Writing the Modern Histories of Homosexual England

ABSTRACT The most useful sexual histories are those that provide depth of context without either assuming sexual identity or anticipating its complete absence; those that do not force taxonomies; histories that resist any simple teleological account of a shift from ‘homosexuality’ as sexual excess to the homosexual as a species. This review examines attempts to write such histories – what has recently been termed the ‘new British queer history’. I will focus on some strands of male and female same-sex desires and their expression in England in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: male and female same-sex friendships, effeminacy in men and masculinity in women; and representations of lesbianism. This review discusses these histories of desires that resist present-day sexual assumptions.