#queer Britain museum

[bitter69uk]

It was pounding with torrential rain Sunday afternoon, but that didn’t stop Pal and I from making a religious pilgrimage to genuflect before THIS sacred artefact – the bright orange “octopus” dress worn onstage by drag terrorist Divine (1945-1988) when John Waters’ “hog princess” leading lady toured the United Kingdom’s dive bars and fleshpots in the 1980s! Divine’s dress is in the permanent collection of the Queer Britain museum in Kings Cross. Pictured: Pal wearing his Divine t-shirt in tribute!

[nooosham3]

Oscar Wilde's cell door

WE ARE QUEER BRITAIN EXHIBITION (2022), Queer Britain Museum

"In 1895 Oscar Wilde was imprisoned with hard labour on the charge of gross indecency. Behind this cell door Wilde wrote De Profundis as a letter to his lover on his allocated four sheets of paper per day. He died destitute three years after release at the age of 46."

[crystalclaire]

details of paintings by john singer sargent: sargent & fashion exhibit at the tate britain in london

Mrs Robert Harrison (Helen Smith), 1886; The Honourable Pauline Astor, 1898-9; In a Garden, Corfu, 1909

[phoenix-joy]

Runtime as shown on Spotify: 37:24 (including advertisement).

Description provided by We Are Queer AF:

Rehangs at art museums are rare. The last one at Tate Britain was in 2012. Whilst galleries will make small changes to their on-display collections, these are small, only happen every few months and usually happen for specific reasons (such as an item going on loan to another gallery).

But each rehang gives an art gallery to make a statement on what its mission as an institution is. A statement that visitors will likely see for ten or more years. So it's a big deal that Tate Britain and the National Gallery both increased the amount of LGBTQIA+ representation in their recent rehangs. This week's producer, Mills Dyer explores some key Trans+ history they reveal, with guests:

Abi Penton – A Tate tour guide and expert on Gluck

Cas Bradbeer - A queer historian and V&A Tour guide

Prof Matt Cook – Professor of Queer History at Oxford University

View the art discussed in today's show:

Flora’s Cloak c.1923, Gluck

Chevalier d'Eon by Thomas Stewart, after Jean-Laurent Mosnier

Prints of Chevalier d’Eon at the National Portrait Gallery

/end of description extract

[amanufacturedheaven]

Rare Language Learning: Polari

If you have ever used the words:

- Naff

- Butch

- Camp

You have unknowingly been speaking the sociolect known as Polari, the language of queer people primarily used in the 30s to the 70s. Polari is now an endangered language, as labelled by the University of Cambridge

Something of note: Many resources out there imply (or state) that Polari was a language invented and used solely by white cis gay men, which is decidedly untrue. Many words of Polari come from drag culture, lesbians, and the Romani people and their language. The use of ‘the language of British gay men’ may be a more palatable title to the general public, but it is not to me. I did my best to curate a variety of resources, but unfortunately much of queer history has been lost many more decades than I’ve been alive, if you have any other resources for studying Polari I would love to read them, message me or leave a link in the replies.

Articles

Learn Polari, the Secret Language of the Gays ⚢ Out Magazine

Polari: The code language gay men used to survive ⚢ BBC

Polari and the Hidden History of Gay Seafarers ⚢ National Museums Liverpool

The Story of Polari, Britain’s Secret Gay Language ⚢ Fabulosa!

Polari People ⚢ Fabulosa!

Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish

The secretive gay language that gave LGBTQ people a voice ⚢ GAYTIMES

A brief history of Polari: the curious after-life of the dead language for gay men ⚢ The Conversation

Study Material

The Polari Bible ⚢ Internet Archive

Fantabulosa: A Dictionary of Polari and Gay Slang ⚢ Internet Archive

Sociolinguistics / Polari ⚢ StudySmarter

FlashCards ⚢ Quizlet

New Polari Translator ⚢ LingoJam

Polari: A sociohistorical study of the life and decline of a secret language. ⚢ Dissertation, University of Manchester

Polari: a language born from prejudice ⚢ Englishpanish

Simon Bowkett: a short blog in Polari for LGBT+ History Month ⚢ Civil Service LGBT+ Network

[the-golden-vanity]

Recovering the Queer History of Britain's Navy in the Age of Sail by Seth Stein LeJacq for Royal Museums Greenwich

@rulebaetannia sent me this lecture because they thought I'd appreciate it. They were right.

