What is Queer about Queer History?

I will begin, however, by querying what is meant by the term “queer.” I have already suggested some of the questions raised by the simple description of “British queer history.” At the heart of these questions is a real ambivalence about the meanings of the word. Queer as a concept referring to sexuality is as fluid and ambiguous as the worlds it addresses. There are at least three overlapping meanings, which point in different empirical and theoretical directions.Footnote ⁴

“Queer” was the word commonly used in Britain, and to a lesser extent in other English-speaking countries, until the almost universal adoption of “gay” after the emergence of gay liberation in 1969, to describe both homosexuality as a condition and homosexual people themselves. It had a long lineage, used across class and cultures, though more generally among men. By the 1950s and 1960s to say “I am queer” was to tell of who and what you were, and how you positioned yourself in relation to the dominant, “normal” society. Queer was a generalized description of otherness and an emerging identity. It signaled the internalization of a particular set of meanings about homosexuality.Footnote ⁵ Like common alternative words such as “bent,” it signaled the general perception of same-sex desire as something eccentric, strange, abnormal, and perverse. Many of the gay liberation generation gladly abandoned use of the term after 1970 because it was seen as a signifier of oppression, and certainly none of the new generation of writers exploring homosexuality in the 1970s or 1980s would ever have described what they were doing as queer anything. That spoke to a different era. So the retrospective labeling of the historical work that was beginning in the 1970s as “queer” is at the very least anachronistic. Whether it clarifies continuities or obscures differences I shall try to address shortly.

The second definition of queer, referring to the rise of new forms of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender militancy in the late 1980s (especially in the United States but also elsewhere), signals a remarkable return of the repressed as part of new manifestations of grassroots activism. The immediate stimulus was anger among young activists at the ways in which the AIDS crisis had been neglected by conservative administrations in the United States and elsewhere, but beyond this was a yet more radical challenge to what was seen as the assimilationist and ethnicizing politics of the gay movement as it had consolidated in the 1980s. Queer activists sought “a more thorough resistance to regimes of the normal,” going beyond the limited forms of toleration that, they claimed, was the limit of the mainstream gay movement’s ambition.Footnote ⁶ The rhetoric reflected a deep sense of political and cultural alienation at the direction of gay politics, which led to a reappropriation of the stigmatizing term “queer” as a confrontational gesture. What was strikingly different from earlier uses of queer, however, was the reversal of the term’s meanings. It had shifted from being a negative, individualizing description to a signifier of collective agency and militancy, as represented by Queer Nation and Act Up! in the United States and Outrage! in Britain, both countries that had seen sharp moves toward conservative moral politics in the 1980s. The new queer politics was by intention at least a politics of the streets, but it also fed into a wider cultural politics, notably in a new queer cinema. Its implications for the practice of history were, perhaps, more ambiguous.

On the surface, at least, there are close affinities between this revived activism and the new theoretical directions indicated by the third definition of queer. Both radically questioned the fixity and arbitrariness of lesbian and gay identities and endorsed a politics of subversion, dissidence, and transgression. They pointed, however, in different directions. Queer theory was a new language in the academy rather than on the streets. The often-unacknowledged lineage of queer theory lies in social constructionism, in poststructuralist theory, in the deconstructionist writings of Jacques Derrida, and in the analyses of discourse and power of Michel Foucault.Footnote ⁷ But whereas the earlier works had been, as we shall see, largely historical and sociological in focus, queer theory was originally much more closely aligned to literary theory and philosophy, although its influence soon spread rapidly back, if sometimes uneasily, into sociology, as well as into critical theory, cultural studies, postcolonial and critical race studies, human geography, and even psychology and biology.

“Queer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant,” as David Halperin put it.Footnote ⁸ This gives the concept a clear critical stance but also a certain elusiveness and an ability to encompass a variety of positions. Its most characteristic concerns have been with the dynamics of the emergence and inscription of the homosexual/heterosexual binarism as evidenced in works of literature or theory. Whereas early theoretical approaches had focused, for example, on the evolution of the category of the homosexual, queer theory was concerned with exploring the power of the binary divide that gave rise to the category in the first place and with the embeddedness of heteronormative values and structures. This was a productive if challenging emphasis but one that had the odd effect of reasserting rather than deconstructing the binary divide, now seen as a (if not the) principal dynamic of social organization.Footnote ⁹ Queer theory worked to stress the arbitrary, contingent nature of identities and subject positions but also had to tackle the apparent resilience of the sexual and gender categories and subjectivities as performatively ritualized and lived. It also had the curious result, while querying identity, of affirming a new identity position—that of the transgressive queer, as much a fiction as any other category.

