Fantabulosa Basket

(With apologies to @mmmmmm-queer-shit , who I promised this post to ages ago- unfortunately uni, moving and a bout of Covid delayed me).

As a general note on Aussie queer history: there are increasing numbers of historians working in the field, but Australian history generally suffers from a tendency of trained historians to go into European and/or American history. There’s also a tragic dearth of material from pre-Federation: not because there’s no records, but because most Australian historians seem to focus on the 20th Century. With all that in mind, I’ve tried to cover as much as I can that’s readily available and reasonably trustworthy (i.e. actually researched). Hopefully it’s a half decent jumping-off point at least!

I’m also more than happy to be asked any questions about specific time periods or people (the Australian history tag on this blog will also pull up a heap of material).

Books:

Acting Out: Canberra’s Very Queer History, Graham Willett *Free, online

Moonlite, Garry Linnell- This is a fantastic bio by a non-historian, of the bushranger Andrew George Scott (a.k.a. Captain Moonlite) and his beloved James Nesbitt. There’s a lot to be said about the queer history of bushranging in general, but the Scott/Nesbitt relationship is fascinating, and this book also tells a great story about the early history of prison reform and abolition movements in Australia.

The Sex Lives of Australians, Franks Bongiorno- This sounds explicit but really isn’t, and is also very focused on straight people. However, it’s an excellent look at the history of Australian attitudes towards sex and sexuality more generally (take the title as clickbait, really).

Revolution is for US, Liz Ross- Focuses on the overlap between left-wing (specifically communist and socialist) politics in Australia and the gay lib movement. Super easy, pretty short read. Definitely problematic in terms of bias (as in: take the ‘truth’ of Ross’ claims with a grain of salt, as she overemphasises socialist/communist support in places), but still a good read.

Articles:

Hidden in Plain Sight: Australian Queer Men and Women Before Gay Liberation

Destiny Roger’s Queer History Tag on QNews- Mostly, but not exclusively, Australian. Rogers isn’t an historian, but she writes hilarious, well-researched and easy to read history pieces. Strongly recommend her work.

Queer Relationships in 19th Century Australia

Queering the Past: The Learned Absence of Homosexuality in Australian History *Link is to Overland- while I don’t always agree with how queer history is presented at Overland, it has a number of articles that are certainly worth reading.

What Do We Know About Queer Indigenous History?

Uncovering Australian Television’s Lost Queer History

On the G.O.D gang of Sydney’s 1990s, queer objects and archives *Link is to Archer magazine- they have heaps of queer history articles, strongly recommended in general.

Queer Organising in Sydney in the Early 1970s

Beyond Buggery: Digging Up Stories About Sex Between Men on the Victorian Gold Fields

How the Killing of a Gay Academic Changed Australia

Websites, Online Exhibitions, Podcasts:

Australian Queer Archives (formerly ALGA- Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives)- currently the main repository for queer-specific historical material in Australia, community run, Melbourne-based. Volunteer program available working with preserving materials (I volunteer here and can 100% vouch for them). They also work with neighbouring archives in the Asia-Pacific, particularly Indonesia, so worth keeping an eye on for broader materials as well.

Coming Out in the 70s- An online exhibition from the State Library of New South Wales on gay liberation in the 70s (bearing in mind that ‘gay’ was the overarching term of the time period, so covers diverse identities).

A History of LGBTIQ Victoria- Downloadable report from Heritage Victoria.

Pride History Group- In effect the NSW version of the Australian Queer Archives- heaps of links to oral histories, projects, etc.

78ers.org- Cannot emphasise the importance of this site enough. This is a community run and updated site, with downloadable book, by the original people who started Mardi Gras. It debunks a lot of misunderstandings about Australia’s relationship to American gay lib. Really helpful for understanding current debates around Mardi Gras and its treatment of the 78ers, as well as its ‘apolitical’ pride focus.

Out of the Closets, Into The Street- Victoria based online exhibition covering the gay lib era.

Victoria’s Transgender History- Report commissioned by Transgender Victoria, produced by historian Noah Riseman. Link is towards the bottom of the page.

Small Town Queer- History from the Tweed Heads region.

Queensland LGBTIQ+ Collections- A range of material and access instructions for Queensland queer histories.

Gay Rights Law Reform- South Australia focus. Pretty basic webpage/info with thumbnail documents that can be accessed.

The Gay Museum- Exhibition documents covering gay and lesbian history in Western Australia.

Lost Spaces- Queer experiences told through various (now-closed) clubs and sites.

Queer As Fact- Podcast by four Melbournian folks who work in history. Broader focus than just Australia, but plenty of eps on Australian figures as well.

The Greatest Menace: Inside the Gay Prison Experiment- Podcast by Patrick Abboud about the specific targeting and imprisonment of same-sex attracted men in the twentieth century. Note: Abboud is an (excellent) journalist, but there are a lot of issues with how this story is framed historically (*coughs* ‘the world’s only gay prison *coughs*) that are designed for public consumption rather than with a groundedness in historical knowledge. Well worth a listen, just be aware that this kind of framing obscures a lot of historical reality around the targeting of queer and trans people by the judicial and political system(s).

Queerways- Augmented maps for self-guided walking tours around Melbourne (specifically Yarra, CBD and St Kilda)

Search advice:

SBS Pride- A lot of the topics are modern, but they do have queer history pieces as well (and a massive repository of articles to dig around in).

Trove- Australia’s digital repository of primary sources. When searching Trove, be aware of historical language and uniquely Australian terminology in place: buggery, sodomy, transvestite, passing woman/women (afab, often covers folks we might now call butch or transmasc), kamp (the Australian spelling historically uses a k, not a c), cross-dressing, man-woman (afab), sistergirl/brotherboy (more recent), virago. Terms like ‘vice’ will bring up a massive array of ‘crimes’ (or even just behaviour) that contravened normative society. As a general rule of thumb, think about a particular time period you’re interested in and try to familiarise yourself with the words used at that time period- often they’ll be euphemisms- particularly prior to the 20th Century.

Facebook- A lot of queer history is on Facebook, because most queer historical groups aim to connect with older members of the community (and many of them recreate social circles that existed in the 60s-80s). As a general rule of thumb, searching gay or queer history will bring up these groups- