Queer Enlightenments: A Hidden History of Lovers, Lawbreakers, and Homemakers

Historian Delaney debuts with an illuminating look at queer lives during the Enlightenment era. The author profiles a range of impressive, liberatory figures, among them a Black gender-nonconforming sex worker, a French soldier-spy who dueled in female dress, and a gay male couple referred to by friends as “a single spousal unit.” While discussing several exhilarating whirlwind romances and lifelong domestic partnerships, Delaney also vividly recounts the fatal risks of the period, most chillingly the 1726 execution of milkman George Lawrence for sodomy after a late-night raid at a working-class “molly house.” The author resists the “impulse to stretch the boundaries of our archive to create a past we feel we deserve” by brushing over inconvenient historical facts—instead, he corrects the record with newfound information, including reframing one much lauded “defiant trans ancestor,” the Chevalier d’Éon, as having been profoundly manipulated by the French crown, and exposing Anne Lister’s “historic lesbian church wedding” in 1834, featured prominently in HBO’s Gentleman Jack, as no wedding at all. Delaney also highlights these figures’ flaws, especially Lister, whose journals reveal her to be “a duplicitous, almost cruel companion.” Being so well-rounded helps paint an even more comprehensive picture of a time when queerness was not only possible but flourished, most notably, as Delaney finds, within domestic spaces. It’s an equally thrilling and painful extension of the historical timeline of LGBTQ+ people’s presence and persistence. (Oct.)