Studies documenting queer communities and identities in modern Britain have appeared with increasing frequency over the past two decades. In their earliest incarnations, these assessments of same-sex-desiring men and women were intended to reclaim, from historical invisibility, the experiences of those who formed intimate relationships with members of their own sex. As the field has evolved, these attempts to resurrect those “hidden from history” have been replaced by richly textured sexual ethnographies and geographies, detailed explanations of how sexual knowledge has been created, and intriguing examinations of individual sexual subjectivities. In their separate histories of gay and lesbian Britain, Matt Cook and Rebecca Jennings have produced not only impressive historiographical summaries of recent scholarship but also compelling narratives of same-sex desire in Britain.

Both of these works are concerned with linking, in instructive ways, recent histories of masculinity and femininity to those of same-sex desire. In so doing, each book highlights the inextricable connections that exist between these two vibrant strands of historical analysis. In Cook, discussions of effeminacy and the relationship between queer men and normative masculinities are given pride of place, while, in Jennings's account, Judith Butler's ideas about discourse and performativity are utilized to explain cultural preoccupations with the masculinity of same-sex-desiring women.

Each of these studies also reveals the methodological complexity of this field. The authors are careful to point to the broad diversity of sources employed by historians of same-sex desire in Britain. In both books, readers encounter not just the words of sexologists or legal cases but also tombstones, plays, chapbooks, ballads, diaries, intimate letters, and a range of visual sources. Despite some important points of convergence in these works, the editors of Greenwood World Publishing have correctly surmised that these are stories that need to be told in separate volumes. By presenting each as a distinctive history, neither form of same-sex desire is made to conform to one set narrative, effectively reminding us that while male and female worlds were, in the past, relational, they could also function as distinctive homosocial entities.

In chronicling the history of same-sex-desiring men in Britain over a thousand-year period, Matt Cook is ably assisted by Robert Mills, Randolph Trumbach, and H. G. Cocks. In his discussion of the Middle Ages (1000–1500) Mills painstakingly demonstrates that no fixed sexual system existed in this period. Relying, for evidence, on the familiar relationships between Richard Lionheart and Philip Augustus of France and Edward II and Piers Gaveston, he shows how the rhetoric of same-sex intimacy in this period could span many practices including peacemaking and diplomacy, traditions of adoptive brotherhood, and various forms of male-male physical contact. Mills is also careful to illustrate the distinctions that existed between homosociality and sodomy—a form of sexuality that could be viewed, alternatively, as a feminizing influence, a sign of courtly degeneracy, or a marker of religious nonconformity. While Mills generally rejects the idea that anything resembling a same-sex-desiring subculture existed in the Middle Ages, he does note the prevalence of same-sex relations in monasteries, the presence of male prostitutes in urban areas, and the possibility of what he terms “gay-like” experiences and expressions.

Randolph Trumbach covers the period between 1500 and 1800 and boldly posits, in the first of his two chapters, that a unified system of sexual desire, in which a majority of adult men had sex with both adolescent boys and women, existed in Renaissance England. According to Trumbach, this dual desire was experienced by all men and reflected in a diverse range of literary, dramatic, and legal sources, including those related to the case of the Earl of Castlehaven (1630). In his second chapter, Trumbach chronicles the eighteenth-century rise of a new kind of sodomite, a figure denigrated for his effeminacy and attracted to the transgressive pleasures of London's Molly Houses. Alongside these men, who were generally in their twenties and thirties and had sexual relations with their generational peers, were those, including some naval men, who continued to function in a system where age difference structured intimate relations.

In his exploration of the nineteenth century, H. G. Cocks chronicles the continued growth of a male same-sex-desiring culture focused on public cruising, a distinctive language (polari), and, after the 1850s, fancy-dress balls. As Cocks rightly notes, this was also a period of increased surveillance characterized, most significantly, by the intense scrutiny of a professionalized police force and, between 1806 and 1900, the indictment of nearly nine thousand men for sodomy. Cocks pays particular attention to the ways in which class status conditioned one's position within gendered and sexualized hierarchies that, by the end of the nineteenth century, were establishing connections between an “inner `inversion' of gender and sexual preference” (125). Cocks also assesses the impact of events like the Cleveland Street Scandal and illustrates how Hellenism, aestheticism, and sexology helped to create, by the end of his period, an “embryonic movement for gay liberation” (143).

In the final two chapters of this study, Matt Cook explores the last century in gay history. In keeping with a theme present in other sections of the book, he begins by noting how connections were made, when war broke out in August 1914, between treachery, sodomy, and foreignness. Building, in part, on the work of Matt Houlbrook, Cook illustrates the emergence of a flourishing queer culture in early twentieth-century London that revolved around new sorts of institutions including a broad range of pubs, taverns, and Turkish baths. By the 1950s, reactions to the homosexual man and his cultural milieu were enormously varied. While Freudian-inspired psychoanalytic practices and aversion therapies predominated in medical “treatments,” and legal prosecutions continued (including those of Sir John Gielgud and Peter Wildeblood), some sociologists and legal reformers were developing, by the time the Wolfenden Committee issued its report in 1957, more positive visions of the same-sex-desiring male. In his final chapter, Cook admirably narrates the rise of the modern gay-rights movement, the impact of AIDS, and several notable controversies including the introduction of Clause 28 (which prohibited the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities) into the 1988 Local Government Act.

