ABSTRACT Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s “hermeneutical marginalization” and Martin Meeker’s “sexual communication network,” this article retraces how the adoption and therefore the existence of queer identities are predicated on the availability of alternative models of understanding sexuality. “Loci of increased human connection,” such as cities, media, and the Internet, are recognized as disseminators of hermeneutical resources and catalysts for “sexual communication networks.” By following this throughline, this article provides a framework for the social ontology of sexual orientation that is intended to be usable across history. The author renegotiates the debate about the applicability of sexual orientation lingo to queer pre-modern history by iterating on William Wilkerson’s emerging fusion theory of sexual identity. Sexual orientation is a self-interpretation of desires, which emerge, or remain hermeneutically marginalized, under the available social models that are specific to each society (and time). Historiography, in this way, can realistically enquire about sexual preference in its search for “gay history”; particular focus must be put, however, on “loci of increased human connection,” because they are the most likely sites where hermeneutically underserved desires might emerge explicitly as alternative social categories. These alternative categories might have lived only in limited contexts before the invention of modern communication technologies.

ABSTRACT In the past two decades, queer archives have proliferated worldwide as LGBTQ+ communities seek to preserve their histories. But what happens when queer histories are incorporated into archives dedicated to ethno-national Jewish narratives? Drawing on research at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives (AJA), this study examines how Jewish LGBTQ+ individuals negotiate belonging and produce new ritual and communal practices. I argue that the inclusion of LGBTQ+ materials – such as sermons and prayers – challenges the archive's hegemonic frameworks. First, it disrupts heteronormative and nationalist narratives that position the heterosexual family as central to Jewish continuity, offering alternative visions of Jewish identity beyond traditional structures. Second, it reveals the archive as a political institution that shapes knowledge and its limits. Integrating LGBTQ+ histories compels archives to expand definitions of “Jewish history,” exposing the constructed nature of collective memory. Ultimately, the archive emerges as a contested and liminal space where marginalized narratives reshape dominant paradigms, and where ethnographers themselves must reflect on the interplay of religion, gender, and sexuality in the production of knowledge.

This essay addresses the construction of queer memory and queer history in Finnish memory activism in the late 2010s and early 2020s. It describes how the work on making queer pasts visible has started and addresses the organizations and activists behind this work as well as the funding and institutional support the work has received. The essay discusses the terms used in this activism, focusing in particular on sateenkaari, rainbow, a local umbrella term for LGBTIQ+ and the effects of the terminological choice between history and memory.

This essay explores Queer Culture Year 2022 in Norway – a yearlong celebration of queer history and culture that marked the fiftieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of sex between men in 1972. The article focuses on the effects the year had on the documentation and dissemination of queer history.

ABSTRACT This paper maps an artist residency at Holocaust Centre North. The artist explores the archive for queer histories and develops a series of works in print and ceramics, making space for the queer silences found in the archive. Using archive research and artistic methods, the paper questions whose narratives are excluded within the Holocaust Archive and what happens when a queer lens is trained on the archive. The paper considers the importance of intergenerational memory in the safeguarding of Holocaust histories and the problems for queer Holocaust memory when queer knowledge is unlikely to be shared through intergenerational family ties.

Drawing on our lived experiences as public health doctoral scholars who grew up in rural communities in the United States of America—and as queer people, one Two-Spirit and one transgender—we used collaborative autoethnography to analyze our participation in an intergenerational 2S/LGBTQ+ storytelling event. Our analysis offered insight into how our intersecting identities shaped the quilt-square narratives we produced and deepened understanding of the cultural and structural forces shaping 2S/LGBTQ+ aging, intergenerational relationships, and the possibilities and constraints of queer solidarity amid an uncertain political climate. We generated four themes from our narrative quilts: (1) performing identity on someone else’s stage to meet dominant expectations rather than personal truth; (2) masking, or how LGBTQ+ people across generations conceal aspects of themselves to navigate safety, belonging, and survival; (3) feeling like a fish out of water, capturing marginalization experienced by trans and Two-Spirit people even within 2S/LGBTQ+ spaces; and (4) questioning whose stories shape our futures, highlighting how racial and cultural erasure in queer aging spaces obscures BIPOC queer histories. Our findings illuminate the need for culturally inclusive 2S/LGBTQ+ spaces that promote solidarity, reduce social isolation, and advance affirming care across nursing, social work, and public health.

