a queer history of britain’s sex life
- Episode 11- Transcript
Georgie Williams, voiceover: When we think of British history, what is it that we think of? We may be inclined to think of the monarchy, the military, or even of notable artists and writers who have emerged from the United Kingdom over many centuries. Our insights into the key events and social practices of the past are so often grounded in seminal literature of the period and the historical recordings of the lives of influential figures in positions of authority. But when history is recorded, who decides what is preserved and what is disregarded?
If you think of British history, you're likely not thinking about 18th Century gay clubs, pioneering sexological research, or kings so enamored with their male lovers that they gift them the entire county of Cornwall- but why shouldn’t you be? In the first of several episodes exploring LGBTQ+ culture in the United Kingdom, join us as we ask the question, what’s queer about the history of Great Britain’s sex life? Welcome to episode 11 of /Queer. You’re here with me, your host, Georgie Williams.
All those who record history record it from a standpoint. Way back in Episode 1 we talked a little bit about the concept of positionality and how all researchers or content producers are a lens through which ideas are perceived, analysed, and then shared with others. History is no different- when it comes to human bias, there can be no objectivity in how a historian records history- details are either knowingly omitted to generate a particular narrative or unknowingly overlooked, when an individual’s personal experiences and perspectives shape what they do or do not recognise as history which warrants recording.
Be it through intentional or unintentional omissions, British history has been subject to this same formulation of narrative- arguably for the sake of defining what Britishness is through the records we keep. The concept of tradition is a powerful one, shaping our ideas about social norms and feeding into our ideas about nationalism too- and British nationalism, as controversial a subject as it may be, is still a driving force which is often either embraced by more conservative types or vehemently rejected by progressives.
So what has been omitted for the sake of preserving an idea of Britishness and British values? Like other countries we have covered in this podcast there is undoubtedly a hidden LGBTQ+ history but the question is, how extensive is this history, and what ‘queer’ events and practices have been left out of the history books? For this episode, we are lucky enough to be consulting with an expert whose online project, Whores of Yore, has been providing insight into the language, literature, objects and social practices related to sex and sexuality to over 400,000 followers on Twitter alone. The brains behind this project, Dr Kate Lister, is a lecturer in literature and history at Leeds Trinity University. She is the author of A Curious History of Sex and the curator of Whores of Yore. She is blocked by Piers Morgan on Twitter & won the Sexual Freedom Award for Publicist of the Year in 2017. When I told Kate I wanted to produce an episode taking apart the heteronormative and cisnormative assumptions surrounding British history, she was more than happy to take me to school on the subject.
Georgie Williams, in interview: Fab so, the first question I wanted to ask was, what misconceptions are there about Britain's sexual history?
Kate Lister, in interview: Awh- [exhales] um-
Georgie Williams, in interview: -a big question.
Kate Lister, in interview: Do you know what? I think, I’m gonna launch straight in there with uh, the misconception is that we don’t have a sex history! [laughs] I think that’s something that the Brits, we’re still not quite comfortable with it and the idea that we’re very repressed, sexually repressed and that, that we haven’t enjoyed sex- we still struggle with it today, we still struggle to get past the kind of like, you know, smutty tittering and like, “ooh, Matron!” part of it [Georgie laughs]. But like, the idea that the Victorian’s didn’t have sex- that, I mean, if you kind of think about it logically, it doesn’t make any sense because of course people were having sex, ‘cause we’re here, of course, they’re having sex- I suppose what I mean is like they weren’t having kinky sex, fun sex, sex that they laughed about or sex that they enjoyed or- we kind of do think of it very much like, lie back, think of England, you know, due your duty [laughs] type of thing- the idea that people in the 19th Century were just as into spanking and watersports and just general filth is… yeah, for some reason that always surprises people, and it’s not only that we’re not good at recognising that in ourselves, but we tend to think of history as very serious, it’s a very serious subject with a lot of gravitas, and when we’re talking about- I’ve picked on the Victorians- we tend to think of like, you know like, these big heavyweights- Queen Victoria, Gladstone, Disraeli. We don’t tend to think that they all had sex lives and that everyone else in Victorian England was shagging like rabbits as well. So we approach the past and our own past with this sort of, I don’t know if we ever fully articulate it because it sounds ridiculous but people are constantly surprised by the fact that they were having filthy, kinky, naughty sex. Always have done, always.
