History

Scythians at the British Museum

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments


As I had to be in London all day Saturday I took the opportunity to travel a bit earlier than I needed on Friday and check out the new Scythians exhibition at the British Museum. This was a research trip, because many people believe that the Schythians were the original source of the Amazons legend. More of that later. First the exhibition.

The most obvious thing you see when you go in is that this exhibition was mounted with the assistance of the Russian government. Many of the items on display are from the Hermitage, and there is a lot of material about how early research into Scythian history was encouraged by Peter the Great. There’s even a big portrait of Peter to emphasize the fact. Of course Scythian territory is now almost entirely within the Russian Federation, which is a bit of a nuisance for those of us who can’t read academic papers in Russian, but I rather suspect that the Scythians are “Russian” in much the same way as the Celts are “English”.

The other obvious thing is that the Scythians were very fond of bling. There is loads of lovely gold jewelry on display. Personally I prefer some of the horse coverings. The Scythians clearly felt that their horses should look as good as they did.

I very much enjoyed getting to see all of this, but I was a little disappointed with the way that the write-ups tended to reinforce Western ideas of gender stereotypes. There are a couple of places where the text mentions that Scythian women rode horses, and could be fierce warriors. However, Scythian women are almost always shown wearing full-length dresses which are completely impractical for horse riding. Where a set of women’s leggings are displayed, they are described as “stockings”.

There is also an unspoken assumption throughout the text that warriors are men, despite the fact that large numbers of burials of Scythian women have been found with horses and weapons. One does have to be careful not to assume this means a “warrior grave”, but some of these women show clear signs of being wounded in face-to-face combat (as opposed to being cut down while running away, which is the usual way of dismissing wounds as evidence of women warriors).

I couldn’t see any mention of the Amazon legend in the exhibition, though a couple of books on the Amazons were on sale in the gift shop. The exhibition book excuses this by quoting Herodotus as saying that the Amazons regarded themselves as distinct from the Scythians. However, the term “Scythians” is about as precise as the term “Celts”. It refers to a group of peoples united by common language and culture. It seems entirely likely to me that all Herodotus meant by this was that the Amazons he met refused to acknowledge the local Scythian king as their overlord.

Anyway, I am glad I went, and I did pick up a few valuable bits of information from the exhibition. Now I need to get round to writing a presentation for next February.

Creative Histories, the Blog Series

~ Cheryl

As some of you may remember, back in July I attended the Creative Histories conference at Bristol University. One of the things to come out of that will be a series of blog posts on Will Pooley’s Storying the Past website.

The full list of posts making up the series can be found here. As you will see, mine is not due up until November 22nd, but there will be loads of great material before then. Many of the posts are based directly on papers from the conference, and I’m looking forward to catching up with those papers I wasn’t able to see. I am, of course, particularly interested in the use of “choose your own adventure” games as a means of teaching history. My post, however, is nothing to do with my paper (which was on steampunk). Instead I talk about who gets to do history, because they are assumed to be objective, and who gets told that their work is too subjective and can’t be considered. This is all directly relevant to what I talked about at the Trans in Academia conference on Saturday.

Update: I had the date of my appearance in the series wrong. It should be November 22nd. I have corrected it above. Apologies to anyone who saw the wrong date.

September Fringe: Chloe Headdon & Anna Smith Spark

~ Cheryl

Thanks to some very fast work by Tom Parker we have Monday’s Fringe readings available already.

Our first reader for September was Chloe Headdon, who had so impressed us in the April open mic.

Ever since she was little Chloe has wanted to be either a writer or a knight, so she now combines a bit of both. Chloe’s work is inspired by myths and legends, especially King Arthur, medieval history, and the British landscape. She is currently working on a young adult fantasy novel as well as other short stories. In her spare time, Chloe practises Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) and can regularly be found fighting people twice her size with swords.

Chloe read from the opening chapters of her novel. Before she got going, I introduced a guest from the USA.