John Gilbert McCurdy’s Vicious and Immoral: Homosexuality, the American Revolution, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh traces the life of British military and Anglican chaplain Robert Newburgh. Accused by British officers of being a “buggerer,” Newburgh defended himself and his actions using Enlightenment ideas and revolutionary rhetoric. Analyzing court records and visual sources, McCurdy writes an outstanding microhistory of Newburgh’s legal troubles. Vicious and Immoral is a significant and original contribution to the history of LGBTQ+ people and the history of the American Revolution.Robert Newburgh was an Anglican clergyman from Ireland. He studied at Trinity College and was commissioned as a chaplain in the British Army, serving in the Royal Irish Regiment. Prior to his arrival in North America, the officers in Newburgh’s regiment accused him of being a buggerer, having heard rumors that he had sexual relations with men and shared a bed with his foster brother and servant. The accusations against Newburgh and his decision to defend himself exacerbated divisions that already existed in the regiment. Newburgh’s accusers also attacked him because of his choice of clothing, his request for larger accommodations in the barracks, and his friendships with soldiers and their wives.Newburgh’s legal troubles and trials epitomized the divisions that were separating the colonies from the British empire, and he defended himself by employing ideals associated with the Enlightenment and the revolution. Newburgh’s experience highlighted diverging American and British views about sexuality, discipline, and order. Economic, cultural, and demographic influences shaped colonial American attitudes toward sexuality. Although both Britain and American colonies prohibited sodomy, Americans who violated these prohibitions were punished by whipping not by being put to death. The need for laborers may have accounted for this difference between the colonies and Great Britain. Religious diversity in the colonies also shaped the punishments meted out to men convicted of sodomy. Native American and African cultural attitudes about gender and sexuality also impacted colonial views about these subjects. A decrease in large families and a stress on nonprocreative sex in the colonies also affected ideas about sexuality. Newburgh’s compassion towards and the support he received from subalterns, enlisted men, and women contradicted the hierarchy, order, and discipline expected by British officers. McCurdy stresses, “Nearly all the men and women who had supported Newburgh became Patriots, while his accusers and opponents remained loyal subjects of George III. In many ways, this case of homosexuality foretold the American Revolution” (248–49). Newburgh’s defense incorporated Enlightenment and revolutionary ideals that stressed a common humanity and equality. He asserted that people should be able to dress and live where they wanted and that they could have their own opinions and preferences.McCurdy’s microhistorical approach relies on a close reading of trial transcripts, incorporates visual sources, and investigates gender. He includes a list of the historical actors involved in the court cases and provides a chronology of Newburgh’s life and trials. McCurdy expertly analyzes macaroni, “a term of derision for a man deemed inappropriately masculine” (204), and the competing masculinities displayed by Newburgh’s accusers, his defenders, and by Newburgh himself. One of Newburgh’s enemies, Captain Benjamin Chapman described him as “a Maccaroni Dishabille” to criticize his clothing and to question his manliness. His critics’ sense of duty, heterosexuality, homophobia, and devotion to the crown comprised “the aspirational form of manhood that was typical of the eighteenth-century Anglo-Atlantic” (267) while his supporters became Patriots, pursued their fortunes on the frontier, and pledged their allegiance to the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican party. Unlike his detractors and his champions, Newburgh ended up in France, unmarried, and childless. McCurdy concludes, “Robert Newburgh’s manhood was queer, and it followed a separate path” (272).Vicious and Immoral is a groundbreaking contribution to LGBTQ+ history and the history of the American Revolution. While acknowledging that his study is limited to “male-male intimacy” (6), McCurdy’s study of Newburgh highlights how the Enlightenment impacted “sexual liberalism” and documents “LGBTQ+ people at the founding of the United States” (5). Like other LGBTQ+ people, Newburgh experienced discrimination and chose to challenge it. McCurdy writes that “when he was accused of buggery, he was able to access a rhetoric of rights and attract the support of friends that might not have been available . . . had not the American Revolution been growing around him. . . . At its creation, the United States inherently included a place for LGBTQ+ people” (282).McCurdy’s book will find an audience among scholars of LGBTQ+ history and the history of the American Revolution. Newburgh’s trials took place in the mid-Atlantic region and his regiment’s barracks were in Philadelphia; historians of revolutionary Pennsylvania will be interested in this information. McCurdy’s book belongs on reading lists for undergraduate and graduate courses on the history of the American Revolution. It might be assigned alongside studies of Baron von Steuben.

