Queer City by Peter Ackroyd

Queer City by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd [Peter Ackroyd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780701188801
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-05-25T04:00:00+00:00


14

Tiddy dolls

Mr Fribble has emerged in an earlier chapter as the model of a mid-eighteenth-century queer. He was the creation of David Garrick who introduced him to the stage in a farce of 1747, Miss in Her Teens. ‘We drink tea, hear the chat of the day, invent fashions for the ladies, make models of ’em, and cut out patterns in paper.’ If eventually Mr Fribble should marry ‘the domestic business will be taken off her hands; I shall make the tea, comb the dogs, and dress the children myself … But my dear creature, who put on your cap to-day? They have made a fright of you, and it’s as yellow as old Lady Crowfoot’s neck … What shall I do? I shall certainly catch my death! Where’s my cambric handkerchief, and my salts? I shall certainly have my hysterics!’

In the same year Nathaniel Lancaster’s The Pretty Gentleman asked the reader to ‘observe that fine complexion! Examine that smooth, that velvety skin! View this pallor which spreads itself over his countenance. Hark, with what a feminine softness his accents steal their way through his half-opened lips!’ He might be known as a fribble or a whiffle, a jemmy or a macaroni, with names such as Lord Dimple and Marjorie Pattypan.

Waterloo Sedley, in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848), announced himself with the words ‘I am a dressy man’. It was remarked that ‘though rather uneasy if the ladies looked at him … and though he blushed and turned away alarmed at their glances, it was chiefly from dread lest they should make love to him’. Yet when posted to Calcutta ‘he gave the best bachelor dinners’.

The effeminate male has been parodied or satirised for the best part of a thousand years and continues in the pantomime dames of the day before yesterday. This in turn leads to the question at the heart of this book. What is the connection between queerness and the city? It is not confined to the city, but it is identified with it. It is no accident that the two great urban centres of classical antiquity, Athens and Rome, were well known for their homosexual ambience.

The atmosphere of London, too, floats over the familiar claims of the family and of traditional loyalties; London is by its nature subversive, suborning previously tight bonds. That is why it symbolised abstract space and abstract justice instead of the claims of kinship. Other forms of community emerged, entirely estranged from the family or blood kinship. These were the communities formed by those of similar tastes and habits; they could be part of the culture of the streets or of the taverns, or they might be communities of strangers associated with a certain public footpath or bog house. Some of them were the anonymous wanderers of London, linked briefly by furtive sex in a dark corner. Some of them claimed the city night as their own. The city was the home and haven of anonymity.

Queer men and women were able in the



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