Next up was Anna Smith Spark. She lives in London, and loves grimdark and epic fantasy and historical military fiction. Anna has a BA in Classics, an MA in history and a PhD in English Literature. She has previously been published in the Fortean Times and the poetry website www.greatworks.org. Previous jobs include petty bureaucrat, English teacher and fetish model.

The first book in the Empires of Dust series (The Court of Broken Knives) was published by Harper Voyager in June 2017. Anna read from the opening chapters of the book.

Finally there was the Q&A. I talked to Chloe about hitting people with big swords and her job in the heritage industry. I have huge admiration for her willingness to get in an arena to fight Francesca Terminiello. I talked to Anna about epic poetry, studying ancient history, what she feeds her shoes, and whether she had any advice for Chloe about getting published. Then Justin Newland asked a philosophical question about history and we discovered that, with three historians on a panel, the discussion can go on for ever. The conversation touched on the sex life of Alexander the Great and tasteless bathroom conversions in historic buildings.

Pete Sutton previewed this year’s Bristol literary festivals, of which BristolCon will of course be a part. The festivals seem to be breeding as we now have a horror convention and a poetry festival in October as well as the Festival of Literature. There are rumors of a festival devoted to Westerns as well.

There is no Fringe next month, but there will be an open mic at BristolCon. The guests for November are Jonathan L Howard & Baylea Hart.

OutStories AGM and Queer Classical Erotica

~ Cheryl

The OutStories Bristol AGM will take place on Saturday, October 7th at Bristol University. Some of you may remember that last year we had a fabulous talk from Dr. Jana Funke about Radclyffe Hall, which is still available in audio here. This year’s talk promises to be equally good.

Edward Warren is best known for giving his name to the Warren Cup, a Roman goblet which is decorated with explicit scenes of men having sex with each other. Warren was a passionate collector of Classical antiquities that provide evidence of same-sex relationships in past times. Dr. Jen Grove of will talk about Warren’s work, the objects he collected, and their use in advocating for LGBT rights both in his time and now.

Full details of the event, which is free to attend, are available here.

Forthcoming Appearances

~ Cheryl

Here are a few places where you will be able to find me in the coming weeks.

First up we have BristolCon Fringe on Monday, featuring the legendary Anna Smith-Spark, owner of the deadliest shoes in the writing business, and Chloe Headdon, one of the best readers from the last open mic event. As usual I will be hosting, and interrogating the readers afterward. I may ask Anna what her shoes eat.

If you happen to be in London, on September 30th I will be at this conference on being trans, intersex and gender non-confirming in academia. I’ll be talking about trying to do trans history when many historians believe that people like you didn’t exist before the 20th Century.

October sees the annual Bristol Festival of Literature and we will once again be doing the ranty feminist author panel. I may talk a bit about Space Marine Midwives. And Dreadnought, always Dreadnought.

I won’t be at BristolCon this year as I will be in Bologna for an academic conference. I’m also doing one in Melbourne early in November, though only by Skype. If you are interested in either, let me know.

And on November 4th, if all goes according to plan, I will be at LaDIYfest in Bristol. Watch this space for details on what I might end up doing there.

Last Week on Ujima – Crime, Cricket, Umbrellas & Protest

~ Cheryl

With profuse apologies for the day, here are the Listen Again links for last week’s show.

We started off with my friend Lucienne Boyce talking about her latest historical novel, Butcher’s Block. This is a new Dan Foster mystery novel, Dan being a Bow Street Runner and amateur pugilist. We got onto the subject of bodysnatchers, and thence onto the horrors of 18th century medicine. Inevitably, when Lucienne and I get together, we start talking about suffragettes as well. Not in the 18th century, of course, but next year is the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, which gave some British women the vote.

Next up was my report on the Kia Super League Finals Day, including interviews with Raf Nicholson of The Cricketer, and Stafanie Taylor, hero of the hour and captain of the West Indies women’s team.

