Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History

by Simon Goldhill

Queer Cambridge recounts the untold story of a gay community living, for many decades, at the very heart of the British Establishment. Making effective use of chiefly forgotten archival sources – including personal diaries and letters – the author reveals a network that was in equal parts tolerant and acerbic, and within which the queer Fellows of Cambridge University explored bold new forms of camaraderie and relationship. Goldhill examines too the huge influence that these individuals had on British culture, in its arts, politics, music, theatre and self-understanding. During difficult decades when homosexuality was unlawful, gay academics – who included celebrated literary and scientific figures like E. M. Forster, M. R. James, Rupert Brooke and Alan Turing – lived, loved, and grew old together, bringing new generations into their midst. Their remarkable stories add up not just to an alternative history of male homosexuality in Britain, but to an alternative history of Cambridge itself.

Genres: Nonfiction, Queer, History, Adult, Gay, LGBT

316 pages, Hardcover

Published February 6, 2025

About the author

Simon David Goldhil is Professor in Greek literature and culture and fellow and Director of Studies in Classics at King's College, Cambridge. He was previously Director of Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, succeeding Mary Jacobus in October 2011. He is best known for his work on Greek tragedy.
In 2009, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2010, he was appointed as the John Harvard Professor in Humanities and Social Sciences at Cambridge, a research position held concurrently with his chair in Greek.
In 2016, he became a fellow of the British Academy. He is a member of the Council of the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Board of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes, and is President of the European Institutes for Advanced Study (NetIAS).
Goldhill is a well-known lecturer and broadcaster and has appeared on television and radio in England, Australia, the United States and Canada. His books have been translated into ten languages, and he has been profiled by newspapers in Brazil, Australia and the Netherlands.

Reviews

[Ditte · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting and compulsively readable book about the unusually large gay community, and the many prominent men within it, at Kings College, Cambridge in the 19th and 20th centuries.

I was surprised by how fascinating I found the book and how much fun it regularly was. It often read like a gossipy book, as if the author found all these very interesting and funny anecdotes, stories, and facts from old diaries and letters and was dying to tell someone but it was too niche for it to be good small talk at parties. Or maybe it wasn't? Who wouldn't want to hear about an influential political scientist from a hundred years ago whose fetish was apparently "getting walked on by men in boots"?

Queer Cambridge was a book I didn't know existed but still always wanted to read. Some parts were more interesting than others, and a few sections didn't really work for me. However, overall this was a fantastic read and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in the history of gay and queer British society and community.

[kate]

obsessed with how many quotes there were from woolf absolutely reading to filth the men this book was about 😭 could def be critical about a lot of things but at the end of the day this was fun and made me even more excited to be at kings because apparently it’s land of the homos 🤩

[heptagrammaton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Queer Cambridge is a loving history of a space as community and community as space, of institutions and continuity (which, as Goldhill and all of queer history remind us, is a rarity.)

(I have had a week of too little and too much sleep: longer review incl. ramblings on the limits of historiography to come.)

[ezra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley and Cambridge University Press for this ARC.

Rating: 4.5 Stars rounded up.

“Queer Cambridge: An Alternative History” is a fantastic nonfiction read which discusses the history of gay men at Cambridge’s King’s College, mostly in the period of the 19th and 20th century. It looks in particular at the interconnectedness and community of men who admired, loved and slept with men (sometimes all three, sometimes only one or two of these elements). The book is divided into three broader categories and looks at the men who had influence on those categories during their lifetimes and after — Life at Cambridge and in academia more generally, politics and art. Goldhill connects contemporary accounts from a variety of sources with modern scholarship to offer the reader a full picture of these men and the relationships not only between them but also with the rest of the university, society, and to the men and women they were friendly with.

As someone who still struggles when reading nonfiction I approached this book with caution, but quickly discovered that there was little need for this, as Goldhill does a fantastic job of communicating the history told here in an easily understandable and approachable manner, even for a layman such as myself. Indeed this has such high readability that despite originally having set the goal of “at least getting through 15% of this every day” I found myself so sucked into this book that I was simply unable to ever leave a chapter unfinished, and I flew through this much more swiftly than expected.