[tristanaef]

Recovering the Queer History of Britain’s Navy in the Age of Sail

If you missed this great talk from the Royal Museums Greenwich, the recording is available! From their YouTube channel:

What is the queer history of the Royal Navy in the age of sail? How did sailors break their society’s rules about sex and gender? Did they enter into same-sex relationships? Did they act in other ways that men ‘weren’t supposed to’ and what were the consequences? Is it possible to learn more about these sailors’ lives and why is it so important to do so? Dr Seth Stein LeJacq (New York Institute of Technology) investigates sexual cultures at sea, discipline and military justice. This includes a long string of naval sex scandals, beginning with the 1698 trial of Captain Edward Rigby.

More Maritime History and Culture Seminars

Dr Seth Stein LeJacq's website

[smollsmule]

Loved the Charles having a crisis at the beach post on your dash , but I have to ask …

What do you reckon is the most boomer thing Charles believes in ? 👀👻

(Ok second attempt bc tumblr decided to mess with me last time.)

I'm so happy to hear you liked it!! I don't usually like to post about my writing before I'm in the editing stage at least bc I don't like building expectations like that and making people wait. This time I hadn't even started writing (I was actually writing another, quite different fic that is almost ready to go up now). It was just an idea I had been rotating in my head for some time and I wanted to know if there were people who agreed with me. But everyone has been so lovely and enthusiastic and I can't wait to get it done and share with the class!

Now, for your question. Actually, no, first let me take this opportunity real quick to say:

I know what Gen X is, guys! I know Charles isn't actually a boomer, please stop yelling at me in the notes (please)!!!

Now, I was going to go into this whole spiel about how Charles is actually a really interesting case because he

seems to have had rather forward views when he was alive

unlike many of his peers, died before growing to adulthood in Thatcher Britain beat them out of him and left him a cynical husk of a person

So I actually like to think he is less behind than you'd expect from a guy who didn't live to see the iron curtain fall (see, just for some examples, his helping his classmate and unwavering support of other's queerness (though his reaction to Chad and Hunter in particular warrants a whole essay)).

And then after thinking all these thoughts I realised that pretty much everything we thought to know about dinosaurs in the 80's has since been overhauled. (Jurassic Park hadn't even been released yet!) And then I couldn't get this image out of my head of Charles scream-crying at a museum plaque (ineffectively since a) he is inperceptible, b) it is an inanimate object.)

So yeah, my answer is dinosaurs. I also firmly believe he checked out re the internet the moment they got rid of the dial up modem, if not earlier.

(All that said you should not think about the (lack) of sex ed this boy recieved and was probably never updated on)*

(*that last one might have been inspired by my own writing I'll admit)

But seriously, I am opening up the floor on this one, because now *I* wanna know what everybody thinks abt this. Thanks for the interesting question!!

[dresshistorynerd]

Hi, while looking through extant garments in a museum collection for reference for a school project, I found several garments of different designs that were all labelled as "binder" without any other context or explanation. Obviously my first thought was the kind of binder I use, especially for the first one that looks elasticated, but I have to assume they're for something else like gynecomastia or compression..? Do you know happen to know anything about them?

This is interesting!

They could actually be the types of binders you use. I immediately thought of 19th century male impersonators - female (?) actors who specialized in male roles in Vaudeville and other similar forms of theater, in which drag was integral part of, and would also have their own one man impersonation comedy and music shows and male stage personas. Basically they were drag kings. (Similarly female impersonators, basically drag queens, were also quite popular.) They were known to bind their chest, and other actors, who didn't necessarily do the impersonation shows, but played male roles on stage, would also often bind their chest for their performance. Here's for example two successful male impersonators, British Vesta Tilley (first picture) and American Ella Westner (second picture).

Queer women and trans masc people, who dressed in masculine clothing, (which was pretty common) also sometimes bound their chests, but unsurprisingly that was not exactly celebrated like drag performances were, so there weren't binders made for queer people specifically. I'm guessing they either made their own binders or used binders made for actors. Often those actors were the same people as those queer people, since drag performance was one of the few socially acceptable ways to fuck around with gender. Not all of them were queer, Vesta Tilley looks excellently queer in her drag, but outside stage she was respectable member of high society and very supportive of her husband who became conservative member of parliament (after she had retired). And I think we can easily imagine what kind of political opinions about queer people she was supporting when he was conservative in the context of 1923 Britain. But many of them were known to be queer, like Ella Westner, who eloped to Paris with a very interesting woman, Josie Mansfield (pictured in the last photo above), who was mistress to an infamous scammer and the man who murdered him. Westner was also buried in men's clothing by their own request.

