History

New Lost Kingdoms

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Regular readers may remember my enthusing over the two BBC series of Lost Kingdoms of Africa. Well they have done it again, but this time the focus has changed. The new series looks at South America and is hosted by Dr. Jago Cooper of the British Museum (who has the advantage of speaking excellent Spanish). There are four programs, each of which looks at a South American culture or two that you have probably never heard of.

There is some amazing material. I was blown away by the cliff tombs of the Chachapoya, and loved the fact that the Tiwanaku are starting to re-use the scared solar observatory in their ancient capital city. Then there’s the segment where Cooper visits a village in Colombia of what is believed to be a remnant of the Tairona living much as their ancestors did. I’d love to do a story about a group of English pirates visiting Ciudad Perdida to trade, as apparently did take place.

Oh, and modern theory suggests that the quipu, far from being simply accounting devices, could be used to create books. No one has any idea how to translate them, but the potential information content is huge.

There’s so much more to South America than the Inca (and remember that the Maya and Aztec lived much further north). The programs are available on iPlayer, though I have no idea what territorial restrictions might apply. One of the four programs, the one set in Colombia, is on YouTube. With any luck the rest will follow. There’s also a section of the British Museum website devoted to the series.

Talking of my favorite museum, next time I’m in London I may just splurge £10 on a visit to the Ice Age Art exhibition. It sounds awesome.

A Mention in Parliament

~ Cheryl

Today the House of Commons was debating the second reading of the putative marriage equality bill. As usual with Parliament, a lot of hot air was spouted. However, a significant number of British MPs are openly gay. Many of them made strong, emotional speeches. One of them is Stephen Williams, the Liberal Democrat MP for Bristol West. He opened his remarks by noting that on Saturday he had attended the opening of an exhibition about LGBT lives at a local museum. That was this exhibition launch, at which I made a speech. Of course I didn’t get quoted in Parliament, but I still got a tremendous buzz out of this, and I’m very happy for my gay and lesbian friends at Out Stories Bristol who must be delighted to have heard their hard work recognized in this way.

Update: You can read the speech here.

By the way, I say “putative” marriage equality because the bill is very badly drafted and, as several speakers pointed out, is more a “creation of a new and different type of marriage” bill than a “marriage equality” bill. However, the bill will now go to a committee stage where some of the defects will hopefully be ironed out. In particular I hope that something will be done for heterosexual couples who want civil partnerships, and for trans people whose marriages were stolen from them by the Gender Recognition Act.

In The Papers

~ Cheryl

We have some media coverage of the LGBT History Exhibition today. The Bristol Post‘s website has a general article up, and a more specific one about Michael Dillon. I understand that there will be coverage in the print edition today as well.

I’m quoted in both articles, mainly because I’m one of the co-chairs of Out Stories Bristol. Credit for the news coverage goes to my good friend Eugene Byrne.

The Launch: Phase II

~ Cheryl

There were still piles of tools and an unmistakable smell of glue when I arrived at the exhibition gallery this morning. Thankfully I have seen Worldcon from the inside and things like that don’t worry me any more. By the time the guests started to arrive, everything was under control.

The choir from Sing Out Bristol got us underway very effectively. If people weren’t quiet before, they certainly were once the songs had finished. The M-Shed’s boss opened proceedings, remarking that we were just the sort of community-focused project that they were created to host. My co-chair, Andy Foyle, then did the traditional speech of explaining how the exhibition came into being, and thanking all and sundry, after which he handed over to me to be political.

We did record the whole opening ceremony. Hopefully it will be on our website soon. I can, however, give you the text of my speech. It wasn’t delivered exactly like this, partly because I prefer to speak without notes and never remember the words exactly, and partly because I was making little improvements to it as I memorized it on the way in this morning. Here’s what I planned to say.

Thanks Andy. It’s a tremendous amount of work that you and the rest of the team have put in, and you should all be very proud.

I’m a fairly recent addition to that team, having only moved near to Bristol in the last few years. I can’t claim to have encyclopedic local knowledge. But I do represent a piece of the jigsaw. I have seen far too many supposed LGBT projects in which the T component is at least silent, if not totally invisible. When it was suggested to me that I should get involved in Out Stories I leapt at the chance because I didn’t want that sort of thing to happen again. I’m absolutely delighted at the reception I got, and at the way in which Andy and the team tried hard to make the exhibition as inclusive as possible.

