People who follow me on social media are sure to have noticed my daily Lightborne Chronology posts over the past few weeks, where I’ve been sharing historical tidbits alongside excerpts from the novel. We started on the 12th of May 2024, when, 431 years ago in 1593, Christopher Marlowe’s roommate and fellow playwright Thomas Kyd was arrested on suspicion of heresy, jump-starting the events of the book. We end, naturally, on the anniversary of Marlowe’s untimely death in Deptford, on 30th May – with a number of questions left unanswered.
For anyone cool enough to stay off social media (I tip my hat to you), or those who want to revisit the whole series in one convenient place, scroll down and click the arrows on the sides of each image to flip between the slides. Enjoy learning a little bit about Ingram Frizer, Robin Poley, Thomas Walsingham, early modern London, and of course, our protagonist Kit Marlowe, and the enduring mysteries surrounding his life and death that inspired Lightborne.
(CW: This post contains the f-slur, as well as historical terms for queer people that are offensive today.)
For those who don’t know, in a former life I was a theatre historian, but I began my academic career studying queer history.
Now, even having left academia behind, I’m still writing queer history. Only fictionalized. Historians are storytellers – it’s right there in the name – I’ve simply found myself more at home with a slightly different form of storytelling.
I just can’t quit queer history. (Sorry.) For me, it’s like genealogy – not merely an attempt to reconstruct lives from the past, but in a way, to actively construct my own identity. Every time I learn about a queer person from the past, no matter where or when they are from, I feel like I am meeting my own long-lost family.
There’s just one thing about the practice of queer history that never sat right with me.
I could be reading about a writer, a general, a pirate, a dedicated breeder of cows – it doesn’t matter. If the person I’m reading about was queer, or is believed to have been queer, and was alive at any time before, say, 1900, the author will have included a little disclaimer in their article that always goes a bit like this:
“In discussing the life of X, we have been careful only to talk about them in terms of queer behaviour, not as a queer person. We must not conflate sexuality with identity, which of course doesn’t happen until Freud and his whole deal. Besides, since the word ‘homosexual’ didn’t exist until the 1860s, and was barely known until decades later, we obviously can’t describe anyone alive before then as ‘homosexual,’ let alone ‘queer!’”
That’s it. Open up a brand new book about a queer historical figure and there it is, like a bad penny. I call it the “In the beginning, there was the Word” Fallacy. ITBTWTWF.
The first flaw in this logic is that actually, things are not created with the Word. Words are created to describe things that already exist.
To talk about the other reasons why this disclaimer is problematic at best, we have to go way, way back in time, to long before the word “homosexual” was even a twinkle in some Hungarian guy’s eye.
Because, “homosexual” was not the first word invented that described a queer person.
Before “homosexual,” queer people had been called or called themselves “Uranians,” “fairies,” “fribbles,” “jemmies,” “queans,” “mollies,” and “Ganymedes,” to name just a few. The term “lesbian” has been around since the 18th century, as has “tommy” (the original “butch”), “tribade,” “sapphic,” and the rather visual “friccatrice” (“One who rubs”). Queer people could speak to one another in codes and secret languages. They could tap a friend on the shoulder and ask, in a whisper, about a mutual acquaintance, “Is he earnest?” Or “Is she musical?”
“Are they family?”
The fact that all of these terms and codes were considered slang should not rob them of their legitimacy as words for both queer behaviour and queer people. In fact, they are all rare, precious things, rescued from the dust-bin of history through a combination of luck, and changing circumstances in English literacy.
In England, prior to the time of Henry VIII, literacy was largely inaccessible for all but a privileged few. But following the introduction of public schools (for men, at least), we begin to see a much higher incidence of slang terms entering the written record. Ordinary people who previously could not tell their own stories now had access to the most powerful technology on earth at that time – a pen and paper – and could write in the language of the street, the pub, the marketplace.
Such was the world wherein queer communities were able to thrive: criminalized as a class of “vagabonds and sturdy (i.e., false) beggars,” many queer people made their living as sex workers and performers, jobs that allowed them to build relationships with others like themselves. Their stories survive in legal records and prison lists, but also in plays and poetry, perhaps most famously in The Roaring Girl (c. 1610) by Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, which dramatized the life of gender nonconforming local celebrity Moll “Cutpurse” Frith, and put numerous slang terms in writing for the very first time.
