History

A Little Ancient History

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

BBC4 is currently running a short series of archaeology programmes called Digging for Britain. Fronted by Alice Roberts, it provides updates on a range of ongoing investigations around the country. I’ve just caught up with the West Country episode, and it contains something that may be of interest to fantasy writers.

The dig in question is at Ipplepen, a small village near Newton Abbot in Devon. It has been interesting for some time because it uncovered the remains of a Roman road. Previously it had been thought that Roman settlement ended at Isca Dumnoniorum (Exeter), which was a large town and home to Legio Secunda Augusta, one of the four legions making up the British garrison. Discovering that a road had been built south-west from that town was a big surprise. No one yet knows where it goes, though my guess is that it connected to a port somewhere in Torbay.

There is definitely a large settlement at Ipplepen, and fragments of roof tile have been found suggesting Roman-style buildings as well as the pottery, jewelry and other evidence of Roman culture. However, the thing that it really exciting the archaeologists is the cemetery.

The Romans didn’t put cemeteries inside towns. Instead they buried people outside, often along the side of roads. Last year a number of graves were excavated, and when Danielle Wootton of Exeter University turned up to talk about the dig on Digging for Britain she had just received the first radio carbon dating results. One of the graves was dated at between 655 and 765 CE. For reference, the official end date of the Roman occupation of Britain is generally accepted to be 410 CE. So what we have here is a Romano-British settlement that was still flourishing some 250 to 350 years after the legions departed.

Let me repeat that. South-West of England, large Romano-British settlement, still flourishing 250-350 years after the legions departed. Obviously there is much archaeology yet to be done, and no one is officially speculating about anything. Fortunately for us, fiction is not required to abide by academic rules.

And yes, the dates for that burial do overlap with the life of Hild of Whitby.

LGBT History Conference – Day 2

~ Cheryl

Something has gone very badly wrong with the UKIP weather forecast. It was raining in Manchester when I arrived on Friday. It is forecast to rain tomorrow. But for the entire weekend, when the gays have been celebrating their history in the city, it has not rained once. In fact today we had bright blue skies for a while. This is so unlike Manchester, especially in February. It must be am omen of something.

Of course I was inside for most of the day. The conference began with Stuart Milk, the nephew of the famous San Francisco politician, telling us what is actually going on with marriage equality in the USA at the moment. I had some idea, but I didn’t know quite how crazy things had got in Alabama. That will be… interesting.

Then we were into panels, and my paper. Thankfully I was not first up. That honor went to Alejandro Melero, a film studies scholar from Spain who talked to us about how censorship worked under the Franco regime. Franco was a bit nuts about teh gays. In fact one of his first acts after coming to power was to mandate that all army barracks should have three beds to a room rather than two, so that soldiers could not pair off. I guess they just had orgies instead.

Anyway, Alejandro showed that while an awful lot that was gay (and quite a bit that wasn’t but triggered the lurid imaginations of the priests) was censored, a fair amount was not. What interested me was that there were some very recognizable tropes. Alejandro told us about a gay cowboys film (complete with a poster of a man kissing a pistol), a lesbian vampires film, and even a transvestite killer film. Truly, there is nothing new in Hollywood.

Next up we had actual Latin grammar neepery as Kit Heyam took us through possible different translations of medieval accounts of the gayness or otherwise of King Edward II. Much of this hinged on how one understand the word “sodomy”, which we now take to mean male-male sex, but which in those times could mean any non-procreative sex. It is interesting how modern day scholars tend to mis-translate the Latin to make it more explicit that Edward had sex with Hugh Despenser.

Then there was me, and apparently I did not disgrace myself, which was a big relief. I have given presentations as literary conferences before now, but this was my first gig as an historian.

After a coffee break we had a presentation on trans history from Professor Stephen Whittle, OBE, one of the people responsible for getting the Gender Recognition Act before Parliament. To my relief, he made pretty much the same points that I did, though he used very different examples. He did bring up an Inuit tribe that recognizes nine genders. That I need to follow up on. Also we both had very different examples of how RadFems try to claim Billy Tipton as a lesbian, something I am sure would horrify him if he were still alive.

After lunch we had a group workshop about the use of archives, in which I unexpectedly found I had a lot to say because of the work that Out Stories Bristol has been doing with Bristol Records Office.

Then there was the final set of papers, which I think was my favorite session of the lot as it ranged all over Europe. It started with a group of Norwegians talking about a national archive of LGBT history that they are setting up. I sent them away with a request for evidence of gender variance in pre-Christian Scandinavia. I figured that if Loki could get away with it, and if Valhalla was full of women warriors, there must have been something interesting going on. Swedish and Danish readers, do feel free to chip in. (Icelanders, hold off for a moment, I have more for you.)

Next Jennifer Ingleheart talked to us about Romosexuality. Those Romans got up to all sorts of things, and had a particular obsession with giant penises. I rather wished that Tansy had been there. Jennifer has promised to dig out some stuff about Elagabalus for me, for which I cam very grateful.

Finally Marianna Muravyeva talked to us about LGBT history in Russia, of which there is, of course, rather a lot, even if Mr.Putin doesn’t want to admit it.

A bunch of us then went off to the pub and I had a long conversation with Marianna, mainly about fiction, but we did also get onto the subject of witchcraft. In the West we are used to it being women who are accused of this crime. In Russia, however, it was mainly men. Russian villages tended to have both a male and female witch. The woman was responsible for the health of the humans of the village, but the man was responsible for the health of the animals. And if there were problems with the horses or cows in the village then the authorities would prosecute the local male witch. Female witches were only prosecuted if someone died as a result of their treatment.