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

The second hour began with a pre-recorded, trans-Atlantic interview with Nancy 3 Hoffman, owner and curator of the world’s only umbrella cover museum. Nancy is packing the museum into suitcases and bringing on it’s holidays to Bristol for a couple of weeks.

Finally I welcomed Amirah and Cat from the Bristol People’s Assembly into the studio. They told me all about the big anti-austerity demonstration that was to take place in Bristol at the weekend. I see from the news reports that it drew some pretty big crowds. It is also the first time I can recall the mayor of a city calling a demonstration against his own policies. Marvin says he has no choice but to make cuts because of reductions in the money he gets from central government, and he wanted people in Westminster to know how angry the people of Bristol are about it all.

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

The playlist for the show was:

  • Thin Lizzy – Fight or Fall
  • Sade – Is it a Crime
  • Eurythmics – Sisters are Doing It for Themselves
  • Queen – We Are the Champions
  • DJ Bravo – Champion
  • Billy Holiday – Stormy Weather
  • Weather Girls – It’s Raining Men
  • UB40 – One in Ten
  • Bob Marley – Get Up, Stand Up

History Goes Viral

~ Cheryl

No, I’m not referring to the ongoing-nonsense about whether people of color existed before they were “discovered” by European colonialists. While I was down in Hove I spotted this tweet from one of the best satirical accounts on Twitter:

Naturally I couldn’t resist offering a few comments. Somewhat to my surprise, some of those tweets I made have over 900 likes. One has over 1000. And it is still going, well over a week later.

Interestingly, despite all of the attention, I haven’t got much in the way of new followers. I’m not overly upset over that. After all, hordes of followers generally means endless harassment. As it is I check new followers for TERFs and block them on sight. But this has been something of a window on what social media popularity is like. I’m rather glad it doesn’t happen often.

Oh, and that tweet has lots of very funny replies. The whole thread is worth reading.

Introducing Talking LGBT+ Bristol #LGBT247

~ Cheryl


The lovely people at Bristol 24/7 have embarked upon a project, backed by the Heritage Lottery Fund, to share the hidden history of LGBT+ life in Bristol through film, print and social media. Naturally this is of great interest to us at OutStories Bristol. I’m sure that I and my colleagues will be contributing in various ways. If you happen to have a story to tell, you can contribute too, of course. And the rest of you will get to enjoy the fruits of the project.

You can learn more about the project, and find out how to get involved, at the Bristol 24/7 website.

While you are there, you may also want to check out this article about Bristol’s LGBTQ Refugees group. I went to talk to them last night. They are a lovely bunch.

More Historical Erasure

~ Cheryl ~ 3 Comments

This morning, while I was on my way to Bristol to do the radio show, my Twitter feed lit up with discussion of trans history. Yesterday The Guardian ran a piece about Albert Cashier, a Union solider from the American Civil War who was assigned female at birth but fought as a man and continued to live as one after the war. It was intended as a challenge to the Unpresident’s ban on trans people in the military. Inevitably it drew comment from well known anti-trans campaigners:

https://twitter.com/helenlewis/status/899966214277132288

There are several things that can be said about this, starting with the fact that this is hardly deep history that we are talking about here. Cashier died in 1915. The first modern trans surgery I know of in the USA took place in 1917 when Alan Hart had the first of a number of operations. He went on to have further surgery and took testosterone as soon as it became available to him. Hart identified as trans in a way easily recognizable today, and his life overlapped with that of Cashier for many years. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that Cashier might have had similar feelings.

Also, while Cashier was assigned female at birth, we have no details regarding his anatomy. As late as the 1930s people with intersex conditions were regularly having their gender re-assigned in adulthood due to errors made at birth. In it not impossible that Cashier had some sort of physical condition that might have inspired him to change gender role.

Some of the complaints about the article say that it is an attempt to “erase women’s history”. That seems a vast over-statement. Hundreds of women fought in the American Civil War. The vast majority of them went back to living as women if they survived the war and can be celebrated as women. Cashier is unusual (though not unique) in continuing to live as a man. Why noting that maybe 1% of the assigned-female people who fought might be trans counts as an erasure of women’s history is a mystery to me. Why is it that every single possible example of a trans man from history has to be reclaimed as a woman for women’s history to exist?

