These are people who spoke about their feelings in literature, diaries, or letters, or who were famous enough that others commented on their love lives. This makes the gay history of England not only rich, but also rather approachable. And it is also visible in England: there are sights you can visit that are connected with many of these people.
Shakespeare and the National Portrait Gallery
One of these people is of course Shakespeare. I say “of course” because I used the famous Chandos portrait of him as my featured photo. This painting is in London’s National Portrait Gallery, one of the great temples of gay history. And it occupies a position of importance in the gallery: when it was donated in 1856, it was the first work in the collection. That makes sense, because Shakespeare is a key figure not only in English literature but in England’s national identity. The question of his sexuality, however, is generally swept under the rug. Perhaps this is because people know the plays better than the sonnets. But the sonnets are the only place in which Shakespeare writes in the first person, so they give us our best evidence for his feelings. A majority of them are addressed to an unnamed young man with whom the author is in love. And although the poems you read in high school may not have been clearly homoerotic, some of them are very much so. An example is Sonnet 20, where he calls the young man “the master mistress of my passion.” He also addresses a woman he is in love with, and there is no point in trying to use the modern category ‘gay’ for a person from long before its invention. Nonetheless, same-sex love was clearly an important part of his life.Oscar Wilde in London and Oxford
Strangely, there is not a single picture of Oscar Wilde in the National Portrait Gallery. There are portraits of many important figures in Wilde’s life in the gallery, though, and England is full of places associated with Wilde. When I was studying in London 15 years ago, there were still two restaurants in London that Wilde frequented. Both of them have sadly closed now, but there are other places still open with Wildean associations. [caption id="attachment_40578" align="alignleft" width="250"]
James J. Fox, Oscar Wilde’s tobacconist[/caption]
Goodyear’s, for instance, the flower shop where Wilde and his friends bought their green carnations moved when it was bombed in World War II but is still open near Victoria Station. And James J. Fox, Wilde’s tobacconist, is not only still open: they still have the list of Wilde’s purchases and his debt to the store.
The gay history of England is not only found in London, however. Oxford and Cambridge are both rich in gay history, and there is a series of historic houses and gardens in the south that are connected with the Bloomsbury circle and their experiments with sex and sexual identity.