GLR May-June 2026

of forged intimacies and community dominates the book. As one gender-nonconforming aristocrat wrote to a friend in 1753, he feared walking about Central London lacking “courage to venture alone among the Westminster boys at the Abbey.” Delaney points to such evidence as indicative of the violent social policing around masculinity in 18th-century London. Seeing the contemporary in lives of the past can be a pitfall for any queer history. Even the terms we use can be anachro nistic to apply to an era when the people would never have con sidered themselves queer, much less gay, lesbian, or trans. Delaney usefully and perceptively acknowledges the fine line that any historian of queer experience must navigate. He pro poses the term “heteroregulation” as a more accurate frame to consider the sexual and gender nonconforming lives he re counts. While the term feels clunky and academic, it acknowl edges that, for the most part, the history of queer Georgians comes to us through court documents and thus reflects people who ran afoul of the legal and social regulations around sexu ality and gender. George Wilson is only known to us because of his arrest, and once released is invisible to the historical record. Delaney is attuned to the particulars of how these people may have defined themselves, making clear the shifting norms and values that his subjects navigated in compelling stories that sink you into the social life of the times. We also encounter Anne Lister, subject of the HBO series Gentleman Jack . Born in York, Lister became a fairly wealthy landowner who eventually ran Shibden Hall in Halifax, York shire. As Delaney recounts, Lister fashioned herself within the masculine attributes of early 19th-century English country life, including affairs with married and unmarried women. As a

country gentleman, Lister longed for a wife, and in 1834 she solemnized a union with Ann Walker in the local church. The two lived and traveled together until Lister’s death in 1840. We know much about Lister because she kept a detailed diary. But the Lister whom Delaney describes is nothing like Gentleman Jack . He presents a more unsettling Lister, writing that “the pri mary source material is littered with examples of her coercive control, manipulation, greed and deceit,” and describes her as a “female patriarch.” But he also acknowledges that he felt “com pelled to confront the unsavoury elements directly” to push “queer history beyond the simple act of ‘finding the gays of the past,’ towards a more nuanced and complex approach.” Such a confession speaks to the strength of this book, as Delaney often makes us aware of his approach as a historian, resisting the temptation to romanticize the queer past. If you enjoy immersive queer histories that recount not only personal lives but also the larger cultural world, Queer En lightenments will not disappoint. Delaney has rendered this Georgian world with a compelling narrative, wit, and insight, re covering an era that feels both strange and familiar. Happiness Inanity has never felt so close to home until now I’ve never been so happy Just knowing that I don’t think like you. A UDRA M C G REW

Bowie Had More Sides Than We Knew

P ETER ORMEROD, a journalist for The Guardian , begins his bi ography of David Bowie with a portrait of David the choirboy at St. Mary’s Church in Bromley: “The younger David pursued money, stardom and sex. But even when he had all the money he wanted, all the stardom he wanted and all the sex he wanted, still he searched, never settling. He evidently

form of spirituality, but it was unclear whether this “conversion” was genuine or just fashionable. In any case, it was part of his fascination with the supernatural, as we find in the smash hit “Space Oddity,” partly inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey (and the moon landing). It was “a song of science fiction for a young man, a song of reflection for a mature man, a song of desperation for a

N IKOLAI E NDRES

DAVID BOWIE AND THE SEARCH FOR LIFE, DEATH AND GOD by Peter Ormerod Bloomsbury Con ti nuum 256 pages, $28.

sought something else.” That search is the subject of the next 200-plus pages of David Bowie and the Search for Life, Death andGod , which “may be understood, at its most modest, as a quest to discover a kind of God that made sense to him, and at its most bold, as a quest to discover nothing less than the real ity of God.” Driven by a dislike of organized religion, Bowie flirted with occultism, witchcraft, Satanism, the Kabbalah, and many other spiritual strands. The next chapter turns to Buddhism, which Bowie discov ered via the Beat Generation and found to be a nonjudgmental Nikolai Endres, professor of world literature at Western Kentucky U., is the author of Patricia Nell Warren: A Front Runner’s Life and Works . 38

dying man, a song of acceptance for a man finding rest.” Throughout the book, Ormerod engages with various philo sophical influences, such as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Ni etzsche, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, George Orwell (one of Bowie’s aborted projects was a plan to turn 1984 into a musical, for which the estate refused permission), and Aleister Crowley (once considered “the wickedest man in the world”). We then get to glam rock, Bowie styling himself into a “rock god,” in the footsteps of Little Richard, Elvis, and Jesus Christ Superstar , giving us the immortal Ziggy Stardust. All this cul minated in an invitation to Top of the Pops in 1972, which put camp and sexuality center stage: “It may well be the most sig nificant moment in the history of British music television.” That

TheG & LR