I have seen some people saying that they find it hard to believe that Cashier identified as a man. This, I suspect, is because they are cis people and can’t imagine why anyone would identify as trans. The way Cashier lived was incredibly dangerous for him. As Jonah Coman noted on Twitter today, cis people would never put themselves in that much danger. You have to really need to transition full time socially in order to survive doing it.

Then there is the political aspect. As far as the Unpresident is concerned, Cashier’s gender status is irrelevant. Cashier fought in the Union army, and trans men fight in the US Army today. Whether you regard them as men, or as “really women” doesn’t affect the fact that they fight well and bravely, and are a credit to their units. It doesn’t matter what gender you believe someone to be to defend their right to serve.

Why, then, is Lewis so perturbed about the Cashier article? The answer, of course, is politics. The idea that a trans man might have existed in the 19th Century is anathema to anti-trans campaigners because it is a matter of political faith for them that trans identities are not real, and that they did not exist until (male) doctors “invented” them in the 20th Century. Just like the Alt-Right goons who can’t accept the existence of black people in Roman Britain, Lewis and her pals can’t accept the existence of trans people in 19th Century America. In both cases this refusal stems from political opinions rooted in bigotry.

(It is, of course, no accident that among the most vocal supporters of the Unpresident’s ban on trans people in the military were anti-trans “feminists”.)

History (as Kit Heyam noted today) is always political. You can’t interpret the past without your own feelings and prejudices influencing that interpretation. Seeking to erase specific groups of people from history is about as political as it gets.

Tampere Site Visit

~ Cheryl

I have no idea whether the Finns are serious about bidding for Tampere in 2032, but just in case I paid the proposed site a visit today.

Tampere is just over an hour by train from Helsinki and has been the site of many successful Finncons. Right now it does not have the facilities to host a Worldcon, but there are plans to build a brand new convention center around the railway station. This is an ideal location. There are already many hotels in the area, including two Scandics, a Holiday Inn that appears to be undergoing a massive expansion, and a giant Sokos that might be the ugliest hotel in the world. There are cheaper hotels as well.

There are plenty of places to eat in the area, and as the university is close by some of them are very cheap. And there is a small shopping mall. The city is building a tram network that will be in operation much sooner than the convention center is built, so getting to other parts of the city will be easy. My only reservation is the airport, which is very small and currently only has bus links to the city.

The main attraction of Tampere is the brand new Moomin Museum located inside Tampere-talo, a massive arts complex located just 5 minutes walk from the railway station. I visited the Moomin Museum a few years back and, while it had lots of great things in it, it all looked a bit sad. The new museum has put a lot of work into presentation and is well worth a visit if you have any interest in Moomins (save for eating them, Paul).

The city also has a fascinating cathedral with some great art, and the world’s only Lenin museum. The great revolutionary lived in Tampere for some time while plotting his take-over of Russia and the city has lots of interesting material connected to his time there.

Today I visited Vapriikki, a museum complex a little further out of town. It contains several discrete exhibitions including a brand new games museum. Most of the material in it is concerned with electronic games, for which Finland is justly famous, but it has some board games and RPG material as well, including a whole section on Finland’s annual role-playing event, Ropecon, which was in Messukeskus two weeks before us.

Vapriikki also contains a natural history section, a geology section, exhibits about life in Tampere in 1918 and 1017, a doll museum, and Finland’s Ice Hockey Hall of Fame. It does not yet have an exhibition devoted to the sayings of Kimi Raikkonen, though I am sure that will come eventually.

Right now there is also a traveling exhibition with material from the Forbidden City in Beijing. It is Qing Dynasty, so relatively modern, and very impressive.

I put a whole lot of photos on Twitter today if you want to see more.

