¹ M. Foucault, The history of sexuality, i: An introduction, trans. R. Hurley (New York, NY, 1978). For a useful survey, see Cocks, H. G., ‘Modernity and the self in the history of sexuality’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), pp. 1211–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² J. D'Emilio, Sexual politics, sexual communities: the making of a homosexual minority in the United States, 1940–1970 (Chicago, IL, 1998) (first published in 1983); J. D'Emilio and E. B. Freedman, Intimate matters: a history of sexuality in America (Chicago, IL, 1998), pp. 288–95, 318–25 (first published in 1988).

³ E. K. Sedgwick, Epistemology of the closet (Berkeley, CA, and Los Angeles, CA, 1990), p. 45.

⁴ G. Chauncey, Gay New York: gender, urban culture, and the making of the gay male world, 1890–1940 (New York, NY, 1994); J. Howard, Men like that: a southern queer history (Chicago, IL, 1999); M. Houlbrook, Queer London: perils and pleasures in the sexual metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago, IL, 2005).

⁵ Howard, Men like that, p. xviii.

⁶ For the former (a rather guarded defence), see Bristow, J., ‘Remapping the sites of modern gay history: legal reform, medico-legal thought, homosexual scandal, erotic geography’, Journal of British Studies, 46 (2007), pp. 116–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the latter, see Cocks, H. G., ‘Homosexuality between men in Britain since the eighteenth century’, History Compass, 5 (2007), pp. 865–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The quote is from Cocks, ‘Modernity and the self’, p. 1222.

⁷ R. Jennings, A lesbian history of Britain: love and sex between women since 1500 (Oxford, 2007).

⁸ R. Jennings, Tomboys and bachelor girls: a lesbian history of post-war Britain, 1945–1971 (Manchester, 2007).

⁹ See Love, H. K., ‘“Spoiled identity”: Stephen Gordon's loneliness and the difficulties of queer history’, GLQ, 7 (2001), pp. 487–519CrossRefGoogle Scholar. As soon as it was published, Love's article became part of this archaeology. See also L. Doan and J. Prosser, eds., Palatable poison: critical perspectives on The well of loneliness (New York, NY, 2001).

¹⁰ Jennings, A lesbian history of Britain, p. xviii. For the sheer range of lesbian history, compare V. Traub, The Renaissance of lesbianism in early modern England (Cambridge, 2002), and Jennings, Tomboys and bachelor girls.

¹¹ The exception to this claim is the work of Laura Doan, strong on both topics: L. Doan, Fashioning sapphism: the origins of a modern English lesbian culture (New York, NY, 2001). Sexology is dealt with in ch. 5 of her book and sapphism throughout.

¹² M. Cook et al., A gay history of Britain: love and sex between men since the middle ages (Oxford, 2007).

¹³ H. G. Cocks, ‘Secrets, crimes and diseases, 1800–1914’, in Cook et al., Gay history of Britain, esp. pp. 108, 109, 144.

¹⁴ M. R. Hunt, ‘The sapphic strain: English lesbians in the long eighteenth century’, in J. M. Bennett and A. M. Froide, eds., Singlewomen in the European past, 1250–1800 (Philadelphia, PA, 1999), ch. 10; Bennett, J. M., ‘“Lesbian-like” and the social history of lesbianisms’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 9 (2000), pp. 1–24Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Doan, L., ‘Topsy-turvydom: gender inversion, sapphism, and the Great War’, GLQ, 12 (2006), pp. 526, 537CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁶ H. Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of nature: Krafft-Ebing, psychiatry, and the making of sexual identity (Chicago, IL, 2000).

¹⁷ D. M. Halperin, How to do the history of homosexuality (Chicago, IL, 2002), ch. 4 (quotes from p. 106).

¹⁸ The term ‘homosexuality before homosexuality’ is not Halperin's. I am thinking here of the parallel concept of ‘heterosexuality before heterosexuality’: see J. A. Schultz, ‘Bodies that don't matter: heterosexuality before heterosexuality in Gottfried's Tristan’, in K. M. Phillips and B. Reay, eds., Sexualities in history: a reader (New York, NY, 2002), ch. 3.

¹⁹ See Cocks, ‘Modernity and the self’, p. 1222.

