A glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of Venice, the ultimate city, embracing facts and romance, history and artists, carnival masks and leper colonies, wars and sieges, and scandals and seductions.

The award-winning historian and author of London examines the history and experiences of gay and lesbian populations in London and other English-speaking cultures, covering such subjects as the pleasure houses of the Roman era, the alternating periods of permissiveness and censure, the Norman persecutions and the 20th century's challenges involving liberation, civil rights and HIV.