There are still areas we could improve. In particular I would like to have seen more involvement of Bristol’s ethnic minorities. However, the work of Out Stories won’t end with the exhibition. We’ll continue to work collecting and recording the stories of Bristol’s LGBT citizens for many years to come. Diversity is one area we are keen to work on.

Of course our journey isn’t over either. As the marriage equality bill works its way through Parliament, we can expect to see renewed media attacks on our gay and lesbian friends. These past weeks have also shown, quite graphically, the level of hatred of trans people that still exists in British society, even at a supposedly liberal newspaper such as The Observer.

This exhibition illustrates how far we have come in the space of a lifetime. Acceptance and equality are still a way off, but we have reached the point where we no longer have to hide. In mounting this exhibition, Bristol’s LGBT communities are saying very clearly that we too are part of the city. We hope it will succeed in giving Bristolians a better idea of the sort of people we are, and help us all go forward into the future together.

The speeches were followed by ribbon cutting and cake cutting, and more fabulous singing. Not to mention lots of photograph taking. The official photos should be on the website eventually. I have very few, due to having had to be in most of them and not having Kevin around to take pictures for me.

The exhibition looks great. It isn’t huge, but it is a huge statement on behalf of the city and its LGBT community. I’m also quite pleased with some of the text, for example the mention of forced divorces under the Gender Recognition Act, and the death toll from TDOR. I think visitors will learn something from what we’ve done.

After lunch we had an excellent talk from gay historian, novelist and theatre director, Neil Bartlett. I like what he had to say about history being all about how the world could be different (just like science fiction, really). It also turned out that he knew quite a bit about Boulton & Park (aka Stella & Fanny, Victorian London’s most famous genderqueer people) and we had an interesting chat about the difficulties of assigning trans identities to historical characters.

If you live near Bristol, please do go along and see what we’ve done. It’s free to get in. Even if you don’t like our bit, you can visit the exhibit on the history of chocolate that is on at the same time. As for everyone else, hopefully we’ll get the panels and pictures of some of the artifacts online once the exhibition is over.

The Launch: Phase I

~ Cheryl

I’m just back from an evening event in City Hall, Bristol, at which LGBT History Month was giving the civic push off the gangway. Peter Main, the city’s first openly gay Lord Mayor, and George Ferguson, our first ever elected Mayor, were both in attendance. (For Americans confused about the difference, George gets to make the decisions, while Peter gets to wear the bling or, as Peter explained it to me, “he’s the power and I’m the glory”).

Also launched at the event was a new Diversity in Schools project aimed at teaching the city’s kids to respect cultural diversity. George, in his speech, noted that one of the first debates he attended as a young councilor was about whether the city would allow LGBT groups to meet on council premises. Now here we were teaching our kids to respect them. Kudos also to Annabelle Armstrong-Walter, the city’s LGBT equality officer, who talked about trans awareness being a key issue for her this year.

Of course you always get someone who is outraged. We got an angry “Lesbian Feminist” complaining about how few women were at the meeting. This confused a lot of people as the numbers were close to 50:50. I think what she meant was that there were very few wimmin there. There were female-identified persons, but some were not lesbians, some were lesbians but not feminists, some were femme and, shock horror, there was even the Evil Trans Agenda, infiltrating our feminisms with their cunning Patriarchal tricks. None of those count as Real Wimmin. And this, of course, is a major reason why so many young women these days say they are Not Feminists. Sigh.

Still, the vast majority of the evening was very positive. Lots of different LGBT social groups got to give a pitch (including me doing Out Stories because the boys and butches were all still down the M-Shed with their power tools putting the finishing touches to the exhibition). And at the end were got a short concert from the fabulous Sing Out Bristol choir. The final song they did was Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day” from Transformer (in fact I think it was the b-side for “Walk on the Wild Side”). It’s a wonderful song, and ideal for a choir. I can’t think of a better way to get ear-wormed.

Tomorrow I have to be up at the crack of dawn so that I can be at the M-Shed for 10:00am. The official opening of the exhibition is at 11:00. I have to make a speech. That can’t be too hard, right?

Trans History: It’s Complicated

~ Cheryl

Last year I blogged about the excellent talk that Juliet Jacques did for me as part of Bristol’s LGBT History Month program. The stars of the talk were Ernest Stella Boulton and Frederick Fanny Park. At the time I commented on how difficult it is for an historian to truly know how people from history self-identified. This year a new book has been published. Fanny & Stella, by Neil McKenna, tells the story of these famous Victorian cross-dressers, and apparently tries to get inside their heads. A review in The Guardian notes:

Using free indirect speech he [McKenna] ventriloquises Stella and Fanny’s inner worlds, creating a camp stream of consciousness in which the two young men think and function as lascivious women.

