hi there! ive always loved your history posts, and was wondering if you had any insights/directions you could point me in to learn more about a specific area of queer history?
im personally most well-read on the history of gay men in britain between the labouchere amendment and ww2, so a pretty specific area. i dont know very much at all about the history of queer women, though id think its harder to get primary sources for them as the legal records wouldnt exist in the same way?
anyway, my main question is actually about cross-gender solidarity. i notice that a lot of the men i read about operated in very gender segregated spaces, which was typical for the era anyway and ofc there are plenty of spaces today where gay men want to be with other gay men exclusively. i suppose im wondering if there's any way of investigating how much queer men in the past would have felt solidarity with queer women, and how to look at whether/how those sentiments changed over time?
i realise this is a bit more of a "how to do history" question than about history proper - any insight or thoughts you'd like to share about this would also be really appreciated! and in either case, hope you're having a great week xx
First, thanks! Glad to help.
Second, the difficulty of doing premodern queer history largely or exclusively from legal documents is that a) it gives us a distorted version of what degree of prejudice actually existed in society, on a practical and not just theoretical level, and b) it makes it even more difficult (if not impossible) to speculate on what people "really" felt, thought, or personally identified. (I currently have a book chapter about John/Eleanor Rykener in the peer-review process, which touches on some of this difficulty, since our only major source in that case is also a legal record.) We are very rarely granted direct access to the actual voices or perspectives of premodern queer people, and if it's filtered through a hostile framework that has an interest in minimizing that person's existence and/or social experience, it provides an even more excessively or solely negative picture than is probably at all the case.
However, I would gently challenge your idea that it's harder to get primary sources on queer women, since the assumption is that premodern queer men are only memorialized by their (presumably punitive) encounters with the legal system, and that society cared less about female homosexuality and thus did not attempt to police it in the same way. Both ideas have some degree of truth, but not entirely and certainly not categorically, and there are many ways to access premodern queer experience and memorialization. I don't know what particular time/region you're interested in, but since you said Britain, I will once more recommend checking out the website of gay British historian Rictor Norton. He has everything, and I mean everything, you could possibly want as a resource/starting point (his specialty is 18th-20th century British LGBT history):
Writings on Lesbian and Gay History and Literature by Rictor Norton
He has a wildly extensive list of links to subject, region, and chronological-specific LGBT history:
Bibliography of Queer History
He has an equally comprehensive list of links sorted by region, methodology, art/music history, thematic approaches, etc:
Links to Websites on Gay and Lesbian History and Literature
Now, obviously I haven't combed through all of these to see if there is something that specifically addresses the question of premodern mlm/wlw solidarity, but since queer spaces have often been a lot more gender-mixed than people tend to think, there are certainly more than enough resources to get you clicking and searching.