Although these meanings have a lineal link, they have different implications for the historical project. One of the temptations, for example, of a post-gay queer sensibility is that it can lead to nostalgia for the ambivalences and fluidities of the pre–gay-liberation queer world, as if the meanings of queer are the same in both instances.Footnote ¹⁰ But they are not. Whatever the possible pleasures of pre–gay liberation lesbian and gay life, it was a period shaped by harsh prejudice and repression. Whatever the continuing restrictions of post-gay life, in most Western countries they are accompanied by growing openness, toleration, and opportunity. Queer theorists often attack the teleological tendencies of early gay history, allegedly written as if there were an inevitable pathway from oppression to light, a sort of Whig interpretation of queer history. Here instead is a sort of inverted teleology that seeks escape from the neat categories of the present in a more indeterminate past where queans and respectable queers and young working-class lads cruised the same streets and public lavatories, and people were able to evade easy categorization. In the process there is a danger that the reality of power, domination, oppression—and resistance—gets lost.

Constructing the Gay Past—and Present

For many of the 1970s pioneers, the practice of history was more than simply a rediscovery of a lost past, however desirable and pleasurable that might be; it was also, critically, helping to remake our understanding of the sexual present, not so much by explaining it, as by questioning the assumptions it takes for granted. This fueled a recognition that lesbian and gay history was inescapably political; by challenging, through scholarly interventions, the structures of domination and exclusion that had shaped the moral and cultural climate, legal framework, and institutional practices for generations, by affirming the value of restricted, forbidden, or execrated activities, and in describing the emergence of new identities and ways of life, the new generation of lesbian and gay historians was not only remaking the history of sexuality—it was helping to challenge the historic present.Footnote ¹¹ This is not surprising, because many of the pioneers were closely associated with or had been strongly influenced by the burgeoning gay liberation movement, and from this perspective existing histories of homosexuality appeared sorely inadequate.

Until the early 1970s, popular homosexual history was overwhelmingly concerned with great queers of history, from Julius Caesar to Shakespeare, from Jesus to Oscar Wilde, taking in, by way of equal opportunity, Sappho and Queen Christina of Sweden along the way. The egregious work of A. L. Rowse was the locus classicus of such approaches.Footnote ¹² There was no sense of shifting meanings, historical context, complex identities, or of changing taboos or stigmas. At the core was an essentialist view of the homosexual, normally male, whose core characteristics barely shifted through time, culture, or place. Even more frustrating for those who wanted a new history of homosexuality was the dismissive tone of even the most sympathetic of contemporary liberals. The sexologist Havelock Ellis’s adopted son, Professor François Lafitte, a luminary of sexually progressive causes in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, described homosexuality as a “very minor” facet of social history.Footnote ¹³ On the contrary, as I argued at the time, attitudes toward homosexuality were “crucial indicators of wider notions of sexuality” and—as I could have added—of the general standards of civilization and humanity of our culture.Footnote ¹⁴

Key elements in the development of lesbian and gay understanding of the past are rooted in that founding moment. Each continues to pose major challenges to the process of historical research and analysis around sexuality and has shaped lesbian and gay/queer history.