Because of their gradual inclusion in the written record, we now know some details about the lives of queer early moderners. In London, they gathered in particular neighbourhoods and houses, often located in “red-light” districts or near performance venues like Whitefriars or Paris Garden. From the 1700s, we have eye-witness accounts of clandestine competitive drag balls and gender-bending spectacles held in the so-called “Molly Houses” where queer men gathered.
Combining the medieval Lingua Franca with the underground dialect known as Thieves’ Cant, early modern queer people even developed their own complex language, Polari, as a way of communicating between each other without being understood by outsiders. Polari had such staying power that it is still spoken by some even today.
If that is not a community, a culture, a people – I don’t know what is.
Now, let’s jump ahead a bit – about three hundred years – to around the time that “homosexual” first pops up. Where did it come from, and why?
This story is full of twists and turns, so strap in…
Towards the end of the sexually repressive 19th century, after hundreds of years in which queer sex was heavily criminalized, things began to change – if not for queer people, then for Western society at large. The rise of the middle class, the end of slavery in the United States, and the Women’s Suffrage Movement (among other things), lead to growing anxieties within white academic circles about the “degeneration” of the human race – specifically, the white race.
While, in this view, non-white people certainly posed a threat to white racial purity, many believed an even greater threat came from within: white people who did not play by the “rules” of sex and gender.
But now that there was a white middle class to maintain, you couldn’t just… hang queer people anymore. A new age required new solutions to the problem of queerness, new words to describe it. Fortunately for the Victorian morality and racial purity police, a revolution in the study of the human psyche was underway on the European Continent: the rise of psychology.
The earliest psychologists called themselves “alienists.” Not because they studied aliens, har-de-har, but because their main interest was in studying those who were “alienated” from society. Naturally, the alienists found plenty of fertile ground (and deep pockets) amongst middle- and upper-class white queer people, many of whom were desperate to cure themselves of their “affliction.”
Rather than seeing queer people as simply monstrous criminals, early psychologists proposed that queerness – or rather, again, queer behaviour – should be reclassified as a mental disease.
But early psychologists did not invent the word. Poetically, perhaps, it was stolen. Coined by Hungarian author and queer rights campaigner Károly Mária Kertbeny (who also coined “heterosexual”), “homosexual” was conceived to describe an “innate and unchanging” sexual identity. Fed-up with having to choose between “vulgar” slang terms and vicious slurs to describe himself, Kertbeny hoped that “homosexual” would be embraced by other queer men, but his goal was bigger still: to humanize queerness in the general population, opening the door for the abolition of sodomy laws.
From 2024, maybe we say Kertbeny won in the end. But it was a very, very long game.
Once the medical establishment got their hands on “homosexual,” Kertbeny’s project came to an inglorious end. Soon, it had been redefined to mean “a person suffering from the mental disease of homosexuality.” Homosexuals who repented their condition and aspired to heterosexuality were subjected to conversion “therapies” such as electro-shock, aversion therapy, even lobotomies. But for queer people who did not desire to change, or who failed to adopt a convincing pretence of heteronormativity, the prisons remained open.
As a result of “homosexual’s” connotations, many queer thinkers and writers of the first half of the 20th century utterly rejected the term. After all, why on earth would anyone want to self-define as a mental illness? Famously, queer author, politician and enfant terrible Gore Vidal, who preferred the term “fag” over “homosexual,” argued for a total separation of personal identity from what he termed “sexual acts” – or, to put it in other words, “sexual behaviour.”
Yes, it was a queer intellectual who first advocated for the separation of behaviour and identity. The call was coming from inside the house all along.
But white, cis, middle- to upper-class gay men like Vidal were only the loudest and most visible queers of their time, and historically, those most often subjected to pathologization by the medical establishment. Just across town from Mr. Vidal’s cushy Uptown digs, in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, you would find very different attitudes about queer identity.
For nearly one hundred years, Black queer culture had been thriving right under the noses of white New York society.
At venues like The Cotton Club, Connie’s Inn, and Barron’s, Black queer people gathered to dance, drink, hook up, watch gender-bending spectacles and express themselves in a place of relative safety and acceptance. Even as early as 1869, the Hamilton Lodge hosted drag balls which drew crowds of thousands. To build off RuPaul, it was in the grand tradition of the Hamilton Lodge balls that Paris Is Burning was made.
