Interview by Justin Bengry Yorick Smaal’s recent book Sex, Soldiers and the South Pacific, 1939-45: Queer Identities in Australia in the Second World War (Palgrave, 2015) looks to the dynamics of wartime to consider how sex and sexuality was affected by global conflict. Massive influxes of American servicemen transformed sexual communities, and […]
Tag: queer history
‘Every time I see a cock I go funny’: what regional studies bring to histories of sexuality
When sexual desire was not attached to notions of sexual identity.
Queer Terminology: LGBTQ Histories and the Semantics of Sexuality
Claire Hayward In Room 53 of the British Museum in London sits a small silver goblet that dates from about 15 BC – AD 15. The Warren Cup depicts ‘two male couples making love’. The descriptive panel underneath the cup tells us that one side shows an erastes and an […]
“Sodomy is not Adultery”: The Clinton Sex Scandal as Queer History
Alison Lefkovitz In 1998, the ABC newsmagazine Nightline fretted that the Clinton scandal with Monica Lewinsky would “come down to the question of whether oral sex does or does not constitute adultery.” President Bill Clinton, supposedly, had told Lewinsky that oral sex could not be adultery. He had told Gennifer […]
Scottish Storytelling Sessions: Queer History, Community and Archives
Oral history faces the challenge of bridging the divide between the observer and the observed.
Truly Ugandan: Martyrs, Pope Francis, and the Question of Sexuality
Francis obscured both the colonial Christian and queer sexual contexts of the executions.
“What can I do to be normal?” Queer Female Desire in Letters to Dr. Alfred Kinsey
Amanda Littauer In 1949, a year after the publication of Dr. Alfred Kinsey’s notorious Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, a young African American woman from the Bronx sent Kinsey a private letter lamenting the “queer control” she seemed to have over other women. These women, she explained, would literally […]
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Syphilis Onstage: Eugène Brieux’s Damaged Goods
The Catholic Church and Child Sexual Abuse in Twentieth-Century Ireland
Reverend Anna Garlin Spencer and the Rise of “Family Life” in Early Sex Education