One may not be quick to perceive of archival preservation as a form of activism, but the work achieved by the women behind the Lesbian Herstory Archives may change that understanding. As queer radical activism began to flourish in the early 1970s, it became clear that queer history needed to be preserved before it was lost or destroyed. After facing exclusion from both the Gay Liberation Movement and Radical Feminist Movement, it was necessary for lesbians to carve spaces of their own. The Lesbian Herstory Archives became one such space. Embracing the histories of all lesbians regardless of race, class, or ability, the Archives embedded inclusion into their framework. In order to maintain their personal autonomy, the Archives rejected any public funding and was financially supported by members and organizations in the queer community. Not only the history preserved in the Archives, but the physical and social space it provided created a welcoming and inclusive space for lesbians to embrace their identity. While more subtle than some other political actions, the Lesbian Herstory Archives should be understood as a political and radical entity.

Peter S. Beagle’s decision to feminize the formerly masculine figure of the unicorn in his influential 1968 fantasy novel The Last Unicorn represents a key moment in the evolution of this now ubiquitous image, one embraced today as a symbol of pride by LGBTQ+ communities. The novel and its 1982 animated film adaptation have themselves remained popular among queer and especially trans audiences, who have often found the narrative resonant with their own experiences. This essay provides a preliminary overview of the queer history of the unicorn symbol and continues into a trans reading of the novel, arguing that these responses to Beagle’s work by contemporary readers reflect dimensions of the narrative congruent with concerns about gender performance and misrecognition; gender dysphoria; and queer temporalities. The nature of the fantasy form itself, we maintain throughout, can also particularly enable reparative readings by queer and trans audiences.

Drawing on personal experiences, the author expresses the importance of LGBTQIA+ teachers in students’ lives.

ABSTRACT In Black communities, heteronormativity installs the belief that Black people are inherently straight, erasing Black Queer histories. Despite its significance, homophobia remains underexamined in racial capitalism discourse, which neglects the interplay of race, gender, sexuality, and capital. This omission reinforces harmful narratives that Queerness is “un‐African.” This paper employs Foucauldian genealogy to uncover how Black people have lived otherwise, tracing the disciplinary mechanisms enforcing heteronormativity. Sexual violence and exploitation are shown as central to racial capitalism, sustaining racial and economic domination. I argue that heteronormativity disciplines Black sexuality and perpetuates exploitation, illuminating racial capitalism's uneven impacts on Black Queer, Trans, and Women of Color. The paper highlights the radical potential of Black Queer resistance to disrupt heterosexual orthodoxy and inspire transformative Black political imaginaries. Findings contribute to a reimagined racial capitalism discourse, attuned to the interplay of race, sexuality, and gender.

