We Go Way Back

Long before the word "gay," people loved whoever they loved.

Two of the pharaoh's manicurists who had themselves painted embracing, nose to nose, for all eternity. A battalion of a hundred and fifty couples that never took a step back. A love poem from one woman to another, scratched on a wall in Pompeii. A person called Eleanor who, in 1394, told the mayor of London far more than he wanted to hear. A servant in colonial Virginia whom a court declared, in 1629, "a man and a woman." A young man in Harlem who spent six months sewing sequins onto a ball gown by the light of a kitchen lamp. A First Lady who wore a reporter's sapphire ring to her husband's inauguration.

We Go Way Back tells, from prehistory to today, the story of those who loved people of their own sex or didn't fit the boxes of their time. With stories that drop you into an ordinary day in every age, the lives of kings, popes, poets, spies, singers and ordinary people, and the gossip that ran through the courts. With humor, with rigor, and always saying what's true and what isn't.

Inside you'll find:

• 99 lives, from Sappho to Freddie Mercury and from Hadrian to Eleanor Roosevelt, each with its own profile card and a certainty rating: certain, probable, debated, literature or hoax.
• 31 "A Day in…" stories: from Uruk and Sappho's Lesbos to Abu Nuwas's Baghdad, Leonardo's Florence, a courtroom in colonial Virginia, Mother Clap's molly house, a Harlem drag ball, the night of Stonewall, the Welsh miners of 1984, Asia's first wedding and fifty years of London Pride.
• Gossip from every age, gods and myths from half the world, and the same old hoaxes debunked one by one.
• 131 cut-paper illustrations, a timeline of every age, a glossary and a guide to the places where you can still see their traces.

A book to give, to dip into, and to keep at hand the next time someone says this is just a fad.