Worldcon: Day 4

~ Cheryl

I was so tired last night that It forgot to set my alarm and woke up 1.5 hours later than planned. While I did get around 7.5 hours sleep, I didn’t get breakfast because I had an 11:00am panel and it takes almost an hour to get to the convention from my hotel.

Thankfully the panel went well. This was the one on the history of gender, which I had suggested. Originally I had been asked to moderate, but Scott Lynch kindly stepped into that role to allow me to talk more. He did a great job of keeping order on a panel with three very opinionated women (Jo Walton, Gillian Pollack and myself). My apologies once again to Thomas Ã…rnfelt who didn’t get much of a look-in, but had some great medieval history info when he did.

I spent most of the panel telling anecdotes about trans history, but I did also get to do some show and tell. There is a great company in the dealer’s room who make cuneiform tablets. If you have some text, they’ll do a custom one for you. So I got them to make this:

https://twitter.com/CherylMorgan/status/896301656656289792

For an explanation, see this blog post.

I also got to attend (and I had to queue early to get in for both) two trans-themed panels. Neither of them told me much new, but it was great to see packed out rooms for such things. The first trans panel I can remember at Worldcon was in Montréal in 2009. There were about 15 people in the audience, one of whom was a very hostile feminist, and all of the other panelists were cis. Here we had several trans-themed panels with a variety of identities represented (including non-binary people with no wish to transition medically), and all of them were younger than me.

Despite having got a decent lunch, the no breakfast thing meant that by mid afternoon I was fading fast. Thankfully Otto managed to catch me and steer me to the staff lounge for some vitamins before I collapsed. However, that was not before I managed to mistake someone for someone else on several occasions and embarrass myself horribly. My apologies to all concerned.

In the evening Thor came to see the masquerade. Despite beating on the roof of Messukeskus very hard, he didn’t get in. Thankfully he got bored after a while and I was about to get out to the party run by the lovely people from Storycom. I got to meet some young Chinese writers and a guy who has started a convention in Hong Kong. And we got to see Neil Clarke on film, which partially made up for his not being here.

I didn’t see the masquerade, but I gather that Miki Dennis got a big prize, as is only right and proper. Best in Show, however, seems to have gone to a very young person in her first masquerade. I want to see photos of that.

Overall things have gone very smoothly today. There are still queues, and some panels do max out, but the vast majority of people are getting to see what they want to see. The discussions I’m hearing in the hallways are changing from, “why don’t these idiots do something about the overcrowding” to “wow, this is an amazing convention!”. One day left, and I suspect it will only get better from here.

Sheffield Uni Does LGBT History

~ Cheryl

The History Department at Sheffield University has a great blog called History Matters. Right now they are doing a series on LGBT history and there is some excellent content already available.

In “The Past is not a Straight Line” Bodie A. Ashton makes the case for history being far more queer than most people think.

In “Tim Farron, the Bible and Queerness” Jo Henderson-Merrygold takes issue with the former leader of the Liberal Democrats over what the Bible actually says about gay people.

And in “Earinus: A Roman Civil Rights Activist?” I talk about one of my favorite Romans, a young eunuch whose sense of his own masculinity was so strong that he may have persuaded the Emperor Domitian to ban child castration.

Much more great content will be forthcoming in the next few weeks.

Creative Histories Revisited

~ Cheryl

I was so busy on Thursday, and so tired on Friday, that I didn’t cover the Creative Histories conference very well. Therefore I’m going to look back over days 2 and 3 so I can highlight some of the great presentations we had. (I looked at Wednesday in more detail here.)

Thursday opened with Ronald Hutton who is the UK’s leading authority on the history modern paganism. I was particularly struck by what he had to say about how even being suspected of having pagan sympathies was sufficient to damage his academic career, and make it difficult for him to taken seriously as an expert witness on the subject. This is very reminiscent of how trans academics are treated when we try to say anything about trans-related issues. I’ll have a lot more to say about this in a post I’m writing for Will Pooley’s blog.