This article explores the material legacy of the popular Victorian novelist Marie Corelli and her partner Bertha Vyver, presenting evidence from surviving letters, objects, and buildings to advocate for their place in queer history. The article publishes, for the first time, a letter from Corelli to Vyver, which was discovered in 2013 and now resides in a private collection. I use material culture to contextualise the letter’s content and explore what it reveals about Vyver’s and Corelli’s relationship. Corelli’s self-fashioning was a careful balance of concealment and revelation through photographs, pseudonyms, and dress. I argue that Vyver and Corelli’s relationship demonstrates a similar manipulation of visibility and invisibility via a series of object and building case studies, including an embroidered piano runner, and Harvard House (which they helped to preserve) and Mason Croft (where they lived) in Stratford-upon-Avon, which blur the boundaries between private and public, heritage and domestic spaces. I examine Corelli’s conservation and heritage campaigns and reinstate Vyver’s contributions to these activities. I demonstrate that Vyver and Corelli adapt and appropriate the past – particularly a Tudor, Shakespearean past – to assert their agency, relationship, and legacy.

This article presents an interpretation of The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) by Patricia Highsmith. At the center is Tom Ripley, the novel’s protagonist, a serial killer suffering from profound internalized homophobia who can be read as a closeted gay man. Also, throughout the narrative, Tom waits in a variety of ways. The article examines how the phenomenon of waiting is rendered in Highsmith’s novel, what Tom waits for, and how waiting affects him. Furthermore, it emphasizes how waiting and queerness intersect in the text while simultaneously investigating if Tom’s antagonistic traits are enhanced because he is forced to endure waiting. Theoretically, two main queer-theoretical concepts influence the interpretation. The first, queer waiting (von Seth 2025), suggests that although waiting is a universal human activity and inescapable feature of life, queer people experience waiting in unique ways. The second, deidealization (Amin 2017), is useful for approaching queer history’s undesirable objects (like fictional queer serial killers), in essence, queers who behave heinously and whose actions are hard to defend. Broadly, the article demonstrates that Tom Ripley embodies a cluster of antagonism, queerness, and waiting. He awaits getting caught for his crimes and experiences a sort of waiting to be outed as queer. Also, Tom waits for attention from the man he desires, his straight friend Dickie. Ultimately, the article concludes that it is because Dickie strings Tom along that Tom’s antagonism is expressed violently.

Becoming Lesbian: A Queer History of Modern France, by Tamara Chaplin

Abstract The UK Department for Education stipulates that lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer+ (LGBTQ+) topics should be integrated throughout the secondary curriculum; however, for various reasons, it can be hard to follow these stipulations in the Classical studies classroom (broadly conceived). This article outlines the context for LGBTQ+ education in the UK, establishing the need for some kind of intervention. It focuses specifically on how sector-wide difficulties in this area manifest acutely in the Classical studies classroom because of several, discipline-specific challenges. It then demonstrates how the materials produced by ‘Queering the Past(s)’, a recently formed collective of academics and teachers, can be used to several pedagogical ends. The Queering the Past(s) resources are shown to fulfil government mandates about LGBTQ+ education whilst also providing important correctives to previous teaching materials. Most crucially, the article outlines how resources from Queering the Past(s) may be used to develop secondary students’ knowledge about LGBTQ+ topics and core KS4 and KS5 skills such as critical thinking and source analysis. This is demonstrated by means of a case study of Elagabalus, emperor of Rome from 218 to 222 CE, and the focus of one of the resources from Queering the Past(s).

This article surveys the current state of sex in Canadian queer history and seeks to establish its methodological basis as a productive and meaningful topic of historical inquiry. It considers sex as a physical and emotional experience, rather than how it is often understood discursively. The article first details three distinct narratives of sex in Canadian queer history: the prominent narratives of the criminalized and the deadly, as well as the more elusive erotic. Subsequently, through case studies of queer archives in Nova Scotia, it offers three possible ways of accessing the queer erotic using photo tracings, fiction, and the ephemeral. Each case study is a vignette into Nova Scotia queer history that also sheds light onto queer sexual practices in this communities during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The sources explore lesbian camping trips, a gay men's BDSM group, a coming out story in Cape Breton, and the use of poppers in the Halifax clubbing scene.