The first is the originating commitment to a more comprehensive, more inclusive history both in terms of areas covered and in voices heard. It is no accident that two key texts in feminist and lesbian and gay history went by the title “Hidden from History.”Footnote ¹⁵ This was essentially a work of recovery, of listening to those condemned to the condescensions of posterity. It is not surprising that the new gender, sexual, and lesbian and gay histories were closely associated with the development of a “history from below,” identified in Britain in particular with the History Workshop movement, respecting those forgotten or ignored by conventional history.Footnote ¹⁶

In its origins, the new lesbian and gay history was a genuine grassroots history. In the United States, for example, the early documentary collections, Gay American History and Gay/Lesbian Almanac, which inspired many subsequent research projects, were collated by an independent scholar, Jonathan Ned Katz, rooted in the gay liberation movement.Footnote ¹⁷ Other pioneers were at the time very junior or marginal in academia, as I was. This was a history from the periphery and one that reflected all too well the status of the subject. For too long, Katz argued, lesbians and gays had been invisible in history, an “unknown people.” But through involvement in the new movement, “we experienced the present as history, ourselves as history makers. … We experienced homosexuality as historical.”Footnote ¹⁸ I encountered Gay American History only as I was completing Coming Out, but I recognized these sentiments and commitments as close to my own. They pointed to a practice of history against the grain, a democratic collective activity that was both scholarly and political. For those involved in the lesbian and gay communities in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, the recounting of an alternative gay history was about their identities and their story: an essential narrative that linked their contemporary struggles with a history of resistance and survival. The late Allan Bérubé, influenced by a reading of Katz’s Gay American History, saw gay community history as a form of activism. He pioneered a dynamic presentation of grassroots history through slide shows, which he toured across the United States.Footnote ¹⁹ Community history in this sense never took off in the same way in the United Kingdom, although oral histories collected, for example, by me, the Hall Carpenter Archive, and a variety of local gay oral history initiatives published in pamphlets and books expressed a similar spirit.Footnote ²⁰ There has been a recent resurgence of interest in this sort of community-oriented history, helped by the appearance of a number of books by a new generation of scholars, who have produced highly sophisticated analyses of how same-sex life was lived.Footnote ²¹ Doing history becomes an aspect of agency, of making our own history.

But writing about sexuality, as I have suggested, is more than simply about recovering the past. It is concerned with recreating the past afresh for the present and, above all, questioning the assumptions that were long taken for granted. Problematizing the hidden assumptions about the past was an important aspect of what became known as the “social construction of homosexuality,” which reshaped lesbian and gay history from the 1970s onward. The term “social constructionism” itself has been criticized for its harsh and mechanistic tone and even dismissed as unfashionable and out of date, as if fashion were a good ground for value or effectiveness.Footnote ²² But the theoretical approaches embodied in the concept have been immensely influential for the history of sexuality in general, and homosexuality in particular, and have been especially significant in thinking about the emergence and significance of sexual meanings, categories, and identities.Footnote ²³

Much of this theory originally derived from sociology. Since its earliest days, British lesbian and gay history was strongly interdisciplinary in its approach. Its earliest publications relied on a productive dialogue between history and radical sociology. The subsequent history of lesbian and gay/queer history has shown the value of other disciplinary approaches also in querying conventional interpretations, from anthropology to human geography, from critical literary studies to cultural studies and philosophy. It is now clear that research on sexuality is impossible without an openness to different analytical approaches, because sexuality is simultaneously a historical, social, cultural, spatial, economic, philosophical, psychological, biological, and moral phenomenon—and much more besides. It demands multidisciplinary skills to understand it. And so, it follows, does queer history.

The starting point of a more theoretically anchored lesbian and gay/queer history was Mary McIntosh’s brilliant essay, “The Homosexual Role,” first published in an American sociological journal, Social Problems in 1968 but circulated in photocopy almost like a samizdat bulletin among early theorists of gay liberation in London.Footnote ²⁴ McIntosh’s influence can be traced in a range of historical studies from the mid-1970s, for example, in Randolph Trumbach’s early essay on sodomites in eighteenth-century London and in my own work, and it has been frequently anthologized.Footnote ²⁵ What is important about the work is that it asked what was at the time a new question: not, as had been traditional from the late nineteenth century, what are the causes of homosexuality, but rather, why are we so concerned with seeing homosexuality as a condition that has causes? And in tackling that new question, McIntosh proposed an approach that opened up a new research agenda: through seeing homosexuals “as a social category, rather than a medical or psychiatric one.” Using the work of Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues, McIntosh makes a critical distinction between homosexual behavior and “the homosexual role.” Homosexual behavior is widespread, but distinctive roles have developed only in some cultures and do not necessarily encompass all forms of homosexual activity. The creation of a specialized, despised, and punished role or category of homosexual was a form of social control designed to minoritize the experience and protect and sustain social order and traditional sexual patterns. This spoke a language of social control, social roles, and deviancy that was already increasingly outdated by the early 1970s, but what it did very effectively was to open the way to historicizing categories and identities.

