Instead of marrying their lovers, these men adopted them. Can you guess why?

The terms ‘gay’ and ‘queer,’ and the identity categories that have sprung up around them, are quite modern.

But people who were what we would now call gay, queer, and gender non-conforming have existed forever – even in the Georgian period, more than 200 years before homosexual acts were decriminalised in the UK in 1967. “We are told that so much of our history as queer people is new, or that Oscar Wilde happened and then we were all gay.

But this isn’t the case – we have always been here,” Anthony Delaney, an honorary fellow at the University of Exeter and author of the new book Queer Georgians: A hidden history of lovers, lawbreakers and homemakers , told the HistoryExtra podcast . “Queer people have always had to be quite fluid in the ways in which they interact with the law and with legalities.

They had to circumvent things that appeared in their way, by using mechanisms that were available to them at the time in order to get what they wanted,” Delaney says. One of these mechanisms used by queer people was adult adoption.

Gay men adopted each other in the 1980s and the 1780s Today, perhaps the best-known examples of adult adoption between gay men were during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 90s. “If you look at that time period, you'll often find gay men adopting their younger partner, because this would then allow them to be at their bedside when they were dying, for instance, or to inherit everything that they wanted to leave them after they died,” Delaney says. • Learn more | The world of the Georgians with Alice Loxton But this wasn’t the first time in history that gay men had adopted each other to legally link themselves outside of an official marriage. “There are these hints in the archive that what we saw happening in the 80s and in the early 90s was not necessarily a new thing,” Delaney says. “There's a suggestion that this was happening as far back as the 1780s.” During the Georgian period – 1714 to 1837 – it wasn’t legal for two people of the same sex to marry.

But gay men still wanted a way to legally link themselves together to pass on property and titles. It wasn’t about a younger man becoming the legal ‘son’ of his partner but rather becoming his legal heir. “It wasn’t necessarily that unusual, because adult adoption was happening in the 18th century anyway in order to secure inheritances and to pass on property.

What makes it more unusual is this queer element,” Delaney says. There are some "important caveats to bear in mind” about the strategy of adoption, though, he says. It wasn’t always possible and would have been much easier for elite men to have gone through with it than anyone else. The ‘Chuthheads’ were an example of this One couple who Delaney thinks used adult adoption were John Chute and Francis Whitehead.

Chute was born in 1701 and inherited The Vyne, his family’s country house in Hampshire, after the deaths of his two older brothers. He had spent most of his youth touring Europe and was known for his taste in decor and fashion. He was very good friends with noted politician Horace Walpole, whose sexuality has been the subject of speculation.

Chute never married, but “surrounded himself with younger men” according to art historian Maurice Howard.

One of these men was his cousin, Francis Whitehead, who was 18 years younger than him. • Read more | Love and lust: 7 of the most shocking romantic royal scandals from British history Chute accompanied Whitehead on his ‘grand tour’ – a long trip, filled with culture, politics, and languages that elite young men would often take around Europe as a rite of passage – between 1740 and 1746.

They lived together in Florence for a while, where they were collectively known as the ‘Chuthheads’ to their friends. Chute made Whitehead his heir, but he died at The Vyne in 1751 at the age of 31. Chute died, childless, in 1776, and his estate passed to another cousin.

Same-sex couples have existed in various guises throughout history Some same-sex couples tried to cheat the law to legally marry each other, like Marcela Gracia Ibeas and Elisa Sánchez Loriga, who had the first same-sex marriage in Spain in 1901. To achieve this, Elisa put her name on the marriage certificate as Mario Sanchez and dressed masculine for the ceremony.

But soon after the marriage, their neighbours exposed them to the press. They lost their jobs, were excommunicated by the Catholic Church, and had arrest warrants put out for them. We know that they managed to board a ship bound for South America, and that’s the last that is known about them. Their marriage was never annulled, so they officially had Spain’s first same-sex marriage.

Other same-sex couples have managed to confirm their relationships within the law or social customs.

In Eastern Christianity, from the 14th to the 20th century, there was a ceremony which bound two people of the same sex together under the eyes of the church called adelphopoiesis, or ‘brother-making.’ Historians disagree on the nature of the relationships formed through adelphopoiesis, with some claiming that it was akin to a sibling relationship and others that it was a marriage-like union.

It is no longer practised because, according to the Pedalion , a book of Orthodox canon law, “it is the cause of many evils… and merely affords matter for some persons to fulfil their carnal desires and to enjoy sensual pleasures.” Meanwhile, before the 1860s in Japan, same-sex relations were a key part of samurai culture.

The principles of nanshoku (meaning male love) and shudo (meaning ‘the way of the youth’) led to pairings of older, more experienced samurais entering into ‘brotherhood contracts’ with younger men apprenticed to them to learn martial arts. As part of these contracts, a life-long loyalty was created between the two.

Before the younger wakashū came of age, he was expected to submit to the older nenja’s sexual attention as part of this loyalty. Anthony Delaney was speaking to Isabel King on the HistoryExtra podcast . Listen to the full conversation .

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