It turns out that there are very few countries in the world where the vast majority of witchcraft prosecutions are of men rather than women. Russia is one; Iceland is another. Why, Icelandic friends? What made you so different from the rest of Scandinavia?

I had a great time over the weekend, and am already wondering what I can do for a paper at next year’s conference. My thanks to Sue Saunders, Jeff Evans and the rest of the team for a really enjoyable and thought-provoking event.

I’ll get my paper up on Academia.edu once I have got home.

LGBT History Conference – Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

I’m just back from day 1 of the academic conference on LGBT History. It has a two-stream program so I won’t have seen everything, but here’s a quick report on what I did see.

The first two papers were ostensibly both about crime, but were actually very different. The first was from Robert Beachy, an American scholar who is an expert on LGBT life in early 20th Century Germany. His talk was all about how gay subcultures survived, or failed to, under Nazi rule. While clearly the Nazis were a disaster for queer people in general, especially after the death of Ernst Rohm, there were exceptions. Here are a few points of interest:

  • While thousands of gay men were sent to death camps, Gestapo records suggest that many were given second and even third chances to reform before receiving such a sentence;
  • A lesbian group continued to hold public meetings in Berlin up until 1940;
  • Cross-dressers could escape punishment if they could convince the authorities that they were not gay (and of interest here was that Magnus Hirschfeld, when his Institute of Sexology was operational, persuaded the Berlin police to issue special certificates to his patients giving them the right to cross-dress in public, presumably on the understanding that they were not homosexual).

The other paper, by Janet Weston, looked at medicalization of certain offenses by UK courts. This was essentially an extension of the Freudian idea that certain types of criminal behavior were the result of suppressed sexual urges, and the associated idea that certain types of sexual behavior were evidence of criminal insanity. This included things like Arson being classified as a sex crime, because it was assumed that arsonists gained sexual pleasure from their activities. What interested me most was that certain sex crimes were not regarded as medical in origin. Rapists, for example, were not deemed insane. The primary difference appeared to be that if your sexual activity was heterosexual and likely to result in procreation then it was not insane, but otherwise it was.

Next up was a general session featuring a presentation by Peter Scott-Presland who is writing a history of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality. The first volume has just been published. Peter is more of a journalist than an historian and his presentation was spiced up with entertaining anecdotes such as letters to the papers from “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells”. I bought the book on the basis of his presentation.

After lunch I heard two papers (from Helen Smith and Jeff Evans) about gay culture in the North of England. There seems to be a distinct cultural difference between a more working class attitude to gay life in the North compared to a more middle class narrative in the South. It is interesting that even fairly recently Northern men engaging in male-male sex often don’t regard themselves as being “gay”, because being gay is some sort of soft, pretentious lifestyle, presumably only indulged in by Southerners. This attitude may also be because these men are not exclusively gay, but merely indulge in gay sex for excitement or when women are unavailable. Not that they would identify as bisexual either.

One audience question after that session notes that interest in gay sex appears to have decreased markedly since the gay liberation movement became prominent, apparently because people began to identify having male-male sex with being “gay”, which was not something they wanted to be associated with.

Finally we had a workshop with American scholar, Charles Upchurch, on the use of digitized archives of newspapers. Here we learned that journalists have endless euphemisms for gay sex. Searching for “sodomy” or “buggery” will get you hardly any hits, but a search for “indecent assault”, while it may turn up heterosexual crimes, will also find you lots of prosecutions for gay sex.

There’s a dinner tonight, at which we have been threatened with traditional Northern food. I am steeling myself for having to eat mushy peas. My paper is tomorrow morning, and will be followed by a general session on trans history featuring Stephen Whittle.

I Do Trans History, With Penguins

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Talk in progress - photo by Mary Milton
I spent yesterday afternoon in Bristol giving a talk on the history of trans people at the M-Shed on behalf of Out Stories Bristol. As you can see from the photo (for which thanks to Mary Milton), I actually had an audience. In fact I’m told that we sold out on Eventbrite, which was quite encouraging. Also the feedback was very pleasing.

The talk begins with the following quote which comes from the notorious appearance of the leading TERF academic, Sheila Jeffreys, on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour program last year.

“… the phenomenon of transgenderism which is a social construct of the 2nd half of the 20th century and which has become particularly common in the last couple of decades…”

The point of the talk was to prove Jeffreys not just wrong, but spectacularly and hilariously wrong. In pursuit of this objective I took a lightning tour through 2000 years of history and all five continents, producing evidence of the existence of, and social acceptance of, trans people in many different cultures and at many different times in history. The only thing different about the 20th century was a step change in the medical technology available, and a start on reversing the drastic curtailment of trans rights that took place in Western Europe in the past few hundred years. Hopefully my audience went away understanding that the negative view we have of trans people in the UK, and throughout Western “civilization”, is the exception rather than the rule.

I had a lot of fun researching the talk. I wasn’t able to find evidence of trans people in every country in the world, but I did manage quite a lot. I was relieved to finally track down something in the Inca empire, because Latin America was looking a bit thin. It turned out that English translations of a key Spanish source on Inca religion had omitted the sentence that makes it plain that members of a particular priesthood were trans people. I was also very pleased to find evidence of trans people amongst the indigenous people of Australia. Given how long they were isolated from the rest of mankind, and the slow pace of change in such cultures, it seems reasonable to assume that trans people have been with us for over 50,000 years.

I did draw a blank in a few places. There is evidence of trans people in many African countries, but Europeans seem to have done a particularly efficient job of destroying their local cultures. Things like the rinderpest epidemic of the 1890s resulted in a mindboggling death toll. (And by the way, America, measles is a direct evolutionary descendent of rinderpest.) I had no luck with the Aztecs either, but they did have a god of gay men so I forgave them.