The other morning session on Thursday was all about creative writing. Nick Barratt, who is one of the historians who works on the hugely successful TV ancestry series, Who Do You Think You Are?, talked about the tension between entertaining the public and doing good history. We also had presentations on story structure and performative story telling. This is a very long way from the traditional structure of academic writing, but of course an essential skill if you do want to tell a story rather than present an argument.

After lunch I headed out to the Other Lecture Theatre, which involved a trek through the zoo. We had a couple of papers on maritime history, and got to see an amazing quilt made from very small squares so as to reproduce a pixelated image of a portrait of Nelson.

The final session was mine, but I was preceded by two excellent papers. Sonja Boon talked about the difficulties of writing about the history of slavery when some of your ancestors were slaves. Obviously that connects with my comments above about doing pagan and trans history. Joe Krawec is researching 20th Century British industrial history, but as a comics fan she is keen to use sequential art in presenting her research. Her paper was about telling history through comics, and the process of learning to produce them. The title of her paper, “Punching Hitler: comic books and their uses for the historian”, will take a lot of beating.

Friday opened with a session on criminal history, though it might not have sounded like it from my tweets. The first paper was about the Digital Panopticon, a project to make a huge number of 18th and 19th century criminal records available online. The second paper was all about how the techniques of journalism can be used to tell stories from history. And paper three told a fascinating story about how a man convicted of murder in Shanghai later became a minor celebrity in London.

After lunch we had a guest presentation from biographer, Julia Blackburn. She talked about how she writes her books, but also in some detail about her latest subject, artist John Craske. He certainly makes for a fascinating story. Here’s Blackburn talking about her subject in The Guardian.

After lunch we had a session on digital projects, which included the OutStories Bristol LGBT History map. The other papers were about the Many Headed Monster blog, which looks great but is not my period, and about Experiencing Arcadia. The latter is a lovely project about an 18th Century garden that has been let down by some poor IT choices. Historians, of course, are generally not well informed about IT issues, and can easily go down the wrong path.

I need to spend more time writing apps, but I have no time.

There were, of course, many other sessions. The conference had either 2 or 3 streams most of the time. Some of the other sessions looked very interesting. I’m still working on bi-location.

The final session of the conference was a round table looking back on the themes of the conference. There seemed to be general agreement that it was a good thing that historians should be more creative when presenting their work, though admittedly the group was very much self-selected. I’m rather surprised that the idea of a PhD By Published Work doesn’t exist in history. Nicola Griffith has just done a really interesting blog series about her journey towards getting one of those.

The big problem from the historians’ point of view is that being creative is all very well when you have an established reputation, but for anyone starting their career it is a major risk because you will get called out for not being “objective”. For us non-professional academics, being creative is a lot easier, but we run the risk of not being taken seriously by historians who are in academia. Ultimately it is all about hierarchies and gatekeeping. People make rules about who is allowed to do what history, and how they are allowed to do it, to try to limit the types of stories that get told. Conferences like this kick back against such strictures, and I’m delighted to see Bristol University taking the lead in doing that.

Conference Wrap and Dinosaur Hunting

~ Cheryl


Day 3 of Creative Histories continued smoothly with a lot of interesting presentations. These included one by my colleague, Andy Foyle, about the LGBT History Mapping Project that we undertook. Andy co-presented with Josie McLellan of the University of Bristol History Department with whom we worked on the project. (The University’s IT department wrote the software.)

I have a lot more I want to say about the conference. Some of that will be here over the next couple of days, and I have also promised a post to Will Pooley, the genius behind the event, for his blog. Many of the other presenters will also be doing guest posts for him. For now suffice it to say that I had a fabulous three days and have come away with some new friends, and a lot to think about.

We had an hour and a half between the end of the conference and closing time at the zoo, so I took myself off on a dinosaur hunt. You can see the entrance to their enclosure above, and in the distance a few kids playing with a friendly pachyrhinosaurus. I’ll have some more pictures, and possibly some video, for you over the weekend. In the meantime here’s a selfie that I took with my new friend, Rex.