I couldn't find pictures though what did the binders used for chest binding looked like, so I decided to look into what kind of other binders were used in the era. I think the first binder or perhaps both of them could be baby/infant binders (first two pictures below). Apparently people in Victorian era (and in 18th century) believed that chilled abdomen could cause cholera and I guess other bowel issues, so they treated cholera and tried to prevent it by wearing binders and belts (last picture), which could be also made from flannel or wool knit for extra warmth. And babies are quite vulnerable to bowel issues and cholera, so they made binders for babies too. I've seen many different types for these (for both baby and adult use) with some of them like cloth wraps, and some of them kinda corset looking though not corset shaped. If the binders you found were indeed for abdomen warming purposes, I'm sure they are for babies, since those for adults would be so low there definitely wouldn't be shoulder straps like that. The proportions on the first binder especially seem to me fitting for a baby, like the straps feel a bit too wide for adult scale. The second one is harder to guess, it could be a baby binder, but it seems to have boning in the middle, which would make maybe more sense in a chest binder?

But yeah Victorian medicine continues to be... interesting.

[nausikaaa]

Six Sentence Sunday

thanks for tagging me @run-for-chamo-miles @that-disabled-princess and @orange-peony!

classicstober 2024's prompts have been announced and i'm super excited because it's historical figures! my obsession with Roman non-fiction and biographies has finally paid off!

i thought it would be a good opportunity to jumpstart my writing brain by writing lots of short and snappy things. and so today, i've written 1000 or so words for Regina of South Shields, who i've had the pleasure of visiting!

i'm about to ramble, so i'm putting it under a cut. also warning, i've included photos of a tombstone and a human skeleton. if you just want to read the six sentences and not see them, scroll fast right to the bottom.

so, this is Regina. or rather, her tombstone, discovered by builders in 1878, and a reconstruction of how it might have looked when it was erected. if you haven't heard of her, which is understandable, she was a British woman from modern day St Albans (near London) during the Roman occupation of Britain. she was sold as a slave (did her family need money? was she born a slave? we don't know) and bought by a man named Barates, from Palmyra, a city in modern day Syria, who was either a soldier or at least travelling with the Roman army. they moved to a garrison close to Hadrian's Wall in what is now South Shields in the north east, and Barates fell in love with Regina. he freed her and they got married.

her tombstone is mostly important because it tells us that a Syrian man was in Britain during this time, and since her tombstone has Palmyrene script on it, and the chances he engraved his own wife's tombstone are slim, there was likely at least one other Syrian person who could engrave headstones around. which suggests that there was a whole group! the name of the Roman fort in South Shields was Arbeia, which could even mean "the place of the arabs."

it's estimated that a third of people in Britain during the Roman occupation were long distance migrants, and most were not slaves, as is often assumed. Ivory Bangle Lady, who I have also visited in York Museum and who lived around the same time, is believed to have come from Africa. and she was a wealthy free woman!

but what about Regina? well, we know she was from the Catuvellauni tribe, and that she died aged 30. we can assume she spun wool as she's depicted doing so on the tombstone, which was a respectable pastime for Roman women, and she's shown wearing lots of jewellery, so she probably led a comfortable life.

but we don't know how she felt about her marriage, as her tombstone is in Barates' words. did she love him back, or was she under duress to marry him to improve her own prospects? did they have children? did she have friends in Arbeia? did she have to learn Aramaic or Latin to communicate with Barates, or did he know Celtic? we simply don't know. so much of her personality has been lost to time.

so my challenge was to write something that pieces together various possibilities to create what could be an approximation of who Regina was. to give her some life, a voice, and at least a bit of agency.

okay. enough preamble. here's six lines:

I had grown and reached my twentieth year, and as the dark circles beneath my eyes disappeared and the warmer months led me to abandon my woollen cloak, I noticed men's behaviour towards me change. I am not the type to play at being coy- I knew they found me attractive. With my white skin, red hair, and pale blue eyes, I was exotic to them. I stood out.