Georgie Williams, in interview: [Laughs] Brilliant. Okay, so that leads on really well to my second question which is um, to what extent is there a queer element to the sexual history of the UK?
Kate Lister, in interview: Absolutely it’s been there I mean that’s, that’s another thing, usually it’s just your right-wing maniacs who like to say that gay people have just been invented, or they weren’t around, or that, I dunno, they’ve been produced in a factory somewhere by, by Stalin or something like- [Georgie laughs] there’s some kind of lefist conspiracy- [Kate laughs] nobody said that, I don’t think, that’s just, just me being silly, um but-
Georgie Williams, in interview: Shiny little communist gay-
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah that it’s a communist plot to overthrow the monarchy or something, I don’t know. But yeah, the idea that being gay or queer is a new thing- that, you hear that quite a lot, it’s complete nonsense. It’s, of course, same sex interests, relations, kind of playing around with gender fluidity have been with us from absolute day dot, as have sex because we’re human beings and that’s a central part of what we are, who we do- that’s our make up. What has changed, what is new and this is what makes studying the subject from a historical point of view tricky but interesting at the same time, is- the language that is used to describe it changes vastly. So if you had spoken to somebody from, I don’t know, the 18th Century, and you’d asked if they were genderfluid they would have just looked at you completely blankly. They would have just, just, “I do not know what the fuck you are talking about”. So it’s identifying how they would have understood themselves can be very very tricky. So, to say, does it have a queer history, you’d have to first of all define what you mean by that and then look backwards and that is, that’s what makes it so difficult to research is trying to identify how they understood that sexuality and gender themselves. But it’s absolutely, always been with us in one form or another. It’s difficult to tease out sometimes, it’s a hidden history, it’s buried, and of course, as soon as people start being persecuted for same sex relations or playing around with gender roles, it becomes even more secretive.
And uh, it’s very, and finding the records is tricky too because you don’t generally first hand accounts of this, like, I completely- you know Ann Lister’s diaries? Yeah, that has been described as the “Dead Sea Scrolls” of lesbian history and they absolutely are because to have it in her voice, in her own voice, just completely unmediated by anything is so rare, because most of the records that we have are of people who found themselves in court, or people who are facing some kind of persecution or you might find it ref- there’s a lot of lesbianism in pornography, always has been- but that’s not exactly a reliable, any more than PornHub is a reliable account of what plumbers do when they come over, do you know what I mean? [Georgie laughs] You’ve got to be careful with it. But it’s um, absolutely- queer history is just part of who we are, trying to deny it or just pretend it’s not there is just really, really silly and it does everyone a great disservice.
Georgie Williams, in interview: That was such a fantastic response [laughs], thank you. Um so, obviously my question is, my question is- do you have any notable stories or case studies regarding queer sexual culture from British history? But obviously, queer is, you mentioned it is subjective temporally, it’s subjective culturally, I think in this regard it’s just, British sexual history that isn’t… what we would believe it to be. Kind of uh… cisgender, heterosexual, for the sake of reproduction and nothing else.
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah, it’s like I said, it’s all throughout us. I mean, Hadrian, who built Hadrian’s wall, he is described as exclusively having sex with boys and men. Yep, he was, he was all about the gay- although he wouldn’t have understood it in those terms obviously because he was Roman and they had a very different- I suppose what’s really different now is that we understand sexuality as being almost like an identity like, you come out, don’t you? And you say “I am gay”, “I am bi”, “I am queer”, “I am- I am none of those things! I am ‘unlabelable’”, or whatever it is, but in Roman and Greek society it wasn’t a case of, you were gay, you just had sex with men. Do you know what I mean? It wasn’t an identity it was an action, it was something that they did. So he wouldn’t have understood it like that, there would have been no big coming out party for Hadrian, he just loved having sex with other men. Um, but it’s, kind of records like that you find all the way through. Ooh uh, yeah, it, it happens in royalty more than you’d like to think. So uh, Edward II, have you seen Braveheart?