Mad Day

~ Cheryl

This morning my social media alerts went crazy because I have a new history blog up the the University of Sheffield’s History Matters site.

Hopefully that didn’t interfere too much with my tweeting of Ronald Hutton’s brilliant lecture.

There was lots of other good stuff at Creative Histories today, though I was a little distracted by the need to have a conference call with Stonewall about a new campaign which I’ll be telling you about in August.

I got to present my steampunk paper. It seemed to go down well. Sonja and Joe, who presented in the same session as me, were both brilliant. It was an honor to follow them.

And then I rushed off to Filton to be on Made in Bristol TV with Emma Newman to talk about the Clarke and the Hugos. Em was brilliant as always. I took one of my Hugos, which outshone me effortlessly. Hopefully I will have the video for you next week.

Now I need sleep. I have to be off to Bristol first thing tomorrow for more history and a spot of dinosaur hunting.

Creative Histories – Day 1

~ Cheryl

As promised, I am in Bristol. I have not yet got to explore the zoo, but I have listened to four interesting papers and made a bunch of new friends. I have also discovered that you get very well fed at the zoo. Or at least you do if you are a human (or masquerading as one). I can’t vouch for anyone else.

Creative Histories is all about engaging with history in creative ways, not all of which involve fiction. The first session today was all about more visual arts. We learned about a project to make textile arts based on stories found in the historical archives of Hertfordshire (which featured alchemists, pirates and witches). We also heard about preserving the artistic heritage of Wiltshire, including making pottery in the style of the Bronze Age “Beaker People” (because Wiltshire looks down its historical nose at most of the rest of the UK in the same way that Egypt does at Greece and Rome).

Session two was all about children’s fiction. We saw a great interactive ebook project based on a YA novel about the Spanish Civil War (which sadly sank without trace because Apple’s big plans for interactive ebooks never amounted to much). There was also a really powerful paper about the evolution of children’s historical fiction in Australia which had some of us in tears. Also bonus Shaun Tan mention.

Tomorrow I get to do my paper. I am in a great session. I have Sonja who is currently based in Newfoundland but is a newcomer to Canada. She’s talking about writing about Colonialism when you are a person whose culture was colonized. And I have Joanne who is talking about teaching history though comics. Her paper is titled, “Punching Hitler” and she has an awesome batgirl-logo necklace.

Basically all is well, apart from the flamingos who have been barracking loudly from their enclosure just outside the windows.

Sheffield Does LGBT History

~ Cheryl

The lovely people at the Department of History at Sheffield University have a blog called History Matters. This year they have decided to run a series of posts on the subject of LGBT+ history. The first one has gone up, and appropriately it is an impassioned plea not to erase queer people from history. I am looking forward to a lot more of this over the coming days.

I’m also pleased to note that I will have a post in the series. I’m not sure when it will go up, but it has been through editing so it is just a matter of scheduling. It is about Romans, and in particular about someone who defiantly asserted that his gender identity was that which he had been assigned at birth.

The British Museum LGBTQ Trail & Exhibition

~ Cheryl

This post has been a long time coming because I have been busy doing lots of other things. What has finally shoved it to the top of my to-do list is that on Friday evening the British Museum has an event on. It is titled, “What makes an object LGBTQ?” and it features, among others, E-J Scott of the Museum of Transology and Sue Sanders of Schools Out. I’d love to be there, but I can’t, so I’m writing this instead.

The current version of the LGBTQ Trail is heavily based on the book, A Little Gay History by Richard Parkinson. There’s a lot of good stuff in it but, as I have mentioned before, quite a bit more that could be in it.

The main addition is a small exhibition in a side room off one of the main classical halls on the first floor. It is, rather appropriately, right next to the section on Amazons. It contains some interesting things I hadn’t seen before, such a different portrait of Beaumont and a bunch of Roman winged phalluses, together with a number of more modern items.

