Make a pilgrimage to the statue of Oscar Wilde in South Soho. The inscription reads, 'We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.'

As LGBT history month begins, take a fresh look at the capital and explore some of the museums and galleries where gay life has written itself onto the body of the city.

Where gay people have left a trace in London history before 1967 it's usually a sign of either great courage or disaster. The vignettes we have of gay men generally come from court records or doom-laden press reports. But it doesn't mean that gay people all saw themselves through the dominant lens. From the 17th century onwards gay people invented all sorts of ways to find each other in London - and create societies with their own codes. After sex between men became legal in 1967 there was an explosion of gay visibility, as a first gathering of 80 protestors in Highbury Fields in November 1970 gradually led to the huge (and increasingly commercial) summer gay pride events that turn the whole of central London into a queer space.

In recent decades historians, museums and community history projects have all worked on unearthing the hidden gay sites of the city. They are everywhere. We hear stories of 1930s lesbians eyeing each other on the underground, of the 18th century builder laying the first stones of St Martin in the Fields who paused to make passes at a gentleman. London museums are collecting the physical manifestations of gay life in many forms: while London Metropolitan Archive collects memorabilia from modern civil partnerships, the British Museum houses the head of a gay Roman Emperor who passed through his remotest province two millennia ago.

The face of Emperor Hadrian, who fell in love with Antinous. Courtesy the British Museum

The British Museum was a favourite amongst homophile Victorian gentlemen who could get an eyeful of flawless male beauty in the Greek statue room without fear of arrest. The historian Matt Cook quotes one gay man who got a completely carried away looking at the statues: “I revelled in the sight of pictures and statues of the male form and could not keep from kissing them.”

The handsome Antinous. Courtesy the British Museum

The Museum also houses a burly bronze head of the Emperor Hadrian. Hadrian was in his fifties when he had a love affair with Antinous, a young man from Bithynia. When the young man accidentally drowned, Hadrian sublimated his grief into monuments and covered the empire with statues of his dead lover, whom he also declared a god. The museum's head was part of a larger-than-life statue of Hadrian himself which stood in the forum of Roman London, perhaps modelled from life when the emperor visited in AD 122. It was rediscovered in the Thames at London Bridge in 1834. You can see it in Room 41 until February 5th when it's travelling to Northumbria to be displayed at each end of Hadrian's wall.

But the gayest object in the British Museum is the Warren Cup, a Roman silver goblet displaying explicit scenes of penetrative sex between older and younger men. It's Victorian owner regarded the cup as 'the holy grail' - an envoy from the far past when homophilic desire was accepted and celebrated in domestic decoration.

The Warren cup is on permanent display in Room 70 of the Museum. The head of Hadrian is in Room 41 until February 5th - and then returns to the museum for a major exhibition about Hadrian in July 2008.

To learn more about homosexuality in the ancient world, head for The Petrie Museum of Egyptology on 7th February. Piled high with material from archeological digs from Sudan and Egypt, the museum is holding a talk on homosexuality in the ancient world. The museum's holdings include an Egyptian image from 700 - 300 BCE of a woman with a stone dildo, but most of the textual evidence about how sexuality was framed comes from the later Graeco-Roman period.

Homophilic organising in London

Before the Industrial revolution, most of Britain consisted of dispersed rural communities: when we get a glimpse of gay relationships, they tend to be between two people in the same household. 18th century London offered the chance for homophiles to have casual sex, or form clubs with a much wider range of men. The Molly Houses were clubs where men came together, often crossdressed and sometimes held wedding ceremonies as well as enjoying sex.

The clubs were scattered all along the North Bank of the Thames. One of the most famous houses, belonging to Mother Clap was in Field Lane – roughly the same place as the Holborn Viaduct.

The nemesis of these clubs was the Society for the Reformation of Manners - first formed in 1690 in Tower Hamlets. Working to stamp out all forms of 'vice', its members arranged raids on clubs especially in the 1720s. The mollies did not go quietly. The historian Alan Bray writes “When a molly house in Covent Garden was broken up in 1725, the crowded household, many of them in drag, met the raid with determined and violent resistance”

To modern ears, it has echoes of the Stonewall riots in New York 250 years later. But alter more raids the following year, the outcome was not liberation but prosecutions and hangings, and a far more fearful attitude to gay expression in the following years.