Another related but distinctive approach that shaped social constructionism came from the work of the social psychologists John Gagnon and William Simon.Footnote ²⁶ Drawing again on the work of Kinsey, with whom they had worked, and symbolic interactionist traditions in sociology, they argued that sexuality, far from being the essence of “the natural,” was subject to socio-cultural shaping to an extraordinary degree. The importance culture attributes to sexuality may therefore, they speculated, not be a result of its intrinsic significance: society may have had a need to invent its importance and power at some point in history. Sexual activities of all kinds, they suggested, were not the results of an inherent drive but of complex psychosocial processes of development, and it is only because they are embedded in sexual scripts that the physical acts themselves become important. These insights suggested the possibility of exploring the complex processes by which individuals acquired subjective meanings in interaction with significant others, and the effects of “sexual stigma” on these developmental processes.Footnote ²⁷

A third theoretical element now came into play, which was represented by the work of Michel Foucault, who has so far been the invisible elephant in the room. Foucault’s essay on The History of Sexuality is often seen, misleadingly, as the starting point of constructionist approaches, but these were already flourishing at a grassroots level, as I have tried to indicate. There can be no doubt of the subsequent impact of what Foucault planned as a brief prolegomena to a multivolume study. Like Gagnon and Simon, Foucault appeared to be arguing that “sexuality” was a “historical invention.”Footnote ²⁸ Like McIntosh, and others who had been influenced by her, he saw the emergence of the concept of a distinctive homosexual personage as a historical process, with the late nineteenth century as the key moment (although McIntosh had stressed the importance of the early eighteenth century). Like McIntosh, he suggested that psychologists and psychiatrists had not been merely objective scientists of desire but, on the contrary, in McIntosh’s formulation, diagnostic agents in the process of social labeling. But at the same time, his suggestion that people do not react passively to social categorization—“where there is power, there is resistance”—left open the question of how individuals respond to social definitions, how, in a concern that now became increasingly central to lesbian and gay history, sexual identities are formed in the intersection of social and subjective meanings, with meanings and discourses intricately intertwined with power relations.

The initial question that intrigued early social constructionists was, when did modern notions of homosexuality and “the homosexual” emerge? For many of the pioneers of lesbian and gay history, they were clearly not fixed or transhistorical.Footnote ²⁹ Were they pioneered in the early modern cities of the Italian Renaissance? Or Dutch cities and London during the seventeenth century? Were they relatively modern concepts that existed in the early eighteenth century? Were the last decades of the nineteenth century the crucible? Or was it as late as the 1940s or 1950s? Or did it never happen at all because the idea that the homosexual was a historical invention was belied by the continuities of gay life?Footnote ³⁰ The subsequent constructionist/essentialist controversy, which spasmodically flared up until expiring of exhaustion in the early 1990s, produced antinomies and polarities that now seem extreme. In practice, as I suggest below, periodization depends on the questions one is asking and what one is exploring. But what does remain absolutely central, I believe, is the critical insight derived from the social constructionist debate: that we can only understand same-sex activities in their specific historical and cultural contexts. The category of “the homosexual” is a construct of the human mind, a historical invention that has meaning only within very particular historical conditions. The controversies of the 1970s and 1980s were so heated not simply because of the passion for truth of ivory-tower academics but because the position one adopted had political implications in relation to contemporary lesbian and gay life. If identities and ways of life were seen as culturally specific, then it was possible to envisage how they had changed, and could change, as part of a wider reshaping of sexual norms and structures. However, if as the essentialist position suggested, male and female homosexuals were a fixed minority throughout time and cultures, constituted at the most extreme by gay genes or a gay brain, then what was required was a politics that claimed rights on the basis of minority status and did not necessarily question the sexual status quo. The political and cultural implications of this still linger. In the United States, in particular, the idea that “we were born this way,” with a continuous history, has been seen as a necessary basis for recognized minority status. The suggestion that lesbian and gay identities are “inventions” or “fictions,” however personally or culturally necessary, seems to undermine the basis of rights claims. The fact is, of course, that rights and justice can never effectively be based on claims derived from biology or an assumed human essence, but that has not lessened the passions unleashed by the debate.

