This book is absolutely amazing and fascinating. It covered so much ground and I am truly thankful it covered more than just queer men. The audio book is also a great listen as well

I was hoping for something more cohesive and substantial.

Some of the facts were amusing if not down right funny. Some were just...

I do think if this had been structured better this would be an impressive text on an important historical topic. The history itself is fascinating and relevant to present day. It's unfortunate that as the book progressed the quality regressed.

Read this book for the shock value and for the inappropriate giggles it will force out of you when you least expect it. Ackroyd is good at writing with a sensational flair and keeping the attention of the reader, and this book is certainly no exception. However, I don't necessarily think this book will teach you a lot about any one specific part of the history of Queer London. There are a lot of quotes and bits from surviving documents and literature of days gone by that don't always seem to express a clear intent of what the author is trying to get across.

Moving from one subject to another at a rapid clip, this book feels like a lot of vignettes hastily linked together, often without any real in depth explanation of the point. The good, the bad and the ugly are all included, and you may find yourself surprised at times by the levels of depravity (especially in medieval times) that this book introduces.

I found it entertaining and worthy of a read on a weekend when I needed a little pick me up from the boredom of daily life. For me, Peter Ackroyd is one of those rare authors that could write about basically any subject and find a way to make it interesting and entertaining, but I do have to say, I have a solid love for his history of England series, his biographies and some of his fiction. Those are things that I read again and again, sometimes having more than one copy of certain books even, but this one I did not feel the same connection with.

Entertaining and interesting, but not my favourite.

This review is based on a complimentary copy from the publisher, provided through Netgalley. All opinions are my own.

This may simply be a case of right book, wrong reader, but I have some serious concerns about the historicity of this volume. It's an eminently readable text, not overwhelmingly long, full of interesting gossipy anecdotes, and I can see fans of pop history enjoying it. I'm not a historian by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have some background in classical studies, and I found it jarring to see writers like Diodorus Siculus and even Tacitus cited as authorities without any consideration for authorial bias or indeed their propensity for just making things up when they didn't know what they were talking about -- which then makes me wonder about the sources referenced for other time periods with which I'm not familiar. And just in general I find it strange to not have footnotes or endnotes giving precise sources for quotations or generalizing statements. But again, this might just be a mismatch of genre expectations -- I don't normally read history books intended for general audiences, and this doesn't pretend to be a scholarly text.

Not what I expected. I’ll take the blame for it not being interesting to me. Too much like a dictionary or a textbook.

This book was really interesting and I learned so much!

An excellent starting point about queer culture in Great Britain but it left me wanting more. Instead of detailed entries we got summaries and rumors of maybe queer or maybe not royalty. And while I respect what the author is trying to do with this book. I wish there was more focus on actual queer people,less summaries, and just more clarity.

A nonfiction book on, well, you've got it right there in the subtitle. Though despite its claim, the major focus is the 1600s to late 1900s, which: fair enough. There's many fewer available records before that, and Ackroyd probably assumed most people are already familiar with the history of the 20th and 21st centuries. Since I tend to find recent history boring (I AM SO TIRED OF HOLLYWOOD'S MULTITUDE OF WWII MOVIES) I was personally more than all right with this decision.

It's a short book to cover two thousand years, or even only four hundred. Which unfortunately results in Queer City reading like a trivia book, a long list of short paragraphs about "here's a king who was rumored to have sex with men; here's two women who were buried together; here's an AMAB person who was arrested for wearing dresses", with little analysis or narrative threads connecting one incident to another. Ackroyd also relies heavily on judicial records, which again: fair enough. I'm not sure there's a better way to access the history of the lower classes, particularly if you want the sort of information that will give you exact street addresses to map onto modern London. But it does mean that this history comes off like a endless recitation of rape, pediophilia, and prostitution. The fact that this seems to provide supporting evidence for the worst sort of homophobia isn't really Ackroyd's fault, but it is depressing.

I would have liked more focus on how queerness was conceived of by the people of the various time periods, though I realize that's probably the hardest thing to get at in all of history. Particularly in the records of a trial, you're just not going to get someone asking the accused, 'please explain your philosophy of gender in clear terms'. Alas. I'll have to keep searching for the possibly-impossibly book that does delve into that mystery.

Overall it's not a bad book, but it could have been so much better.

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2343713980

Book received from NetGalley.