One of my favorite features of the trail was the presence of Xena and Gabrielle in one of the cases of vases with pictures of Amazons on them.

Sadly the nearby vase showing Achilles being dipped in the Styx had been taken off display. That might not seem like a queer artifact, but it is because the story of Achilles is proof that cis people have a gender identity. His mother, Thetis, had him raised as a girl in the hope that he’d never go to war, but Achilles knew he was a boy and refused to go along with this. Changing people’s gender identity is much harder than most people think.

One item that I think should be in the trail is this lovely little oil lamp decorated with pictures of Cybele and Attis. You can’t get a much clearer story of gender transformation than Attis, and of course it is an excuse to talk about the galli. The Museum doesn’t seem to want to acknowledge that side of Roman culture. I can kind of see them not wanting to highlight the castration clamp, but then it is on display so squeamish people are going to see it anyway. Why not tell the whole story on the LGBTQ trail?

The castration clamp, by the way, is in the Roman Britain room, on the far side of the museum to all of the other Roman and Greek material. Also in that room is a collection of jet jewellery. As I understand it, jet was particularly significant for the galli, and so some of this jewellery may have belonged to Roman trans women. Certainly the galli burials found at Catterick included jet jewellery.

The Museum has tried to include Egypt in the Trail, but the only item they had to highlight is a stela featuring two characters called Hor and Suty. According to the accompanying text, some scholars have suggested that they were a gay couple as they are clearly fond of each other, but the text goes on to say, “This interpretation, though technically possible, is highly unlikely.” A much more obvious interpretation is that they were twins, because the inscription talks about them coming forth from the womb on the same day. If you are going to have an example of a controversial interpretation, it might be better to have one with more substance to it.

The Sumerian section is still identifying the Queen of the Night as Ishtar. There is more of an argument to be made for that than of Hor & Suty being gay, but by identifying her as Ereshkigal, which is more likely, IMHO, it gives you an excuse to talk about the Descent. The story of Ishtar’s descent into the Underworld is a very famous mythological tale with queer people right at the heart of it. Why not tell that story?

Of course they also have Silimabzuta somewhere in their archives. I know it is only a fragment of a statue, but it is hugely significant for trans history and I think it ought to be on display, at least for this exhibition.

A new addition to the trail is this fabulous stela of a Mayan king, Waxaklajuun Ub’aah K’awiil. He is dressed as the young maize god who is a character of ambiguous gender, and thus the king is wearing women’s clothing. For a long time this resulted in the stela being mis-identified as depicting a woman. I want to know a lot more about this god.

I am sure that there is still a lot more that can be found in the Museum that relates to LGBT issues. You just have to know what you are looking for. In view of that, I have a question for my friends who are experts on Greek vases. Look at this:

It depicts a scene as a symposium, and the Museum identifies the women present as hetairai — high class sex workers. However, when I see someone from the classical world with that double flute I immediately think “gallus”. I don’t know things worked in Greece. Did women musicians play that instrument regularly? Was it associated with the followers of Meter? Could we be looking at a picture of a trans sex worker? I suspect probably not, but it is worth asking just in case.

Historical Fiction at the Zoo

~ Cheryl

As a kid I was addicted to the Animal Magic show on children’s BBC, fronted by Johnny Morris. As the older readers among you may remember, it was set in Bristol Zoo. Little did I imagine that I would one day end up being on display in the zoo myself.

No, don’t worry, this is nothing to do with my having cat genes. Nor do I expect to be put in a cage. Rather I will be speaking at Creative Histories, a conference on the intersection of history and fiction. My paper is going to be on “Challenging Colonialism through Steampunk”. Also on the programme is my OutStories colleague, Andy Foyle, who will be talking about telling LGBT history through maps.

The conference is at the end of July (and I’ll be going straight from there down to Brighton for Trans Pride – yes, I know, I’m mad). I’m looking forward to it. If anyone has any recommendations for anti-colonialist steampunk besides Everfair, Buffalo Soldier and Airship Shape & Bristol Fashion, please let me know.