But did they actually see themselves as women? Would they have self-identified as trans had they known such a thing was possible? The Guardian‘s reviewer, Kathryn Hughes, doesn’t seem to be much help. She seems to buy into the view that Victorian society had of the pair, that they must be “gay men”. She even describes James Barry as a “sexual deviant”, even though there is no evidence that he lived as a man for sexual purposes. Indeed, all of the rumors about him during his life were about his being gay.

Ultimately it doesn’t really matter how Stella and Fanny saw themselves. What matters (and I say this after having spent part of this morning discussing the problems of dealing with gender-variant kids) is accepting that there are no rigid boxes that you can put everyone into. People cross-dress for all sorts of reasons, not just because they are gay, or just because they are trans, and trans people exhibit the full range of human sexual orientations. So I wouldn’t want to claim Stella and Fanny as trans pioneers, but equally describing them as definitely gay men buys into the assumption that all trans women are “really” gay men.

It sounds from the review that McKenna has done a lot of research and had access to contemporary documentation. I’ll be interested to read the book and see what he makes of it all.

Early Russian SF

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

The origins of science fiction are a matter of much debate. Frankenstein (1818) is often cited as the first SF novel, while Jules Verne is lauded as the “father of science fiction”. Shelley, Verne and Wells all pre-date the launch of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories. But the more we find out about other cultures, the more complex the story gets. Earlier this year I blogged about Enrique Gaspar’s The Time Ship, which pre-dates Wells’ The Time Machine. Now Wesleyan University Press has surprised me again with We Modern People, a history of early Russian science fiction.

Anindita Barerjee’s book traces the history of Russian SF in the decades from the 1890s through to 1920s, a tumultuous period in Russian history, and one driven by a desire amongst many Russians to modernize their country. Banerjee argues that science fiction was key this movement.

If you haven’t heard of anyone else from this period, you should know about Yevegeny Zamyatin, whose 1921 novel, We, was a major inspiration for George Orwell’s 1984. There were, however, many others. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky began publishing SF in the 1890s and was also a pioneer of rocket science. Oh, that that much quoted comment of William Gibson’s about the future being unevenly distributed: Trotsky once said something very similar.

The book looks to be a fascinating read, both because of what it can tell us about the history of SF, and what it says about how SF influences actual technological development. Many thanks to Wesleyan for sending it to me. I suspect that Jon Turney will be wanting to get a look at it.

History – It Requires Research

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

A couple of weeks ago the BBC World Service ran a short piece about Christine Jorgensen, an American who underwent gender reassignment in 1952 and returned home to a blaze of publicity. The BBC advertised this as the story of the first successful gender reassignment, which inevitably transformed into billing Jorgensen as the first ever transsexual when the story was discovered by the tabloid newspapers. Even the official UK LGBT History Month Twitter feed picked this up.

Sadly this is nonsense. Of course to a large extent it depends on what you mean by “transsexual” and “gender reassignment” (and by the way, shame on LGBT History Month for using the sensationalist and incorrect term, “sex change” — they should know better). The first historical record I know of that mentions someone who has an obvious trans personality refers to the Roman emperor, Elagabalus. People have been making eunuchs for centuries, and I refuse to believe that in all that time no one used that option to allow her to live as a woman. Making a eunuch is surgery.

Of course many societies around the world, including Native Americans, Polynesians, and most notably India and neighboring countries, have allowed people to change gender for centuries. The tradition of Hijras pre-dates Elagabalus, though I don’t think there are any specific individuals mentioned. Surgery is often involved.

There are plenty of examples in European history of people choosing in live in a gender different to that which they were assigned at birth. James Barry, who served as a surgeon in the British Army, is a well-documented example. Up until recently I would have said that the first example of actual medical treatment of a trans person would be Lili Elbe, a Danish trans woman who underwent surgery in Germany in the 1930s. The BBC documentary says that Elbe died as a result of the treatment, but this is misleading. Lili underwent five separate operations. She died following the final one. What the surgeons got wrong was to try to transplant ovaries and a uterus. This was decades before transplant surgery was perfected. Lili died of tissue rejection. The surgeries that killed her have, to my knowledge, never been tried since. The ones that she had that were similar to modern gender reassignment worked.