²⁰ Seitler, D., ‘Queer physiognomies; or, how many ways can we do the history of sexuality?’, Criticism, 46 (2004), p. 82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²¹ Sinfield, A., ‘Lesbian and gay taxonomies’, Critical Inquiry, 29 (2002), pp. 120–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Waters, C., ‘Distance and desire in the new British queer history’, GLQ, 14 (2007), pp. 139–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²³ See also V. Traub, ‘The present future of lesbian historiography’, in G. E. Haggerty and M. McGarry, eds., A companion to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies (Oxford, 2007), ch. 7.

²⁴ Halperin, How to do the history of homosexuality, p. 121.

²⁵ A. Bray, ‘Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England’, History Workshop, 29 (1990), pp. 1–19. Reprinted in J. Goldberg, ed., Queering the Renaissance (Durham, NC, 1994), pp. 40–61. See also Bray's The friend (Chicago, IL, 2003).

²⁶ Bray, The friend, p. 143; J. Masten, Textual intercourse: collaboration, authorship, and sexualities in Renaissance drama (Cambridge, 1997), p. 32.

²⁷ Bray, The friend.

²⁸ M. DiGangi, The homoerotics of early modern drama (Cambridge, 1997), p. 12.

²⁹ G. E. Haggerty, Men in love: masculinity and sexuality in the eighteenth century (New York, NY, 1999); and his ‘Male love and friendship in the eighteenth century’, in K. O'Donnell and M. O'Rourke, eds., Love, sex, intimacy and friendship between men, 1550–1800 (Houndmills, 2003), ch. 3.

³⁰ The best short description of the cultural commonplace of nineteenth-century male intimacy is D. Yacovone, ‘“Surpassing the love of women”: Victorian manhood and the language of fraternal love’, in L. McCall and D. Yacovone, eds., A shared experience: men, women, and the history of gender (New York, NY, 1998), ch. 8.

³¹ See D. Deitcher, Dear friends: American photographs of men together, 1840–1918 (New York, NY, 2001). One such picture, of two working-class men, seated but holding hands, forms the cover image on Jonathan Ned Katz's Love stories: sex between men before homosexuality (Chicago, IL, 2001). The temptation for historians, not entirely resisted by Katz, is to read too much into these friendships.

³² M. Seymour, A ring of conspirators: Henry James and his literary circle, 1895–1915 (London, 1988), p. 188.

³³ S. E. Gunter and S. H. Jobe, eds., Dearly beloved friends: Henry James's letters to younger men (Ann Arbor, MI, 2001), pp. 7–8.

³⁴ Ibid., pp. 38, 162.

³⁵ The memoirs of John Addington Symonds, ed. P. Grosskurth (Chicago, IL, 1986), pp. 211, 265–6. For Symonds, a central figure in the history of nineteenth-century homosexuality, see J. Pemble, ed., John Addington Symonds: culture and the demon desire (New York, NY, 2000).

³⁶ Ibid., p. 176.

³⁷ S. Mason, Oscar Wilde: art and morality (London, 1912), p. 244.

³⁸ M. Holland, Irish peacock & scarlet marquess: the real trial of Oscar Wilde (London, 2003), pp. 85–7, 89, 90, 163, 184.

³⁹ J. Bristow, ‘“A complex multiform creature” – Wilde's sexual identities’, in P. Raby, ed., The Cambridge companion to Oscar Wilde (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 12, esp. p. 204.

⁴⁰ M. B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: sex, love, and scandal in Wilde times (Ithaca, NY, 2005), Part two: ‘Love stories’.

⁴¹ Ibid., pp. 251, 259.

⁴² See L. Dowling, Hellenism and homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY, 1994); Evangelista, S., ‘“Lovers and philosophers at once”: aesthetic Platonism in the Victorian fin de siècle’, Yearbook of English Studies, 36 (2006), pp. 230–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴³ H. Montgomery Hyde, The trials of Oscar Wilde (New York, NY, 1962), p. 201.

⁴⁴ Ibid., pp. 170–1, 216, 267. Cocks also notes this juxtaposition: see, ‘Secrets, crimes and diseases, 1800–1914’, in Cook et al., Gay history of Britain, p. 141.

⁴⁵ R. Croft-Cooke, Feasting with panthers: a new consideration of some late Victorian writers (London, 1967), pp. 115–16.

