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Recent years have seen LGBTQ histories increasingly take centre stage, from the Stonewall riots to the queer pasts of National Trust houses. But what are the challenges of telling such stories? We assembled an expert panel to find out
Published:
April 18, 2021 at 11:48 am
What are the challenges of telling LGBTQ stories? We assembled an expert panel to find out…
The panel
Matt Cook is professor of modern history at Birkbeck College, University of London. His books include Queer Domesticities: Homo- sexuality and Home Life in 20th- Century London (Palgrave, 2014)
Channing Gerard Joseph teaches journalism at the University of Southern California, and is writing a book on the leader of the world’s first queer resistance organisation
Jen Manion is associate professor of history at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and author of Female Husbands: A Trans History (Cambridge, 2020)
Angela Steidele is a German freelance writer who has published several books on LGBTQ people, including Gentleman Jack: A Biography of Anne Lister (Serpent’s Tail, 2018)
Social historian and author Virginia Nicholson talks about her book
How Was It For You?, which explores how some of the radical changes of the decade, from the pill to feminism, shaped the lives of women from many different backgrounds. 11
Londonâs trailblazing women
On a podcast from February 2020, Francesca Wade talks about five remarkable women who all lived on the same London square in the interwar years. 12
Historian Carol Dyhouse talks about her book,Â
Love Lives: From Cinderella to Frozen, which explores how womenâs lives, dreams and loves have been transformed since 1950 â when Walt DisneyâsÂ
Cinderella was released, and teenage girls were told to dream of marriage, Mr Right, and happy endings
Recommended by Jen Manion
These two books are among my favourites – I teach them all the time and they’re also really accessible. One is
Transgender History by Susan Stryker (Seal Press, 2017), which is an introductory overview of the transgender rights movement in contemporary US society.
The other is probably lesser known, but it’s called
Queer Injustice (Beacon Press, 2011) and it was co-authored by historians, lawyers and activists. It’s a beautiful synthesis of queer history and experience in the US in relation to the criminal justice system. And part of what it does is capture a more diverse group of our communities’ experiences. But it also reminds [us] that, up until very recently, being queer was criminalised: people were incarcerated for their love, and that it’s actually just a very new phenomenon that homosexuality does not subject one to criminalisation, even in modern times.