OutStories Bristol

OutStories Bristol wants to make it clear that we support trans people. Following a transphobic comment made by an audience member during a Q&A at the OutStories LGBT+ History Month event at MShed in February, we want to make it absolutely clear that OutStories as an organisation sees trans women as women, trans men as men, and nonbinary people as nonbinary.

We would like to apologise for not addressing this comment when it was made, as we are aware that leaving the comment unchallenged during the event caused distress to a number of audience members.

Going forward we will make sure that our events include an introduction that makes it clear that we are here to represent, celebrate, interrogate and explore the histories of all LGBTQ+ people in and around Bristol, and with the due respect that they deserve. Should transphobia be witnessed at future events, we will ensure it is challenged as soon as possible.

Our thanks to Eugene Byrne for permission to reproduce this article first published in Bristol Times 7/1/2025.

BT was saddened to hear of the death just before Christmas of Darryl Bullock at the age of 60.

Darryl had – has! – a world-wide following as the author of a number of respected books on music and LGBT+ life and culture, including The World’s Worst Records (two volumes!), Florence Foster Jenkins: The Life of the World’s Worst Opera Singer (Duckworth-Overlook, 2016), David Bowie Made Me Gay: 100 Years of LGBT Music (Duckworth-Overlook, 2017), The Velvet Mafia: The Gay Men Who Ran the Swinging 60s (Omnibus Press, 2021) and a few others. His book about Gloucestershire record producer and songwriter Joe Meek, Love and Fury is due out later this year.

In Bristol he deserves a prominent place in local gay history. He grew up in Gloucester, later moving to Bath before coming to Bristol as a freelance journalist. For years in pre-internet times he covered local LGBT+ issues in local listings magazine Venue, playing an important role in creating a city that’s much more welcoming and tolerant than it used to be.

He and his then-partner were also the first couple in the region to enter a Civil Partnership, in December 2005.
“We had it in Bath, as we’d previously had a blessing there (Bath was years ahead of Bristol when it came to recognising and celebrating same-sex couples)” he told BT some years back. He later lodged some memorabilia from this historic event with M Shed.

He and his then-partner later became the first same-sex couple to have their partnership dissolved (“a difficult process as the court had never had to deal with one before”).

He had been with Niall since 2008; their Civil Partnership was upgraded to full marriage on the first day the law allowed it, in 2014. They later moved to Cumbria.

Darryl was a lovely man, easy company, and an editor’s dream to work with. His delight in many of the more absurd aspects of both popular culture and gay culture was infectious.

Our sympathies go out to his family, and to Niall. He will be greatly missed.

©Eugene Byrne

Frontispiece by George Cruikshank for an 1831 edition

Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random (1748) is regarded as one of the earliest, if not the first, English novel to depict openly homosexual characters. Smollett (1721-1771) was a Scottish doctor, naval surgeon and novelist who regularly spent winters in Bath from the 1740s-60s.

Partly set in Bath and drawing on people he met there, Roderick Random was Smollett’s first novel and includes several gay characters. Earl Strutwell, “notorious for a passion for his own sex”, takes advantage of the naive young Roderick in order to kiss and fondle him. Roderick writes: the Earl “pressed me to his breast with surprising emotion”.

At first Roderick does not understand Strutwell’s advances but later “his hugs, embraces, squeezes and eager looks were no longer a mystery” and Roderick realises he has been introduced to Strutwell, for his seduction, by Lord Straddle “a poor contemptible wretch who lived by borrowing and pimping to his fellow peers”. Roderick sees that Strutwell’s manservant is jealous of Roderick because previously this “valet de chamber …. had been the favourite pathic of his lord”, meaning a catamite, a youth who plays a submissive role in anal intercourse.

Although Roderick rejects Earl Strutwell’s advances, Smollett lets the Earl have a lengthy and eloquent defence of homosexual love, citing precedents of same-sex relationships in Ancient Greece and Rome. Strutwell was based on a real man. In his essay Offences Against One’s Self: Paederasty (circa 1785) philosopher and social reformer Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) wrote:

“Much about the time when this novel was published a Scotch Earl was detected in the consummation of an amour after the manner of Tiberius* with two of his servants at the same time. The affair getting around, he found himself under the obligation of going off to the Continent where at the close of a long life he died not many years since.”
(* Tiberius: a reputedly “sexually perverse” Roman emperor).

This was John Tilney (or Tylney), 2nd Earl of Castlemaine (1712-1784) who in order to escape scandal lived in Italy for many years where he died the year before Bentham wrote Paederasty. Although not published until 1978, the essay is the first known argument for homosexual law reform in England, making Bentham an early advocate of the decriminalisation of homosexual acts.

While working as a naval surgeon’s mate on board ship Roderick meets Captain Whiffle, a wildly flamboyant gay man dressed as an effete dandy of the period in pink and gold. Tall, thin, with “meagre legs”, Whiffle fits the popular stereotype of the day of homosexual men. The surgeon, Simper, has the bedroom attached to Whiffle’s own and it is made clear no one should walk in on them unexpectedly. Simper is described as “a young man, gayly dressed, of a very delicate complexion, with a kind of languid smile on his face, which seemed to have been rendered habitual by a long course of affection”.

It could be argued therefore that Whiffle and Simper are the first gay couple in English literature. Roderick informs the reader:

“These singular regulations did not prepossess the ship’s company in his [Whiffle’s] favour but on the contrary gave scandal an opportunity to be very busy with his character, and accuse him of maintaining a correspondence with his surgeon not fit to be named”.

“Correspondence” in this context means a sexual relationship. “A crime not fit to be named” was a common euphemism for male same-sex intercourse used in the 18th and 19th centuries. Captain Whiffle is said to have been inspired by Admiral Lord Harry Powlett, 6th Duke of Bolton (1720-1794).

Smollett was obviously aware of gay men and, although he uses them for comic effect, he expected his readers to be aware as well. By reading Roderick Random gay men would have seen they were not alone and that homosexuality was widespread, even to the point that it featured in popular novels.

Smollett lived in Gay Street, Bath, from 1765-66 and also visited the then fashionable Hotwells Spa in Bristol. He travelled to Italy for his health in 1768 where he died in Monte Nero, near Livorno, Tuscany, in 1771 aged 50.

Jonathan Rowe 2024

Rictor Norton (Ed.), “Lord Strutwell, 1748”, Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, 22 February 2003
http://rictornorton.co.uk/eighteen/strutwel.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobias_Smollett

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventures_of_Roderick_Random