“Queer Enlightenment: The Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers, and Housewives.”
Written by Anthony Delaney
Circa 2025, Atlantic Monthly Press
$30/352 pages
It had to start somewhere.
Discrimination, persecution, and inequality had a starting point. Could you identify that date? Was it DADT, the horrors of the 1950s, the Kinsey Report? Certainly not Stonewall or the Marriage Act. So where did it come from? “Queer Enlightenment: The Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers, and Housewives.” By Anthony Delaney, the story of queer oppression goes back a long way.
The first recorded instance of the word “gay” was shouted out in the spring of 1868. In a letter to German activist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Hungarian journalist Károly Maria Kersveny referred to “men with same-sex attraction” using this new term. Many people believe this is the “invention” of homosexuality, but Delaney insists otherwise.
“Queer history is much deeper than this…” he says.
Take, for example, the delightfully named Mrs. Clapp, who ran a “house” in London where men met other men for “marriage.” On a February night in 1726, Mrs. Clapp’s house was raided and forty people were taken to prison and held in filthy, dank confinement until their court was heard. One of the men was eventually hanged for sodomy. Mrs. Clapp was pilloried and then disappeared from history.
William Pulteney dueled with John over an insult to Lord Harvey. Truth: Harvey was actually an avowed “sodomite.” He and his buddy Steve Fox even built a house together.
In 18th century London, it was common to adopt a lover to make him the legal heir. Around 1769, rumors spread that this lovely female spy, the Chevalier d’Eon, was actually Charles d’Eon de Beaumont, a man who had been wearing feminine clothing for much longer than his career as a spy. Anne Lister’s masculine demeanor often made her an “outcast”. And when George Wilson brought his bride to North America in 1821, he confessed that he loved men and became North America’s first official “husband of a woman.”
Sometimes history can be very dry. So is author Anthony Delaney’s wit. But together they work well in “queer enlightenment.”
No doubt you are well aware that inequality and persecution are nothing new – Delaney emphasizes here – and just like people today, our queer ancestors faced them head-on. The twist in this often gruesome story is that the punishments meted out to queer people in the 18th and 19th centuries were harsher, but Delaney does not soften those accounts for the reader. Read this book and you’ll find yourself at the gallows, in prison with allies, in a duel with complex grounds, embedded in the king’s court, and on a ship with a man whose new wife generously ignored his secrets. Most of these stories are set in England and Europe, but a few stories also feature in North America, and Delaney does a good job of wrapping things up for their relevance today.
There are some interesting asides in this book, but “Queer Enlightenment” is a bit heavy, so take your time. But once you pick it up, you’ll love it till the end.
Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made through this post.
Source: Washington Blade: LGBTQ News, Politics, LGBTQ Rights, Gay News – www.washingtonblade.com