This article aims to demonstrate how queer readings of premodern historiography can make meaningful contributions to contemporary political struggle and to make one such contribution. It uses fifteenth-century Byzantine depictions of Ottoman sultans as heretical, barbaric, and sexually non-normative to denaturalise the very different (and yet uncannily similar) combination of religious, ethnic, and sexual alterity in contemporary Norwegian homonationalist discourse. It seeks to unpick the anti-Muslim and anti-migrant implications of the neoliberal story of LGBT+ rights accumulation told in the framing of skeivt kulturår 2022, the commemoration/celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the decriminalisation of sex between men in Norway. Specifically, it seeks to draw out the positioning of the Norwegian state in that framing, by leveraging the temporal and cultural alterity of Byzantine historiographical invective. The objective is to disturb the complacent production of a story of Norwegian queer history as a dimension of benign Norwegian liberalism and exceptionalism. The specific role of the premodern past in Norwegian homonationalist narratives is illustrated through the example of an exhibition within the framework of skeivt kulturår 2022, which was ultimately cancelled because of a text naming Norwegian state violence and use of the term homonationalism. In the process, this article seeks to identify a way for Byzantine queer history to do useful work in the present.

ABSTRACT This essay examines the myth of metronormative safety through the metaphor of the hunting grounds, exploring how queer bodies navigate violence across rural and urban landscapes. First, the author lays out the theoretical frameworks of queer ruralism and metronormativity to analyze how violence against queer individuals is recorded and understood. Rather than treating the archive as a passive record, this method reanimates queer experiences, transforming them into active, embodied acts of remembrance.Second, the paper articulates the use of performative archival methods that challenge traditional, static approaches to documenting queer histories. Third, tracing these histories across geographic landscapes, this work reveals how violence often perceptually begins in rural spaces and shifts—sometimes intensifying, sometimes transforming—as queer individuals move to metropolitan areas. Finally, this work examines what remains of the queer self in these encounters with violence, considering the lasting effects of being both haunted and hunted. By intertwining these threads, this work challenges dominant narratives of queer identity, offering a more complex understanding of queer time, space, and survival.

The Canadian government has a long history of regulation, exploitation, and violence against lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2S+) people. One of the most painful chapters in this history is the “LGBT Purge,” a term that refers to the expulsion of LGBTQ2S+ service members and employees from the Canadian Armed Forces, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Federal Public Service between 1955 and 1992. The LGBT Purge was the subject of a class action lawsuit filed in 2017 that resulted in a settlement agreement in 2018. On a parallel track to the settlement, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology for the government’s history of state-sponsored discrimination against LGBTQ2S+ people in 2017. In this article, I consider these events from a legal historical and queer theoretical perspective. I focus on the potential of the settlement to promote reconciliation with LGBTQ2S+ people, contextualizing the settlement in light of neoliberal and homonationalist pressures on the class members to settle the past and forgive legacies of homophobic violence that continue to be felt today. Praiseworthy as the settlement terms might be, I conclude by arguing that forgiving the government’s history of discrimination against LGBTQ2S+ people is an historical impossibility.

In this article, I explore the hopes and aims of Christian queer activists in Finland from the late 1960s to the early 2000s by conceptualising them with the notion of utopia. I approach utopia from the perspective of not-yet-existing and hopeful queer futurity (Muñoz 2009; Jones 2013), tying it together with affect theoretical notions of activism as an affectively motivated aspiration for a better world (Gould 2009). The study makes an empirical contribution to the study of queer activism and the interdisciplinary fields of queer history and queer religious studies, as well as a theoretical contribution to queer theoretical accounts of utopia. As my data, I use oral history interviews, autobiographical writings, and archival materials collected by the activists. As a method of analysis, I utilise close reading informed by affect theory (Berg et al. 2019). I ask: how did utopian thinking appear in the stories of Christian queer activists, who aimed for inclusion and equality in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland? I argue that activism always needs utopias to exist, and that utopian thinking was a central force within the early decades of Christian queer activism in Finland. I show that utopian thinking had both private and public relevance for the Christian queer activists and that by striving for inclusion and equality, the activists represented utopian voices within the Church and the local Christian queer community of the time.