The first documented UK case of gender reassignment is Michael Dillon. He was an Irishman who transitioned while living in Bristol in the 1940s. Like Barry, he became a doctor, and he actually helped with the surgery for Roberta Cowell, which took place in 1951, the year before Jorgensen’s operation.

Up until today I would have been happy to accept Dillon as the world’s first case of female-to-male gender reassignment treatment. Hormone treatment and plastic surgery hadn’t been invented in Barry’s time. But today I discovered the remarkable story of Peter Alexander. According to the Encyclopedia of New Zealand, Alexander’s transformation occurred naturally. I find this a little hard to believe, and it is possible that the story was concocted as a cover for medical treatment that would have been regarded with suspicion at the time. Of course, given how weird human biology can be, it may also be true. Whatever the truth, however, here is a remarkable interview made by Pathe News in Sydney in 1937.

Taking the Waters

~ Cheryl ~ 4 Comments

Today Kevin and I headed into Bath and got wet. A few years back, Bath & North East Somerset Council decided to revive the idea of “taking the waters”. With backing from lottery funding and private investors they built a brand new spa, using the same hot springs as the original Roman baths. The resulting spa, Thermae, opened in 2006 and is now a popular local attraction.

Kevin and I signed up for the Twilight for Two package. Thankfully it does not involve any sparkly vampires. What you get is 3 hours in the spa, including a restaurant meal. None of the massages, beauty treatments and so on are included, but you do get to use the pools and steam rooms.

There are three main levels to the spa. The lowest level (the Minerva Pool) is an indoor pool fed by spa water. It’s not that hot — just pleasantly warm — but that means you can stay in it for a long time. Water depth is about 5′, and there are floats available for those who need them. A small section is put aside for jacuzzi-type bubbles, and that’s always busy.

The middle level contains four steam rooms. They are not as hot as a proper Finnish sauna, but they are warm enough to drive you out after a while. Each one has a different aromatherapy mix. The idea appears to be that you sample each one in turn, showering off in between.

Finally there is the roof pool, and if you time things right you can be there to watch the sun go down over the city. The pool is open to the air, and at this time of year its quite chilly out of the water, but still pleasantly warm in it.

The choice of meals in the restaurant is quite limited, but the food was far better than I expected given the captive audience. Kevin had prawn noodles and I had grilled haloumi. The house white (heavily oaked Chardonnay) was very drinkable.

I should note also that the changing rooms are mixed gender, with individual cubicles. So are the toilets, though some of the cubicles in them are female-only. To my knowledge, no one has complained that this makes the place unsafe for women, and indeed large numbers of women were happily using it.

All in all we have a lovely, relaxing three hours. I have no idea if it was good for our health, but it was very good for our spirits. And we were done in time to go and see Joe Abercrombie at Toppings. It was a fine day.

More Trains

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday we visited the Great Western Museum, STEAM, in Swindon. I suspect that hardcore railfans would much prefer the Didcot Railway Centre as it has a lot more rolling stock, but it is only open at weekends. STEAM has a lot of interesting history that is very well packaged. Also, just visiting it gives you a great impression of how huge Swindon Works, the GWR locomotive factory, was. The museum is big. The site also includes a large outlet mall and lots of apartments and offices. There are still large parts of it unused.

Today we are planning to go to Bath to take the waters, as one does. It should be good for our tired legs.

Live Longer Without Testosterone?

~ Cheryl

Remember that bit in 2312 where Kim Stanley Robinson speculates that intersex people will be longer-lived than pure males or females, leading mankind to genetically engineer for intersex traits? Well, here’s a Wired article claiming that eunuchs in ancient Korea lived substantially longer than other males.

I’m somewhat doubtful myself. It occurs to me that non-eunuch males are much more likely to die in warfare than eunuchs, which is bound to affect the data. These days trans women are much more likely to be murdered than cis men, so the opposite applies. Eventually we’ll have better data. In the meantime it amuses me that Stan might be onto something.

Orkney: Capital of Britain

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

I’m doing a bit of TV catch-up with meals to give my brain some relaxation from reading government documents. Today I watched a BBC history program about an excavation of a Neolithic site in Orkney that made my jaw drop. The dig has actually been in progress since 2007, so I guess I should have known about it, but to those of you outside the UK it should still come as news.