The biggest problem was Antarctica, because there are no native people. However, I did manage to find evidence of the world’s first known trans male penguin, which is a pretty awesome thing.

I’ll be giving a repeat of the talk at Bath University on the 26th, and hopefully I’ll get to do it in some other places in the future. I think I have a recording, but I’m a bit hesitant about making it public because I had to skim so quickly over so many different cultures. I’d prefer to do some more in-depth posts on particular aspects of the talk.

February Schedule

~ Cheryl

It is LGBT History Month, so I’ll be rather busy. On the off-chance that some of you might be daft enough to want to attend one of my talks, of just catch up, here’s where you can find me.

Saturday 7th (14:30) – “A Potted History of Gender Variance” at the M-Shed (in which I intend to show that the much-vaunted gender binary is something of an aberration in human history).

Saturday 14th & Sunday 15th – I’ll be at the National LGBT History Festival in Manchester. On Sunday at around 11:00 I’ll be giving a paper: “Their-stories: Interrogating gender identities from the past”.

Monday 16th (18:00) – The Bristol University Student’s Union Festival of Liberation is hosting “How do we make the Women’s Movement Intersectional?” I’ll be there if I get back from Manchester in time, and maybe dropping in on BristolCon Fringe (John Hawkes-Reed & Stark Holborn) if I can get away in time.

Thursday 19th (18:00) – I’m hosting a book launch at Foyles, Cabot Circus. This is for The Ship by Antonia Honeywell, which is proving a very interesting read.

Wednesday 25th (18:00) – Back at the University, the Festival of Liberation asks, “What Next for the LGBT+ Movement Following the Passing of the Same Sex Marriage Act?”. I’m on the panel, as if Daryn Carter of Bristol Pride.

Thursday 26th (19:15) – I’m reprising the history of gender variance talk at Bath University.

Friday 27th – I’m giving a lunchtime trans awareness talk at a Bristol hospital. Then in the evening I’ll be at Josie McLellan’s “Glad to be Gay Behind the Wall” – 19:00 start at Roll for the Soul.

Saturday 28th (14;00) – Out Stories Bristol will be hosting “Opening Our New Chapter”, a launch event from some new local LGBT history projects at Hamilton House in the People’s Republic of Stokes Croft.

History – It’s (Mostly) Fun

~ Cheryl

I used to really enjoy history as a kid, and I might well have taken it up as a career had my parents not so badly wanted me to be a scientist. Running role-playing campaigns allowed me to indulge my passion for a while, but that was a long time ago. It hasn’t really been until I got involved with Out Stories Bristol that I have been able to get back to it again.

Over the past few weeks I have been researching my main talk for this year’s LGBT History Month. It has been a lot of fun, and I have learned a lot about some interesting people, and the way in which different cultures around the world have been accepting or otherwise of gender-variant people. Those of you who can get to Bristol can see the talk on February 7th at the M-Shed.

It has been quite heartwarming to discover just how many different cultures all over the world have been accepting of people like me, and a bit scary to realize that our modern Western culture is one of the least accepting. Probably the least fun bit, however, was seeing how hard cis people work to deny the validity and even the reality of trans people. The accounts I have been reading have been full of amateur psychoanalysis purporting to explain away why trans people are the way they are (none of it flattering). Texts on gender history tend to be written by feminist academics who are particular hostile to trans women. LGB historians insist that all gender variance is evidence of same-sex attraction. And I have found myself wishing I had more language skills because English translations of original sources have a habit of changing or editing out eye witness accounts to as to remove any taint of “immorality” from the text.

Overall, however, it has been a positive experience. I look forward to seeing some of you in Bristol next month, and will try to find other ways to make the talk available. At least, unlike the LGBT Superheroes talk, this one does not rely heavily on copyrighted art.

Book Review – Straight

~ Cheryl

OK, so I spent part of Christmas reading a book about sex. It was interesting.

Straight: The Surprisingly Short History of Heterosexuality, by Hanne Blank, does exactly what it says on the cover. It looks at the history of the phenomenon that we understand as heterosexuality, and how that concept has changed in nature over the years. You can read my review here.

Historical Fantasy at Foyles

~ Cheryl

La Belle Dame San Merci - Sir Frank Dicksee

After the radio show I managed to find Juliet in time for us to have lunch and see a bit of Bristol before the event. Juliet asked to see an art gallery, so I took her up Park Street to the City Museum and introduced her to the work of the Bristol School, in particular Rolinda Sharples. That gallery is something that Mary Robinette Kowal needs to visit, and it is full of contemporary paintings of people in 18th Century clothing.

The Bristol School stuff is OK, and does have a couple of over-the-top apocalyptic pieces reminiscent of John Martin (and which may pre-date him, I need to check). However, the stand-out piece in the collection is one of my favorite bits of Pre-Raphaelite art, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, by Sir Frank Dicksee. As this post is mainly about historical fantasy, I have chosen that to illustrate it. (Doesn’t look a bit like Nyx, though.)

We were spared further traffic chaos, and both Helen Hollick and Jack Wolf turned up at the store on time. Helen was resplendent in a pirate costume to advertise her current series of books. We had an excellent discussion. It hardly needed me there to moderate it. There was a decent crowd too. You never quite know with these things, but I think Foyles will have been pleased. We were delighted to see a bunch of the local steampunk group turn up in costume.

Juliet has written a blog post about the discussion here, and there’s no point in my re-hashing that. I did record it, but I haven’t listened to the recording yet and even if it is OK I have no idea when I’ll get the time to edit it. The other thing I took away from the event is that I really need to read Lucienne’s book, To The Fair Land, if only to see what she has made of that strange Terra Australis. I wonder if her characters find that large island where all of the inhabitants have two heads? (That’s an Australian joke, for which Tansy will probably kill me.)

