Tag Archives: novelist

(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, having left academia behind, I’m still writing queer history. Only fictionalized. Historians are storytellers, after all – 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, especially as much of it begins and ends with biography. I could be reading about a writer, a general, a pirate, a dedicated breeder of cows – it doesn’t matter. If the individual under examination is believed to have been queer, and was alive at any time before, say, 1900, their biography will include a little disclaimer 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!’”

I call this the “In the beginning, there was the Word” Fallacy. ITBTWTWF.

Here’s my issue with it: 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,” “Ganymedes,” and – yes – “queers,” to name just a few examples. The term “lesbian” has been around since the 18^th 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, these words are rare, precious things, rescued from the dust-bin of history through a combination of luck and changing circumstances in English literacy, beginning with my favourite era: the Tudors.

Prior to the reign 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. People like Shakespeare, for example.

Then as for much of Western history, queer communities thrived in the shadows, amongst a criminal 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 largely 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 and AMAB people 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.

But of course, queer early moderners knew nothing of the term “homosexual.” It would be three hundred years before that term would become available – and immediately fall into massive controversy, both within the queer community and without.

The truth is, it’s impossible to talk about the genesis of “homosexuality” without also talking about eugenics.

Towards the end of the sexually repressive 19^th 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 fears within white academic circles about the “degeneration” of the human race – specifically, the white race. Thus, out of this hotbed of white supremacist and patriarchal anxiety, the pseudo-science of eugenics was born.

While, according to eugenicists, 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 race, 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.

They named this new illness “Homosexuality.”

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 can say that 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, the term 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 the word “homosexual’s” connotations, many queer thinkers and writers of the first half of the 20^th 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 Manhattan 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 came about.

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 (you guessed it) eugenics. According to eugenicists, Black people were sexually inferior to whites and naturally “perverse.” Besides, there was no point in helping queer Black people mend their wicked ways. 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 a boom in drag spectacles all over the country, even, and some might say especially, among affluent whites. All-male revues, whose star performers were the “drags,” became ad hoc social clubs for young men of promise – and perhaps, also, of unconventional predilections.

(On a personal note: my grandfather Russell Connolly was a drag performer in the 1930s, and plied his trade in the respectable halls of the University of Pittsburgh, alongside Gene Kelly, of all people. He even had his picture taken with the mayor, if that’s any indication of just how normalized drag was during this extraordinary, and nearly forgotten time.)

It’s no accident that the “Pansy Craze” 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, writ large, 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 empirical 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 the existence of queer behaviour – 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, and actively so, or you can forget about your dissertation entitled “The Lesbian Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

So here we are, little queer historians, trying desperately 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 and feminist 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 terms available to describe ourselves as queer people, 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, connected not by blood but by shared experience that transcends culture, language, and time. Like all families, we stand on the shoulders of thousands of years’ worth of ancestors. As a storyteller and historian, 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.

Sources:

• Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day by Peter Ackroyd
• Homosexuality in Renaissance England by Alan Bray
• A Queer Geography: Journeys Towards A Sexualized Self by Frank Browning
• Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncey
• Homophobia by Byrne Fone
• Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities by Jonathan Goldberg
• Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy by Ladelle McWhorter
• The Changing Room: Sex, Drag, and Theatre by Laurence Senelick
• Black On Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity by C. Riley Snorton

Featured image: Joseph Brown, drag and vaudeville performer, Gregory & Brown (pictured c. 1902). Wikimedia Commons.

This post was updated in February 2026.