The records of the Old Bailey are online and allow us to search for particular sodomy cases and their outcome until 1834. The language is colourful and the sentences often harsh – ‘Mustapha Pochowachett a Turk, was tried for committing the most Unnatural and Horrid Sin of Buggery’ and was hung in 1694.

In the years after the molly trials composer George Frederick Handel and the poet Alexander Pope both revised their works in these years to remove same-gender admiration and make all love lyrics firmly heterosexual.

Handel's apparent celibacy caused comment even in his own day. Asked by George III why there were no women in his life, he replied that he was just too busy composing. Recently some historians have caused a flurry by suggesting his homosexuality, and showing how his cantatas - written in gay friendly European courts - were filled with homophilic references.

Leighton House

The Handel House Museum doesn't offer evidence either way, but does give an otherwise comprehensive take on the man's life and music. It is one of a number of museums that recall the life of a London figure whose sexuality has been open to speculation. The Leighton House Museum celebrates the life and work of Frederick Leighton, the Victorian painter. Almost certainly homosexual, he avoided scandal in London by taking long trips to the Arab world to pursue both his painting and love interests. Pictures in Leighton House include a vast picture of fashionable London at the Royal Academy, featuring a pre-fall Oscar Wilde with a white lilly in his lapel.

It's particularly hard to spot pre-20th century lesbian lives, or distinguish sexual love from the passionate friendships that were not uncommon between women in 19th century society. The Florence Nightingale Museum describes the recorded life of the famous nurse. Refusing proposals of marriage, she had passionate friendships with women at the beginning and end of her life.

What's important here is not to go back through history 'claiming' figures on sketchy evidence, but rather that we can acknowledge that the material bears a homophile interpretation. In the sixties, worried biographers were able to posit a string of female singers as Handel's lovers without challenge. We shouldn't be afraid now of queer readings. What's certain is that thousands of "gay" people have found refuge in an assumed or actual celibacy - Ted Heath being a recent example. Our historical gaydars bleep when confronted with lives framed this way.

Plans are afoot to restore this dilapidated site of the poets' stormy affair in Camden.

Meanwhile one undoubtedly gay museum is still in the making. French poets Verlaine and Rimbaud lived for a year at 8 Royal College Street Camden in 1872 – Rimbaud later recorded their stormy, absinthe-fuelled relationship in ‘A Season in Hell’. Their now-dilapidated house certainly looks like a metaphor for what acute alcoholism can do to you – but it’s being restored to a more wholesome state in alliance with the Poet in the City organisation. They hope to turn it into a art, poetry and history space; updates on progress here.

Jeremy Bentham: straight but not narrow.

Jeremy Bentham's writings are in contrast to the obfuscation around homosexuality of most of the 18th and 19th centuries. Around 1785 the philosopher and jurist wrote the first argument for homosexual law reform in England. Straight, as they say, but not narrow, Bentham argued that homosexuality harmed no-one else and should not be a crime – “For what is there for anybody to be afraid of?”. His writings hardly furthered gay liberation since he was too nervous to have them printed and they weren't published until 1978. But his funny and clear-headed manuscript is a unique voice from the period. In a section entitled "How came scratching not to be held abominable?" he is critical of the religious fundamentalists who seem intent on preventing anyone from enjoying pleasure.

He famously asked for his body to be preserved in a wooden cabinet after death and his 'Auto Icon' is still on display at University College London.

The Auto-Icon, University College London, South Cloisters, entrance in Gower Street. Open to the public free Mon - Fri 0730 – 1800

This is the headline of an article published in 'Titbits' on August 2 1969. It tells us in a tone of slightly horrified relish that this is "the final part of our investigation into these misfits in the twilight of a hostile world". It claims "there are more than a million lesbians in Britain today, and the number is growing."

Lesbian Life

The story of lesbians in London is closely bound up with causes that allowed greater autonomy for women, like the suffragette movement. 60% of the WSPU were single women, and there are records of life-long alliances and bed sharing. During the First World War women were given the opportunity to do jobs like policing, bus conducting and munitions work that gave them power, autonomy and a wider choice of dress. For some women, wearing trousers was an expression of sexual identity.

The London records do reveal one or two lesbians in the earlier period - the stories often centre around women who cross-dressed, or cases of women attempting to marry each other. In 1734 two people from Soho John Mountford and Mary Cooper were refused a marriage certificate, with the clergyman noting "Suspected 2 Women, no Certif.". In 1737 another couple did succeed in getting married despite the clergyman's suspicions "if ye person by name John Smith be a man, he's a little short fair thin man not above 5 foot."

