Queer City Quotes

“As so often with the King's commandments, a measure that was designed for specific purposes had wide and unintended consequences.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

“Another term emerged in 1862, in the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs. ‘Uranian’ or ‘urning’ was derived from Plato’s description of same-sex love in the Symposium as ‘ouranios’ or ‘heavenly’. (‘Ouranos’ literally means ‘the pisser’, opening up a further line of enquiry.) Whatever its celestial origins, the term did not quite catch on. Who would want to be called an ‘urning’? It sounds like some sort of gnome. An ‘urnind’ was a queer female, while ‘uranodionings’ were bisexual.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

“The love that dares not speak its name has never stopped talking.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day

“Sexuality was a fluid, infinitely malleable and indefinite condition. It permeated the streets of London like the smell of pies and sweetmeats.”
― Peter Ackroyd, Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day