I noticed Barates' behaviour change too. I realised I had a choice to make.

if you want to know more about Regina, my main source is this podcast by Mary Beard, but i also took inspiration from the book Roman Woman by Lindsay Allason-Jones.

tags: @forabeatofadrum @j-nipper-95 @artsyunderstudy @prettygoododds @confused-bi-queer @imagineacoolusername @ic3-que3n @aristocratic-otter @larkral @hushed-chorus @ivelovedhimthroughworse @shemakesmeforget @fatalfangirl @ebbpettier @you-remind-me-of-the-babe @cutestkilla @youarenevertooold @alexalexinii @shrekgogurt @bookish-bogwitch @thewholelemon @supercutedinosaurs @shutup-andletme-go @theearlgreymage @ileadacharmedlife @alleycat0306 @carryonsimoncarryonbaz @comesitintheclover @noblecorgi @roomwithanopenfire and @blackberrysummerblog

[swifty-fox]

hi, sorry to pop in like this. i've followed you for a while and i was intrigued by your mota posting, so when i was on an airplane recently i watched the first three episodes on the free in-flight service, and... first off THANK YOU for that. i have now finished the whole series and fucking loved it??

anyway, second off--i hope this isn't too awkward but i was hoping i could ask a million questions about like...... what your experience is writing fic and how you tag things and approach the historical aspects etc? i've just started poking around at the ao3 tag but i'm getting fic ideas and i'm not sure how to go about the tagging/writing/etc

(either way, i'm excited to dive into your fics because some of these are 👀👀👀)

HELLO I LOE YOU WELCOME TO DEAD GAY PILOTS!!!!!!!

First and foremost, I would recommend following @hogans-heroes who knows all things plane and has written up some good info on how they work. And also pilots in general

@thatsrightice has a TON of good research done about the irl boys as well

And in general check out the tag for all our lovely lovely writes there's so many to name.

For meeee i think the HboWar fandom understands the separation from the real guys and the fictionalized versions we play dolls with. Some people will put disclaimers but not all. Generally you're not going to piss anyone off by exploring them through a queer lense so long as nobody's harassing the real family members (really only find them in the FB groups. @bcolfanfic has had some sweet exchanges with the Egan and Crosby family)

In terms of researching, my kind of separation from the real people is that I only take show canon as fact. Anything not included in the show about the real guys I don't follow. That's what feels respectful of me! But there's so many lovely writers out there who do follow the events of their real lives and such good content for 'canon' fic.

In terms of researching Google is my best friend as well as the historians we have in the fandom. (Hogans-Heroes again is a gem. @reallylilyreally has a great attention to detail and we also have a few current/former service members who family of service members who are good points of reference!)

In terms of other research. the Masters of the Air book is a great go to

Cros actually wrote a book called A Wing and a Prayer which is a great resource and also pretty heartbreaking!

I personally referenced The Evening Crowd at Kirmsers by Ricardo Brown for queer underground culture in the 40's

Coming Out Under Fire is a fucking devastating but really helpful book about gay service members in the 40's and kind of the danger they were in. @bcolfanfic also has some excerpts from that she posted a while back if you don't mind digging.

I've also used ancestry.com to research the guys as well as these websites contains the personnel and mission files as well as photos of the guys!

https://100thbg.com/ you can search both the guys AND the planes!

another great website with a similar search function but they have a few diff documents.

For tagging the main tags are: Mota, Clegan and Hbowar (this one will include the other shows like Band of Brothers, The Pacific, and Generation Kill)

Really it's treated like any other fandom. Everyone understands that we're playing with dolls, not real people. But also RPF is fine kill the cop in your head and join the hockey rpf fandom next >:)

[omgthatdress]

Apparently, Molly is low-key a major gay icon, and honestly, I get it. After all, Molly did *really* like her pretty teacher, Miss Campbell. If you think about it, it makes sense that lot of future lesbians would absolutely love Molly. Most dolls in the 90s were hyper-feminine princess dolls, and Molly was... not. I’d imagine the market for girls who want to play with dolls that aren’t pretty pink princesses is pretty large and the supply is pretty small. Just like there’s plenty of boys out there who want to play with something other than GI Joes. Molly (and AG in general) fits neatly into that market, which I’m sure is why she was so successful.