Georgie Williams, in interview: Mhm, yeah.
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah, so you know the sort of weakling son and his mate that gets shoved out of a window? Yeah, so that’s not exactly based in history but that’s Edward II and he was definitely- although we don’t have definitive accounts of it, he was so close to his personal advisor who was called Piers Gaveston that he was known as being “the Second King”, and they were described as being married and as being like, intensely in love with each other. It got so bad that eventually, the nobles forced Edward to exile him, and then he had him back and all the rest of it- but eventually Gaveston was executed because they couldn’t be doing with this, yeah. Because he gained so much power- because Edward made him like, Duke of Cornwall and everything- because if you’re King, you know and you’ve got some good dick, yeah you would, wouldn’t ya? You’d just be like, have Cornwall-
Georgie Williams, in interview: [laughs] If I could I’d be like yeah, it’s yours.
Kate Lister, in interview: Right? If you’re getting laid properly, you were just- and you were the King you’d just-
Georgie Williams, in interview: You’d just give them Cornwall.
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah, have Cornwall. It’s been amazing. [laughs] so obviously that didn’t go down very well at all with the nobles… or his wife. Who was um, yeah, Isabella [of] France, her family were furious about it. At their wedding, at the wedding of Edward and Isabella, Gaveston turned up and like, flounced around in a big purple robe which doesn’t sound… but like, purple was reserved for royalty, so what he did was like, the faux pas of turning up to your ex’s or your current lover’s wedding and wearing a better wedding dress than the bride- that’s like the equivalent of what he did. Yeah, right? So then they got rid of Gaveston, then he found another “favourite”, is what they refer to it as, favourite- Hugh Despenser, who again, he hadn’t learned his lesson the first time, so again he was showering him with like incredible, well land, basically, the nobles got really pissed off and then eventually his wife dispossessed him and put him in jail. And the story about Edward is that he was killed eventually with red hot poker up the ass- that’s the, yeah, and the thing that i’ll say is interesting about that is there is no evidence really that that actually happened and most historians do not accept that that is true but what that is is kind of a leftover of the general general homophobia and the sort of slur on his character about that, that of course he would have been executed with a poker up the ass because he was gay and because da da da da da… yeah? So he was absolutely big, big gay royal, definitely. The moral of the story is, don’t give Cornwall to your lovers.
Georgie Williams, in interview: You know what, I’m gonna try my best to not do that.
Kate Lister, in interview: It’s just a bad idea, really.
Georgie Williams, in interview: It’s a, it’s a struggle, but I’m gonna take that advice to heart [laughs]
-PAUSE-
Georgie Williams, in interview: No but that is so insightful because I think, you know when people think of of, kind of British history as well, they do often think of the royals, and there is this, evidently this kind of sanitisation of the royals-
Kate Lister, in interview: Oh yeah.
Georgie Williams, in interview: -in every regard.
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah and uh, James I as well, so that was um, Mary Queen of Scots’ son, who eventually took the throne- he was at the very least bisexual. He had a lot of male lovers and when, I forget exactly which country hall, it’s in Northamptonshire and it was where he used to live, and when they renovated it and sort of did restorations back in 2004 they found a secret corridor that went from James’ bedroom to what would have been his um, his male lover’s. So it was-
Georgie Williams, in interview: [quietly] bloody hell…
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah, so he was definitely- I mean you know, he had kids and everything, he seemed to love his wife, but he was at the very least bisexual. And it was known enough for him to have had secret corridors built to access their bedrooms, so...
