Queer City by Peter Ackroyd, Chatto and Windus, £16.99

Review by Mark Smith

Peter Ackroyd once said that we should tread carefully on the pavements of London for we are treading on skin, but his new book is all about peeling the skin back. Queer City is a story of what happens underneath, and behind, and round the corner. It is a history of the gay life of London and all its gay bars and hang-outs – long-gone places with glorious and suggestive names like Dick’s Coffee House and the Pheasant in Fuller’s Rents. But most important of all, in uncovering the sensational and sometimes unsettling details of gay London, Ackroyd’s book ends up being about much more than one great city. It is the story of every city there ever was and all the gay men and women who have ever run away to one.

The book begins with what is known (very little) about the possibility of gay life in Celtic Britain, and if there is a lesson to be learned about history here, it is that we should not always assume going back in time means people are less developed and progressive. Not so. In the 21st century, being gay is still illegal in 74 countries, but at the beginning of civilisation, many societies were much more forward thinking – there were early forms of gay marriage among the Celtic Britons for example and at times there has been widespread tolerance, even celebration, of gay sex.

Ackroyd identifies a few of the periods in British history where this was most obvious – and of course others where it was extremely difficult for gay people. In the fourth century, it is thought a form of marriage between men existed, although it was also in the fourth century that the first laws were enacted against homosexuality. And the driving force of the clampdown, as it so often is, was religion.

How free and easy things were tended to depend on who was in power (Charles II: very gay; Oliver Cromwell: not so much). Another period that seemed to be particularly liberated in London were the Elizabethan years. In fact, Ackroyd suggests there were probably as many gay bars in 17th century London as there are in the 21st century. Mostly, they were for men, which raises an interesting point. We know there have sometimes been a few places where gay women could go, but as in most of history, there is less known about the women than the men. The crimes of men with men were proclaimed in courts of justice, says Ackroyd; the crimes of women with women were left unspoken.

When the backlash came, as it inevitably did, and the police and their agents started to infiltrate and raid the gay bars in the 18th century, there were reports in the press that scandalised and titillated readers. Ackroyd quotes one from the 1700s. “I found a company of men fiddling and dancing and singing bawdy songs, kissing and using their hands in a very unseemly manner. Then they sat in one another’s laps, talked bawdy, and practised a great many indecencies.”

There are plenty of other stories like this in Queer City – in fact, the book is mostly made up of a series of such stories, which raises one of its problems. Ackroyd’s great talent, when he wants to, is to explore the meaning of the facts, rather than just relate the facts themselves, but it takes him a while to do so in Queer City. Needless to say, when he does, it’s wonderful: the city, he writes, is the home and haven of anonymity. A busy city can also be a sexual experience in itself, he says: “You could see, and be seen by, many others, with the delight of the gaze or the shared look … The city sexualised everything … In a sense the city itself … emboldened and inspired them to create a new identity.”

The slight issue with Queer City is that there is not enough of this kind of analysis, although the sleazy colour of the book is more than sufficient compensation. Ackroyd makes sure he stops off at all the significant dates in gay history (the death penalty for buggery was abolished in 1861 for instance). In peeling back the skin of London and looking at the blood and guts underneath, he has also issued a kind of warning. London, and Britain, have sometimes been tolerant of gay people and sometimes not. Right now, London and the UK could hardly be more open and liberal. But in taking us through all the light and dark periods of the gay story, Queer City is a disturbing reminder of a reality of history: just because something is now does not mean it will always be.