The reasons why New York’s civil authorities often turned a blind eye towards Black queer culture are enormously complicated, and to no small extent bound up in the racial pseudo-science known as eugenics – essentially, a form of white supremacist racial engineering whose popularity from the late 19th through at least the middle of the 20th century simply cannot be overstated. According to eugenicists, Black people were sexually inferior to whites and naturally “perverse.” Queerness in whites threatened the grand project of eugenics – the building of the white master race – but queerness in Black people did not.
And so, police often let Black queer clubs go about their business. Under this permissive atmosphere, New York City’s drag balls flourished into the Prohibition era, drawing higher and higher numbers of attendees, Black and white, queer and straight. Soon, a fad for “Pansy Clubs” arose, leading to the popping up of drag spectacles all over the country. On a personal note: my grandfather was a drag performer in the 1930s, and plied his trade in the respectable halls of the University of Pittsburgh. He even had his picture taken with the mayor, if that’s any indication of just how normalized it was.
That would be grandpa in the middle (1933). Photo from the author’s collection.
It’s no accident that all this coincided with the Harlem Renaissance, which was not merely a Black movement but also a queer one. Poets, artists, and musicians such as Langston Hughes, Alain Locke, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Countee Cullen all maintained queer relationships with varying degrees of openness. Singer Gladys Bentley, who performed at the aptly-named Clam House, wore masculine clothing, proudly adopted the term “dyke,” and even married her then girlfriend in a highly publicized civil ceremony.
The golden age was not to last, however. By the time Gore Vidal was making his incendiary remarks about queer identity, McCarthyism and the Lavender Scare had swept American queer culture back into the closet. While Black queer people continued to hold drag balls and found gathering spaces like the now iconic Stonewall Inn, they did so in secret, under constant threat of police raids and vigilante mob attacks.
Meanwhile, white, cis, middle- to upper-class gay men like Gore Vidal sought to distance themselves from the queer culture of nightclubs, sex workers, and drag bars, yearning for acceptance in cis-heteronormative society.
To put it another way: they wanted the freedom to engage in queer behaviour, without having to live a queer life.
Today, perhaps, we’d call them “pick mes.”
What I hope is clear from this longwinded but by no means exhaustive history is that people have been living queer lives since long before there was any textbook definition of “queer,” and that the trajectory of queer history has by no means been one long, uphill climb towards the relative freedoms we know today. And, as most queer people will tell you, queerness is absolutely not defined by sexuality and/or sexual “behaviour.” Nor was it ever. We have only found new ways of talking about what was already there, all along.
Queerness is a social code, a manner of existing, a culture and language all its own. It is intensely private and individual but also communal, signalling both inwards and outwards. It evolves, adapts, innovates. It exists everywhere, regardless of whether the wider culture accepts it.
Queerness is connected to all aspects of a person’s humanity. To reduce queerness to mere “behaviour” is an inherently dehumanizing act.
This brings us all the way back to the beginning: the study of queer history.
The problem for queer historians is that history is basically just a big fat record of human behaviour. Often, a researcher’s first task in writing queer history is to prove that something queer happened, usually by taking an individual or group and exposing whatever might be known of their sex lives, scrutinizing their manner of dress, the people they associated with, things they either said or wrote, in search of evidence. In doing so, we become the Victorian morality police, sniffing around someone’s dirty linens in attempt to “out” them. It feels distasteful, to say the least.
However, without doing so – without first building an unimpeachable case for queerness – queer historians cannot move onto their main premise, whatever it may be, lest it be rejected as mere conjecture, or worse, fantasy. Prove Emily Dickinson was queer, or you can forget about your dissertation entitled “The Lesbian Poems of Emily Dickinson.”
So here we are, trying to please the frowny-faced greybeards who stand guard at the door marked “Serious History.” Maybe, if we say the right words, they’ll let us in?
At some point during my academic career, feeling frustrated and sullied by the constant need to prove that queer people existed without being allowed to say so, I had a revelation:
The ones who need to be convinced by dirty linens are never going to accept my queer little stories anyway.
Why would they? They operate from the assumption that, first of all, the default setting of all human beings is heterosexuality, and therefore, history is straight – the only history that matters, anyway. They will argue that concerning oneself with the sexuality of people from the past is tawdry and trivial, because they believe queerness to be tawdry and trivial. They are the same people who say “I don’t care who you go to bed with” as a way of keeping you in the closet, because for them, queer identity is about who and how you fuck – nothing else.
