Considering that London has been a metropolitan capital for millennia, there’s no end to the history that lies just beneath our feet. For nearly two thousand years, the city has seen inarticulable change, from the first Roman settlements up to being the urban, international global that it has become today. It’s a city that is constantly changing, and there’s no knowing what stood where your favourite coffee shop stands now. What you might find surprising is that where Buckingham Palace stands now, there once stood a gay brothel.
We’ve never wished that ghosts were more real than when imagining the Queen getting visited by the spirits of rent boys.
Clement Walker, a 17th-century lawyer, official and politician there stood “new-erected sodoms and spintries at the Mulberry Garden at S. James’s” in his Anarchia Anglicana dated in 1649. That is the site now occupied by Buckingham Palace. GAG.
Though there were many gay sex workers in London at that time, and sodomy was mainly associated with homosexuals, it could also be referencing a more general sense of debauchery with straight brothels at the time also being dubbed ‘Sodom’ by contemporary satirists.
This account was taken a few decades after the reign of King James I (1603 – 1635) who maintained a relationship with three close male lovers throughout his life, bestowing titles upon them. A few decades following this account by Walker, a same-sex marriage between Arabella Hunt and “James Howard” who turned out to be Amy Poulter was annulled in 1980.