As I see it now, and was perhaps dawningly aware of at the time, the task of the historical approach pioneered by constructionists was not to celebrate but to question, not to confirm a settled history but to problematize, not to systematize the past or order the present, but to unsettle it. By historicizing “the homosexual,” constructionists opened the way to challenging all fixed categories, not least heterosexuality, and to revealing, in all its richness and complexity, the diversity of the sexual past and of the present.Footnote ³¹

This immediately raised questions of structure and power. Early gay liberationist theory was not able to address the issue of the many forms of diversity, beginning with the interlocked but different histories of lesbians and gay men, and extending to a range of differences, especially around race and ethnicity. Subsequent critiques that highlighted the significance of this “intersectionality” pointed to the reality that identity is complex, that subjectivity is messy, and that personhood is inextricably bound up with relations of power.Footnote ³² But these insights could only be the starting point of analysis. The real challenge has been to grasp the diverse ways in which the messiness of identity operates in everyday practice.

Building on early constructionist arguments, what queer theory sought to do was to see hostility toward same-sex desire and unorthodox gender behavior as structured and systematic. So, for example, instead of being preoccupied with the historical emergence or invention of the homosexual, which was a leading preoccupation of early lesbian and gay history, queer theorists have been more concerned with the social organization of desire that necessitated such categories and subjectivities in the first place. All of them are artificial constraints on the potentially radical play of desire. The difficulty of this is that it then becomes all too easy to slip into concerns with structure rather than agency and often occludes the complexities of the lived realities of personal lives. The real challenge of the new history is to give due weight to the diversity within the queer world, the complex axes of power, and the variety of social worlds that have developed, organized around differences of gender, sexual tastes, class, race, age, and a variety of other factors.

The “Modern Homosexual” Revisited

So where does this leave the “modern homosexual,” the semimythical personage who emerged from early lesbian and gay history as the avatar of a changing sexual world? My own early work has been widely associated with the arguments for the emergence of new homosexual identities and ways of being from the late nineteenth century, so some reflections on what I was attempting to do seem appropriate at this point. I set myself the task in Coming Out of exploring the emergence of what I called a “homosexual consciousness” in the last decades of the nineteenth century.Footnote ³³ That was not very specifically explained, but it clearly refers to a sense of individuals being defined and defining themselves in terms of their sexualities. In particular, I explored the new ways in which same-sex desire was articulated and acted out from the late nineteenth century.

In the collective endeavor at Essex University that led to The Making of the Modern Homosexual, that argument went a little further. In the preface to the book, Ken Plummer suggested, reflecting our collective view, that “the age of a new homosexual would seem to be arriving … the evolution of the modern homosexual is a process that began a good way back—quite when is uncertain—and it is a process that is likely to continue some while into the future.”Footnote ³⁴ Behind this formulation was a complex view of the actual history and the significance of sexual subjectivities and identities. In a powerful final paragraph to his essay in the edited book, Plummer argues that the study of homosexuality is “haunted” by a paradox. Sexual categories—especially the homosexual category—“control, restrict and inhibit whilst simultaneously providing comfort, security and assuredness.”Footnote ³⁵ They limit yet seem inevitable. The identities that are shaped within categories are, as Judith Butler later put it, troubling and cause trouble, but they appear inescapable. They may be fictions, as I later suggested, but they are “necessary fictions.”Footnote ³⁶ At the same time, it has always been obvious that identities, however resonant, can never encompass fully the complexity of lived sexualities.