Georgie Williams in interview: Wow. Wow. And I think also, it’s interesting because I think there’s a question of class that comes into place as well, is- who could get away with this with the right kind of money and… you know, having the benefit of being able to give away Cornwall-
Kate Lister, in interview: Cornwall-
Georgie Williams, in interview: really helps, I think, whereas, perhaps it was easier to demonize people from a less affluent kind of background for these kinds of things.
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah, I mean it was um, so it was Henry VIII who passed the first laws against sodomy that make it a capital offence- and when they said sodomy, it doesn’t necessarily mean what we mean now, it kind of meant any sexual act that didn’t make a baby, basically. So they also threw in bestiality, but interestingly it’s always been um, male, same-sex sex that’s caused all the fuss- lesbianism really barely gets a look-in with this stuff, it’s always about the men-on-men that people get very upset about. So yeah, from then there were a number of noblemen who were executed for sodomy, but all throughout history statistically it has been the poorer people, people who can’t defend themselves, people who are easy targets, of course it has, yeah. It’s hard to take- we see that today with Weinstein, don’t we? It’s harder to take down people with power and money and influence even if they’re doing things that we socially have deemed is, is wrong- I mean Weinstein really was but you get my point is, that people are protected by money and power, always have been.
Georgie Williams, in interview: Yeah, absolutely- but it’s also I guess, the history of royals will have been recorded a little bit more than the common person as well, so maybe-
Kate Lister, in interview: Yeah, all those lives and stories lost that we don’t know about and like, there’s a whole culture that we just, it’s there, we know it’s there and we just can’t quite see it through the historical records because it was so secretive. In the 18th Century, there was a number of raids- weird thing about homophobia is it seems to come in like waves and lashes. Like there were kind of like spikes of like, really vicious oppression and then it kind of dissipates again to a sort of tolerance, almost. But in the 18th Century there was one of those, there was a real wave of repression, in London in particular and there were a number- they were called Molly houses, which were raided. Now a Molly house is not technically a male brothel but selling sex definitely went on there. It was more like a meeting house where they would go and have sex with one another, pretty much. So I don’t know, maybe like a gay club is probably the closest that you’re gonna get to that. So there were a number of raids on these clubs by the so-called ‘moral police’ of London, who sort of formed to try and well, instil everybody being really moral and a number of men were dragged out and arrested and executed as a result of that- but it’s their testimonies really that give us the insight into that history. And it’s really sad that it had to be mediated through persecution and their ultimate execution but, that’s the kind of records that we’ve got where you can start to see how gay subcultures or, you know, queer subcultures existed. And we know there’ll have been so much more but we just can’t get to it, you know?
Georgie Williams in interview: Yeah of course, of course and I think um, there is that pervasive kind of issue with the erasure of queer history um, and obviously we see it in so many other countries, especially colonised countries, but it is, it’s still a problem here as well. And I think often about what happened in Germany, during um, you know, Nazi-era Germany, with the book burnings at the Sex Research Institute- um, and obviously that was an extreme but that was very much, there was that kind of sanitisation of uh, kind of, European culture, that happened in the kind of 18th, 19th, 20th Century.
