The first narrative history of its kind since 1970, A Gay History of Britain tells the extraordinary history of male-male sex and love in Britain, in all its diversity, from the Middle Ages to the present.
Acknowledgements Introduction Matt CookChapter 1 Male–Male Love and Sex in the Middle Ages, 1000–1500 Robert MillsChapter 2 Renaissance Sodomy, 1500–1700 Randolph TrumbachChapter 3 Modern Sodomy: The Origins of Homosexuality, 1700–1800 Randolph TrumbachChapter 4 Secrets, Crimes and Diseases, 1800–1914 H. G. CocksChapter 5 Queer Conflicts: Love, Sex and War, 1914–1967 Matt CookChapter 6 From Gay Reform to Gaydar, 1967–2006 Matt CookIllustrations Further Reading Notes Author Biographies Index
Matt Cook (lead author and editor) is lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, and author of London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 - 1914 (2003). Robert Mills is a lecturer in English at King's College London, and author of Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005). Randolph Trumbach is professor of history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1978) and Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (1998). H. G. Cocks is lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003).
The authors are professors of history and English at Birbeck and
Kings Colleges in London and Baruch College in New York. In
chapters focusing on six British eras from the Middle Ages to the
present, they examine through literature and other primary
documents how intimate emotional and/or sexual relationships
between men were understood and defined by those involved and their
societies. Among other things, they demonstrate that it was not
until the 1700s that the notion of a gay identifying minority of
men existed and separated them from the rest. The final chapter
catalogs gay reform in Britain and its modern legacy.
*Reference & Research Book News*
[A] very worthwhile project, which brings together some of the best
insights of modern scholarship. Here we have a very readable
history that refuses simple categorisations while providing vivid
insights into the complex ways in which sexuality and intimacy are
organised. Mills asks for a 'more unruly understanding of sex and
love' than is usually allowed by historians of sexuality. This
offers an unruly history at its best.
*Times Higher Education Supplement*
[A] thorough and fascinating glimpse back at gay life in the UK
over the last 1,000 years….a landmark achievement, shedding light
on a section of history too often ignored or overlooked.
*Out in the City*
It is next to impossible to offer a continuum gay history, whether
in Britain or elsewhere. Nevertheless, the four authors assembled
here (Cook, Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach and HG Cocks) do a
largely good job. Professional historians, they manage not to
over-enunciate recent ritualistic assumptions in the field.
Foucault appears twice….Fundamentally, the story of gay Britain
becomes narratable from the mid-19th century onwards. It is a
substantial, moving and significant one, well captured in an
impressive book whose watershed moment remains the trial of Oscar
Wilde in 1895.
*The Independent (London)*
A valuable, long-overdue addition to the canon of gay history.
*Gay Times*
"In their separate histories of gay and lesbian Britain, Matt Cook
and Rebecca Jennings have produced not only impressive
historiographical summaries of recent scholarship but also
compelling narratives of same-sex desire in Britain." Reviewed with
A Lesbian History of Britain: Love and Sex between Women since
1500
*Journal of British Studies*
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