"All this he saw, for one moment breathless and intense, vivid on the morning sky; and still, as he looked, he lived; and still, as he lived, he wondered."

― Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

1701: could you be killed for being gay?

One of the main characters, in the Gothic Novel I’m writing, is a shapeshifter who’s unapologetically pansexual and occasionally gender-fluid, so this was a question I was bound to ask myself.

1701: could you be killed for being gay?

Specifically, we assume the character left England in the wake of the 1542 “Witchcraft Act”, being born as the familiar of a witch, but the 1533 Parliament Act #25 was bound to be equally troubling.

There are a lot of interesting parallels that can be drawn between the anti-sorcery movements, which are mostly constituted by persecutory acts against women, and hate crimes committed in the same society against LGBT+ people. It’s a concept it would really be great for certain people to understand: oppression against women and oppression against gay and trans people, for instance, are only different manifestations of the same phenomenon.

But was it the same in all countries, or were there places we could have looked at as safe-havens?
We try to figure it out today in the free article on my Patreon.
Summertime

Omeros in the Caribbeans

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

Read More »
August 9, 2026 6:00 am
books and literature

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

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August 8, 2026 9:00 am
Summertime

The Path You Have to Sing

Alexis Wright‘s Carpentaria, an epic work set in a fictional town called Desperance, opens before there are any people in it at all: an ancestral serpent, “a creature larger than storm clouds,” descends from the stars and drags itself across the wet clay of the

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August 8, 2026 6:00 am
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Omeros in the Caribbeans

August 9, 2026

Derek Walcott was a Saint Lucian poet, playwright, and painter, and one of the major voices of Caribbean literature. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992, and his work often explores Caribbean history, identity, colonial inheritance, and the meeting of European and African

Read More

Ioanna Papadopoulou’s The Castaway and the Witch

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I had a genuine “oh shit” moment when I read the author’s preface saying this was darker than “Winter Harvest” because – and I absolutely ADORED “Winter Harvest” – that was pitch-black dark. I thought “we’re all going to die”. This maybe has something to

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