Kate Lister, in interview: and just before like, the Nazis took hold, that’s kind of like, another example of severe backlash and persecution that comes about periodically it’s because before that, in Berlin and in Paris in particular, there was an absolutely thriving gay and lesbian scene- like it wasn’t even particularly a subculture, it was very much culture- it was very much out there. People uh, laughed about Paris and referred to it as Lesbos Paris and you know there were very prominent clubs and and, there was a kind of clique of very very wealthy women who were unashamed in their lesbianism who settled in Paris. Dolly Wilde, for example, Oscar Wilde’s niece, who a lot of people haven’t heard about- she was the only one to carry his name forward. But she settled in Paris and lived very openly as a lesbian, and so did a whole host of other very- and it became almost chic, in Paris like you know, it was almost like “well these very influential women are being gay so I am gay now too.” [Kate laughs] it was like, almost like it became fashionable to do it, it sounds mad but it’s true- but in Britain we weren’t very tolerant like that. At the same time there were these really prominent lesbian clubs in Paris like Le Monocle was one of them, because they’d all go in wearing tuxedos and monocles, and other Paris salons that were really, they focused on lesbian literature but at the same time Britain, in 1921, we tried to introduce an amendment to the uh, criminal act that had been the one that persecuted Oscar Wilde to basically include women in that- to include females having sex with, with other females- sound like a right wing twit- females- women, women having sex with other women and it was actually, they debated it, you can see the whole debate- it’s recorded, on-online in the Houses of Commons. But they debated it at length and spoke about how horrendous it was that some women were having sex with other women- it was described as disgusting and polluting and all the rest of it. But they didn’t pass the act because they thought that other women might read it and it would “give them ideas”- which I love [Kate and Georgie laugh] that’s such a British thing, isn’t it? They were all just like “right so this definitely happens, it’s disgusting, but we can’t, we can’t make this a law because it will just encourage other women, they’ll just, they’ll get ideas.”
Georgie Williams, in interview: So… so when I was talking about the, the burning of the books at the Institut fur Sexualwissenschaft, you know, and implying that we’d all kind of lost these histories- what it seems to be is that actually, Britain was maybe not cool enough to have something to lose in that regard?
Kate Lister, in interview: Ah, I don’t want to do us down, but we weren’t a Paris, we weren’t a Berlin- because you know like, Berlin, before the Nazis took hold, there really was this vibrant cabaret world and researchers there were the absolute forefront of transgender research which was all burnt and lost and in Britain we just… we weren’t quite there. I mean we did, so Radclyffe Hall, she published the book The Well of Loneliness in 1928, I think- and it’s definitely a landmark book in lesbian literature and queer literature because it focuses- if you’ve not read it- it focuses on the story of a woman called Stephen who basically comes to terms with the fact that she is what is described in the book as a “sexual invert” which was terminology at the time meaning like gay or lesbian- it’s kind of clumsy but that- it was the first attempt to understand lesbianism and homosexuality in scientific terms instead of just... moral condemnation. So it’s a book that’s all about that and it’s not a raunchy pornographic book, my god, not at all there is so little sex... in it. But the fact alone that it was about a woman who very much identifies as masculine and wants to wear male clothes and have sex- be with other women, that was enough and there was a censorship trial about it, and there was a newspaper campaign against it saying that, I forget the name of the journalist, but he wrote this article about it saying that he would rather give a healthy boy or girl a vial of prussic acid to drink than give them this book. So it was, you know… on one hand, it was great because we had Radclyffe Hall writing it but, yeah, we clearly weren’t ready for that, were we.
Georgie Williams, in interview: Was this around the same period of Edward Carpenter’s writing ‘cause I know that he used the phrase “invert” in his writing which is-
Kate Lister, in interview: It comes from Havelock Ellis who was a pioneering sexologist, one of the first to… so like, the end of the 19th century, scientists start researching sexuality- as in like trying to really understand it- and you know, a lot of their conclusions have been obviously vastly revised today, but this idea of sexual inversion became really prominent at the time because it was the first one to say, people who feel like this aren’t freaks, it’s natural, it’s normal, lots of people feel like this. The… they called it ‘inversion’ because they conceived of it as being like it’s an inversion of… cisgender I suppose, but they didn’t use those words- so it’s clunky and it’s clumsy by today’s terms but it was genuinely the first attempt to understand it and once that kind of research got going as well, that definitely fed into sort of a vibrant community and culture you know, in Berlin and Paris- and maybe a bit in Britain as well because we had the Bloomsbury set, you know, your Virginia Woolf and your… people like that and they were all… gay for each other, definitely. [Kate laughs] that’s not written in a journal article anywhere, not in those terms but if you wanna explore their sexuality and their relationships it’s very much all kinda genderfluid and yeah, free for all. So I think we did have our own little… vibe, we just weren’t… no we weren’t as cool as Paris, I can’t pretend we were, no. In fact lots of really prominent lesbian and gay people left Britain to go to Paris and hang out there cause it was just definitely much cooler. [Georgie laughs]
Georgie Williams, in interview: Well that actually, it brings up another question for me actually where we were talking about ‘inverts’. Do you think that to a certain extent there are misconceptions about the kind of cultural perceptions of what we would now call queerness, looking back at some of the writing around it because people presume that the language is being used in a derogatory… tone? That actually, these early… don’t even want to describe it as atavistic but kind of, of, those first attempts to articulate queerness- because it’s language we wouldn’t use now, we may read that and automatically presume that it was meant with any kind of vitriol or, or disapproval.