The Ness of Brodgar site is located on a thin spit of land between two lochs in the west of Orkney. It consists of a number of large — some very large — stone buildings, surrounded by a 10 foot high stone wall. Some of the interior walls appear to have been painted. The site was started around 3300 BC, several hundred years before Stonehenge was built, and remained in use for some 1200 years. That’s a stone age civilization, folks. There’s a huge amount of information (and much speculation about Neolithic religion) available on the dig’s website. Definite fantasy novel fodder, I would have thought.

Medea – Not Guilty?

~ Cheryl ~ 6 Comments

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time reading mythology. Of course I was very interested to find female characters with whom I could identify. I was never very fond of Atalanta. She seemed much too sporty, and probably a lesbian, which wasn’t my style at all. Medea, on the other hand, seemed rather cool. She was cunning like Odysseus, and she became a key part of Team Argo. Then it all fell apart. That toad Jason decided to dump her for the Corinthian princess, Glauce, and while Medea did get her revenge, she also killed the children she had with Jason. That final bit seemed terribly out of character to me at the time, and listening to Galactic Suburbia this morning I was reminded that it is by no means the only ending for the myth.

The child murder is best known from the play, Medea, by Euripides. Prior versions of the myth have the kids killed by the people of Corinth after Medea is exiled so that they won’t be rivals to Glauce’s children. I’m reminded from this post about the play that Robert Graves claimed Euripides was bribed by the Corinthians to alter the story so that their ancestors didn’t look bad. If that’s true, it is a very early, and very successful example, of political spin, because the charge has stuck and been repeated by many writers down the centuries.

I note in passing that while it was perfectly OK, even honorable, for Menelaus to declare war on Troy because Helen dumped him for Paris, therefore causing the deaths of huge numbers of people, the fact that Medea killed Glauce is seen as evidence of her villainy.

Of course there’s the whole Absyrtus thing as well, which is quite a different matter. There doesn’t appear to be any excuse for that, though again the murder doesn’t happen in all versions of the myth. Violent lot, those ancient Greeks.

Lost Kingdoms of Africa: Series 2

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

Back in 2010 I blogged about a fascinating BBC series called Lost Kingdoms of Africa (see here, here, here & here). I’m pleased to say that the series is now available as a DVD and as a book. This year Gus Casely-Hayford was back with four new programs packed full of fascinating history.

The first program covered Asante, a kingdom that ruled the area that is now modern Ghana. It grew wealthy on gold mines, but also on its habit of selling the victims of its wars to the Europeans as slaves. Eventually, of course, they lost their own freedom, in part as a consequence of the collapse of the slave trade after Britain banned it.

Program two looked at the Zulus, probably the most aggressively militaristic society since Sparta. Naturally that overlaps with the history of the Boers, and the eventual conquest of both by the British.

Next up were the Berbers, an African (as opposed to Arabic) people who conquered much of North-West Africa and Southern Spain during the 11th and 12th Centuries. They were certainly the equal of any European kingdom of the time.

Finally we have Bunyoro & Buganda, two rival kingdoms in what is now Uganda. That’s another history in which British imperialism played a key part. However, the program also touched on the semi-mythical civilization of Kitara whose rulers, the Bachwezi or Chwezi, are now worshiped as gods in parts of Uganda.

I’m very nervous of the whole “let’s see whose traditions we can plunder next” syndrome in fantasy fiction, but at the same time there’s a wealth of fascinating history in these two series, and I very much hope that some African writers come forward and do something with that history.

I also note that the image of 19th Century Africa that I was taught as a kid, which basically had the Africans living lives similar to those of the current native tribes in the Amazon basin, was wildly inaccurate. Zulu culture may have been more like Iron Age Europe, but Asante, Bunyoro & Buganda were more like medieval kingdoms.

A Day in Tiger Bay

~ Cheryl

In days past the area around the docks was one of the least salubrious parts of a city. It had homes for the impoverished dock workers and immigrants fresh off the boats; it had the inevitable red light district. Most coastal cities had a place like this. These days, however, what few docks there are take the form of highly mechanized container ports. The majority of cities have identified the old dockyard region as a valuable piece of seafront real estate that can be transformed into an urban entertainment complex.