Strands of the Cook narrative also appear in Rebecca Jennings's history of lesbian Britain, which starts with a brief summary of the essentialist/constructivist debates and the influence of queer theory on the writing of lesbian history. Beginning chronologically in 1500, Jennings enumerates some of the disadvantages faced by historians of female same-sex desire, including source availability and historical assumptions about “lesbian” invisibility in the early modern period. Despite these obstacles, the author contends, reconstructing the lives of same-sex-desiring women in the years between 1500 and 1800 is possible through a careful analysis of cultural representations in, to mention just two, scientific writings on the clitoris and descriptions ofTurkish seraglios. While some early modern Britons clearly worried about the contaminating influences that female servants and aristocrats might have on women of the gentry and the middling sort, Jennings observes that most tended to view same-sex desire and behavior between women as insignificant and unthreatening.

A certain amount of ambiguity also characterized the responses of early modern Britons to gender inverting and cross-dressing individuals like Hannah Snell, Catherine Vizzani, and Mary East, who sought, through their actions, to subvert the traditional gender order; to express their status as same-sex-desiring individuals; and, in some cases, to marry other women by successfully passing as men. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the rise of intimate, but allegedly nonsexual, relationships between women like Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby—the so-called Ladies of Llangollen. Largely the preserve of upper- and middle-class women, these romantic friendships provided a respectable face to relationships that might have otherwise elicited scandalous responses. Despite the prevalence of these relationships in this period, Jennings is careful to note that for some figures like Anne Lister, sexual contact with other women was erotic, sexually fulfilling, and, at least partially, identity affirming.

Like H. G. Cocks, Jennings notes a significant epistemological shift regarding sexual knowledge and attitudes after 1850. The rise of feminism and the emergence of the New Woman prompted a broad range of social anxieties about female homosociality in feminist organizations and settlement houses. Sexologists, who increasingly linked, in their writings, female masculinity, sexual deviance, and feminism, began to offer a dizzying array of causes for female homosexuality including congenital predisposition, excessive masturbation, and general social degeneracy.

Jennings is at her best when describing the emergence of the modern lesbian in the twentieth century. She begins her discussion of this important century by noting the opportunities that the First World War presented to same-sex-desiring women. By the 1920s, she asserts, an unprecedented lesbian culture began to flourish in Britain, especially in London. Unsuccessful attempts to criminalize female homosexuality in 1921 aside, this decade witnessed some acceptance and growing public discussions of lesbian sexuality in the form of debates around the publication of Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928) and, more indirectly, Virginia Woolf 's Orlando (1928). As they moved to urban areas during the Second World War, female desiring women began to congregate in bars and clubs like the Gateways Club in Chelsea, the Union Pub in Manchester, and the Spotted Dog in Brighton. Like their U.S. counterparts, these social institutions were governed by fairly strict codes of etiquette and were dominated by butch/femme lesbian styles.

The 1950s and 1960s witnessed the emergence of explicitly political organizations catering to the needs of lesbian women who were increasingly influenced by feminism. The publication of the magazine Arena Three, beginning in 1964, signified the growing maturity of an emerging social and rights-based form of activism that continued into the 1970s. During this decade a number of lesbian women also became active in the Women's Liberation Movement. In the 1980s and 1990s, lesbian women were mobilized by the AIDS crisis, the agitation around Clause 28, and by a desire to increase lesbian visibility throughout the country.

While the narrative and documentary strengths of each book are considerable, neither is able to escape some of the problems and pitfalls associated with the production of synthetic studies. Despite nods to regional variation and the four nations model of British history, neither of these works adequately addresses provincial cities or Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Some material is included on Manchester, Liverpool, Brighton, and Edinburgh, but readers are presented with few insights into how region or ethnicity may have affected individual experiences of the sexual systems described in each work. Furthermore, rural voices are almost entirely absent in these accounts, and little effort is made to thoroughly examine the relationship between imperial desires, orientalist discourses, and metropolitan sexualities. Finally, while each author is meticulous in his or her presentation of evidence, some readers may find themselves troubled, for example, by Randolph Trumbach's reliance on continental material or his bold, and slightly reductionist, arguments about dual desire in Renaissance England. Such observations are not, of course, meant to detract from the considerable achievements of these books. These are bold and innovative projects that remind us, simultaneously, of the richness of the field and the immense possibilities that continue to exist for interested researchers.