⁴⁶ G. Robb, Strangers: homosexual love in the nineteenth century (London, 2003), p. 149. Browning's modern biographer wrote that his subject ‘preferred to sleep at night with a muscular companion lest he was seized by sudden illness’. See Richard Davenport-Hines's entry on Browning in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. C. Matthew and B. Harrison (Oxford, 2004).

⁴⁷ S. Koven, Slumming: sexual and social politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ, 2004), ch. 1.

⁴⁸ Ibid., ch. 5. See also his ‘From rough lads to hooligans: boy life, national culture and social reform’, in A. Parker, M. Russo, D. Sommer, and P. Yaeger, eds., Nationalisms and sexualities (New York, NY, 1992), ch. 20.

⁴⁹ X. Mayne, The Intersexes: a history of similisexualism as a problem in social life (New York, NY, 1975), pp. 426–42. A reprint of the original edition of 1908. Mayne's real name was Edward Irenaeus Prime Stevenson.

⁵⁰ Ibid., pp. 212–23.

⁵¹ See Houlbrook, M., ‘Soldier heroes and rent boys: homosex, masculinities, and Britishness in the Brigade of Guards, circa 1900–1960’, Journal of British Studies, 42 (2003), pp. 351–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² M. Holland and R. Hart-Davis, eds., The complete letters of Oscar Wilde (New York, NY, 2000), pp. 758–9.

⁵³ Hyde, Trials of Oscar Wilde, p. 178; Holland, Irish peacock & scarlet marquess, p. 166.

⁵⁴ Holland and Hart-Davis, eds., Complete letters of Oscar Wilde, pp. 1078, 1095, 1113, 1116, 1185. See also pp. 1066, 1067, 1070, 1073, 1074–5, 1101, 1104, 1105, 1107, 1110, 1112, 1114, 1117–18, 1119, 1129, 1132, 1139, 1140, 1177, 1179, 1182, 1186, 1187, 1192, 1196.

⁵⁵ S. Calloway, Aubrey Beardsley (London, 1998), p. 80. The Cleveland Street affair of 1889–90 involved telegraph boys employed as male prostitutes in a brothel patronized by aristocrats: Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames, Part three: ‘West End scandals’.

⁵⁶ T. d'Arch Smith, Love in earnest: some notes on the lives and writings of English ‘Uranian’ poets from 1889 to 1930 (London, 1970), p. 108.

⁵⁷ D. Felix, Keynes: a critical life (Westport, CT, 1999), pp. 107–11.

⁵⁸ M. Holroyd, ed., Lytton Strachey by himself: a self-portrait (London, 1971), p. 139–56; J. A. Taddeo, Lytton Strachey and the search for modern sexual identity: the last eminent Victorian (Binghampton, NY, 2002), pp. 71–3.

⁵⁹ Houlbrook, Queer London, ch. 7. Quote from p. 171.

⁶⁰ Ibid., p. 7.

⁶¹ See Vicinus, M., ‘Queer differences’, English Language Notes, 45 (2007), p. 187Google Scholar.

⁶² M. Vicinus, Intimate friends: women who loved women, 1778–1928 (Chicago, IL, 2004).

⁶³ M. Wood-Allen, What a young woman ought to know (Philadelphia, PA, and London, 1905), pp. 177–8.

⁶⁴ C. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly conduct: visions of gender in Victorian America (New York, NY, 1985), pp. 53, 59, 74. The original essay, ‘The female world of love and ritual’, appeared in the first issue of the journal Signs in 1975.

⁶⁵ S. Marcus, Between women: friendship, desire, and marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ, 2007), p. 19.

⁶⁶ Ibid., p. 54.

⁶⁷ Vicinus, Intimate friends. Reviewed in Cocks, ‘Modernity and the self’.

⁶⁸ Marcus, Between women, pp. 193, 203.

⁶⁹ No priest but love: excerpts from the diaries of Anne Lister, 1824–1826, ed. H. Whitbread (New York, NY, 1992), p. 78.

⁷⁰ Vicinus, Intimate friends.

⁷¹ I know my own heart: the diaries of Anne Lister, 1791–1840, ed. H. Whitbread (New York, NY, 1992), p. 210.

⁷² Ibid., p. 273.

⁷³ Ibid., p. 145. For Lister's sexual interactions, see A. Clark, ‘Anne Lister's construction of lesbian identity’, in Phillips and Reay, eds., Sexualities in history, ch. 12.

