DK - The LGBTQ+ History Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained

The words we now use for the LGBTQ+ community would be as alien to the people of the ancient world as the concept of an LGBTQ+ community itself. Historians looking for evidence of same-sex desires, gender variance, or intersex experiences have found it in many places from art, poetry, and drama to diaries, letters, and court records but portrayed completely differently from modern LGBTQ+ life. As American historian David Halperin has observed, for most historical societies the idea of a conceptual divide between the heterosexual and homosexual did not exist, making it problematic to describe people from the past in these terms.

Historians who study LGBTQ+ experience routinely encounter the same questions: how did past figures understand gender and sexuality? Can and should we give them the modern label of LGBTQ+, based on our interpretations of their actions? Historians are also required to present their findings under a certain burden of proof. How can we be sure that Alexander the Great and Hephaestion were not simply intimate friends? Does it matter whether the 19th-century American women living together in Boston marriages had what we would call sex? The demand for proof of sex acts has excluded some people from LGBTQ+ history particularly in debates about the erotic nature of womens romantic friendship and in identifying the history of asexuality. Yet contemporary scholarship has moved towards a broader idea of what counts, such as American historian Judith Bennetts term lesbian-like to describe women whose primary relationships were to each other.

Studying LGBTQ+ history comes with a particular challenge, familiar to anyone researching marginalized people. Traditional archives museum collections, court records, library archives can present a skewed picture of the past, as LGBTQ+ histories are typically only mentioned in relation to prosecution, scandal, or supposed abnormality. This is no accident, as over time such institutional archives have been curated by societies hostile to the existence of LGBTQ+ people. Prior to the 19th century, much of the extant evidence was created not by LGBTQ+ people themselves, but by others who condemn and obscure them. The historian must learn to read against the grain, finding the silences in the archive into which queer possibility can be read. Many LGBTQ+ historians prefer to call their work queer history, because queer suggests a challenge to the status quo, a breaking with tradition, and a resistance to rigid definitions and fixed identities.

Queerness has an especially vexed relationship to evidence. Historically, evidence of queerness has been used to penalize and discipline queer desires, connections, and acts.

Jos Esteban Muoz

Cuban-American academic (19672013)

A number of countries around the world now celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month, including the UK and Hungary in February; Germany and Cuba in May; and the US, Canada, and Australia in October. These celebrations usually centre around the recent history of LGBTQ+ rights movements, and shine a spotlight on historical LGBTQ+ figures. However, the scope of LGBTQ+ history is far beyond what such celebrations could convey. It is a potentially infinite project, full of endless avenues for exploration and interpretation. It is, importantly, not a story of linear progress from intolerance to equality, no matter how politically useful such a claim might be. Crucially, LGBTQ+ history is not a single story at all it is many conflicting and contrasting histories that overlap and interact in surprising ways.

This book is not an exhaustive catalogue of important LGBTQ+ stories, but a cross-section over time and place that seeks to move away from histories of individuals to expose larger societal structures and ideologies. It includes queer theory as part of LGBTQ+ history because it not only explains how we have come to understand sexuality and gender in the 20th and 21st centuries, but also has provided a theoretical underpinning for much recent political activism.

No book of LGBTQ+ history would be complete without the stories of transgender, intersex, and other gender-nonconforming people. They can be complicated histories: accounts of cross-dressing; of living as another gender; of gender deviance; and of those who were considered between sexes or a third gender are often tied up both in each other and in stories of same-sex desire. For earlier histories, this book describes such gender subversion as transing gender to indicate how people were acting in relation to gender norms, rather than giving them an ahistorical label. As with the history of sexuality, we aim to shift the lens for transing gender from individual identities to wider social practices. There is considerable variation in these practices around the world, many of which were and in places still are threatened and prosecuted by religious or political forces.

The longing for community across time is a critical feature of queer historical experience.

Heather Love

American queer theorist

Over time, people have used a number of words to describe what we now call LGBTQ+ experiences from sodomites and sapphists to mollies, tribades, urnings, and berdaches. This book also uses the modern language of homosexual, lesbian, transgender, non-binary, cisgender, and queer (used in its academic contexts, or where it is a persons chosen identity), as well as terms from non-English contexts. We describe transgender people as assigned male or female at birth and presenting/living as men/women. Our use of these terms reflect the differences in how we conceive gender and sexuality from people of the past, but aim not to obscure the things that we have in common.

Many of the historians who study this history are themselves LGBTQ+. The pursuit of queer history is, therefore, often a search for ancestry and legitimacy, a need for proof that LGBTQ+ people have, as the protest chant goes, always been here. What American historian Carolyn Dinshaw has called a queer desire for history is at the very heart of this project.