It might have been because of this revelation that I ultimately became a novelist instead of a historian. But though flawed, queer history is necessary. Urgently necessary. This is evidenced by the volume of outcry against it – the now familiar claims that we, along with Black historians in particular, are “rewriting history,” as if queerness is simply some modern mass delusion that will disappear if we only stop talking about it long enough.
Queer historians are not “rewriting” history any more than human sexuality is being distorted by queer or trans people living openly as themselves. That which has been here all along, buried, suppressed, rejected, erased, is at last being discovered and brought into the story of humankind. We are not rewriting, we are enriching. We are not distorting, we are revealing.
Nowadays, with so many queer terms available to describe ourselves, sometimes it takes a good deal of soul-searching and trial and error before hitting upon one that feels right. But my favourite word is not really a new one. It can be traced back to the early 20th century, but might go back even further.
The word is “family.”
Queer people are a family, and like all families, we stand on the shoulders of thousands of years’ worth of ancestors. As a storyteller, I no longer hesitate to call my ancestors queer. I claim them as queer: for myself, for queer culture, and for my queer brothers, sisters, and siblings, both alive and dead.
One big, weird, queer family – with roots all the way to the centre of the Earth.
It’s LGBTQ+ History Month in the UK, which means I’m thinking about Christopher Marlowe – again – even after spending half my earthly existence writing a novel about him. Despite having been a major influence on Shakespeare, an innovator of English poetic form, a writer of numerous homoerotic verses, and the author of the 1st English play to feature an explicitly homosexual relationship between men, Marlowe is often left off the Queer Historical Figures roundups that come out around this time of year. Which, y’know, really bugs me.
So what happened? Who was “Kit” Marlowe, and why is he still important?
Marlowe’s story is often likened to that of a tragic rockstar: the flame that burned bright, and much too fast. After sailing to the highest tier of English poets at just 24 years old, Marlowe’s life came to a violent end before he turned 30, in 1593. His murder continues to baffle historians, and is a huge topic all its own. But right now, I’d rather talk about the circumstances that led up to it, and what they mean for his legacy.
Scholars disagree as to exactly how much trouble Marlowe was in at the time of his death, or what exactly put him on the wrong side of the law. Nevertheless, 10 days prior to his murder, Marlowe was placed under arrest and ordered to make daily reports to the Privy Court in London. Just 6 days after that, Richard Baines, a spy with whom Marlowe had once spent an ill-fated winter abroad, handed in a document to the English authorities accusing Marlowe of sedition, heresy, and sodomy, and suggesting he might have been guilty of far worse.
But it wasn’t Marlowe’s actions that were of concern to the powers-that-be. It was his words.
A section of the “Baines Note,” showing the most infamous of Marlowe’s alleged quotes: “all they that love not Tobacco & Boies are fooles.” Image by The British Library Board.
The “Baines Note,” as it is now known, allegedly records things that Marlowe said, albeit abstracted from any context. Did Marlowe ever say, as Baines claimed, that John the Baptist and Christ were lovers, or that “all they that love not tobacco & boys are fools,” or – very dangerously for the time – that the world was far older than Adam & Eve? We don’t really know, and some scholars dismiss the Baines Note as mere slander. But Marlowe had stoked controversy before. One year prior to Marlowe’s death, his fellow playwright Robert Greene had even made veiled references to Marlowe’s “atheism,” saying, “he hath said… ‘There is no God.'”
Was Marlowe, as accused by Baines and Greene, an “atheist?” Maybe not, at least in the modern sense. He was, however, prompting people to ask questions about the religious doctrine by which the laws of the land forced them to abide. He was poking fun at dogma, and by extension, mocking the queen.
We tend to think of pre-20th century history as dominated by rampant queerphobia, and therefore might expect Marlowe to have been persecuted mainly for his sexuality. But in fact, it was his heresy that made him more dangerous to public order. Marlowe’s England was ruled, above all, by religion. Even now, the myth of the peaceful, progressive Elizabethan Golden Age persists – a myth that was formulated while Elizabeth I still ruled. But in fact, the reign of Elizabeth was marked by war, rebellion, and religious strife, leading her government to impose still harsher strictures than her predecessors on anyone caught deviating from the Protestant Church of England, of which Elizabeth herself was the head.
To so much as voice doubts about “her Majesty’s church” in any form was not merely heretical, but potentially treasonous. Do it loudly enough, and the punishment was death.
