makingqueerhistory

[makingqueerhistory]

Do you have any suggestions for sources relating to the history and culture of drag as a form of art and entertainment? I'm wanting to look more into it, but I'm not sure where to start aside from reading wikipedia because every search engine nowadays is filled with wildly unrelated results and ai generated dumpster fires.

Yes, I have one book that I think is perfect for this question!

Before We Were Trans

A New History of Gender

Kit Heyam

(Affiliate link above)

[makingqueerhistory]

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles

Read on audiobook

Pedro Lemebel (Author), Gwendolyn Harper (Editor)

“I speak from my difference,” wrote Pedro Lemebel, an openly queer writer and artist living through Chile’s AIDS epidemic and the collapse of the Pinochet dictatorship. In brilliantly innovative essays—known as crónicas—that combine memoir, reportage, fiction, history, and poetry, he brought visibility and dignity to sexual minorities, the poor, and the powerless. Touching on everything from Che Guevara to Elizabeth Taylor, from the aftermath of authoritarian rule to the daily lives of Chile’s locas—a slur for trans women and effeminate gay men that he boldly reclaims—his writing infuses political urgency with playfulness, realism with absurdism, and resistance with camp, and his AIDS crónicas immortalize a generation of Chileans doubly “disappeared” by casting each loca, as she falls sick, in the starring role of her own private tragedy. This volume brings together the best of his work, introducing readers of English to the subversive genius of a literary activist and queer icon whose acrobatic explorations of the Santiago demimonde reverberate around the world.

(Affiliate links above)

[makingqueerhistory]

A warrior, artist, and incredibly valued person in the Crow nation, Osh-Tisch was a baté person and is remembered as one of the last baté people to have existed before colonizers committed genocide against this part of Crow culture. A baté person is a person who is born with a body that many European cultures of the time designated as male, and later is discovered to be a woman and is accepted as a woman in Crow culture.

Support Making Queer History on Patreon

Send in a One-Time Donation

[makingqueerhistory]

Bite Marks

Bex Deveau

From Bex Deveau comes a spicy sapphic vampire romance between a coven that owns an adult club and their new bartender. At O Nightclub, it’s love at first bite.

Someone should've told Vi that. And reminded her that she knew better than to get swept up by four vampires. Especially four vampires that hit all four of her secret relationship wish list: sexy, stylish, sapphic and stupid rich.

But resisting is easier said than done.

With her mom’s medical bills piling up and no job prospects she’s forced to fill in as a bartender at O, an exclusive vampire-only adult club and finds herself entangled with the captivating coven that runs it.

Sparks fly, and lust turns to more. But old secrets threaten to tear apart their tenuous bond, and the stakes may be too high for happily ever after. The party won’t stop until mourning.

[makingqueerhistory]

Any book or other media recommendations to learn about the history of kink and its ties to queer rights/liberation? It’s something I hear talked about a lot in debates over whether kink should be allowed at Pride, and I want to learn more.

Yes! I would love to share some that have specifically shaped my thoughts around it!

Park Cruising

What Happens When We Wander Off the Path

Marcus McCann 

Transland

Consent, Kink, and Pleasure

MX Sly 

Secret Historian

The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade

Justin Spring

(Affiliate links above)

[makingqueerhistory]

There's a lot of queers out there that find it hard to plan for a future wherein society doesn't want them in it. Can you offer a queer reading list of queer folx who have resisted authoritarian regimes? Any particular figures that stand out? Quotes? Are there other Claude Cahuns in history to offer inspiration in these times? Any stories of support networks that persisted throughout the AIDs genocide like the San Diego Blood Sisters? I'm sorry for so many questions; this topic has been weighing heavily on me.

I absolutely understand this, and I have some stories for you.

For articles:

George Everett Klippert tells the story of a man who changed the shape of a country because he was loved.

Jackie Shane tells the story of a trans woman of colour in the fifties who had a happier story than you'd expect.

Simon Tseko Nkoli tells the story of a man who fought back.

Elvira de la Fuente Chaudoir, A.K.A Agent Bronx tells the story of a woman who survived.

For books (affiliate links below) :

The Women's House of Detention

A Queer History of a Forgotten Prison

Hugh Ryan

The Freaks Came Out to Write

The Definitive History of the Village Voice, the Radical Paper That Changed American Culture

Tricia Romano

Liberated

The Radical Art and Life of Claude Cahun

Kaz Rowe 

Nothing Ever Just Disappears

Seven Hidden Queer Histories

Diarmuid Hester 

The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions

Larry Mitchell (Author), Ned Asta (Illustrator)

Double Cross

The True Story of the D-Day Spies

Ben MacIntyre

The New Queer Conscience

Adam Eli 

If you need hope, take it from here.