Kate Lister, in interview: I mean, people did get hold of it and use it with, with vitriol. The obscenity trial for Well of Loneliness, if you look that up you’ll see it being used like that. But I think that no, it wasn’t intended to be used like that, at all- and the reason that Radclyffe Hall wrote that book and she talks about inversion and there’s a foreword by Havelock Ellis is because that was so important to her, was finding that book for the first time and reading his research was like, this… I mean imagine that, imagine like, that you are so consumed with this that you don’t feel akin to, to the gender that you’re being foisted upon, that you don’t fancy the right sex and that this is absolutely such a struggle within you and you live in a world where it doesn’t really have the language to articulate that or facilitate that- and then suddenly you find a book by a guy called Havelock Ellis who explains you and your feelings and there are other people like you and… it calls them ‘inverts’. So you know it… wouldn’t have been offensive at the time, it would have been an absolute revelation. A revelation at the time you know and it offered so much, it was so important to so many people and threatening to other people as well because it seemed to offer some kind of scientific legitimacy where it’s far easier to just say “these people are evil”, you know? So it’s… no, it was not derogatory at all, in fact it was really… for the time, enlightening? Pioneering? Important? And yeah obviously, and we can look back and say the idea you know, that you are inverted somehow is clumsy and shit because it suggests a state of not being inverted, that you’ve got something wrong, doesn’t it? Like you know, you were normal and now you’re not, that’s kind of what it suggests. But at the time, that was just… it was revelatory, it was amazing, it was so important in queer history to have that language.
Georgie Williams, in interview: Yeah, and I think also there’s kind of… [sighs] for all of my perspectives on Butler, there is… when she wrote about these Althusserian ideas of interpolation and being hailed by somebody, you know, walking down the street and having a police officer say “you there”, and you can only defend yourself if you identify yourself as the ‘you’ being hailed, right? That you can only… as a queer person, unless you have the language to identify yourself and articulate your experience, how do you fight for your visibility or representation, your protection through legislation, um-
Kate Lister, in interview: How do you even understand yourself? If you don’t even have the vocabulary to be able to understand… yourself or that language, it’s so… yeah, like how do you do that how do you… which is why it’s so- the tricky thing about, you know, ‘queer history’ is exactly that, is it’s very… you can find examples all throughout history of people that today, right now if they existed, we would almost certainly go “well that’s a transgender man” or “that’s a transgender woman”, but at the time, they did not have access to that language. They didn’t. And they didn’t have access to the concept either, that you could be transgender- they didn’t. They understood themselves, they understood that they identified with another gender, but that’s what makes it so tricky and it always causes contention, like if you call somebody from history a trans woman, there will be somebody who says that they were a butch lesbian and the person isn’t there anymore to articulate it for themselves, and more than that at the time they didn’t have the language to do it so… trying to tease out what they thought of themselves, how they understood and conceptualised their own sexuality is so... tricky because like, are we putting modern labels on it- what would they be today? It’s very, very tricky to be able to do that. Which is why when Havelock Ellis starts writing this stuff and giving names, it’s so… it’s a revelation, absolutely, because people can start to understand themselves in a different way.
