#i've had to sit through a lecture on gender and sexuality this semester

[veilchenjaeger]

Another brilliant one. As a(n aspiring) historian, I wanna add so much to this - like the issue of sources and looking at them critically. On the one hand, you can’t just go and take a piece of evidence we have, point at it and say “That’s definitely queer”, because you can’t jump to conclusions as a historian. And a lively discourse and criticism of existing theories - including someone going as far as posting a “In Response To” on JSTOR and dragging a theory because they think it’s bullshit - are vital to our ability to understand and explore history. After all, jumping to conclusions and cis/straight people projecting their world view of “Gay is bad so it didn’t exist before the 60s” onto existing historical evidence is what got us into this situation in the first place.

On the other hand, see the video above. It’s so important for queer people to have a history that’s not just AIDS crisis and persecution, and “Uhh, possibly this person might have kissed a girl once but we aren’t sure because our sources are shit” just doesn’t cut it.

On top of that, queer history has been actively erased - and is still being actively erased - thorough the history of academia. Nowadays, methods aren’t as drastic as literally changing the gender of the people Catullus or Sappho write about in translations. But the old interpretations of source material that try their hardest to deny any kind of queer evidence are still very much present, and that gets dangerous when they end up in history books or are seen as historical facts even by historians although there could very well be another interpretation. (You can find evidence for and against absolutely anything, and if your academic predecessors accumulated a bunch of evidence with a homophobic bias, that’s what you inevitably end up working with unless you invest blood and tears in re-examining all those sources yourself. One person just can’t undo all that bias. We’ll get to that.)

And then there’s the thing where today’s modern historians, writing books in the year of 2k19, gloss over queer history almost constantly. I routinely check every text I come across on a few specific historical figures for discussions about their either very certainly queer or quite possibly queer sexuality, and I come up with a lot of works where sexuality either isn’t mentioned at all or queer theories are dismissed as minor and something “some authors suggest that maybe”. In the same vein, heterosexual encounters - even if they are 100% speculative and the person in question is confirmed to have been queer - are often played up as incredibly important to a historical figure’s psyche.

That’s a very generalising view of historical academia, and I’m also talking about a lot of more popular historical science here. But the issue is very present both within universities and the works that actually get out there and are read by people who don’t spend their days digging through archives, deciphering Roman inscriptions, and screaming at each other about the legitimacy of Herodotus. The few instances when queer history is actually visible in the sources and even discussed in an academic context are actively omitted by writers.

Plus, the video talked about the issue of a lack of education, and this is a major problem in university as well. If you don’t specifically go digging for courses on gender and sexuality studies, queer history is barely even mentioned. (Again, exceptions exist and some lecturers are awesome, but I have been studying history for 5 semesters now and have yet to come across any actual exploration of queer history.)

Like, we, as queer people (and queer historians), have a bias. We wanna have this legacy, this evidence that we’ve always been around, so we actively look for it, and we tend to be too overjoyed when we find it to critically engage with the source material.

That’s a bias we have to be aware of. But in the end, cis/straight historians are biased too, especially cis/straight historians who have close to no contact to queer people or haven’t actively engaged with queer topics, and who just never think of that being an option. I’d say they’re less likely to pick up on things that seem a little queer (pun intended) in both sources and literature, and they’re more likely to eat up the biased POV that was created by conservative historians.

My personal opinion is that the latter bias is the dominant one in academia in general and historical studies in particular, and has been for... uh... ever. (Or maybe since the Romans, they had their own bias going on.) So we need people who pick up on these things and who go and look for the queer stories, who go and re-examine the old theories and interpretations and call out homophobic/transphobic bias in the old academic works. We need people who look at things through a queer lense and offer another set of theories that actively include queer people. We can still discuss them and criticise them, but I’d say that it’s important that this POV is present and part of the historical discourse.

One day, I’ll write a book on “Advocating for a Queer Historical Science”. For now, deal with me slapping rants onto other people’s posts.

Why is queer history so difficult to learn about? 

A twitter thread about gay WW1 soldiers went viral this week with the hashtag #emilyxaver - and then turned out to be fake. 

 Here’s why that matters…