User:Lbitter/Timeline of LGBT history in the United Kingdom

18th Century


 * The term “lesbian” to describe same sex relationships between women comes into use around the 1730s.

19th Century


 * In 1811, the Scottish court case Woods and Pirie vs Dame Cumming Gordon showed two teachers are accused of having a lesbian relationship by a pupil, claiming they had indecent sexual relationships. However, one judge found that sex between women was "equally imaginary with witchcraft, sorcery or carnal copulation with the devil”, illustrating notions at the time that tied sexuality with masculinity.
 * Ballads celebrating crossdressing female solders circulated during the Napoleonic wars, frequently depicting women donning male garb flirting with men and occasionally even “female husbands” would appear.
 * During the first half the 19th Century, Yorkshire gentlewoman Anne Lister actively participated in and wrote about her lesbian relationships. Although she did not use the word lesbian, at age thirty, she wrote, "I love and only love the fairer sex and thus, beloved by them in turn my heart revolts from any other love but theirs.”
 * A collection of the poems of Sappho were translated and published in English by Henry Thornton Wharton in 1885 as Sappho: Memoir, Text, and Selected Renderings. Wharton maintained a homosexual interpretation of “Ode to Aphrodite”.


 * In 1889, Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper published Long Ago, a collection of love poems devoted to each other and to the poet Sappho, under the pseudonym Michael Field. From 1870 until Bradley’s death in 1913, the aunt and niece duo lived together and wrote a number of passionate love poems to each other.