[makingqueerhistory]

hi! I'm a transmasc living in rural southwest US. it's super isolated out here and it's been hard to find any friends or community. but this year, I've been brainstorming an idea to have a reoccurring event at my local library! I wanna give a powerpoint presentation on a queer person/event in history and offer a supportive, helpful, and friendly space for allies and queers to hang out.

I wanted to ask if you had any suggestions for a queer person/event in history that would make for an interesting powerpoint I would present.

(and if you had name suggestions for such an event, I was thinking maybe Queer Club but I am a little scared of getting hate crimed. my fiancé suggested Stonewall Support as well.)

This is such a fabulous idea! You might inspire me to do something similar! As for who to start with honestly, you can't go wrong with Magnus Hirschfeld! His story is known, but not so much that everyone will already be familiar. He is one of the best jumping-off points for queer history just because his work had so many ripples that you can point to.

I would also recommend looking into some local history for a name. See if there is anything there that honours the history of where you live!

[makingqueerhistory]

Selected Works from George Quaintance

George Quaintance was an American painter considered a pioneer of gay aesthetic. His work features homoerotic depictions of muscular men, often nude or semi-nude, in primarily historic settings. Often these settings were used to set the scene for the nude figures — think gods or ancient Greece — though he was also drawn to the Wild West. His work was featured in "physique magazines," including Physique Pictorial, Tomorrow's Man, and Adonis, and his influence can be seen in artists like Tom of Finland. Quaintance's partner, Victor Garcia, often served as his model.

Quaintance's work — particularly his prominence in physique magazines — also brings up the conversation of capitalism's role in the gay rights movement, media, and queer assimilation. For those wanting to learn more than this brief artsy dive goes, Buying Gay: How Physique Entrepreneurs Sparked a Movement by David K. Johnson may be an interesting read!

[makingqueerhistory]

Mini Mid-Year Making Queer History Wrap-up

1,900+ social media followers

41 new paid patrons

203 new free patrons

33 queer books read

5 new articles (Edwin Chiloba, Wu Zao, Keri Hulme & The Bone People, ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, Lohana Berkins)

Started Queer Writers' Collective

Queer in Alberta Podcast episode released

80k website visitors

Gave out 436 queer Google calendars

7 new Public Domain Library entries

Went through 5 Stonewall Book Award Winners

It's a little funny to look at this because I have said so many times this year that Making Queer History is scaling back, we are looking inward, we are improving what we have already built, but it's nice to see that growth has still been there.

This year has been a difficult one financially for Making Queer History due to a lot of outside stressors, but it is so beautiful to see that even at the worst moments, there is so much expansive love that comes from and to this project.

We hit our 9th year anniversary this year, and we are hoping to hit our 10th next year! Sending out so much love to the people who make Making Queer History possible. Our patrons, our audience, and our team.

If you want to help keep Making Queer History going, check out our Patreon.

[makingqueerhistory]

I was invited to work with Libro.fm on this playlist! This is an affiliate link, and the proceeds will go to continued queer history research!

Read Through Queer History on Audio!

[makingqueerhistory]

Is there a reading lust for queer history and or queer theory that you would recommend?

Yes absolutely! I have curated a couple lists for this!

For physical books

For audiobooks

These are both affiliate lists, so a part of the profits go to Making Queer History, but feel free to use as a reference to find the books elsewhere if you prefer!

[makingqueerhistory]

Authority

Andrea Long Chu 

Many worry that criticism is suffering from a crisis of authority. In a world where everyone’s a critic, what is criticism for? Since her canonical 2018 essay “On Liking Women,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Andrea Long Chu has established herself as a leading public intellectual and a bold cartographer of the new landscape of taste itself. Authority brings together sharp, illuminating essays on everything from musical theater to sci-fi novels, as well as an acclaimed tetralogy of personal essays first published in the magazine n+1. Throughout, Chu defies the imperative to leave politics out of art, charging fellow critics like Maggie Nelson and Zadie Smith with complacent humanism and modeling how the left might brave the culture wars with both its faculty of judgment and its sense of justice intact.