I wish I had been able to hang around and talk to people, but I had an hour to get to an event in Bath, so I headed out immediately the panel was over. Thanks again to all for a great evening.

This Week’s Radio – Judy Darley, Bristol Homeless, Black Identity

~ Cheryl

I began Wednesday’s show with a few mentions of people. As many of you will know, Caroline Symcox has just been inaugurated as Vicar of Fairford, which is not that far away from Bristol. I suspect that Paul Cornell is hoping that the vicar and her spouse get an invitation to the town’s famous air show.

Also in the mentions list were the environmental campaigners from Avonmouth, whom I had on the show back in July. Council staff had tried to sneak through approval of the biomass plant without debate, but the Councillors insisted on discussing the matter and, much to everyone’s surprise, denied the planning application. The expectation is that the power company will go running to the government who will order Bristol to change its mind, but at least our local politicians have made a stand. My colleagues at Bristol 24/7 have the story.

Finally I played a tribute to the great Acker Bilk, one of our local area’s finest musicians, who sadly died on Sunday.

My guest for Wednesday was local writer, Judy Darley. As Judy mainly does short and flash fiction, she was able to read some of her work on air. Much of Judy’s writing is inspired by works of art, which makes it very different from the sort of thing I normally read, but fascinating all the same.

Paulette took over for the next half hour, and welcomed Caz from the One Love Breakfast Show (which Ujima co-hosts with BCFM). Today they were doing a fund raiser for homeless people in Bristol, which is a very good thing to be doing at this time of year. Caz also looked back on the special edition of the show that featured Mayor Ferguson answering questions live in the studio.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

The second hour was given over entirely to a discussion of black identity, so it was very much a Paulette thing.

I suspect that most of you won’t know that Haile Selassie once lived in Bath. The house where is lived is now a museum, and naturally it is a focus for local Rastafarians. It was great to have Shawn Sobers from that project on the show.

Some of the discussion will ring true with those of you who get irritated by the habit of our American friends of referring to all black people as African-American. (He’s from Wakanda, damnit! He’s African.) I was also reminded of a discussion on the Writers Of Colour tweet stream over the weekend in which they talked about being “politically black”.

You can listen to the second hour here.

As a reminder, next week I will have Juliet McKenna and Lucienne Boyce in the studio to talk about historical fantasy. I think I might play some Bat for Lashes.

Ada Lovelace Day, 2014

~ Cheryl

There won’t be a post from me today. That’s not because I haven’t written anything. It is because the thing that I wrote is in another venue that won’t be published until Monday. What venue is that? I hear you ask. Why, it is this thing, which has just launched. I note that it has an absolutely kick-ass books section, because my pal Joanna Papageorgiou edits it, and the first edition contains an interview with the fabulous Emma Newman. The article mentions BristolCon and the Hugos. Can’t ask for much more, can I?

While I am here, however, I’d like to make a quick mention of Ada’s mum, Annabella Milbanke. The story goes that Baroness Byron had her daughter educated in mathematics because it was the most un-poetic subject that she could think of. However, Annabella’s interest in educating girls was not limited to irritating her notorious ex-husband. In 1854 she purchased a building called the Red Lodge in Bristol, which she gave over to one Mary Carpenter to use as a school for girls. The Red Lodge is one of the oldest buildings in Bristol, dating back to 1580. I’m told it is well worth a visit, and it certainly looks so from the photos I have seen. Must drop in one day.

Today On Ujima – Israel, Serbia & Iraq

~ Cheryl

Thanks to my uncle, and Tracy the cleaner, holding the fort during the day I was able to get up to Bristol to do my radio show today. This was a great relief as I had a busy show planned.

First up was a pre-recorded interview with Gili Bar Hilel, an Israeli translator who, amongst other things, has been responsible for bringing the work of J.K. Rowling and Diana Wynne Jones to Hebrew readers. The discussion included shout outs for Frances Hardinge, Garth Nix and Philip Reeve. Gili and I also briefly discussed the situation in Gaza.

The second half hour saw me joined in the studio by Karen Garvey from Bristol Museums and Gordana Grabež, the Executive Director of the National Museum of Serbia, who is in Bristol on an exchange visit to learn how we do community-based museum exhibits. Karen will be teaching her all about things like the Revealing Stories exhibition that I helped put together, and also the You Make Bristol exhibition that Karen masterminded. In return maybe Bristol will get a loan of some of the fantastic art collection that Belgrade has, including everyone from Hieronymous Bosch to Rubens to Picasso. We talked quite a bit about the history of the Balkans, from Roman times through to Tito. There was also some brief mention of Zoran Živković, and of the embarrassment of the tennis. At least Novak did beat Andy, so we were even less happy than Gordana.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

For the second hour I was joined by Jo Baker from the charity, Child Victims of War. The main focus of our conversation was the situation in Iraq, which is quite horrifying (and not for the reasons you’ll hear in the British media). Of particular note was the accusation that US forces are using radioactive weapons (not just depleted uranium) in Iraq, and that these weapons have been sold to Israel. The discussion of how drones are used was also quite horrifying, and led to us speculating that Bristol’s expertise in robotics could lead to the city becoming a leading manufacturer of actual robot war machines.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

The playlist for today’s show was as follows:

  • World Party – Meet Your Feet
  • Money Don’t Matter 2 Nite – Prince
  • Friendship Update – The Go Team
  • Rescue Me – Fontella Bass
  • War – The Temptations
  • Save the Children – Marvin Gaye
  • Tribal War – Black Roots
  • Life During Wartime – Talking Heads

Next week’s show, assuming I am able to get to Bristol, will feature Glenda Larke.