My grandfather’s ship was based out of Cardiff, so he must have spent a fair amount of time at the docks. However, he died long before I was born, and when I was a kid Tiger Bay was known only as a bad part of town, and the home of the most famous Welshwoman of the time, the divine Shirley Bassey. That’s all changed. With devolution came money, renewed civic pride, and a need for impressive new national buildings. Thus Tiger Bay became Cardiff Bay, the location of the National Assembly building and so much more. I have never liked the re-naming, but I must say that the place does look rather nice these days.

I was there yesterday for the opening of a Welsh LGBT History exhibition staged by the fine folks from the LGBT Excellence Centre. I won’t say much about the exhibition itself, because my colleagues and I at Out Stories Bristol are planning a similar event for next year and they’ve asked me not to give my views on the Cardiff exhibition until they have had a chance to look at it. I can, however, comment on the event itself, and the location.

The exhibition is in the Pierhead Building, a delightfully crazy piece of Victorian extravagance that is now a small museum of Welsh identity. The photos below show details of the building and some of the non-LGBT elements on display. If you are interested in learning more about the ancient legal code of Wales, the BBC has an interesting post here.

Special guests for the day were Sarah, Fox, Karen and Donna from the My Transsexual Summer TV series. I’m delighted to report that they are all just as nice in person as they seemed on screen. They have also grown into magnificent ambassadors for the trans community and I’m proud to have met them. They gave an excellent interview and Q&A session.

The other main event for the day was a performance of Not About Heroes, a two-person play by Stephen McDonald detailing the relationship between the WWI poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. It was a very powerful piece, and got me thinking a lot about the very different war I have been writing about. There may be a separate blog post about this at some point if I think I can do it justice.

I also spent a bit for time wandering around the Bay taking photos. It is a very science fictional location. The BBC Wales studios, where Doctor Who is filmed, are not far away, and parts of Mermaid Quay have been used for sets in Torchwood. Indeed, one of the main sites of interest at the Quay is the Torchwood HQ and associated shrine to Ianto Jones. That’s quite a memorial for a fictional character. The location also memorializes Cardiff’s most well-known contributor to the arts of speculative fiction, Roald Dahl.

One of the things that impressed me most about the day was the multicultural nature of the event, and of the city. LGBTEC is a thoroughly diverse organization. The event was chaired by Federico Podeschi, who sounds quite Welsh despite his name. I met a PoC trans woman who was born in the Sudan. There were also people with clear connections to the Spanish-speaking world. Dahl, of course, was the child of Norwegian immigrants. The church that the Norwegians built for themselves can still be seen across the Bay. And on Mermaid Quay there is a statue of a young couple enjoying the view. The young man looks like he might be a dock worker with a lengthy local ancestry. His partner looks like her family came to Cardiff via the Caribbean or Africa. But the title of the sculpture is “People Like Us”. It is a very conscious statement of the multicultural nature of modern Welsh society.

Here are the photos. There are three pages of them, so single-click on the picture and then keep clicking “next”.

[shashin type=”album” id=”52″ size=”medium”]

Sports Documentaries

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Over the weekend I finished watching a few DVDs I need to send to Kevin. Two of those were sports documentaries: Ken Burns’ Tenth Inning and Stevan Riley’s Fire in Babylon. Both are notable for using sport a a lens with which to examine social history.

There’s an interview with Burns in the extras for Tenth Inning in which he says he sees Baseball as a kind of sequel to his famous series about the American Civil War. Both of them are projects that examine American history. Tenth Inning fits right into that theory. Although it is fairly recent history, the Dot Com Boom and 9/11 are well worth historical examination, and once again baseball proves a fascinating lens through which to do so.

Fire in Babylon takes us to another part of the American continent, and another sport. It celebrates the creation and 15-year domination of the great West Indies test side. The stars of the show include Clive Lloyd, Viv Richards, Michael Holding and Bunny Wailer. I loved it, especially the extra that is made from a series of interviews with Sir Geoffrey, Lord Gower and Imran Khan where they talk about having to face up to the West Indies pace attack. If any of my American friends want to know why I think baseball players are a bit wussy (though I now understand the game much better than I did when I wrote this) they should watch this documentary.

A brief warning for my West Indian friends. There’s one extra that is an interview with cricket historian David Frith. He’s so smarmy and vile that you may end up wanting to punch your TV. I know I did. Thankfully the main film makes it very clear how West Indies developed their pace attack as a response to the physical battering they took from Lillee and Thomson, and the racist abuse they got from the Australian crowds, in 1975, and this exposes Frith’s comments beautifully.