⁷⁴ A. Jagose, Inconsquence: lesbian representation and the logic of sexual sequence (Ithaca, NY, 2002), p. 21.

⁷⁵ I know my own heart, ed. Whitbread, p. 145.

⁷⁶ Ibid., p. 267.

⁷⁷ J. Bristow, Effeminate England: homoerotic writing after 1885 (New York, NY, 1995), p. 2.

⁷⁸ E. Cohen, Talk on the Wilde side: toward a genealogy of discourse on male sexualities (New York, NY, 1993); A. Sinfield, The Wilde century: effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the queer moment (London, 1994).

⁷⁹ Holland, Irish peacock & scarlet marquess, pp. 42, 78–9, 102, 118, 253–4, 255. For a recent account, using this expanded transcript of the first trial, see Kaplan, M. B., ‘Literature in the dock: the trials of Oscar Wilde’, Journal of Law and Society, 31 (2004), pp. 113–40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁰ L. Hamilton, ‘Wilde, new women, and the rhetoric of effeminacy’, in J. Bristow, ed., Wilde writings: contextual conditions (Toronto, 2003), pp. 239–41.

⁸¹ Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames, Part one: ‘Sex in the city’.

⁸² Ibid., p. 21.

⁸³ Ibid., pp. 91, 94, 97.

⁸⁴ Ibid., p. 87.

⁸⁵ See also Upchurch, C., ‘Forgetting the unthinkable: cross-dressers and British society in the case of the Queen vs. Boulton and others’, Gender and History, 12 (2000), pp. 127–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar; H. G. Cocks, Nameless offences: homosexual desire in the nineteenth century (London, 2003), ch. 3.

⁸⁶ S. Brady, Masculinity and male homosexuality in Britain, 1861–1913 (Houndmills, 2005), p. 103.

⁸⁷ Houlbrook, M., ‘“Lady Austin's camp boys”: constituting the queer subject in 1930s London’, Gender and History, 14 (2002), pp. 31–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Houlbrook, M., ‘“The man with the powder puff” in interwar London’, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), pp. 145–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁸ See J. Bristow, Sexuality (London, 1997), pp. 20–4; H. Kennedy, ‘Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, first theorist of homosexuality’, in V. A. Rosario, ed., Science and homosexualities (New York, NY, 1997), pp. 26–45. See also H. Kennedy, Ulrichs: the life and works of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs pioneer of the modern gay movement (Boston, MA, 1988).

⁸⁹ R. von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia sexualis with especial reference to the antipathic sexual instinct: a medico-forensic study (New York, NY, 1998), p. 295 (translated from the 12th German edition of 1903).

⁹⁰ E. Carpenter, The intermediate sex (London, 1896).

⁹¹ Brady, Masculinity and male homosexuality, ch. 5. Brady argues that sexology had limited influence in Britain. However, he seems oblivious to interaction between the continent and England and the fact that educated English men and women could read publications in other languages. He also ignores the availability of sexological literature in America, where Krafft-Ebing's work was commented on as early as the 1880s. For the US, see Jay Hatheway, The Gilded Age construction of modern American homophobia (New York, NY, 2003), chs. 8–9.

⁹² Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames, pp. 7, 268.

⁹³ Ivan Crozier's latest work demonstrates that British psychiatrists did have access to sexological thinking about homosexuality; see Crozier, I., ‘Nineteenth-century British psychiatric writing about homosexuality before Havelock Ellis: the missing story’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 6 (2008), pp. 65–102Google Scholar. Though he provides examples from the 1880s and earlier, most of his evidence of British psychiatric writing about homosexuality comes from the 1890s. Crozier's article, however, has implications for Brady's claims: see note 91 above.

⁹⁴ M. Cook, London and the culture of homosexuality, 1885–1914 (Cambridge, 2003), esp. ch. 1. See also Cocks, Nameless offences.

⁹⁵ Doyle, D. D., ‘“A very proper Bostonian”: rediscovering Ogden Codman and his late-nineteenth-century queer world’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 13 (2004), pp. 446–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹⁶ L. Brake, Print in transition, 1850–1910: studies in media and book history (Basingstoke, 2001), ch. 6; Visual Culture in Britain, 18 (2007), esp. pp. 1–14: J. Edwards, ‘Introduction: “anxious flirtations”: homoeroticism, art, and Aestheticism in late-Victorian Britain’.

