What’s new in the Library

In this unique intervention in the study of queer culture, Dominic Janes highlights that, under the gaze of social conservatism, ‘gay’ life was hiding in plain sight. Indeed, he argues that the worlds of glamour, fashion, art and countercultural style provided rich opportunities for the construction of queer spectacle in London. Inspired by the legacies of Oscar Wilde, interwar and later 20th-century men such as Cecil Beaton expressed transgressive desires in forms inspired by those labelled ‘freaks’ and, thereby, made major contributions to the histories of art, design, fashion, sexuality, and celebrity. Janes reinterprets the origins of gay and queer cultures by charting the interactions between marginalized freaks and chic fashionistas. He establishes a new framework for future analyses of other cities and media, and of the roles of women and diverse identities.

In its contributions to the study of material social differences, queer theoretical writing has mostly assumed that any ideas which embody ‘difference’ are valuable. More than this, where it is invoked in contemporary theory, queerness is often imagined as synonymous with difference itself. This book uncovers an alternative history in queer cultural representation. Through engagement with works from a range of queer literary genres from across the long twentieth century – fin-de-siecle aestheticism, feminist speculative fiction, lesbian middlebrow writing, and the tradition of the stud file – the book elucidates a number of formal and thematic attachments to ideas that have been denigrated in queer theory for their embodiment of sameness: uselessness, normativity, reproduction, and reductionism. Exploring attachments to these ideas in queer culture is also the occasion for a broader theoretical intervention: Same old suggests, counterintuitively, that the aversion they inspire may be of a piece with how homosexuality has been denigrated in the modern West as a misguided orientation towards ‘the Same’. In offering a fundamental challenge to the frameworks through which it has been imagined as most appropriate to understand and interpret queer lives, this book will be of value to scholars and students of queer theory and culture as well as twentieth literature and culture more broadly. Combining queer cultural and literary history, sensitive close readings, and detailed genealogies of theoretical concepts, Same old encourages a fundamental rethinking of some of the defining positions in queer thought.

A sweeping survey of sexuality in Europe from the Greeks to the present, Desire: A History of European Sexuality follows changing attitudes to two major concepts of sexual desire – desire as dangerous, polluting, and disorderly, and desire as creative, transcendent, even revolutionary – through the major turning points of European history.

Chronological in structure, and wide ranging in scope, Desire addresses such topics as sex in ancient Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, sexual contact and culture clash in Spain and colonial Mesoamerica, new attitudes toward sexuality in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and sex in Bolshevik Russia and Nazi Germany. The book introduces the concept of “twilight moments” to describe activities seen as shameful or dishonorable, but which were tolerated when concealed by shadows, and integrates the history of heterosexuality with same-sex desire, as well as exploring the emotions of love and lust as well as the politics of sex and personal experiences. This new edition has been updated to include a new chapter on sex and imperialism and expanded discussions of Islam and trans issues.

Drawing on a rich array of sources, including poetry, novels, pornography, and film, as well as court records, autobiographies, and personal letters, and written in a lively, engaging style, Desire remains an essential resource for scholars and students of the history of European sexuality, as well as women’s and gender history, social and cultural history and LGBTQ history.

We Are Everywhere brings together the key primary sources relating to the politics of homosexuality. Tracing the evolution of the lesbian and gay movement, We Are Everywhere includes writings from the beginnings of the gay and lesbian movement in the 19th century ; legal and government studies concerning rights of gay and lesbian citizens; articles from the early US liberation movement publications; documents from the first days of the AIDS epidemic to current activism; statements and writings from the movements within “the movement”; and finally, alook at the future of lesbian and gay politics.

This groundbreaking critical anthology gathers together a wide range of primary source material on lesbian lives in the past. The material here is drawn from a diverse range of sources, including court records, newspaper reports, literary sources, writings on lesbianism from psychologists, doctors, anthropologists, as well as personal letters and journals.

The sources are arranged into thematic chapters, covering topics such as archetypes of lesbians – cross-dressing women and romantic friends, the making of lesbianism in culture, professional discourse on lesbians, public perceptions of lesbianism and women’s own experiences.

This book will be a milestone in the publishing of lesbian history, and is set to provoke the impetus for fresh research.

This text examines the workings of the London Gay Liberation Front between 1970 and 1973. It gathers the accounts of people who were involved and the papers they wrote, as well as the comments of bemused bystanders. A chronology gives context to the GLF against a background of events of the time.

Bi: The Hidden Culture, History and Science of Bisexuality explores all that we know about the world’s largest sexual minority. It is a personal journey that starts with Dr Julia Shaw’s own openly bisexual identity, and celebrates the resilience and beautiful diversity of the bi community. From the hunt for a bi gene, to the relationship between bisexuality and consensual non-monogamy, to asylum seekers who need to prove their bisexuality in a court of law, there is more to explore than most have ever realised.

Vivaan, a teenager in India’s silicon plateau, has discovered love on his smartphone. Intoxicating, boundary-breaking love. His parents know he is gay, and their support is something Vivaan can count on, but they don’t know what exactly their son gets up to in the online world.