This book does a fantastic job of explaining the gay male culture of the chosen period and the chosen environment, while still recognising how the figures in this book were of a privileged societal position and certainly didn’t reflect the “common homosexual” of this era. Goldhill also recognises, both in the introduction and throughout the text, how prevalent misogyny was not only in society generally but also within the “heroes” of this history. Besides misogyny, the author also recognises the issues of classism and racism and how they affected the narrative not only of this book but also of the history it discusses more generally.

Goldhill is currently a fellow at Cambridge, and his more “insider” viewpoint is what I personally think made this book come together the way it did, especially in the later parts when he discusses and talks to more contemporary academics at King’s, including one of the first female fellows of King’s, Tess Adkins, and Jim Trevithick, who is the last retired fellow to have been permission to remain living at the college. In this way he shows us how times and traditions have changed, not always for the better, but also reminds us of, despite how far we have come, just how far we have left to go to become an equal society.

If, like me, you have an interest in (male) homosexuality throughout history and you wish to take a specific look at one extended homosexual community in one specific institution and how it has shaped society I would very much recommend this book, even if, like me, you are rather inexperienced in reading nonfiction. This book is very approachable, and I think even the casual interested reader would enjoy this work greatly.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bold and fascinating study on an early queer community, an abnormal queer space, and the men who occupied it [and influenced society because of it] over time.

5 stars - full RTC.

[C. B. · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is thoughtfully written, but I’d hoped for a grander revision of how we think about homoeroticism in places like King’s College, Cambridge (the book’s subject). Most of the characters will be familiar to anyone who’s read a lot on these sorts of Oxbridge types. Ultimately, the book feels cliquey, even as it tries to argue for a wider significance to this history.

[Keelia]

Soooo interesting and so entirely up my alley. Feels both academic and widely readable for those not in this specific field of research. I neeeed to go to Cambridge asap

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

I recieved this as a digital ARC from NetGalley.

It was really interesting to read about the ecosystem of queer life in Cambridge/Cambridge University. The book focused chiefly on gay men but I credit the author for occasionally mentioning lesbian history and also acknowledging that the lack of lesbian history was a fault in scholarship overall.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fascinating account of gay life at Cambridge this is! An in depth exploration of the many gay men who studied and taught at Cambridge University, from E M Forster to Rupert Brooke to Alan Turing, and an examination of how they negotiated their way through their lives and loves, often at a time when homosexuality was illegal. There were many of them, for sure, rather too many to keep track of, not helped by the rather meandering style of the book which seemed to skip around all over the shop. A more chronological rather than thematic approach would have perhaps been kinder to the reader. Well, to this reader anyway. It’s structured in four main thematic sections, and I couldn’t see why this would be considered preferable. I found it confusing. But perhaps that’s just me. However, that said, I found the book a deeply compelling and informative read, thoroughly researched, balanced, nuanced and non-judgmental. Many anecdotes and illustrations accompany the text and add to the reading pleasure.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this book only moderately enjoyable .
I have been fascinated this topic since my discovery of Rupert Brooke and Lytton Strachey in my teens in the 1960s..My initial rapture re Brooke has been vastly modified by subsequent reading about his life but my passion was fuelled by Michael Holroyd's impeccable biography of Strachey and by the equally enthralling EM Forster:a Life by PN Furbank.

I felt very much in familiar territory here,but thought the writing style somewhat irritating and the organisation into four large sections simultaneously bitty and indigestible..Some of the critical framework and analysis was unsatisfying.

Obviously the author has done a lot research but there is still much to be done.

Thank you to NetGalley and to CUP for the digital review copy.

[Nick Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow!

This meandering tale is definitely worth the read.
The halls of King’s College in Cambridge were home to an inordinate number of queer men in the last 150 years. Men who literally changed the course of history — despite the obvious obstacles.
Goldhill weaves from the threads of personal diaries, private correspondence, and published works the material which is brilliantly draped over the frame of the culture of the college to create a most notable history. It is part gossip rag, part academic paper, and all enlightening.