"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.

Kathleen Jamie on Attention and Corridors

Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish poet and essayist, born in 1962, known for her prose and poetry about landscape, place, and everyday life. Findings is her essay collection of personal reflections, first published in 2005, and it moves through nature and cities, archaeology, hospitals, family

Read More »
August 10, 2026 6:00 am
comics and illustration

Leo Ortolani, Tapum

A un certo punto ci sarà una battuta, in questo fumetto, e riderete. Sappiate che è l’unica. Com’è giusto che sia. Se devo paragonare quest’opera a qualcosa, il confronto più azzeccato è probabilmente lo spettacolo che Marco Paolini trasse dal Sergente nella neve di Rigoni

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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
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Kathleen Jamie is a Scottish poet and essayist, born in 1962, known for her prose and poetry about landscape, place, and everyday life. Findings is her essay collection of personal reflections, first published in 2005, and it moves through nature and cities, archaeology, hospitals, family

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A un certo punto ci sarà una battuta, in questo fumetto, e riderete. Sappiate che è l’unica. Com’è giusto che sia. Se devo paragonare quest’opera a qualcosa, il confronto più azzeccato è probabilmente lo spettacolo che Marco Paolini trasse dal Sergente nella neve di Rigoni

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