Peter Ackroyd: A secret history 2,000 years of gay life in London

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In his flat in Knightsbridge, central London, Peter Ackroyd ushers me into his study. It is a tight, faintly anonymous space crowded with books and prints, and with a discouraging view on to the back of a building. Now in his late 60s, Ackroyd is famous for his Stakhanovite appetite for work: his books could fill a decent-sized bookcase, though such is their girth, you would probably need to reinforce it (his gargantuan 1990 biography of Dickens weighed in at 1,195 pages). As far as I can calculate, there are now 18 works of fiction and more than 30 biographies and histories. Ackroyd does nothing by half measures, as the legendary tales of his drinking testify.

Much to the teeth-gnashing of academics, Ackroyd is no respecter of specialism, gliding serenely across such topics as Charlie Chaplin, Edgar Allan Poe, Turner’s watercolour technique, the origins of Englishness and the history of Venice. His abiding love is, of course, London – the city where he was born and has almost always lived, and which has infiltrated everything he has done. So deep does the obsession run that even Ackroyd seems at a loss trying to explain it: “How can I put it? London has always been a refuge.” It’s not clear whether he means geopolitically or personally. Perhaps it is both.

The new book, a history of gay London entitled Queer City, returns to familiar territory, so much so that it’s surprising Ackroyd hasn’t already written it: in fact, it turns out that, after a manner of speaking, he has. The very first work in the bibliography is by “Ackroyd, P”, a little‑known 1979 work on transvestism and drag. More famously, a 1983 novel is written as a fictional diary by Oscar Wilde, a photograph of whom decorates his study, sandwiched between Thomas More and the Elizabethan magus John Dee.

Yet the new work goes far deeper, travelling from the barely visible remains of Celtic London and the arrival of Christianity in the AD300s to the great sex scandals of the 19th century – Wilde included – and on to recent fights for gay rights. As ever, the book is rambunctiously inclusive, practically Rabelaisian. One sentence quotes Julius Caesar on the flamboyantly long-haired, moustachioed Celts, who honoured what Aristotle called “passionate friendship between men”. In the next sentence, Ackroyd drily remarks: “You can still see them walking in the streets of London.”

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/20/peter-ackroyd-interview-2000-years-gay-life-london