A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex Between Men Since the Middle Ages - Hardcover

by Matt Cook (Author)

The book explores the changing ways in which male-male sex and love have been perceived and experienced from the late Anglo-Saxon period to the present. Celebrated figures, such as Richard Lionheart, whose love for Philip Augustus of France was so well-documented, Oscar Wilde, gubject of the most explosive scandal of the Victorian period, and Derek Jarman, the great artist and chronicler of the age of AIDS, are examined alongside little-known figures: Eleanor/John Rykener, a cross-dresser in Chaucer's England, the mollies of eighteenth-century London, the habituants of underground gay bars and cafes in 1930s Manchester and Brighton, and the newly-confident gays of contemporary Britain, who marry, adopt children and command the increasingly powerful 'pink pound'. Drawing on a fabulous wealth of research, the authors - each an expert in his field - have worked closely together to deliver a powerful, highly-readable and eye-opening history of love and desire between men in Britain.

Author Biography

Matt Cook (lead author and editor) is lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, and author of London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 1885 - 1914 (2003).

Robert Mills is a lecturer in English at King's College London, and author of Suspended Animation: Pain, Pleasure and Punishment in Medieval Culture (2005).

Randolph Trumbach is professor of history at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York and author of The Rise of the Egalitarian Family (1978) and Sex and the Gender Revolution, vol. 1: Heterosexuality and the Third Gender in Enlightenment London (1998).

H. G. Cocks is lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London, and author of Nameless Offences: Homosexual Desire in the Nineteenth Century (2003).