Georgie Williams, in interview: That… leads on so perfectly to my last question, actually-
Kate Lister, in interview: Let’s do it.
Georgie Williams, in interview: [Georgie laughs] That… yeah, perfectly… how do you think the UK's sexual history (or lack of knowledge of it) shapes our contemporary approach to sex and sexuality as a society?
Kate Lister, in interview: [exhales] I think that the really powerful thing about history is um, is when it’s used for context and it’s used for continuity is, it’s not dead, it’s not- the people you’re talking about might be long gone but the narrative and the legacy is absolutely alive and vibrant and really, really important today because it frames context it frames debate. It tells us why we got to where we are- and when you look back through history and you realise at different points, attitudes to sexuality and gender have been vastly different to how we conceptualise it today. For example [coughs] in Native American culture, the idea of a third spirit person with, with their gender- there’s many different names for this according to the various tribes. But they had an understanding of gender… very very differently to anything in the West, and that they conceived of there was a third gender when somebody didn’t align with the gender they were assigned with at birth and they were absolutely fine with that. There were some tribes as well, I can’t remember the name of them but they didn’t even give the child a gender until they were about four or five and they decided. So when you look at things- and I’m not saying that you know, this is brilliant and we should all do that, but when you look at that, you have to realise that our attitudes to gender are not as true and fixed as we might think that they are, because other people have experienced it and done it very, very differently all throughout history.
Georgie Williams, voiceover: For clarity, what Kate is talking about in Native American culture is Two Spirit individuals. A rather imperfect equivalent in British culture would be a bigender, bisexual individual- only Native Americans can identify as Two Spirit, and traditionally some of these Native American gender identities were determined in-part by occupational skill instead of biology.
Georgie Williams, in interview: Yeah, yeah and I think, I think to a certain extent, British culture- as somebody who’s grown up here- there’s this problem with us having this idea of us being the default, and I think to a certain extent it comes into our kind of colonial history, that we are representative of the norm, that there is something objective and true about British values, um… which is absolutely not the case. Our conceptions of gender and sexuality are also subjective and biased and based on very arbitrary notions of what they should be. I often talk about a community in Papua New Guinea who… their gender stereotypes were that men were very lively and energetic and women were very sluggish and their bodies were naturally heavy and that’s obviously why these women always sat on the floor, right? And for better or worse- I want to say worse- uh, Christian Missionaries contacted this community um [Georgie laughs] and they introduced them to gospel music, and within a few generations those stereotypes of men being the energetic ones and women being heavy and sluggish were lost because women were encouraged to engage with gospel music, right? And I, I often have to say to people, our ideas of what gender is in the UK are just as subjective and, and subject to change and outside influences can absolutely change how we perceive gender identity and how it’s presented and that doesn’t mean that it’s not valid, it means that it’s supposed to be something that’s non-static and adapt and should be inclusive as well. Just because gender is a social construct doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, it just means that we get to construct it, you know- and that’s not always an active thing, that can also be unconscious, that’s, that’s engagement with other communities, that’s a political climate it’s… it’s an amalgamation of all of these other factors- that there is nothing true and right and correct or even exemplary about how British people navigate gender and sexuality.
Kate Lister, in interview: No, no. It becomes our truth and we understand it as a truth, but it’s not. It is the product of a lot of social conditioning, it’s the product of what we think of as history, as well. You know it’s difficult to sort of conceive of- I know a lot of people struggle with it, the idea of, you know, genderqueer, transgender people- like they’re new, somehow. And I know that that, you know, you sort of encounter that and hear about it but again it’s because the history we’ve got just, just hasn’t included them. They were there, they’ve always been there, but when you’ve got a history syllabus- where the history that you’re taught is primarily that of heterosexual, wealthy white people, is you do tend to exclude- tend to- you do exclude minority people, marginalised people. And so we can fall into the trap of thinking that they were never there at all, which isn’t... true. And just because the only ones we’re looking at are Queen Victoria and all the rest of them, it’s not a very good representation of transgender women throughout history, is it? You know-
Georgie Williams, in interview: As far as we know, as far as we know [laughs]
Kate Lister, in interview: As far as we know, as far as we know. I wouldn’t be surprised though, she was a kinky minky, was Vicky. [Georgie and Kate laugh] it’s true! Um, but yeah, it’s all this recovered history that we’ve got to get back to and like, stop projecting our own values onto history and stop expecting it to conform to the way that we think that it was... not at all. So it’s there, it’s always been with us and we’ve now got to do, we’ve now got to diligently unearth it and piece it back together, instead of just ignoring it ‘cause it’s mildly inconvenient.
