Hadrian’s Wall has been declared a ‘gay icon’ – hurrah! But why stop there?

I’m all for the heritage industry making the case that the 73-mile-long fortification is somehow ‘linked to England’s queer history’, says Paul Clements. Just don’t put a pink plaque on it…

‘The most famous homosexual couple in Roman history’: An 18th-century bust of Antinous, the teenage favourite of Emperor Hadrian (Getty)

Whoever came up with the phrase “It’s queer up north” could not have anticipated that English Heritage would take it quite so literally.

The charity whose job it is to champion historic sites has declared that Hadrian’s Wall – an archaeological landmark that stretched across the entire width of the country, from the Irish Sea to the English Channel – to be a “gay icon”, and “linked to England’s queer history”.

Gays have a habit of trying to reclaim things about which they really have no business. Back in the 1990s, I was the editor of the Pink Paper, the now defunct national lesbian and gay community newspaper that was a vital campaigning force during Section 28, the Aids crisis and the push for equal rights. Overseeing a design “refresh” to smarten up the old bird and pare down the near-permanent angry tone, I introduced a light-hearted weekly column, Queer Icons. (The “Q” word had previously been banned by the publishers, reclaiming the slur supposedly a sign of how far we had come as a community.)