First and foremost, this particular history book is not for everyone, the subject matter can be very divisive even though the author is a marvelous researcher and writer of British history. This is one of my auto buy authors. I love his books especially his non-fiction. He somehow finds a way to bring his subject to life and draw the reader in. This book is no different, even though the subject matter can be hard to read at times. Unlike many of his history books this one is very short. This is due to how little information on the LGBTQ community in the earliest parts of the historical record. When it does show up for many years it's found in the trial records. The book mostly focuses on the Gay community in London, there is very little mentioned about Lesbians and even less about the rest of the community in general, which is also do to the persecution that seemed to be focused on the males sexual preference. If you want to know the origin of some of the worst slurs, it's in here. Why the author believes that homosexual sex became a death penalty case, it's in here. The ending of the history shows how much things have changed for the better in current times in Britain for the LGBTQ community, even though more changes need to be made, it gives some hope that it will happen. I learned quite a bit from reading this history and have plans to order myself a copy as soon as it's released. If you like Gay studies, alternative histories of Great Britain, or Social history this book should be on you want to read list.

Disclaimer: ARC via Netgalley
One of my closest friends is a gay man who is twenty plus years older than me. Most days, we take a walk though the local cemetery, The Woodlands (where Eakins and Stockton are buried among others). Early on in our ritual, we noticed a headstone for a couple, but the couple in this case were both men. Sadly, it was one of those couple headstones where one partner is still alive, and the other has died years ago. My friend said that it was likely that the husband had died of AIDS. When I asked him why, he pointed out the death date and the link to the AIDS epidemic. Seriously, after a conversation like that, you never look at tombstones the same way.
I found myself thinking about that as I read Peter Ackroyd’s Queer City.
Queer City is another entry into what I call Ackroyd’s London History series (London, The Thames, London Under), and, as the title indicts, follows the history of London’s Queer residents and culture. Queer here meaning homosexual and trans, which dates further back than you would think. Ackroyd’s Queer City is a bit close to a chronical history, in a way that the other London books are not, though much of the flow and hither and there is still present. You are either going to love this poetic style or hate it.
There is a level of almost catty gossip and sly humor to Ackroyd’s non-fiction books. Even a massive tome that is London doesn’t feel anyway near that long because of his tone. It engages the reader, moving the book far past a simple history book. So, we have observations like, “They were a tribe of Ganymedes and he was their Zeus”.
Yet, the book covers so much. Ackroyd starts during the Pre-Roman/Roman era, detailing even how gladiators weren’t perhaps quite the men we think they were (apparently, they really like perfume). He then moves to the advent of Christianity and the Anglo -Saxons. He does discuss not only homosexual men but women as well, noting that society’s view of women was also reflected in how society (not law, but society) viewed homosexual relationships.
Being Ackroyd, he is particularly interesting when discussing literature. There is a detailed look at Chaucer’s homosexual pilgrims as well as the view of the erotic theatre of Elizabeth’s time (“the codpieces were padded so the cods looked plumper”).
But he also doesn’t hesitate to describe punishment dealt out to those who did not fit the norm. We learn not only of whippings and beatings, but also of women slicing off a penis of an accused homosexual. We hear of what happened to two women, one of whom had married the other while disguised as a man. We learn more about those women who Waters wrote so well about in Tipping the Velvet. As well as certain Mrs. Bradshaw, who will get approving looks from Disc fans. We learn about the view of homosexuality and the arrival of AIDS in Britain. This last section of the book is perhaps the quickest and almost glossed over. I found myself wondering if this time period was too personal for Ackroyd to comfortably write about, at least in times of his story (Ackroyd’s long term partner Brian Kuhn died of AIDS in the 1990s).
It is this last section of the book that is at once the most hopeful and most touching. In the same chapter where he discusses the AIDS epidemic, he looks at the legislation of gay marriage as well as the phrase “check our privilege”, and this too made me think about the differences between then and now. How some younger members of queer culture (or transgender culture) are somewhat dismissive of those that came before. A trans person was dismissive of older homosexual because of lack of awareness of what that generation had endured. He was not aware of men and women being unable and even forbidden to attend the sick and death beds of loved ones. The word Stonewall to this young person meant little more than a Civil War Reference. The student lacked awareness and inability to see beyond or outside his own pain/frame of reference. It is also possible that this young man (his preferred description) had been condensed to by older homosexual/trans population. One can sense a missed discussion between groups. It is case like this that Ackroyd seems to be thinking about when he talks about checking privilege. He doesn’t claim immunity, but he is pushing towards an ability to talk, to discuss, to learn, to be better. Ackroyd is making a cause of understanding each other, in a way that the city he writes so passionately about seems to understand its residents.