Georgie Williams, in interview: Well I’m very bloody glad you’re doing that, Kate. Um, thank you so very much for this,
Kate Lister, in interview: It was my pleasure, thank you.
Georgie Williams, in interview: Delightful-
As an amendment to this interview I would like to add that since recording this I have learned that Judith Butler now uses they/them pronouns and is nonbinary, so my apologies for the use of she/her pronouns in the original interview.
Having grown up in the United Kingdom and traversed the mainstream education system in this country- I knew next to nothing of what Kate shared in our conversation. I can't help but wonder how it would have felt, as a newly out adolescent, to have been learning about queer historical figures during my history classes. I wonder how it would have shaped my teacher's approaches to supporting queer students, too.
All those who record history record it from a standpoint. That is undeniable- but where there are gaps, omissions, stories overlooked and deemed unfit for the chosen narrative- there will always be those looking to preserve and uphold those histories. We all have a standpoint- and for some of us, our particular standpoint generates our interest in seeing all histories and experiences preserved, particularly those which have been stigmatized in the past. There is comfort, there is reassurance, there is even hope to be found in being given irrefutable proof of the truth- that we existed. We aren't the first to be carving this path- many of us are doing this in memory and recognition of our queer forebears. We existed then. We exist now. We in turn become the histories we have worked to see recognised. And it is with the work of historians like Dr Lister that we can take comfort in the likelihood that our customs, struggles and identities will become indelible marks in time. There is something truly queer about British culture- and I cannot wait to explore this with you all in our episodes to come.
This episode of the /Queer Podcast was edited by Sam Clay and scripted and produced by me, Georgie Williams. A very special thanks to our funniest interviewee so far, Dr Kate Lister from the Whores of Yore Project and Leeds Trinity University for her contributions to this episode.
As of this episode, it has been a whole year since the /Queer podcast officially launched! As a humble academic who just wanted to share these stories with whoever would listen, I could never have imagined how big this project would get and I am over the moon to have experienced the love, support and encouragement so many of you have offered over the last twelve months. As an angry gay activist, I’m also pretty chuffed. I’d also like to take a moment to especially thank our Patreon subscribers who have supported this project over the past year. If you’re not a Patron and would like to support reparative queer activism through the medium of accessible educational resources, you can visit the /Queer Patreon at patreon.com/slashqueer. That’s S-L-A-S-H Queer. The link is also available on our Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages. Additionally, we are still selling our first set of /Queer merch, with the /Queer logo available in various pride flag colours across t shirts, mugs, face masks and more. You can check us out at slashqueer.threadless.com and, once again, if you fancy throwing us a few pennies as a one off donation you can donate to the /Queer research project at ko-fi.com/slashqueer- that’s ko hyphen fi.com, forward slash, slashqueer. Your likes, subscriptions and shares also make a world of difference. For those who have been with us for a year, thank you. For those who have just joined us, we’re so excited to have you on board for all the episodes yet to come.
This episode was recorded on location in London, the United Kingdom. Music in this episode was composed by Kevin MacLeod. If you enjoyed this episode or have any feedback, please get in touch on Instagram or Twitter at @SlashQueer or email us at slashqueer@outlook.com. As always in the meantime stay kind, stay radical and stay queer.