For our alt history fans…
Hundreds of years ago, there was likely to have been a gay brothel on the site where Buckingham Palace now stands, historians believe. According to LGBT+ historian Norton Rictor’s 2013 essay The Gay Subculture in Early Eighteenth-Century London, gay cruising spots and brothels may have started popping up in London in the early 1600s.
Although evidence is scarce, in 1649 English politician Clement Walker made an observation that has fascinated Londoners for centuries. In his Anarchia Anglicana, Walker wrote that “there stood “new-erected sodoms and spintries at the Mulberry Garden at S. James’s”.
At the time, the term “sodoms” could have referred to brothels of any kind, but the word “spintries” was used specifically to mean gay male sex workers.