Gay rights and wrongs in the early nineteenth century

I came across the name Anne Lister as I was researching my novel-in-progress, a subversive retelling of Jane Eyre. Born in 1791, Anne Lister was a pioneering Yorkshire landowner, businesswoman, traveller and mountaineer. She was also a secret diarist commonly considered the first modern lesbian, unkindly nicknamed Gentleman Jack.

Although her sexuality, and her independent spirit, was frowned upon at the time, she was able to defy convention and live the life she chose. Clad in black, she had several lovers until, on Easter Sunday 1834, she took communion with the heiress, Ann Walker, and the two lived together as wife and wife.

Anne Lister had recorded her liaisons in her journal in explicit detail from the age of fifteen, albeit in “crypthand” code. When a descendant discovered these papers in the 1890s, he was so shocked at the content he hid them away in the walls. Fortunately, he didn’t destroy them, but it wasn’t until historian Helena Whitbread delved into the archives of Halifax library in the 1980s to begin the mammoth task of decoding five million words across twenty-six volumes that this evidence of sex between women became available to the modern world. Author Emma Donoghue has described the diaries as The Dead Sea Scrolls of lesbian history.

Although she was often vilified in public, I imagine Anne Lister’s middle-class background afforded some protection, perhaps her gender too. My reading of a recent novel set in 1809 suggests the law and public opinion were harsher towards working-class gay men.

Based on the true story of John Church, a foundling who became an independent minister, Radical Love by Neil Blackmore is set in an intolerant London, exhausted by years of war. By day, John Church preaches on the radical possibilities of love to a multicultural congregation; at night, he becomes the first minister to marry men to other men in a molly house. If that isn’t risky enough, his obsessive love for an African abolitionist threatens both his reputation and his sanity.

I was struck by the violence of the crowd’s reactions when – slight spoiler – the molly house is busted and the men face physical and mental abuse in the pillory. Some are hanged. And the most vicious taunts come from the women.

But our unreliable narrator is not only a victim. I enjoyed his blindness to his own faults and to the extent of the damage to his character his abusive childhood has wrought.

In a poignant afterword, the author notes that he wrote the novel during the Covid pandemic when the repeated media commentary about society pulling together stood in stark contrast to the condemnation of gay men during the AIDS crisis. He’s woven in a wonderful rebuttal to the ‘but it’s all right now’ attitude that some of us can slip into when minoritised people refer to past injustice. One of the African abolitionists argues that freedom is incomplete if the opposition against the fight to claim it is latterly denied.

That’s why awareness days, weeks and months like LGBT+ history month this February feel so important. This year’s theme is science and innovation. Anne Lister qualifies to a degree, as she dabbled in dissection and anatomy when she lived in Paris. For someone more famous in the scientific field,Murmur by Will Eaves, based on the ‘chemical castration’ and compulsory ‘therapy’ of mathematical genius Alan Turing, is the only novel I can recall reading that fits that criteria. Do let me know of any others you can recommend.

A not-quite PS: since Neil Blackmore’s debut novel was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize, here’s a reminder that mine was too (in a different year). If you haven’t done so already, LGBT+ history month is a good time to readSugar and Snails.

And, as I’ve mentioned, Radical Love was written during the pandemic, which brings me the opportunity for another plug. Not only for my most recent novel,Lyrics for the Loved Ones, but for a talk on pandemic fiction I’m doing with Clare Stevens at Nottingham library on 11th March. If you’re able to come, do say hello. Obviously, I don’t expect my readers in Australia and New Zealand to travel that far!