As a young, gay Welshman, I am embarrassed that before reading this book I had never heard of any of the people whose stories it tells. Perhaps that is my own fault; more likely though it’s a result of the fact that society has effectively all but erased these people from history.

In his foreword, Jeffrey Weeks says that the only LGBT stories he heard while growing up in Rhondda in the 1950s and 1960s were ones of guilt and shame. What this book shows is that that was nothing new. Our stories have been tarred with shame for centuries because society has refused to accept us for who we are.

It is important at this stage to put on record my sincere thanks to Norena Shopland for her years of work researching the lives and stories of LGBT people in and from Wales. Forbidden Lives is not simply a book but a significant contribution to the LGBT community, and indeed the whole, of Wales.

In Forbidden Lives, Shopland charts the history of people who might today fit into what we call LGBT. In their time no equivalent terms existed and such phrases as ‘romantic friendships’ were used to describe their lives. Shopland expertly explores their lives without categorising them with one label or another. Rather, she looks at each person – each story – and finds what was so different about them that society decided their history should be forgotten.

Forbidden Lives is a sensitive piece of work. Shopland has avoided making assumptions about people where definitive answers would simply be impossible. Indeed, the impression I get is that Shopland does not believe it her place to make such assumptions. But where the subjects’ lives, relationships, and behaviour differed from the norm – that is, straight and cis-gendered – she tells their stories with great care and compassion.

I am relieved that Forbidden Lives doesn’t hide its subjects’ failings. It is a book of celebration, but it would have been a disservice to have forgotten that these people were exactly that: people. They weren’t perfect and they weren’t saints. But where characters were flawed – sometimes extremely so, such as Hugh Despenser – their story is told all the same. This book isn’t an effort to suggest that all these people did good, it simply says that they existed and that this part of their being should not be erased.

I was pleased by the number of LGBT women whose stories this book tells. From Marged ferch Ifan, whose supposedly masculine traits gave her great renown during her time to the wonderful story of the Ladies of Llangollen, who have, in some ways, become icons.

A number of the women whose stories are told in Forbidden Lives are rather steelier, more determined, than the men. When society expected women to be dainty ornaments, to dress in a certain way, and talk in a certain way, these women showed immense courage and defiance.

The men too were undeniably brave, but Forbidden Lives paints a picture of the men being somewhat quieter in their defiance, perhaps wanting to get on with life without drawing too much attention. But the women wanted to make a point. Good on them, I say.

Of course this is a generalisation, and this book only tells the stories of a very small number of LGBT people throughout the history of Wales, but it was a gentle reminder – if only to me – that I should more often look to the women in my life and in the world for strength and inspiration.

The first half of Forbidden Lives is somewhat beyond the realm of my imagination. Perhaps that’s because the stories told are long before my time. Perhaps it’s because the people it discusses weren’t of our time and so didn’t identify in ways with which I am familiar. But then the book moves into the twentieth century and I start to see the Wales that I know. I start to see the same kind of attitudes and prejudices that I experienced growing up, and sometimes still experience. I start to see the kind of modern discussion of sexuality and gender identity to which I am used.

As Forbidden Lives draws to a close there is a marked change in the kind of stories it tells. The reader starts to hear about LGBT people (and non-LGBT people) who have made substantial contributions to the LGBT community in their own right. We hear of people who put on plays, arranged conferences, and introduced legislation. This is the story of a more strategic and purposeful defiance. These acts weren’t about the self but about something bigger.

The book’s final chapter – ‘Pride in Wales’ – is, for me, the most difficult; its story is the most recent, and the one most familiar to me. It is not happy reading, but it is nevertheless important. The book’s closing words remind me that I would need to have been born a decade later to have been in a Wales free of legal persecution of people like me.

It took me until the very end of Forbidden Lives to realise that this was never meant to be a book that made one happy. Instead, it tells the stories, for better or worse, of people like me who have been erased from the history books. They were not perfect people, nor are these perfect stories, but my goodness, they are worth telling. And I am grateful to Norena Shopland for telling them so carefully and defiantly. Shopland makes her own view known throughout this book, so let me say this: today’s Wales is still far from perfect. LGBT people here are still suffering, and facing discrimination.

This book serves as a call to action to make our stories known and our voices heard, and to keep up the fight.