Edinburgh’s LGBTQ+ History

As a tour guide, one of the things I love about my job is being able to show people the real Scotland. That means sharing not just the stories we find on the surface – the kings and queens, the ancient dwellings, the battles – but also those that have never been woven into our national narrative. Last year, I wanted to start using my time in lockdown to find out more about the Edinburgh people and stories we don’t talk about as often, particularly those of women, people of colour and LGBTQ+ folk.

For as long as Edinburgh has existed, LGBTQ+ people have walked the city’s streets. Their stories can be harder to uncover, because for most of history people had to hide their identities from the eyes of society, but once you start digging you find a wealth of LGBTQ+ experiences buried in the fabric of the city. For Pride month in 2020, I decided to make a short virtual tour of Edinburgh’s LGBTQ+ history (you can view it at the end of this article) and I found more information than I could pack in. Even though so many people’s stories have been lost – even though history often tried to deliberately erase them – there were still so many surviving glimpses into rich and varied LGBTQ+ lives. I ended up making a full hour-long virtual tour (available to download here) and I’m looking forward to offering it as a walking tour in 2021 when it’s safe to do so!

So what did LGBTQ+ lives look like in the past? Nowadays, Edinburgh is a modern city with LGBTQ+ venues and societies, and Scotland is recognised as one of the most LGBTQ+ friendly countries in the world. But until the late twentieth century, it was a different story altogether. Scotland was a very socially conservative place back in the day, and most LGBTQ+ people wouldn’t have been able to live openly in society. Of course, that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist – it just means that we rarely get to hear someone’s whole story.

Homosexuality wasn’t decriminalised in Scotland until 1981, and gay men were often the targets of police raids. In the 1920s and 1930s, a police officer called William Merrilees conducted numerous raids on public bath houses in Edinburgh, where the single-sex facilities were popular meeting spots for gay men. You can still visit some of these places: Dovecot Studios tapestry studio and gallery is in the former Infirmary Street Baths, and Glenogle baths in Stockbridge is a public swimming pool to this day. Calton Hill by night was (and remains) another known cruising spot, and another place where William Merrilees hunted for gay men to arrest in Edinburgh. He also closed down several dance halls for “male prostitution” – shutting down the city’s gay social scene was an ongoing crusade.

Although it’s grim to read about William Merrilees and his men raiding clubs and persecuting gay men (and trans and gender non-conforming people they perceived as men), it also shows us that an LGBTQ+ social scene existed in the city. Even though it was illegal, even though they risked arrest, people still found each other and created spaces where they could meet and find sex and intimacy and love. Although it would be difficult or impossible to live openly in a gay or lesbian relationship, there were always people who found a way.

Dr Sophia Jex-Blake

Dr Sophia Jex-Blake was one such person. In 1878, she became Edinburgh’s first woman doctor. She also went on to establish a medical school for women in the city, after she herself had to complete her studies abroad when the University of Edinburgh refused to allow her to graduate because she was a woman. It was at her own medical school in the 1880s that she met Margaret Todd, who would go on to become her life partner.  

Dr Margaret Todd

The two women lived together for around 25 years, including in a house in Bruntsfield that you can still see today. Lesbianism was never illegal, but it would still have been socially scandalous. However, for two women – especially two educated and professional women like Sophia Jex-Blake and Margaret Todd – it was sometimes possible to live as unmarried spinster “companions” without causing a fuss. Sophia and Margaret lived together until Sophia’s death in 1912, and Margaret, who was also a doctor and a respected author, went on to write her biography. Sophia had left instructions that all her papers and diaries should be burnt after she died, so sadly we’ve lost any private reflections and correspondence between the two women. Nonetheless, it’s now generally accepted that they were romantic partners – two women who were able to find a way to live as a loving couple and forge professional careers as pioneers in their fields, more than 120 years ago.

Just as there have always been LGB people, there have always been trans and gender non-conforming people in the city. It’s likely that at least some of the people arrested for “cross-dressing” by William Merrilees were actually trans women and non-binary people in today’s terms, and if there were folk who were brave enough to go out to clubs in the 1920s then there were surely many more who weren’t able to live publicly in any way.

In the early nineteenth century, a graduate of the University of Edinburgh medical school lived both very publicly and very privately. Dr James Barry was originally from Cork in Ireland, but he studied in Edinburgh from 1809 to 1812 before joining the British Army as a surgeon. This was at a time when Britain was expanding and maintaining its empire across the globe, and James’ job took him to places including the West Indies, Canada and South Africa. He was known as a passionate advocate for public health reforms wherever he was stationed, including tackling cholera epidemics and campaigning for better medical care for prisoners, and he was sometimes so vociferous that he was arrested by the army for his conduct. He was also a pioneer of obstetric medicine, performing one of the first recorded caesarean sections where both the mother and child survived. Although he had a reputation for being cantankerous and difficult to work with, he was also widely acknowledged as a skilled doctor who showed great care for his patients.

Dr James Barry with his servant John Joseph Danson

James retired to London in 1859 and died there six years later from dysentery. He had left instructions that after his death he should be buried as he died, without any autopsy or burial preparations. Despite this, his body was prepared for burial and it came to be known that he had been assigned female at birth. Remember that James Barry died four years before Sophia Jex-Blake and her contemporaries would become the first women to be admitted to a British university – the idea of a “woman” being not only a doctor but one with a long and highly distinguished military career was completely incomprehensible and deeply embarrassing to the authorities at the time. The army now viewed James Barry as a woman, and they ordered all of the records about him to be sealed for a century to avoid a scandal.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any records that tell us how James identified privately. Throughout his whole adult life, he seems to have been James Barry to everyone who knew him as a friend or colleague and so it seems right to use the name and pronouns he used in his everyday life. Even today, James Barry is sometimes referred to as “Britain’s first woman doctor” – and it is possible that’s the case. If James Barry was a cis woman who wanted to pursue a career in medicine, assuming a male identity would have been the only way to do that in Britain or Ireland at the time. But it’s equally possible that James Barry was a trans man who used moving away to university as his chance to live how he had always wanted. Even though we’ll perhaps never know how he saw himself, his story is a reminder that even hundreds of years ago there were people who lived outside the roles assigned to them at birth.

LGBTQ+ people are a part of Scotland’s history at every level – it’s just a bit harder to uncover their stories. To find out more about LGBTQ+ people from Edinburgh’s past and present, including a famous Scottish king and his male lovers, join me on one of my regular Scottish LGBTQ+ History walking tours. You can also head to my online shop to buy the full hour-long tour that I recorded last autumn, complete with a PDF of handy maps and links to further information. And if you have any of your own stories or recollections, please feel free to get in touch – I’d love to hear them.

You can watch the 20-minute virtual tour here:

Thanks for reading! Feel free to get in touch if you have any questions or suggestions for topics you’d like to see me write about here. If you enjoy reading these posts, please consider sharing them with other people and following me on instagram. You can also leave something in my tip jar if you’re able. I’ll be back with another post next Friday! Hannah x