thing they’re trying not to mention. I’m reading Wallace’s travelogue and my red light for “unintended testimony” keeps flashing. The trouble with the conventional historical method, the search for evidence, is that it tends to end in historians limiting or even erasing us from some periods. They can’t find a letter or a diary entry that is explicitly about sex with another man, so they conclude that there was none, and the myth of the asexual bachelor or kindly spinster grows. Wallace does not make any mention of sex with a man, or of homosexuality directly, and yet his account of his time with Whitman is soaked in it.

I see part of my job writing these heritage premieres is an act of restitution. I want to restore sexuality to the men who have been cast as sexless, to create a rounded and fully human picture of them, and to restore them to us. This allows for a proper connection between the queer past and present to be made. It creates an inheritance.

The men of the Eagle Street College, even in this period of state-sanctioned homo-extermination, did still leave some scraps of evidence: a letter, a few crossings out in a diary and a scratched out face in a photograph. Using those, and applying Wilkinson’s method to the rest, I’ve have built up a picture of the sexual and emotional intimacies that I believe the group contained. Some of it is speculation, but it is historically literate speculation. And I would argue that if what I depict in the play didn’t happen exactly, then something pretty similar did. Without a bit of homonormativity, we’re just left with puzzles.

I hope I’ve done them justice. I hope I’ve written a funny, sexy, smart play. I hope my Joannie comes to see it.