Rainbow Jews Crowdfunder

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

My friend Surat Knan is running a crowdfunding campaign to help support their Rainbow Jews project. If you have any interest in LGBT history, and in particular if you do so and are Jewish, you may want to support this project.

One of the uses of the money will be to allow the Rainbow Jews history exhibit to tour around the UK. Surat and I have briefly discussed bringing it to Bristol at some point. We’ve also been taking an interest recently in the work of the Jewish Pre-Raphaelite painter, Simeon Solomon. More of that in due course.

To learn more about Rainbow Jews, and support the crowdfunder, go here.

Trans History Is Not White

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Yesterday Juliet Jacques had an article in the New Statesman about the supposed “debate” between radical feminists and trans women. (It is an interesting form of debate — the TERFs want us dead, and we just want them to leave us alone.) The article is, in most ways, fine writing which makes clear the dishonesty, spite and bigotry at the heart of the TERF cause. However, in tracing the history of trans people, Juliet focuses solely on events in Western Europe and the USA, dating from the late 19th Century. This gives a very distorted view of trans history.

The first firmly documented evidence of a trans person is the Roman emperor, Elagabalus. According to the historian, Cassius Dio, Elagabalus enjoyed dressing as a woman, referred to his handsome charioteer as his “husband”, and offered a fortune to any doctor who could provide him with female genitalia.

The date that the Kama Sutra was written is a matter for scholarly debate. It may be older than the Roman Empire, or it may not. Either way it makes reference to gender identity. In the section on fellatio it notes that some eunuchs adopt a male gender performance while others adopt a female gender performance.

The existence of trans women in India — Hijra, Aravani and other terms depending on the language — dates back at least to the time of the Kama Sutra, and probably much longer. Other Asian civilizations have their own traditions of gender variance. The Kathoey of Thailand are probably the best known. Kabuki theatre in Japan may also have provided an outlet for gender-variant people.

In her autobiography, Redefining Realness, Janet Mock notes that Hawaii had a tradition of gender variance before the arrival of Europeans.

To be mahu was to occupy a space between the poles of male and female in precolonial Hawaii, where it translated to “hermaphrodite,” used to refer to feminine boys or masculine girls. But as puritanical missionaries from the West influenced Hawaiian culture in the nineteenth century, their Christian, homophobic, and gender binary systems pushed mahu from the center of culture to the margins.

Other Polynesian cultures have their own versions of gender variance. In Samoa the term used is Fa’afafine.

Across the Pacific, many Native American cultures also had traditions of gender variance. Once again many different terms are used. One of the most commonly seen today is Two Spirit. I am fairly confident that research would turn up gender variant traditions in the pre-colonization cultures of Africa and South America as well.

Traditions of trans men are much less common, presumably for the same reason that trans men attract relatively little attention in our culture. Trans women are almost always seen as being far more socially transgressive, and therefore more notable. However, the Sworn Virgins of Albania form an example of a tradition that makes space for trans men in society.

The way in which gender identities are constructed in other cultures can be quite different from the accepted medical model of transsexualism that we are used to in the West. This is hardly surprising, because the form that gender variance takes will be necessarily dependent on the way in which gender is perceived by the host culture, and on the level of medical technology available.

Many Hijra identify as Third Gender rather than male or female. Pakistan (yes, Pakistan, a predominantly Muslim country) has had a law allowing citizens to register as Third Gender since 2009. Nepal and India have since followed suit.

One thing that the West might regard as unique is the use of advanced medical technology, in particular the use of hormone therapy and plastic surgery. However, Hijra have been undergoing castration for centuries, so medical intervention is hardly new.

There are many reasons to acknowledge the existence of gender variance in non-white cultures. To start with white people ought to stop claiming to have invented things when they clearly have not done so. Much more importantly, the vast majority of trans women murdered each year because of their identities are non-white, and we should not erase them by appearing to present being trans as largely a white phenomenon.

In this particular instance, however, it is also important to present the long history of gender variance outside of white cultures because a fundamental axiom of the TERF cause is that being trans is a modern creation of a medical industry at the service of Patriarchy. They see this as a direct response to the rise of feminism, which is generally taken to be an invention of white women from the 20th Century. (Go back and read The Female Man to see some of these ideas spelled out fairly clearly.) Once you are aware of the long history of gender variance in other cultures, the fatuousness of their claims is apparent. Trans people have always been with us, even in cultures far more misogynist in many ways than our own, and even when no medical industry existed to create them.

Today on Ujima: WWI, Music Courses & Fair Trade

~ Cheryl

I’m online at the Ujima studios because I have a meeting this evening and won’t be home until late. Getting some blogging done is a much better use of my time than going shopping.

Today’s show began with my friend Eugene Byrne talking about his new book about Bristol during World War I. Eugene has collected a lot of great stories. The book, Bravo Bristol!, is available on Amazon around the world, but if you want to get a preview of the material there is a website and a free app (which includes suggested walking tours).

The next half hour featured some people from the Trinity Centre who are running music courses for young people. As luck would have it, I had a studio full of teenagers on a National Citizenship Scheme course. They didn’t have a lot of interest in WWI, but once we mentioned music they all lit up and basically took over the show. One of them was even texting his mates getting questions to ask.

You can listen to the first hour here.

The second hour of the show was all about the Fair Trade movement, featuring our good friend Jenny Foster whom I have had on the show before. With her was Lucy Gatward from the Better Food Company. It was an interesting and wide-ranging conversation. Also I got to explain who Thor really is. Because it is radio you did not see me playing air guitar in the studio.

You can listen to the second hour here.

