Oueer City: Gay London from the Romans to Present day - Peter Ackroyd

Ackroyd takes us right into the hidden history of the city; from the notorious Normans to the frenzy of executions for sodomy in the early nineteenth century. He journeys through the coffee bars of sixties Soho to Gay Liberation, disco music and the horror of AIDS.

Today, we live in an era of openness and tolerance and Queer London has become part of the new norm. Ackroyd tells us the hidden story of how it got there, celebrating its diversity, thrills and energy on the one hand; but reminding us of its very real terrors, dangers and risks on the other.

I am filling torn about this book. Queer city is so crammed with facts that it becomes almost dizzying for it. In effect the whole thing feels like a big brain dump. Ackroyd rushes through a vertiginous list of facts often without really explaining things properly, or simply adding, by way of conclusion to a story, an opaque comment that seems meant as an explanation but leaves the reader puzzled and non the wiser. There wasn't really a coherent flow to it - it felt a bit choppy, like one paragraph he'd be talking about something, the next it'd be something else, which didn't seem to connect, so there wasn't really an overarching structure for each chapter let alone the book.

The book is certainly informative and enjoyable to read, and I have learnt lots of things from it, but often I was left with unanswered questions about the episodes described, or about their context. The book somehow manages to be both punctilious and vague at the time, and would, I think, be quite confusing to a reader approaching the subject for the first time. The focus was primarily on cis gay men, which I can understand because they're likely higher profile than any other part of the LGBT community, and therefore easier to find information about but found it slightly disappointing. He really does just skim over most of the 20th and 21st centuries and that's when most of the change happened so it'd have been nice to actually get something more about that. I also found the skimming over of the sexual assault described a little coarse. 

Perhaps this is due to the necessary breadth of the book, sweeping two thousand years of obscured and fragmentary history, but I can't help feeling Ackroyd could have given his subject a little more care and affection.

Age Rating 16+. Adult content.