On Writing Queer Histories
OR: 1,000 words of actually using my degree.
In order to explain the approach I have taken to writing a queer history it might be easier to first explain the approaches I haven’t taken.
This will not be a political history that chronicles the legislation and laws about or around queers people's existence. Firstly, because I am nowhere near a political historian and so to me that sounds really boring, but also, perhaps more importantly, because that would be telling our story from outside perspectives, merely showing what others have, often very negatively, thought of us.
While I will mention some names, as afterall there are definitely people you can't write a history of queerness without giving a name check, and most other histories I’ve used as research take this approach, I will not be writing this as a chronology of important figures, their lives and actions. Trying to tell a complete(ish) history, as a history of individual people will inevitably miss out so much, particularly when those people were queer. When your very existence is frowned upon to the point of criminalization, you’re not going to leave or even make much evidence of your existence to be left to history, any evidence that is created is likely to be destroyed. That’s not even considering how relatively modern writing being a thing everyone can do is.
Focusing on individuals would also inevitably lead to the assignment of narratives and ideas onto individuals. Take Anne Lister, born in the late 18th century, she was a wealthy landowner, prolific diarist who wrote in secret code about her steamy affairs with women, wore men's clothes and was known by locals in her Yorkshire Village as “Gentleman Jack” (Thomas, 2025). If she were alive today, aside from doing absolute numbers on thirst trap tik tok, would she call herself a butch lesbian or non-binary or a trans man or did she actually want to dress feminine but in a heterosexist society dressing the way she did was her only way to own land and sleep with women? Even as the existence of familiar terms appears, their interpretations, what they specifically mean to people, and the weight they carry within culture was vastly different even five years ago. Of course no history can completely avoid this but with a focus less on individuals, and more on communities, ideas and collective experience of the world, I hope to mitigate this at least somewhat.
Furthermore, I think that thinking of history as a story of a few great people doing a few great things makes us think about ourselves, today, in an unhelpful way. It places too much focus on individual greatness and makes us (or maybe just me) think that we need to write poems people will still be reading in 2,000 years, run for office, top the charts or do some other incredible, text-book worthy things in order for all of this to have had a point. John Green has described how he views the world like the World's Largest Ball of Paint1: a 5,000 kg ball made up of over 30,000 layers of paint over a baseball in Alexandria, Indiana. People come from all over the world to add their layers the best they can, knowing that they will get covered up again and again until it is all but completely forgotten about. However none of that makes that layer irrelevant, it's still vital for the next layer and the one after that and the one after that, having ever so slightly changed the ball. I often like to try and fathom, almost certainly unsuccessfully, how many queer people have silently painted their “layers” for thousands of years, so I can paint mine.2
My history aims to be a hopeful one. While it is a difficult balance to write a positive, uplifting history that doesn’t santise the hardships and tragedies of the past, I want hope to be at its core. This is mainly because I want this to be proof that we’ve always been here, are still here, and therefore always will be. Not only do I need this right now on a personal level, I’ve seen a need for this reassurance rising given *vaguely gestures to the current state of everything.*
I aim to write a history of queerness. "Queer" is a term that has been used in English since the early 1500s when it meant strange or weird; by the 1700s it came to mean wrong or out of sorts (OED, 2007). In the 1800s, due in part to the high profile of Oscar Wilde’s criminal trial for “gross indecency”, it became a derogatory term for gay men and a slur that continues to haunt many. Queer has been used as a self identifier of LGBT individuals since at least the 1930s, but it was the activist movements of the 1980s and 90s when this reclamation became commonplace. I use queer in a way it it has been used since the 1990s but has only become mainstream in the past 10 years or so, to be a shorthand, umbrella term for all that is encompassed by the LGBTQIA+ acronym (Clarke, 2021), the alphabet mafia as I’ve been told the kids say. For one, that acronym is too long, and it will inevitably miss out identities, and leaves the "+" to do a lot of heavy lifting. “Queerness” also includes all the inherent “baggage” that comes from having any one of those identities. Sexual orientations are so much more than who people want to sleep with and trans identities are more than what names and pronouns people are most comfortable with. Danielle Croom (2022) so beautifully makes this point when she describes what being a lesbian is to her: “it is the lens in which I see the world, it is a celebration; it is immense gratitude for the people who forced the world to tolerate us; it is love, acceptance, joy, hardship, and community.” I think all queer people carry with them, at least somewhat, the hope, resilience, culture, community and down right stubbornness that is queerness, and that's what I want to write a history of.
To put it simply when Chappell Roan said “you’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling”, the feeling was more than just fancying girls.
2. My layer will almost certainly be going viral on reddit with memes about terrible gay sci fi shows, but I’ve still got time left to leave some more.
Clarke, M. 2021. ‘Queer’ history: A history of Queer. https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/queer-history-a-history-of-queer/
Croom, D. 2022. The Term Lesbian and Who it Includes: An abriged history of lesbians in etymology and culture https://wakemag.org/online/2022/11/29/the-term-lesbian-and-who-it-includes#:~:text=In%20the%20text%2C%20%E2%80%9CLesbian%E2%80%9D,wasn%27t%20even%20the%20first
Oxford English Dictionary. 2007. queer. https://www.oed.com/dictionary/queer_adj1?tab=meaning_and_use&tl=tru
Thomas, S. 2025. Anne’ Story https://www.annelister.co.uk/
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