GAY history will burst out of the closet at British libraries this year.

The National Archives has launched a pilot project consisting of an online portal devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender history. It will link Britain’s regional archives and draw out material previously buried in court records and a host of disparate sources.

“This was the crime not to be named,” said Harry Cocks, lecturer in British history at Birkbeck College.

“Until the 19th century, court records were thrown away. Other sources got buried in the archives.”

Historians have to know where to look: guidebooks, for instance.

The 1840s equivalent of the Rough Guide to London alerted the reader to the existence of sodomy — and how to avoid it.

A 1930s guide titled “For Your Convenience” provided coded advice to gentlemen seeking other gentlemen.

“It’s addressed to a reader who has had too much to drink and doesn’t know where to relieve himself in the West End,” said Dr Cocks. “The subtext is that it’s a place for certain gentlemen to go.”

Evidence from the medieval era exists mainly in the correspondence of clergymen, discussing confession.

There is, however, the remarkable case of a prostitute, brought before the aldermen of the City of London in 1395. Upon examination, she turned out to be a he: John Rykener, had been found “lying by a certain stall in Soper’s Lane” with one John Britby, who had known him as Eleanor and remained none the wiser.

A whore had taught Rykener the trade, a woman called Elizabeth Bronderer had dressed him in women’s clothes and her daughter Alice had endowed him with a reputation, by satisfying clients’ passions on his behalf with the lights off, leaving Wykener there fully clothed in the morning to take the credit.

After that he plied his trade with a rector, “three unsuspecting scholars” from Oxford and clerics, friars and monks. He “accommodated priests more readily than other people because they wished to give more than others”.

So far, the National Archives, working in conjunction with the London Metropolitan Archives, has catalogued a string of documents from the early modern period of British history.

A witness statement from a sodomy case against Captain Edward Rigby in 1698 describes secret trysts in the back rooms of the George Tavern, in Pall Mall. To call it a gay bar would be misleading, according to Dr Cocks. “Often they would cater for a number of things. In the 1820s there was a club that had one night a week devoted to men having sex and other days something else.” Captain Rigby was acquitted but later caught in a trap set by the “Societies for the Reformation of Manners”. Convicted, he escaped to France but was later recaptured while captaining the Toulouse, a French man-of-war. The talented Captain Rigby escaped again and built a reputation as a French sailor.

There is a ballad sheet dating from 1762, picturing a homosexual man in the stocks, apparently advising that such people should be made to fight in the forces. Matt Houlbrook, from Liverpool University, who is the author of Queer London, believes that such documents are “the tip of the iceberg” and expects the online archive to unlock a rich body of evidence on the crime not to be named.

Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet, said that the site could “make life easier for those of us already engaged in the thrilling process of teasing out queer stories from the past”.

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