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.