The playlist for today’s show was:

  • My Heart Belongs to Daddy – Ella Fitzgerald
  • It’s Too Darn Hot – Billie Holiday
  • Hot Stuff – Donna Summer
  • Boogie Nights – Heatwave
  • It’s Raining Men – The Weather Girls
  • Purple Rain – Prince
  • Higher Love – Denise Pearson
  • Dr. Meaker – Dr. Meaker

The final two tracks were recorded live on the main stage at Bristol Pride and appear courtesy of Shout Out Radio.

Unstraight Conference – The Interviews

~ Cheryl

I have done a podcast of the various interviews I did at the Unstraight Conference in Liverpool last weekend (see here and here).

As you might expect, mostly I talked to people about the April Ashley exhibition, but hopefully it will be of general interest.

The people interviewed are:

  • Janet Dugdale – Director of the Museum of Liverpool
  • Gary Everett – Director of Homotopia
  • Bev Ayre – Project Director for the April Ashley exhibition
  • Jenny-Ann Bishop – a local trans activist
  • Sara Davidman – a photographic artist who works with trans people
  • Surat Knan – Project Manager for Rainbow Jews
  • Sarah Blackstock – Heritage Project Manager for LGBT Birmingham
  • Michael Fürst – Schwules Museum*, Berlin
  • Durk Dehner – Tom of Finland Foundation, Los Angeles

My thanks to them all for their time.

For anyone coming to this blog because of the conference, my podcast feed for gender-related material can be found here.

The Un-Straight Conference – Day 2

~ Cheryl

Day 2 in Liverpool was a bit of an anti-climax because the schedule was constructed around April Ashley’s keynote speech. As she was too ill to attend, there was a big gap in the day. The organizers filled it with what I gather is a very rare film about early trans women, including April. I’d love to see that one day, but I chose not to do so this weekend as I wanted to have a look around the rest of the museum, and grab some vox pops for Shout Out and podcasting.

Before that, however, we had some excellent presentations from museum professionals. The first session featured Zorian Clayton from the V&A and Marcus Dickey Horley from the Tate. Both talked about how staff networks within the London museums had worked to put on special events interpreting museum exhibits through a queer gaze. These have been very successful, and I have some hope that similar things can be done in other museums around the world.

Marcus was responsible for the wonderful Transpose event at which a number of trans artists presented their work at Tate Modern. That included CN Lester, Juliet Jacques and Raphael Fox, all of whom I have the honor to have met. He also came out with the best Twitter fodder of the weekend. The Tate now asks visitors whether they identify as LGBT as part of the demographic survey on their feedback forms. He said that 20% of respondents under the age of 20 tick that box. And that, of course, is only the proportion that are prepared to self-identify for a survey. That’s hugely valuable data when making a case to cater for LGBT visitors to a museum or gallery.

The other session featured international visitors: Hunter O’Hanian from the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York, and Michael Fürst from the Schwules Museum in Berlin. This got me questioning the statement yesterday that there are only 2 LGBT museums in the world. Strictly speaking, the Unstraight Museum is more of a virtual installation, and the Leslie Lohman is an art gallery. However, I see I have a comment on Friday’s blog post listing a whole bunch more. We are still well short of the 312 Elvis museums, but I’m delighted to see that these places are out there.

A common feature of both Hunter and Michael’s talks was how an establishment that was originally set up as exclusively about gay men has shifted its focus to cater to the whole QUILTBAG spectrum. The Leslie Lohman was founded in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, so it inevitably had a male focus. For the Schwules it was more a case of lesbian separatists refusing to have anything to do with it at first.

Which reminds me, one of the more delightful aspects of the weekend has been the complete absence of TERFS.

There were two more breakout sessions to attend. The first was from Kati Mustola, a Finnish academic who talked about how an LGBT presence in Finland came about via an interest in social and community issues. The other was a presentation by the amazing artist, Andrew Logan. His glass portrait of April is one my favorite things in the exhibition.

I have a huge number of photos, and quite a bit of audio, to process. That will take time, and this coming week is ferociously busy. Please bear with me. I would, however, like to thank Sarah Blackstock from Birmingham LGBT and Surat Knan from Rainbow Jews for enabling me to bring some diversity to an otherwise fairly white event. There was a strong feeling amongst the attendees that we wanted to do more events like this, and hopefully future conferences will be larger and more diverse in many ways.

The Un-Straight Conference – Day 1

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

April Ashley Exhibition
Well, that was a roller-coaster of a day.

The conference thus far as been excellent. I tweeted a lot (the official hashtag is #UnStraightConference if you want to see what other people are saying about it. Also several major sessions are being webcast here. Here’s a quick run-down of what went on today.

We began with Nicholas Hasselqvist from the actual Unstraight Museum, which is based in Sweden. He talked quite a bit about how even Sweden fails dismally when it comes to things like helping LGBT asylum seekers or standing up to the International Olympic Committee. He also talked about some of the amazing outreach work he and his colleagues do around the world. One of the key stats he mentioned is that there are around 55,000 museums in the world; of them 312 are dedicated to Elvis Presley, but only two (his and the Schwules in Berlin) are dedicated to LGBT lives.

During the Q&A on Nicholas’s talk we chatted briefly about the difficulty of assigning identities to people from history. He mentioned the case of Queen Christina of Sweden, whom many Swedes believe to have been a lesbian or even trans.

After the break Nicholas has us all participate in the creation of a museum exhibit. We had all been asked to bring an artifact that had personal importance to us. We then had to write a brief blurb for it, do a short video talking about it, and have our photos taken with it. Each personal entry was put together to form an exhibit item. In under an hour we had created a really great little exhibition. There were some very moving stories being told, and a few extraordinary exhibits. Several people mentioned pop stars as having been inspirations. One exhibit was a pair of sunglasses that were once owned by David Bowie. (Lauren, I am so jealous!) Being utterly shameless, I gave them a photo of me with a Hugo trophy. That should infuriate a few people in fandom.