Last year, with its re-launch of the classic dolls, AG put a post on it’s instagram, “To all the Molly girls in the world, we see you and celebrate you,” which a lot of folks on Twitter took to see as confirmation that Molly was gay. When asked if they just outed Molly, AG gave a very non-committal reply. AG has always had a distinctly feminist slant, but it’s only ever toed the line of actually being LGBT inclusive. So far the only actual inclusion we’ve seen from them is a Girl of the Year with a pair of gay aunts. Even that tiny whiff of queerness was enough to set off a frothing horde of angry conservative moms screaming for a boycott. Since Mattell is only motivated by profit, I doubt we’ll get more representation any time soon, but we can dream.

Anyway, World War II was pretty gay to begin with.

A lot of historians point to WW2 as the starting point of the modern gay rights movement because before it, you had very many people living on isolated farms and never going very far from home in their lifetimes. With mass recruitment of men into the military, gay servicemen were able to find other men like themselves and build a community. It was much the same way for women who went to work in factories, joined the WAC or WAVES, and joined women’s baseball leagues. That’s right, the league of their own was gay as FUCK.

As far as Molly’s fashion goes, I love her lack of pink. I’m glad there’s a doll out there that isn’t hyper-gendered, and I wish there were more dolls like her out there.

With sweaters coming into fashion in the 1920s and 30s, the sweaters of the 40s started to see more complex and colorful knits coming into style.

Much of the fashion of this era was dominated by frugality. Europe’s couture houses were shut down, and fabric was rationed. Hems were shortened and baggy cuts and useless frills were done away with. Britain introduced the “Utility Scheme” which hired designers to make chic ensembles using as few resources as possible. Because of this, separates and outfits that could be made with scraps of fabric were very popular, and at-home knitting and sewing continued to be highly popular.

“After the United States entered World War II in 1941, companies began to experiment with various materials in anticipation of rationing and shortages. This example is a prototype from Nina-Fay Foundations, which uses plastic for closures and stays instead of the usual metal. Although metal was not ultimately rationed, the company was experimenting with alternatives to metal zippers and hooks in the event that it was needed for the war effort.”

(The Met Museum)

Women were taking men’s jobs and taking on masculine roles

But they were still expected to maintain a certain level of femininity, “To give our boys something to fight for.”

Because of all of this, the gender politics of the 1940s are really complicated and interesting.

[ufonaut]

divine's octopus dress from the 1985 uk tour at the queer britain museum, london

[johannestevans]

Does Assassin's Creed: Origins (or AC: Valhalla) have the same historical overlay and museum mode that AC: Odyssey have?

Those are my absolute favourite part of the game, but I'm already quite educated on these cultures and periods of history across Greece and Macedonia

I know a lot less about daily life in historical Egypt, and while I'm pretty good on monks in early medieval Britain, I'm way less familiar with the broader daily life aspects of history

Apart from the museum mode, I do like that the MC constantly makes commentary on where he is and what people do or believe in the area, so if that's present, that would be useful to know as well (Also are they as queer as AC Odyssey?)

[firespirited]

thought I might add a little to a question unanswered by the video essay: the why?

not as an excuse, not a full explanation either because there's still the matter of the Telos money.

but why does a man live, breath and eat for his channel/career without the passion for researching and learning?

I can tell you that he truly *did* devote his entire time and energy to producing videos and engaging with the commentariat as a full time job, though if the video scripts were copy paste. He probably feels like he's devoted his entire soul for years into this project and the copy paste was "just" to keep up with the youtube once a week upload demands.

IMHO, what we have is a bloke with crippling anxiety, loneliness and body dysmorphia with a pathological fear of rejection who attempted to build an online queer community that wouldn't ever let him down. As far i can can tell he barely left the house, didn't date and i started to wonder if he really had moved when he wasn't visiting any of Toronto's very gay friendly places or even some of the museums and libraries, wasn't making any local connexions even when people reached out. Instead, he spent his weekends chatting online (often on livestream) about gay media, business, youtube and film making.

I think he could have built that safe haven if he'd kept the day job, produced a fully credited video once a month which was in the format of let's watch this documentary, let's read this book, let's dive into a topic and read the various articles followed by his livestream chats. There is clearly an audience eager for it.

and that's where it gets uncomfortable, right? the lines blur between shyness + not wanting to be hurt vs not collaborating and not being part of other established groups. Canada not only has multiple gay filmmaking scenes, advocacy groups and even a whole bunch of Canadian queer youtubers. They don't have to all get along, because there's more than just the Canada based breadtube, there are a lot of smaller channels that'd love the opportunity to network.

