Sex, Time and Place is that rare thing, a truly interdisciplinary collection of essays that offers something new to its field. Starting at the “Queer London” conference, held at the University of Westminster in 2013, the editors, Simon Avery and Katherine Graham, have assembled a group of scholars who reflect the academic diversity of that event. Contributors to the volume range from PhD researchers to senior scholars and represent the fields of history, history of medicine, English, French studies, gender and sexuality studies, literary studies, cultural studies, and geography.

The volume is also rare in that it is enjoyably readable and manages to cohere as a collection dealing with queer histories of London while also destabilizing notions of a homogenous queer experience of the capital. As a historian who has written on nonmetropolitan queer experiences, I find this reflection of “the sheer complexity and diversity” of experience within the capital especially gratifying (18). Criticisms of the field often stem from a perceived lack of engagement with issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender, and the editors and contributors have thought carefully about these issues. In chapter 5, “Bigot Geography: Queering Geopolitics in Brixton,” Emma Spruce thoughtfully tackles potential tensions between lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people moving into areas of the city like Brixton and “those immigrant and/or black and/or poor communities that are presumed to be inherently homophobic” (66). She convincingly troubles this assumption of “bigot geography” and proves that experiences of sexuality, race, and class are never as simple as they may appear. In chapter 8, “Claude McKay: Queering Spaces of Black Radicalism in Interwar London,” Gemma Roman and Caroline Bressey offer a fascinating account of black queer culture and experience in interwar London through the life of writer Claude McKay. This biographical approach provides an excellent addition to well-established scholarship on the period by historians such as Matt Houlbrook.

Explorations of gender and how it speaks to queer culture, both now and in the past, have also been considered. In chapter 7, “Are Drag Kings Still Too Queer for London?,” Kayte Stokoe examines male impersonators in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries alongside the drag kings of today. Stokoe uses the term queer to “gesture towards stances of fluidity, collectivity and anti-normativity,” and this approach allows for a nuanced appraisal that is not unduly constrained by theoretical labels (97). Similarly, in chapter 11, “‘Famous for the Paint She Put on Her Face’: London's Painted Poofs and the Self Fashioning of Francis Bacon,” Dominic James offers a reappraisal of the life and work of the artist Francis Bacon by considering his “engagement with practices of gender indeterminacy” rather than his sexual relationships with men in isolation (168). Thankfully, lesbian experience is also given due consideration in the volume. In chapter 14, “Sink Street: The Sapphic World of Pre-Chinatown Soho,” Anne Witchard challenges the notion that “there was no lesbian nightlife in early twentieth-century London” and in doing so provides some wonderful snippets of experience that have been previously lost (221). In chapter 6, “Representations of Queer London in the Fiction of Sarah Waters,” Paulina Palmer presents a thought-provoking assessment of the city's influence on contemporary Welsh novelist Sarah Waters and the lesbian characters in her neo-Victorian novels.

The rather long chronology of the volume is also surprisingly well-served, and it feels like the 150 years in question have been well represented. In chapter 12, “Mingling with the Ungodly: Simeon Solomon in Queer Victorian London,” Carolyn Conroy ably conjures the dirt, danger, misery, and excitement of nineteenth-century queer London, while in chapter 4, “London, AIDS and the 1980s,” Matt Cook fast forwards by a hundred years to give a moving and personal account of more recent “ghosts” who haunt the city (61). The final two chapters, Marco Venturi's “Chasing Community: From Old Compton Street to the Online World of Grindr” and Sam McBean's “Being ‘There’: Contemporary London, Facebook and Queer Historical Feeling,” bring the volume into the present. Together, they consider what impact the queer past has had on recent developments and how queer spaces and the history that they are imbued with fit alongside more modern, technological, or consumer-driven understandings of sexual identity and, that disputed word, community.

I enjoyed reading this collection immensely and would recommend it to scholars, students, and interested general readers alike. It offers up-to-date scholarship on queer readings of London from a variety of disciplines and in so doing provides a springboard for further research and an introduction to new ideas and approaches within the field. Many of the chapters encourage the reader to rethink key ideas such as what is meant by queer, the boundaries of London, and, perhaps most intriguingly, how we construct readings of history and whose history needs to be explored. Particularly after last year's (often simplistic) commemorations of the decriminalization of homosexuality, it is vital to foreground the messy complexity highlighted by this book.