Although heresy was the deadliest of the accusations levied against Marlowe, the crime of sodomy also technically carried a death sentence, and had since the time of Henry VIII, with the passing of the “Buggery Act” in 1533. But it would not be until later, with the rise of Puritanism, that this law would be enforced in the extreme against gay men and gender nonconforming people.
During Marlowe’s lifetime, certain forms of homosexual behavior were tacitly condoned, so long as they fell within strict parameters determined largely by class, race, and age. The sexual use (and abuse) of servants by masters, or underage prostitutes by wealthy men, went broadly unprosecuted. Loving, committed same-sex relationships, on the other hand, brought certain dangers, which Marlowe explored thoroughly in his play Edward II.
There’s a group of academics out there who argue quite adamantly against including Marlowe in the queer canon, despite the queer themes found throughout his body of work. Largely, these scholars’ reluctance is based in the fear that Marlowe’s queerness somehow feeds into the feverish speculation that surrounds his life, and to a greater extent, his death. To claim Marlowe as queer, in short, would be unseemly. Hysterical. Melodramatic. Playing into conspiracy.
Whether or not Marlowe was queer is not really the point. Marlowe never married, maintained long-term, intimate relationships with other men for the entirety of his adult life, and was surrounded by rumors of homosexuality both during his lifetime and afterwards. But what really matters is that Marlowe wrote queer stories – was, in fact, among the first English writers to do so, and do so consistently. Marlowe gave queer stories, queer love, queer desire a seat at the table, to an extent that no one would dare do again till centuries later.
So why, in queer history, is Marlowe so often left out of the conversation?
Well, Elizabethan propagandists were extremely successful in destroying Marlowe’s reputation, aided later on by good ol’ Victorian Comstockery. Mere months after Marlowe’s death, moralists and mouthpieces of the state mounted a smear campaign against him, maligning him first of all for his heretical beliefs and, in time, for his rumored sexual “deviance.” The archival discovery of the “Baines Note” in the 1780s led to a firestorm of disapproval in the decades that followed. By the 19th century, performances of Marlowe’s plays were often heavily censored, and accompanied by withering caveats about the author’s “degenerate character.”
To put it in modern terms, Marlowe was “cancelled.”
By the 20th century, Marlowe, once known as “the Muses’ darling,” had become a dark, controversial figure, dogged by a “bad boy” image, overshadowed by his longer-lived and less incendiary contemporary Shakespeare. But here’s the thing: Marlowe’s life was short and violent, but in fact not unusually violent for his time (see: Ben Jonson, actually killed a guy!) Some deride Marlowe’s plays as loud, garish gorefests, but Shakespeare frequently outpaces him in blood n’ guts, and frankly, the perception that Marlowe’s language was overblown or bombastic probably says more about our mania for comparing everything written in this time period to Shakespeare than it actually does about Marlowe as a writer.
Drawing comparisons between Marlowe and Shakespeare does both authors a disservice. Shakespeare built an incredibly successful career on not ruffling feathers (for the most part, see: Essex Rebellion), nostalgia, populism, and sentimentality. Marlowe was a very different writer, drawing on a proto-camp sensibility to tell stories that subverted the jingoistic myths of Elizabethan England. His theatre was political, jarring, irreverent. It was Charles Ludlam, not Andrew Lloyd Webber; John Waters, not James Cameron.
This is why I spent so… damn… long writing a novel about Marlowe, and why I feel like it’s high time he took his rightful place in queer history, as one of our ancestors. I hate all this self-promo stuff as much as any writer on the Internet, but if I look upon the task ahead as promoting Marlowe, and his story, it gets a little easier to show up and do my little dance.
Marlowe lived in a time of moral panics, global strife, and cultural upheaval, not so alien to our own. His story has a lot to reveal about our world today.
Don’t take my word for it: read Marlowe’s Edward II – a devastating play about a king who loves his male lover much more than his kingdom, and pays the ultimate price for his devotion. Read Hero & Leander, an erotic, sometimes funny, sometimes heartbreaking pansexual romp about sexual awakenings and love – or lust – at first sight. Read about his riotous, glorious, tragic life.
Or if you wanna make this humble scribbler’s day a little brighter, preorder my book LIGHTBORNE, coming Oct 22nd 2024 to the USA – or if you’re in the UK, head to your local booksellers or buy online.
(This post is modified from a thread originally posted on Threads, 5 Feb 2024. It was last updated on 14 Oct 2024.)
HESSE PHILLIPS 
