Thank you to NetGalley and Cambridge University Press for this ARC.

Rating: 4.5 Stars rounded up.

“Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History” is a fantastic nonfiction read which discusses the history of gay men at Cambridge’s King’s College, mostly in the period of the 19th and 20th century. It looks in particular at the interconnectedness and community of men who admired, loved and slept with men (sometimes all three, sometimes only one or two of these elements). The book is divided into three broader categories and looks at the men who had influence on those categories during their lifetimes and after — Life at Cambridge and in academia more generally, politics and art. Goldhill connects contemporary accounts from a variety of sources with modern scholarship to offer the reader a full picture of these men and the relationships not only between them but also with the rest of the university, society, and to the men and women they were friendly with.

As someone who still struggles when reading nonfiction I approached this book with caution, but quickly discovered that there was little need for this, as Goldhill does a fantastic job of communicating the history told here in an easily understandable and approachable manner, even for a layman such as myself. Indeed this has such high readability that despite originally having set the goal of “at least getting through 15% of this every day” I found myself so sucked into this book that I was simply unable to ever leave a chapter unfinished, and I flew through this much more swiftly than expected.

This book does a fantastic job of explaining the gay male culture of the chosen period and the chosen environment, while still recognising how the figures in this book were of a privileged societal position and certainly didn’t reflect the “common homosexual” of this era. Goldhill also recognises, both in the introduction and throughout the text, how prevalent misogyny was not only in society generally but also within the “heroes” of this history. Besides misogyny, the author also recognises the issues of classism and racism and how they affected the narrative not only of this book but also of the history it discusses more generally.

Goldhill is currently a fellow at Cambridge, and his more “insider” viewpoint is what I personally think made this book come together the way it did, especially in the later parts when he discusses and talks to more contemporary academics at King’s, including one of the first female fellows of King’s, Tess Adkins, and Jim Trevithick, who is the last retired fellow to have been permission to remain living at the college. In this way he shows us how times and traditions have changed, not always for the better, but also reminds us of, despite how far we have come, just how far we have left to go to become an equal society.

If, like me, you have an interest in (male) homosexuality throughout history and you wish to take a specific look at one extended homosexual community in one specific institution and how it has shaped society I would very much recommend this book, even if, like me, you are rather inexperienced in reading nonfiction. This book is very approachable, and I think even the casual interested reader would enjoy this work greatly.

I recieved this as a digital ARC from NetGalley.

It was really interesting to read about the ecosystem of queer life in Cambridge/Cambridge University. The book focused chiefly on gay men but I credit the author for occasionally mentioning lesbian history and also acknowledging that the lack of lesbian history was a fault in scholarship overall.