After lunch various people from Liverpool museums and Homotopia, the arts foundation that did most of the work creating both the April Ashley exhibition and this conference, talked about their work and how they managed to create such a high profile event. I was seriously impressed at how much commitment and buy-in the diversity project had from senior management in Liverpool’s museums. Nor were they content with just exhibiting stuff, they wanted to change people’s minds through doing so.

Of particular interest was Ann Bukantas from the Walker Gallery, which has put on a lot of LGBT-themed art exhibits of late. (They had a David Hockney exhibition recently, and now have Grayson Perry). From her I learned about the transvestite artist, Phil Sayers, whose specialty is appearing as a woman in his own art, often recreating famous works of art with female subjects. Sayers is the only artist in the over 100-year history of the Walker whose art has been attacked by an irate member of the public.

Finally we came on to the creation of the April Ashley exhibition itself. I’ll have more to say about that later, but for now here’s the official trailer for it.

The bit at the end where April talks about finally getting official confirmation of her identity after over 45 years (thanks to the passage of the Gender Recognition Act) totally tore me up. I very nearly sobbed out loud, which would have been very embarrassing.

The rest of the day was given over to breakout sessions. I attended two. The first was about an exhibition viewing punk history from a queer perspective (with particular focus on Poly Styrene). The second was about the Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, which exists to preserve the work of the great Finnish gay artist.

One of the more interesting questions we addressed during the day was what level of openness about LGBT issues straight people are prepared to tolerate. Val Stevenson of Liverpool John Moores University, who gave the presentation about the punk exhibition, noted that the shopping mall where she was exhibiting was very prudish about sexualized images, despite its shops being covered in advertizing featuring highly sexualized pictures of near-naked women. Durk Dehner from the Tom of Finland Foundation said he and his colleagues are very reluctant to let any of their collection out of their control because so much of Tom’s art is deeply sexual and they fear other organizations would want to sanitize it before putting it on display.

Back, then, to April. I had a look around the exhibit, and I must say that it is beautifully done. It looks great (though April is so beautiful it is hard not to have her looking great), and the content is good too. Some younger trans activists are likely to be outraged by it because it does include the whole man-into-woman narrative, but sadly such things are still necessary when reaching out to the general public. Bev Ayre, the Project Director, said that April was initially reluctant to have her pre-transition life mentioned at all. However, taking it out would have erased both her connection to Liverpool (where she was born and grew up) and her suicide attempt.

I should note that Bev and her colleagues put in a huge amount of work to get the local trans community involved with the project, and to have them tell their stories alongside April’s. Credit here should go to local trans activist, Jenny-Anne Bishop, who worked tirelessly to get the local trans community on board. Several local trans people have been working as volunteers at the conference.

The final event of the day was also trans-themed. It was the opening of a small exhibition titled, “Ken: To Be Destroyed”. Some of you may remember this Guardian article from late last year about a woman called Sara Davidman who discovered that an uncle of hers had been trans. Sara has created a small museum exhibit about her relative (K, as Sara now calls her) which is now installed alongside the April Ashley exhibition. In many ways it is a very sad story, because of the way in which K had been forced to live in the closet all of her life, and how even now members of Sara’s family don’t want to be associated in any way with what they perceive to be the shame of K’s existence.

I was expecting this trip to be fairly emotional, but I didn’t realize quite how bad it would be until I started looking around April’s exhibition and I was reminded of how much she had inspired me as a teenager. Of course there was no way I’d ever have been that glamorous but she was, as Laverne Cox has it, a Possibility Model. She showed me that life was possible. Sadly April is currently very ill and her planned appearance at the conference tomorrow has been cancelled, so I will not have a chance to thank her personally. I am doing so here instead.

April, I would not be me without having had your help.

A Brief History of Polari

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth.

And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the Fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.

And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.

The Polari Bible


You need to imagine that being read in a splendid, Gothic cathedral, by a sister of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence.

Today I headed into Bristol for an Out Stories Bristol talk on the history of Polari, the secret language most famous for its use in gay subculture in the early 20th Century. The talk was given by Jez Dolan of the Polari Mission in Manchester. A fantabulosa time was had by all.

Historically Polari can be traced back to the Thieves’ Cant of 17th Century England. It also has inputs from a wide range of sources including theatrical slang, Cockney rhyming slang, the Lingua Franca used by sailors to communicate around the world, Romany language, circus slang and probably a bunch of other things as well. It is more of a dialect than a language, with aspects of a substitution cypher. Many of its words are standard English, and some items it has many different words for due to the multiple sources. Studying it must be rather hard linguistically, but huge fun otherwise.

By the time of the 19th Century Molly Houses some aspects of Polari were already well established. Male homosexuality had been illegal in England since 1533, and was punishable by death up until 1861, so there was an inevitable interaction between the gay subculture and the criminal underworld.

In the early 20th Century, Polari was well established as a means of recognition and communication within gay society, but after WWII gay life began to become more mainstream. In particular the radio comedy show, Round the Horne, featured two characters called Julian & Sandy (voiced by Hugh Paddick & Kenneth Williams) who were fairly camp and spoke a lot in Polari. The show as mainly written by Barry Took and Marty Feldman, who were straight, but Paddick and Williams contributed material and, because of the way Polari re-purposes common English words, they were able to insert some decidedly flithy jokes. Jez told us that Took was horrified when Polari researchers interviewed him about the show and explained what some of the jokes meant.

Because the BBC audience was now learning Polari words, it because less useful as a secret language. Also the rise of the gay rights movement led to pressure on gay communities to behave less differently. The Gay Liberation Front, being full of right-on Marxists, probably didn’t care, but the far more conservative Campaign for Homosexual Equality was very down on anything camp, including Polari.