I tried to capture the paradoxical nature of the homosexual categorization in the formulation I used in Coming Out: that the developing homosexual consciousness was a product of a process of definition and self-definition that gathered force from the late nineteenth century. On the one hand were the forces of stigmatization, criminalization, and medicalization. On the other hand was an increasingly complex subcultural organization, especially for men, an incipient reform movement around people like Edward Carpenter and George Ives, the emergence of precarious identities built around homosexuality, and what I described, borrowing from Peter Wildeblood, a prominent victim of the notorious Montagu-Wildeblood trials of the early 1950s, as “a way of life.”Footnote ³⁷ The history of homosexuality in Britain over the past two hundred years at least is a history of regulation and resistance, social organization, and individual and collective agency. It is also a history of more amorphous, less defined, forms of homoerotic interactions that escape easy containment or even definition.

The arguments have advanced substantially over the past thirty years, and some of my earlier formulations have been inevitably challenged and critiqued.Footnote ³⁸ This is a necessary aspect of the historical endeavor, and queer history as an inherently critical history must always be a space of debate and contention. I have modified a number of my own judgments in the light of new evidence, although I would still broadly defend the main lines of my original arguments.Footnote ³⁹ I would like to look at four issues in particular.

The first of these relates to periodization. I strongly argued that the last decades of the nineteenth century were a key moment in the emergence of new ways of thinking of homosexuality. Writing in the 1970s, I could scarcely avoid seeing parallels between then and my now: political upheaval, cultural dissidence, a socialist revival, new theorizations of gender and sexuality, feminist stirrings, new legal enactments around homosexual activities, the development, even if sotto voce in the 1880s, of new articulations of same-sex desire, culminating in the disastrous downfall of Oscar Wilde and the threat of backlash in the 1890s. When I encountered the writings of Havelock Ellis, the books, pamphlets, and private papers of Edward Carpenter, the unpublished memoir and pamphlets of J. A. Symonds, the three million word diary of George Ives, the plays of Oscar Wilde, the ostensible memoir of Jack Saul, the expressions of passionate friendship between women in letters and books, Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and other sexological texts, and when I explored the medical journals, studied the treatment in the press of the great scandals, such as Cleveland Street, read the trial records and the Home Office files and the like, it was not difficult to conclude that something crucial was going on. It was not so epochal, perhaps, as the transformations of gay life following gay liberation that was the obvious model then in my mind, but it was not dissimilar in its impact on key people. Especially, we see the emergence in the late nineteenth century of a new language to describe same-sex relationships that was crucially to impact on twentieth-century concepts. It was not all in one direction. It was often confused. It was an elite language. There was a disjunction between old and new ways of articulating desire. But we are clearly entering a new world. This is not the same as saying that the modern homosexual sprang forth here fully armed, nor that other periods were unimportant for the articulation of same-sex desires. Historians have shown in great detail the significance of developments in the eighteenth century in articulating new concepts of same-sex subjectivity.Footnote ⁴⁰ But without what happened at the end of the nineteenth century, I would argue, the transformations of the late twentieth century would have lacked a vocabulary to challenge, bend, and remake.

The second issue concerns the law. Recent scholarship has explored the forms of criminalization of male homosexuality in the nineteenth century and has questioned the novelty claimed for the well-documented changes of the 1880s and 1890s.Footnote ⁴¹ There was a variety of conflicting understandings of male homosexuality, and the sodomite, in Cock’s graphic phrase, remained a “figure of equivocation,”Footnote ⁴² but unnatural offenses became increasingly subject to legal surveillance in the course of the nineteenth century. During the middle years of the century, it is now suggested, homosexual acts were more likely than ever before to be subject to criminal penalties. This had less to do with a deliberate assault by the state on homosexuality than with changes in the ways in which cases could be prosecuted. As it became easier for individuals to bring cases before the law, the increase in prosecutions seems to have been driven by contingent factors. Prosecutions were frequently brought by people of low social status, and only occasionally through the actions of reforming magistrates and local anti-vice initiatives.Footnote ⁴³

This new scholarship has illuminated the complexities of legal administration and produced significant new findings about the operation of the law on homosexuality. Does this mean that the emphasis earlier historians like myself have given to the 1861 Offences against the Person Act (which abolished the death penalty for buggery), the Labouchère Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which effectively outlawed all forms of male homosexuality, in private as well as in public, and subsequently the Vagrancy Act of 1898, which clamped down on importuning for immoral purposes, is exaggerated? I do not believe so. The new offense of “gross indecency” dreamed up by Labouchère was capable of more flexible interpretations than the preexisting offense of “indecent assault,” and as a lesser offense than sodomy was more likely to lead to conviction. Even more crucially, as Matt Cook has argued, these changes sent out “powerful messages about expectations of private conduct and public behavior” and provided a focus for new forms of homosexual consciousness and protest.Footnote ⁴⁴