⁹⁷ Hilliard, D., ‘UnEnglish and unmanly: Anglo-Catholicism and homosexuality’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1982), pp. 181–210Google ScholarPubMed; F. S. Roden, Same-sex desire in Victorian religious culture (Houndmills, 2002).

⁹⁸ P. Fussell, The Great War and modern memory (Oxford, 2000), ch. 8: ‘Soldier boys’. Originally published in 1975.

⁹⁹ Cocks, H. G., ‘Safeguarding civility: sodomy, class and moral reform in early nineteenth-century England’, Past and Present, 190 (2006), pp. 121–46CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. pp. 123, 129, 131.

¹⁰⁰ See John Stokes, ‘Wilde at bay: the diary of George Ives’, in his Oscar Wilde: myths, miracles, and imitations (Cambridge, 1996), ch. 3. See also M. Cook, ‘Sex lives and diary writing: the journals of George Ives’, in D. Amigoni, ed., Life writing and Victorian culture (Aldershot, 2006), ch. 9.

¹⁰¹ F. Harris, Oscar Wilde: his life and confessions (2 vols., New York, NY, 1918), i, pp. 106, 109, 110, 116.

¹⁰² J. R. Ackerley, My father and myself (London, 1968), p. 117.

¹⁰³ Mayne, Intersexes.

¹⁰⁴ T. C. Worsley, Flannelled fool: a slice of life in the thirties (London, 1967), pp. 26, 74.

¹⁰⁵ See Times Digital Archive, 1785–1985: keyword search: homosexual. The earliest reference is for 1907 and there are a handful of references for the 1930s and 1940s but it is not until the 1950s that the word is used with any frequency.

¹⁰⁶ Doyle, ‘“A very proper Bostonian”’, p. 476; Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames, pp. 6, 269, 270. Before Kaplan's remarkable book was published, he produced a series of tasters, the best of which is Kaplan, M. B., ‘Who's afraid of John Saul? Urban culture and the politics of desire in late Victorian London’, GLQ, 5 (1999), pp. 267–314Google Scholar.

¹⁰⁷ These quotes come from Medd, J., ‘“The cult of the clitoris”: anatomy of a national scandal’, MODERNISM/Modernity, 9 (2002), pp. 21–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁰⁸ Cohler, D., ‘Sapphism and sedition: producing female sexuality in Great War Britain’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 16 (2007), pp. 68–94CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹⁰⁹ Medd, ‘“Cult of the clitoris”’, p. 44.

¹¹⁰ Doan, Fashioning sapphism, esp. pp. 165–7, 179–81.

¹¹¹ See also the informative online interview: A. Jagose, ‘The evolution of a lesbian icon’, Genders, 34 (2001). http://www.genders.org/g34/g34_jagose.html

¹¹² Ford, R., ‘Speculating on scrapbooks, sex and desire: issues in lesbian history’, Australian Historical Studies, 106 (1996), pp. 111–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar (quotes from p. 119).

¹¹³ Vernon, J., ‘“For some queer reason”: the trials and tribulations of Colonel Barker's masquerade in interwar Britain’, Signs, 26 (2000), pp. 37–62CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

¹¹⁴ A. Oram, ‘“A sudden orgy of decadence”: writing about sex between women in the interwar popular press’, in L. Doan and J. Garrity, eds., Sapphic modernities: sexuality, women and national culture (New York, NY, 2006), p. 169. This argument is expanded in Oram's impressive new book: A. Oram, Her husband was a woman! Women's gender-crossing in modern British popular culture (Oxford, 2007).

¹¹⁵ See Times Digital Archive, 1785–1985: keyword search: lesbian. Apart from frequent references in the Shipping Intelligence to a steamer called The Lesbian, the earliest reference is for 1918 in connection to the Pemberton-Billing case. As with use of the term homosexual, it is not until the 1950s that the word lesbian is used with any frequency.

¹¹⁶ M. Hatt, ‘Near and far: homoeroticism, labour and Hamo Thornycroft's Mower’, Art History, 26 (2003), pp. 26, 34.

¹¹⁷ J. Medd, ‘Séances and slander: Radclyffe Hall in 1920’, in Doan and Garrity, eds., Sapphic modernities, p. 213.

¹¹⁸ Traub, ‘Present future of lesbian historiography’, p. 138.