By the early 20th century lesbian visibility was a case of knowing how to look. Barbara Bell recalls cruising in the 1930s: "You'd recognise the lesbians by... their little finger rings. So you'd plenty of chances for making passes if you were standing on the Underground ...it was a lovely warm feeling to think you weren't the only one - there were hundreds."

Radclyffe Hall courtesy of National Portrait Gallery. Museums lag behind on reflecting lesbian life but researchers are raising the bar with books such as 'A Lesbian history of Britain' by Rebecca Jennings.

Archives are still the best places for finding lesbian history in London, particularly the Women's Library, LAGNA and London Metropolitan Archive. Find out how to reasearch lesbian history in archives. Also check out the National Portrait Gallery for two images from the primary collection which are often on display - the novelists Radclyffe Hall and Mary O’Brien give a picture of a certain style of 30s lesbian in elegantly tailored mannish tweeds.

For an overview of gay life in the 20th century, start at the National Film Theatre. The NFT's newish Mediatheque archive allows you to watch over 100 gay films and documentaries for free. There's a range from lesbian doom films to anonymous interviews with mostly rather unhappy gay people from the 1960s. It's more cheeringly balanced with footage of the modern equality battles - images of Black and disabled gay lives and often fly-on-the-wall view of Stonewall and Outrage at work.

Further along the river the Imperial War Museum has a large permanent exhibition about the Holocaust. Principally describing the fate of six million Jews in the concentration camps, it touches on the fate of thousands of gay men. The pink triangle appears here as one of raft of different symbols devised by the Nazis to categorise their prisoners.

On the liberation of the camps homosexuality was still illegal so some gay men were sent to complete their sentences in ordinary prisons.

A rare display of club flyers and other memorobilia at Museum in Docklands offers a taste of the Rukus! archive of Black LGBT material.

Material from modern collecting projects has begun to find its way into museums – and unlike some of the earlier records, these objects pick up the homeliness of gay lives, rather than always emphasising Byzantine strangeness. At the Museum of Croydon you can see a carpenter’s drill and a 70s pregnancy dress, both belonging to lesbians and then listen as they speak about their lives .

Gay nightlife is represented at the Museum in Docklands who are showing Outside Edge, a small display of Black gay club memorabilia from 7th February. The Kairos in Soho Weekly Historic Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Walking Tour covers three hundred years of history of the area, up to present day, introducing walkers to stories about artists, actors, scientists, politicians, and ordinary everyday LGBT people – not to be missed. The guide says that the walks often take on a Wikipedia-like collaborativeness as older gay tourists describe the adventures that they once had in the bars and clubs of the area.

Kairos walk around Soho, every Sunday at 2pm. Just turn up outside the Admiral Duncan pub £5.

The perfect spot for a rest on the walk between Kudos and Heaven.

Since 1998 a statue of Oscar Wilde has presided over the south corner of Soho. The odd tomb-like structure of his plinth is apparently because Westminster Council intend him for a bench – presumably out of sympathy for any young men who may feel a little tired on the walk between Kudos and Heaven. Like all London gay plaques and monuments there’s no mention of his sexuality despite the fact that anti-homosexual sanctions so directly led to his end. It would be good to see London’s many gay plaques from Ethel Smyth to Vita Sackville-West, Alan Turing to William Pitt the Younger – outed at least once a year.

Oscar Wilde. Courtesy of Museum of London

But generally speaking, London’s reaching a point where it’s much easier to find gay narratives. In the last couple of years LGBT history month has acted as a catalyst for many museums and archives to look again at their collections. The ‘T’ part of the equation still remains thin, but a few exhibitions, such as the ‘Trans Men’ display at Swiss Cottage Library are beginning to explore the field. It may be time for London queers to learn from the dozens of small displays we’ve seen in the capital over the last two years, and put on a really big exhibition.

Trans Men: Our Lives at Swiss Cottage Library, last week in February

Bibliography

Homosexuality in Renaissance England by Alan Bray

London and the Culture of Homosexuality by Matt Cook

The Pink Plaque Guide to London by Michael Elliman and Frederick Roll

Handel as Orpheus by Ellen T Harris

A Lesbian history of Britain by Rebecca Jennings