In two magisterial new essays, Chu offers a fresh intellectual history of criticism’s crisis of authority, tracing the surprisingly political contours of the discipline from its origins in the Enlightenment to our present age of social media. The desire to recover some lost authority, she argues, is neither new nor particularly freeing. Rather than being taken in by an endless cycle of trumped-up emergencies over the state of our culture, Authority makes a compelling case for how to do criticism in light of the actual crises, from climate change to rising authoritarianism, that confront us today.

(Affiliate link above)

[makingqueerhistory]

We Will Not Cancel Us

And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice

Adrienne Maree Brown

Cancel culture addresses real harm...and sometimes causes more. It's time to think this through.

"Cancel" or "call-out" culture is a source of much tension and debate in American society. The infamous "Harper's Letter," signed by public intellectuals of both the left and right, sought to settle the matter and only caused greater division. Originating as a way for marginalized and disempowered people to address harm and take down powerful abusers, often with the help of social media, call outs are seen by some as having gone too far. But what is "too far" when you're talking about imbalances of power and patterns of harm? And what happens when people in social justice movements direct their righteous anger inward at one another?

In We Will Not Cancel Us, movement mediator adrienne maree brown reframes the discussion for us, in a way that points to possible paths beyond this impasse. Most critiques of cancel culture come from outside the milieus that produce it, sometimes even from from its targets. However, brown explores the question from a Black, queer, and feminist viewpoint that gently asks, how well does this practice serve us? Does it prefigure the sort of world we want to live in? And, if it doesn't, how do we seek accountability and redress for harm in ways that reflect our values?

(Affiliate link above)

[makingqueerhistory]

Listening Through Queer History

In all the discussion about how reading is necessary in a world of book bannings, I want to highlight accessible reading. If sitting down and reading a physical book is not something your body wants to do, there are other ways. Ebooks are great, especially when it's physically challenging to hold up a heavy book, but my personal favourite accessibility tool is audiobooks.

Not every queer history book has been recorded as an audiobook, but there are some amazing ones that deserve attention, which is why I made a libro.fm playlist (linked above) for some of my favourites so far. I hope this makes accessing queer history easier for people who otherwise would feel distanced in the often elitist/ableist world of academia.

In the future I would love it if more textbooks were made into audiobooks, but that will of course take time. For now many of these books on this list are something someone who has never read about queer history before could pick up. There is an array of identities, age ranges, and subjects. I hope everyone finds something to love!

[makingqueerhistory]

Mini Mid-Year Making Queer History Wrap-up

1,900+ social media followers

41 new paid patrons

203 new free patrons

33 queer books read

5 new articles (Edwin Chiloba, Wu Zao, Keri Hulme & The Bone People, ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, Lohana Berkins)

Started Queer Writers' Collective

Queer in Alberta Podcast episode released

80k website visitors

Gave out 436 queer Google calendars

7 new Public Domain Library entries

Went through 5 Stonewall Book Award Winners

It's a little funny to look at this because I have said so many times this year that Making Queer History is scaling back, we are looking inward, we are improving what we have already built, but it's nice to see that growth has still been there.

This year has been a difficult one financially for Making Queer History due to a lot of outside stressors, but it is so beautiful to see that even at the worst moments, there is so much expansive love that comes from and to this project.

We hit our 9th year anniversary this year, and we are hoping to hit our 10th next year! Sending out so much love to the people who make Making Queer History possible. Our patrons, our audience, and our team.

If you want to help keep Making Queer History going, check out our Patreon.

[makingqueerhistory]

Become a Patron

[makingqueerhistory]

Mini Mid-Year Making Queer History Wrap-up

1,900+ social media followers

41 new paid patrons

203 new free patrons

33 queer books read

5 new articles (Edwin Chiloba, Wu Zao, Keri Hulme & The Bone People, ABilly S. Jones-Hennin, Lohana Berkins)

Started Queer Writers' Collective

Queer in Alberta Podcast episode released

80k website visitors

Gave out 436 queer Google calendars

7 new Public Domain Library entries

Went through 5 Stonewall Book Award Winners

It's a little funny to look at this because I have said so many times this year that Making Queer History is scaling back, we are looking inward, we are improving what we have already built, but it's nice to see that growth has still been there.

This year has been a difficult one financially for Making Queer History due to a lot of outside stressors, but it is so beautiful to see that even at the worst moments, there is so much expansive love that comes from and to this project.

We hit our 9th year anniversary this year, and we are hoping to hit our 10th next year! Sending out so much love to the people who make Making Queer History possible. Our patrons, our audience, and our team.

If you want to help keep Making Queer History going, check out our Patreon.