Anyway, it was during a live that i bought up some local Canadian networking opportunity, he backed off quite hard in a way that felt like a little bit more than anxiety about the fierce competition that goes on for such stuff. It felt vaguely like Little Britain's "The Only Gay in the Village" but mostly I was reminded of folks in my life who decided to forge their own paths in charity work and activism, specifically the very dodgy intersection between missionary work and charity and charities that are about the joy of bringing fish to the hungry instead of helping the locals who know how to fish get the new motor for their boat. It's actually a really complex and nuanced conversation where sometimes the least colonialist choice is to hold your nose and work with the local catholic church - yeah I know, that level of complicated, here's some reading before I start on the importance of translating books to creoles being a better investment than teaching english to match an english curriculum and how relief work is often predatory business opportunities and how secularism is a tightrope balancing act and don't get me started.

It is possible to walk and chew gum and listen to music at the same time. We can talk about how plagiarism is bad, how the algorithm rewards it, how this guy is probably getting more ire than the right wing grifters also brought up, why left tube maybe feels a lil intimidating, why people build their own little digital or offline communes, how being an educator and being a thought leader get smooshed together in an attention economy that wants to create influencers with a parasocial engagement with folks that want personal guidance, sometimes stolen valour/plagiarism/fake cancer is for power and clout and sometimes it's a maladaptive response to a desperate loneliness I hope I never fully comprehend.

[familyabolisher]

2022 reading list >:)

fiction:

charlotte brontë, jane eyre

n.k. jemisin, the stone sky

victor hugo, les misérables

susanna clarke, piranesi

james baldwin, giovanni's room

tamsyn muir, gideon the ninth

tamsyn muir, harrow the ninth

emily brontë, wuthering heights

ursula k le guin, the left hand of darkness

oscar wilde, the picture of dorian gray

isaac fellman, dead collections

joan lindsay, picnic at hanging rock

shirley jackson, dark tales

gretchen felker-martin, manhunt

herman melville, moby dick

octavia butler, parable of the sower

shola von reinhold, lote

larissa lai, the tiger flu

alison rumfitt, tell me i'm worthless

julia armfield, our wives under the sea

shirley jackson, the haunting of hill house

miguel de cervantes, don quixote

toni morrison, the bluest eye

isaac babel, odessa stories

alexandre dumas, the count of monte cristo

daphne du maurier, rebecca

clark ashton smith, the dark eidolon and other fantasies

rivers solomon, the deep

akwaeke emezi, freshwater

e.m. forster, a room with a view

vladimir nabokov, lolita

ayse papatya bucak, the trojan war museum and other stories

sheridan le fanu, carmilla

e.m. forster, maurice

tamsyn muir, nona the ninth

vladimir nabokov, pale fire

shirley jackson, we have always lived in the castle

jorge luis borges, fictions

henry james, the turn of the screw

tamsyn muir, undercover

ling ma, severance

orhan pamuk, the museum of innocence

shirley jackson, hangsaman

nonfiction:

vijay prashad, no free left: the futures of indian communism

eduardo galeano, open veins of latin america

hakim adi, pan-africanism: a history

paulo freire, pedagogy of the oppressed

a rainbow thread: an anthology of queer jewish texts ed. noam sienna

kwame nkrumah, africa must unite

vijay prashad, red star over the third world

norm finkelstein, the holocaust industry

robin wall kimmerer, braiding sweetgrass

vladimir lenin, the state and revolution

saidiya hartman, wayward lives, beautiful experiments

john aberth, from the brink of the apocalypse

erik butler, metamorphoses of the vampire in literature and film

amin maalouf, the crusades through arab eyes

anandi ramamurthy, black star: britain's asian youth movements

christopher chitty, sexual hegemony

shakespearean gothic, ed. christy desmet and anne williams

cervantes' don quixote: a casebook, ed. roberto gonzález echevarria

edward said, culture and imperialism

emily hobson, lavender and red: liberation and solidarity in the gay and lesbian left

audre lorde, zami: a new spelling of my name

ghassan kanafani, on zionist literature

afsaneh najmabadi, women with moustaches and men without beards: gender and sexual anxieties of iranian modernity

jamie berrout, essays against publishing

beverley bryan, stella dadzie, suzanne scafe, heart of the race: black women's lives in britain

jamaica kincaid, a small place

friedrich engels, socialism: utopian and scientific

poetry:

trish salah, lyric sexology

melissa range, scriptorium

wendy trevino, cruel fiction

june jordan, selected poems