For his uncle, born thirty years earlier, things were very different. Mambro’s life changed forever when he fell for a male classmate at a time, and in a country, where the persecution of gay people was rife under a colonial-era law criminalising homosexuality.

And before that was Mambro’s uncle Sukumar, a young man hopelessly in love with another young man, but forced by social taboos to keep their relationship a secret at all costs. Sukumar would never live the life he yearned for, but his story would ignite and inspire his nephew and grand-nephew after him.

Bold and bracing, intimate and heartbreaking, Deviants examines the histories we inherit and the legacies we leave behind.

Using a rich array of oral histories and archival sources, Tomboys and Bachelor Girls provides the first detailed academic study of lesbian identity and culture in post-war Britain. Described by psychiatrists as immature and neurotic and widely ignored as taboo by mainstream society, lesbians nevertheless recognised and accepted their same-sex desire and sought out women like themselves.

Challenging the conventional picture of the post-war decades as years of austerity and conservative femininity, this book traces the emergence of a vibrant lesbian social scene in Britain, centred on the metropolitan nightclubs of post-war London, but also developing across the country, through lesbian magazines and social organisations.

This fascinating book brings to life the rich history of post-war lesbian culture for the scholarly and general reader alike.

Vera Holme, known as Jack, left a career as a jobbing actress to become Emmeline Pankhurst’s chauffeur and mechanic. Evelina Haverfield was a classic beauty, the daughter of a baron and fourteen years older than Jack. They met in 1908, fell in love, lived together, and became public faces of the suffragette movement, enduring prison and doing everything they could for the cause.

The First World War paused the suffragettes’ campaign and Jack and Eve enrolled in the Scottish Women’s Hospital Service and soon found themselves in Serbia. Eve set up and ran hospitals for allied soldiers in appalling conditions, while Jack became an ambulance driver, travelling along dirt tracks under bombardment to collect the wounded from the front lines.

Together, they carved radical new paths, demonstrating that women could do anything men could do, whether driving ambulances, running military hospitals, becoming prisoners of war or bearing arms. They refused to compromise in their sexuality – they were lifelong partners even though Jack enjoyed relationships with other women. Determined to be themselves, ‘forthright, flamboyant and proud’, Wendy Moore uses their story as a lens through which to view the suffragette movement, the work of women in WWI and the development of lesbian identity throughout the twentieth century.

Traditionally, historic women have been seen as bound by social conventions, unable to travel unless accompanied and limited in their ability to do what they want when they want. But thousands of women broke those rules, put on banned clothing and travelled, worked and even lived whole lives as men. As access to novels and newspapers increased in the nineteenth century so did the number of women defying Biblical and social restrictions. They copied each other’s motives and excuses and moved into the world of men. Most were working-class women who either needed to or wanted to, break away from constricted lives; women who wanted to watch a hanging or visit a museum, to see family or escape domestic abuse, some wanted to earn a decent living when women’s wages could not keep a family. The reasons were myriad. Some were quickly arrested and put on display in court, hoping to deter other women from such shameful behaviour, but many more got away with it. For the first time, A History of Women in Men’s Clothes looks at those thousands of individuals who broke conventions in the only way they could, by disguising themselves either for a brief moment or a whole life. Daring and bold, this is the story of the women who defied social convention to live their lives as they chose, from simply wanting more independence to move and live freely, to transgender and homosexual women cross-dressing to express themselves, this is women’s fight to wear trousers.

This fascinating and diverse collection of essays concerns the lives and representations of homosexuals in the long eighteenth century. The collection addresses and seeks to move beyond the current critical division between essentialists and social constructionists, a division that bedevils the history of sexuality and fissures Queer Theory. Drawing on a wide range of sources as well as theoretical approaches, the essays explore canonical and non-canonical literature, scurrilous pamphlets and court cases, music, religion and politics, consumer culture and sexual subcultures. Eighteenth-century life is depicted here in all its rich variety, from the scandals surrounding Queen Anne to the struggles of laboring-class poets, and from the famous – Defoe, Handel, Boswell, Burney, and the Duchess of Devonshire – to the obscure male frequenters of Mother Clap’s Molly House or the anonymous female participants in the extraordinary story of The She-Wedding.

The book explores the changing ways in which male-male sex and love have been perceived and experienced from the late Anglo-Saxon period to the present. Celebrated figures, such as Richard Lionheart, whose love for Philip Augustus of France was so well-documented, Oscar Wilde, gubject of the most explosive scandal of the Victorian period, and Derek Jarman, the great artist and chronicler of the age of AIDS, are examined alongside little-known figures: Eleanor/John Rykener, a cross-dresser in Chaucer’s England, the mollies of eighteenth-century London, the habituants of underground gay bars and cafes in 1930s Manchester and Brighton, and the newly-confident gays of contemporary Britain, who marry, adopt children and command the increasingly powerful ‘pink pound’. Drawing on a fabulous wealth of research, the authors – each an expert in his field – have worked closely together to deliver a powerful, highly-readable and eye-opening history of love and desire between men in Britain.

Sissy home boys or domestic outlaws? Through a series of vivid case studies taken from across the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Matt Cook explores the emergence of these trenchant stereotypes and looks at how they play out in the home and family lives of queer men.