Whatever the reasons for the amendment, whatever its similarities to earlier legal dispositions, it was clearly seen in the 1880s and 1890s and subsequently as a “blackmailer’s charter,” a decisive move against same-sex desire. What is believed to be true has truth effects. The Labouchère Amendment was seen as a sharp attack on homosexuality, and the Wilde debacle confirmed this not just for contemporaries but to subsequent generations, just as later in the 1950s the Montagu-Wildeblood trials were seen as part of a conscious, McCarthyite clampdown on male homosexuality, even though subsequent accounts have demonstrated that there was no such concerted effort.Footnote ⁴⁵ Historians may put such events into a calmer perspective, but what matters in everyday life is how they are seen on the ground, at the time, and the subjective effects they have. As historians, it is our duty to grasp the subjective moment as well as the objective reality—if such is possible. And from that point of view, Labouchère came to symbolize a turning point in the living of homosexuality, shadowing the lives of women not directly affected by a clause targeted at male persons as much as the lives of men. It demonstrated the personal, social, and cultural dangers of same-sex desire.

Third, there is the issue of medicalization: did medicine create the modern homosexual? This has been perhaps the most controversial issue of all. I never argued that in Coming Out, and nor really did Michel Foucault in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, although he is usually seen as the main articulator of such an argument. What I did argue, however, is that changes in the theorization of perversity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century did shape a new discursive positioning that had profound effects on the ways in which homosexuality was defined in the twentieth century.Footnote ⁴⁶ The medical profession was a key to the transmission of these new ideas. Already by the 1880s, the medical profession was widely seen by feminists and other critics as a new priesthood, and speaking about sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular was difficult and often personally risky outside a medical context, as Havelock Ellis (though he was trained as a doctor) and Edward Carpenter were to find.Footnote ⁴⁷ Even the pioneering sexologist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, we may recall, found it politic to render the explicit bits of his case studies in a decent Latin in case he found readers beyond the professional classes. As I suggested earlier, sexology offered a new language for thinking about homosexuality, and doctors were the obvious purveyors of a discourse that saw homosexuality as a sickness, even though the process was prolonged and uneven, with many doctors nicely confusing sin and sickness well into the 1950s.

The appropriation of this language by those it addressed was an even more haphazard and tortuous process. Many homosexuals did indeed see themselves as “crippled” by their homosexuality, and the medical model of homosexuality continued to have major effects into the 1970s in shaping self-perceptions, as well as in encouraging the endless search for “cures.” At the same time, it is now abundantly clear that the interaction between the scientists of sex and the individuals who came before them was more dialogical than was once believed. Sexologists learned from their clients and in interaction with them often modified their views.Footnote ⁴⁸

The final issue concerns the ways of life open to homosexual men and women. The modern homosexual did not emerge fully armed in the 1880s and 1890s, although this was a vital period, with London since at least the eighteenth century as a major crucible.Footnote ⁴⁹ The modern lesbian did not walk full of self-confidence out of the pages of Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness at the end of the 1920s, however defining the prosecution of the book proved to be.Footnote ⁵⁰ Neither did he or she fully emerge in the 1950s, or even in the 1970s. Even in the book that partly created the narrative, Plummer’s The Making of the Modern Homosexual, the modern homosexual proves to be an elusive personage. The various essays demonstrate not so much a destiny or fate as contingency. McIntosh queries her own thesis of a “homosexual role.” Plummer argues for the fluidity of categories. Annabel Faraday problematizes the male understandings of homosexuality as applied to lesbian experience. John Marshall details the partial embeddedness and embodiment of the homosexual category as late as the 1950s. Dave King sets out an agenda for research on what was not then called transgender. Gregg Blachford pioneers research on the relationships between homosexual subcultures and masculinization. There is a vast research agenda outlined here, which has unfolded in subsequent work.Footnote ⁵¹ My own contribution, “Discourse, Desire, and Sexual Deviance” runs the whole gamut of theory from Freud, Lacan, Althusser, and Hocquenghem to interactionism and discourse theory, with various empirical examples, largely from the late nineteenth century, to leaven the abstractions.Footnote ⁵² My aim was to suggest that we need theory and empirical research to understand sexuality and homosexuality. Too often, even today, we only get one or the other. But the best of contemporary history blends the two in highly productive ways, demonstrating the complexity and richness of British queer life.

