Queer City: Gay London From the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd Edward Behrens

About halfway through Queer City, Peter Ackroyd’s catalogue of criminals that purports to be a study of gay London, he writes that, ‘The effeminate male has been parodied or satirised for the best part of a thousand years … This in turn leads to the question at the heart of this book. What is the connection between queerness and the city?’ There’s a lot of leading down alleys in this book but none of it looked as if it was heading in this direction.

Condensing a history of London from Roman times to the present day down to 230 pages could well be considered an achievement, but then so could the building of Westfield. It starts with that most reassuring of techniques: the definition of terms. It’s a perfectly sensible place to start any essay, as we learned in our history classes at the age of twelve. The problem here is that rooting out the etymology of homosexual nomenclature is a mug’s game. Even Ackroyd himself admits this, ‘ “Gay” comes from who knows where.’ This historical authority continues throughout the book.

Ackroyd leans heavily on what he can be certain about: the law courts.

Rather than getting a history of gay, or even queer, London, we get a distorted history of those charged with the crime of sodomy. It wasn’t always illegal and the biggest problem seems to crop up under Henry VIII. He introduced the Buggery Act in 1533 and the happy dalliances of Edward II had to take a back seat, as it were. Ackroyd does, of course, mention that it ‘gave officials licence to roam through the monasteries, convents and friaries in search of gold and other treasures’. Quite what form of buggery they were expecting in a convent remains an area of speculation.

This illegality continued in some form until 2003: it gives Ackroyd plenty of scope to detail the crimes of homosexuality. So we have the poor buggers who were caught, from John Rykener, who had ‘learned to dress as a woman in the household of an embroiderer, Elizabeth Brouderer, and that … he had sexual intercourse with a priest “as with a woman” ’, to Mother Clap and the Bishop of Clogher. If this doesn’t seem salacious enough, there are plenty of details of the gays who, through history, were subjected to the pillory. In 1756, Mr Shann, a china shop owner, ‘asked to be transported rather than endure the punishment of the pillory. But his request was refused.’ Edmund Burke lamented ‘this cruel punishment during which “the poor wretch fell down dead on the stand of the instrument.” ’

The locations of these criminal events are carefully plotted against the topography of London. ‘The aisles of St Paul’s Cathedral, as well as St Paul’s churchyard, were honeytraps,’ while, later on, ‘Orange Street and Trafalgar Square became notorious.’ It gives an appearance of detail but this urban individuation can’t make up for the generalities of a world where ‘There was solidarity in suffering’ and ‘Only the active could rule’.

Looking at London through the prism of ‘who f***s who and who does worse’ seems to shrink everything. Even the Elizabethan playhouses become ‘little better than pick-up joints for queer men’. Who knew that’s what Shakespeare was up to?

Ackroyd brings us up to 2017 without noticing that queer London – if it exists – is more likely to be found online and behind the digital walls of dating apps. In his old-fashioned world, where criminality and homosexuality go hand in hand, ‘Recent surveys have indicated that queer couples now seek permanent union of marriage … they are eager for love and commitment.’

This is wrong on almost every count. It might be true of gay couples but is the opposite of queer. The reason LGBT has expanded to LGBTQIA+ (the last three are Queer, Intersex and Asexual – Ackroyd misses out the ‘+’ that signifies an effort not to exclude, and thus betrays the closed world he inhabits) is precisely because queer is a separate identity from gay. If being queer stands for anything, it is standing against the heteronormativity of marriage and the commodification of homosexuality.

Ackroyd seems not to recognise this and whips the queer world into a froth of sex and sadness that ends up as meaningless as a pink blancmange.