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.