Conclusion

I have talked about my own early research on lesbian and gay history at some length because, as someone who was there at the beginning, it seemed a useful way of tackling the question of the nature of British queer history. In comparing my own work with that of Matt Houlbrook, as representative of the “New British Queer History,” Chris Waters has suggested that we have “distinct projects”: the older one (mine) concerned with the salience and power of identities and their development over time, the newer (Houlbrook’s) concerned with the critique and dispersal of identities, which are seen as straitjackets on life in the present and limit us in interpreting the past.Footnote ⁵³ These are indeed definite contrasts, rooted in generational and political differences, no doubt. But to suggest a major epistemological divide between the gay history of the 1970s and 1980s and the queer history of the present seems to me misguided. The 1970s generation, as I have tried to illustrate through reflecting on my own work, was much less wedded to a teleology of inevitable progress than is often alleged, and moreover sought to illustrate the complexity and diversity of same-sex relationships as well as the clear development of self-conscious identities and ways of being. This is confirmed by the significant degree to which the new queer historians build on the pioneering studies of the 1970s and 1980s. This is true not only of empirical findings but also of the continuing significance of the major breakthrough achieved in the 1970s: the problematization and historicization of the category of the homosexual. Contemporary queer history would have been impossible without that major shift.

In Coming Out, I quoted Christopher Caudwell, a Marxist writer of the 1930s, who writes that “the natural human failing is to suppose nothing changes, that ideas are eternal, and what is denoted by a word is as changeless and invariant as the word. Wisdom consists chiefly in learning that vague gestures toward part of reality, gestures we call concepts, not only cannot describe the thing indicated, but cannot even point to the same thing.”Footnote ⁵⁴ That was the paradox of attempting a homosexual history that I grappled with in the 1970s; it remains the underlying paradox of queer history today. It remains a practice without a clear referent, as our constant struggle to name what we are studying reveals.

But is that all that can be said? I do not think so. Contemporary queer history, building on the pioneering work of earlier decades, may reject teleologies and the myth of the modern homosexual. It fragments rather than traces the evolution of identities. It refuses essentialist ruses of common roots and necessary destinies. It queers as well as queries imposed categories. We do it not so much to affirm the present as to question it. Yet I think that the practice of queer history can still find its roots in the hopes and ambitions articulated by Jonathan Katz in the 1970s. His dream was that his book might contribute to the establishment of a team of lesbian and gay researchers to work together to “discover and disseminate our forgotten history” to help “restore a people to its past; to itself.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Perhaps few would feel able to put it quite like that today, but I still think there is something important in the idea of stretching beyond our everyday contingencies, and of making gestures of recognition toward a gone-forever past. What makes queer history popular, I think, is not so much the idea of a continuous past of which we are part, but the acknowledgement that we are different, and yet can still find startling moments of identity that highlight our common human aspirations across the chasm of time.

In Coming Out, I discuss the relationship between Edward Carpenter, scion of the upper middle classes, socialist pioneer, supporter of feminism, and self-affirming intermediate sexer, and his working class lover George Merrill. In this cross-class relationship there was more than a hint of paternalism. There were class and educational differences and interests, a large age gap, and many of Carpenter’s intellectual friends found Merrill a trial. On the surface at least, this is a long way from contemporary ideals of egalitarian relationships. Yet there was deep and persistent affection and trust that is immediately and utterly recognizable. In 1897, George wrote to Edward, “It is impossible for me to love anyone as I love you and I always shall to my dying day.”Footnote ⁵⁶ The poignancy and passion of this echo for me across the years, sparking instant recognition—and does more than anything else to justify a queer history.