Juliet Jacques at Hydra

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Last night’s LGBT History Month event saw some actual, serious history. Juliet Jacques, best known for her “Transgender Journey” column in The Guardian gave a presentation on how gender variance was viewed in Victorian England. We had a great crowd, and Juliet was excellent.

One of the things that became very obvious during her presentation is that doing histories of trans people is very hard. Any group of people who are marginalized by society is unlikely to leave much in the way of records. Most of the material that Juliet had to work with comes in the form of court records, and the associated media coverage of the cases.

Furthermore, in Victorian times there was no concept of gender, let alone gender identity. The only reason that people of the time could conceive for a woman to dress as a man would be for economic advantage — to be able to take jobs from which women were normally excluded. The only reason that they could conceive for a man to dress as a woman would be in order to solicit sex with other men.

Given that buggery was a crime punishable by up to 10 years in prison, no one arrested for “female personation” was going to admit to wanting to be a woman, or even to liking wearing women’s clothes. Anyone appearing in court would excuse his behavior by claiming that he had dressed up as a lark, or with some other creative excuse. I liked the chap who claimed he was doing an art project to do with women’s clothing, but by far the star excuse came from a Rev. Holmes, a minister from a small Scottish splinter church. He claimed to be surveying the dark underbelly of London society with a view to finding sinners and rescuing them. The judge, quite reasonably, asked him why he found it necessary to dress in women’s clothing in order to do so.

The most notorious case from the period is that of Boulton and Park, who were both found not guilty. Thanks to the tradition of double jeopardy, once acquitted they could no longer be tried again for dressing as women. Ernest Boulton went on to have a successful career as a drag artist.

The other complexity that I hope is obvious from all of this is that in Victorian times there was no effective difference between gender identity and sexual orientation. Because society assumed that any man dressed as a woman must be doing so in order to solicit sex, every man who crossed-dressed was, by definition, gay. As a consequence it is very difficult for an historian to separate the history of trans people from that of gay people. All we can do is speculate on the motives of the people who stories we discover, and it may well be that the prevailing social attitudes colored their identities.

My thanks again to Hydra Books for providing an excellent venue, to Juliet for a wonderful talk, and to everyone who attended.

An LGBT-HM Day Out in London

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Yesterday I headed up to London for the day, and managed to get back before the snow got heavy. Thanks to someone else being unable to go, I was able to snag a free ticket to a workshop being run by Write Queer London as part of LGBT History Month.

The main thing of interest to me was the historical talk on LGBT people in the 1950s. The obvious lesson from it was that tabloid newspapers have always been scum. Also, people believe the strangest things. Alongside the usual scare stories about the corruption of youth, the tabloids ran “queers under the bed” stories. How can you tell if someone you know might be a secret queer? Some of them look just like humans. It might even be your wife/husband.

The theory was that guys going to the pub together, or women having afternoon tea together, might in fact be having secret homosexual orgies. And this led to a truly wonderful headline: “The vicar drank cups of tea in secret”.

The vicar in question was trying to divorce his wife on suspicion of her being a secret lesbian. The court was told that she called her women friends “darling” and sometimes hugged them and kissed them on the lips. This was highly suspicious. But the vicar’s main beef with his wife appears to be that she nagged him mercilessly about his habit of having tea and biscuits before giving sermons. Apparently she was very High Church and regarded this as deeply inappropriate. So the poor vicar had to drink his tea in secret. Dreadful.

If you are able to get to London in the evening you might like to check out Wednesday’s talk in which Robert Mills will be addressing the issue of “Discipline and Desire in the Medieval Cloister”. That sounds fascinating.

The workshop took place in the Geffrye Museum in London, which I think is in Shoreditch, but Gideon & Jen may take me to task for my lack of understanding of London geography. It is a fascinating place. The museum is built inside a terrace of old alms houses. The interior walls have all partially knocked down, and a corridor opened up along the front of the building. So you walk along with front walls and doors on one side, and a sequence of rooms on the other. Each room is furnished from a different historical period. Much of it is hideous, but some of the earlier furnishings would be quite nice if you could add cushions.

The Geffrye is essentially a museum of middle class life, which makes it very British. Of course most of the visitors will be middle class too, and doubtless most of them disapprove of the majority of the decor in some way, just like I did, that being a very middle class thing to do. I should note, however, that they have a few very retro futurist pieces that were, of course, futurist at the time. This was my favorite piece.

Space helmet televisionYou can read more about it here.