Meanwhile many words from Polari have found their way into common usage, though some have changed meaning. “Drag” was originally a Polari word for women’s clothing. “Naff”, which now means simply rubbish or useless, was originally a term of abuse for straight people, one possible derivation of which is an acronym, Not Available For Fucking. (And that’s got me banned by the UK’s Net Nanny system, I guess, if I wasn’t already.)

Nowadays, with gender-conformity becoming less important once more, it is possible that Polari will make a comeback, if only as a fun thing to do. Certainly the Polari Bible (quoted above) appears to have been intended in that vein (and is apparently viewed fondly by gay Christians).

Polari has also found its way into other areas of life. I was able to add a few factoids to the discussion. Suzanne Barbieri told me on Twitter that when she trained as a hairdresser she was taught Polari by the other women so that they could talk behind customers’ backs. In Grant Morrison’s 2009 Batman & Robin it is revealed that Dick Grayson is fluent in Polari. Of course it had been long established that Dick came from a circus family, so he has a reason for knowing the language, but I suspect that Morrison was having a bit of a joke there. (Thanks to Tade Thompson for the tip off on that one.) And, of course, Ian McDonald uses Polari as the language of the Airish, the airship crews from his YA science fiction series, Everness.

It was a highly entertaining talk, and if you have an LGBT group of any sort in the UK looking for speakers I recommend you ask Jez to come and perform for you. In the meantime, here are Julian & Sandy to entertain you.

Today On Ujima: Bristol & Slavery, plus Talking Books

~ Cheryl

Today’s show began with good and bad news. The good stuff included Nalo Hopkinson winning the Andre Norton Award for Best YA Novel of 2013 at last weekend’s Nebula Awards ceremony. It also included the really good news that Ahad & Anum Rizvi, the two young Pakistanis whose plight I highlighted last week, have been released from detention and will be having their applications for asylum reconsidered.

The bad news was that today’s programming has been dedicated to our of our regular presenters, DJ Flora, who died from cancer yesterday. She was younger than me. Because she presented a late-night show I hardly ever saw her, but many of the staff at the station were very upset about it. There’s an official tribute to her on the Ujima website.

However, the show must go on, and the first hour today was devoted to discussion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and Bristol’s role therein. My main guest in the studio was Dr. Olivette Otele from Bath Spa University who is a well known expert in the history of slavery. Alongside her we welcomed three young people from Cotham School who were with us on a work experience placement. I’m really pleased with how it went. And thanks to Olivette we had some great music. I played Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song”, Billie Holliday’s “Strange Fruit” (one of the most disturbing songs I know) and Louis Armstrong’s “Go Down Moses”. It was great to see the kids’ faces light up with recognition when they heard Satchmo’s voice.

The fourth piece of music was Violin Concerto #9 by Joseph Bologne, Le Chevalier de Saint-Georges, played by the Orchestre de Chambre, Bernard Thomas. Saint-Georges is an amazing fellow who really ought to be better known. Those of you setting books in revolutionary France should take note. I also want to see books about Nanny Maroon, one of the other amazing people that Olivette introduced us to.

The discussion includes an appeal to George Ferguson to get Bristol to do more to acknowledge, apologize for, and memorialize the city’s role in the slave trade. You can learn more about the history of Bristol’s involvement in the trade from the M-Shed website.

You can listen to the first hour of the show via Ujima’s Listen Again feature here.

I note that this was the first time I call recall having someone text the studio to tell us how much they were enjoying the show.

The second hour was given over to fiction. I had Jo Hall in the studio to promote her new novel, The Art of Forgetting: Nomad, which is being launched at Forbidden Planet, Bristol on Saturday. That was followed by an interview with Karen Lord that I had recorded during Ã…con. I still have the much longer interview that Karen and I did as part of the convention program. I’m hoping to get that edited and on Salon Futura soon.

Jo got music appropriate for epic fantasy. Bat for Lashes was a no-brainer (I played “Horses of the Sun”, because I had played “Horse and I” a few weeks ago and didn’t want to repeat). The other song I chose was “Killer on the Rampage” by Eddy Grant, because I was teasing Jo about the number of people she killed off in the book. (Really, George would be proud. Whole towns massacred.) Jo’s soundtrack for the new book, which we mentioned in the show, is available here.

Karen had asked for jazz, which I was very happy to provide. I’m sorry we didn’t have time to play either track in full. The two tracks were: “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” by the Cannoball Adderley Quintet; and “Stolen Moments” by Oliver Nelson.

Any discussion of SF&F on the show is liable to get into name-dropping of people we know. Jo enthused about Joe Abercrombie. I invoked Juliet McKenna when we got on the question of discoverability of women writers. And Kate Elliott needs to listen to the Karen Lord interview.

You can listen to the second hour of the show here.

Next week most of the show is being run by Jackie and Judeline, but I will have half an hour with Kevlin Henney talking about flash fiction. Kevlin won the flash competition run by Crimefest last weekend, which pleased me greatly.

Tomorrow on Ujima

~ Cheryl

The first hour of tomorrow’s Women’s Outlook will see me interviewing Dr. Olivette Otele, an expert on the history of the slave trade. It should be a fascinating interview. If you have any specific issues you’d like me to raise with Olivette while I have her in the studio, please let me know. I can’t guarantee to have time for everything, but if something interesting comes up I’ll try to fit it in.

The second hour will be all books. Jo Hall will be in to talk about her latest novel, the Art of Forgetting: Nomad, which launches at Forbidden Planet on Saturday. After that I’ll be playing an interview with Karen Lord that I recorded at Ã…con.

You can listen live from Noon tomorrow via the Ujima website. I’ll post links to the Listen Again service when I get home.