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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 ...
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Preshistory

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OR : How You Bury Your Gays is Important. There have been for queer people 1  for pretty much as long as there have been people. Evidence exists of them in cave paintings: homosexual intercourse is shown in works made in  11,000 BCE 2  by the San people of modern day Zimbabwe (Toomey, 2016) and wroks made by Upper Paleolithic Sicilians in the Grotta dell’Addaura caves near Palermo (queerstorian, 2017).  There’s also an abundance of evidence in burial sites. An Egyptian tomb from around 2500 BCE, discovered in 1964, contained two men from; while their given names are not known the names on their tomb refer to them as Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, which by some translations can mean “joined in life, joined in death”. The hieroglyphics from their tomb show that they were both chief manicurists of the palace, and that they both had wives and children, however those individuals are only shown in the background of pictures. The foreground is reserved for the men next to st...
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The Ancient World

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Despite declaring an attempt to write a queer history straying away from focusing too much on individuals 1 , I cannot help myself from indulging in a few hundred words on Sappho. Very little is known for sure about her early life, but she was from Lesbos, being born around 620 BCE 2  in either of the island's major cities, Eressos or Mytilene, and potentially to an aristocratic family. What we do know is that she ran an academy for young, unmarried women that was devoted to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, the Goddesses of love, beauty, desire and fertility, and of course, she wrote lyrical poems, designed to be accompanied by music on the lyre.       And on more than one occasion (there were two      of them, to be exact), while I looked on, too      silent with adoration to say your name,      you glazed your breasts and arms with oil.      No holy place existed without us then,      no...
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Middle Ages

  OR: Around the World in 80 (Medieval) Gays  The Middle Ages, or Dark Ages if you want to be even more outdated, is  usually defined to be from roughly 500 CE to 1500 CE 1 . It’s often thought to be when nothing was really happening: in this gap between the Roman Empire and the beginning of the modern age, trade decreased, as did large cities and the scale of war so everything became more locally focused. That’s a very euro-centic way of looking at history, as there was quite a bit going on elsewhere, and obviously quite a lot of queerness. 2 The Arabic world was spreading west with Muslims conquering the Byzantine Empire, taking control of North Africa, and spreading into the Iberian Peninsula (Green, 2012). At this time their Arabic language contained words for lesbians, or at the very least women who had intimate relations with each other; the word comes from inherently sexual innuendo. This was concurrent with the global theme of the time of homosexuality being much ...
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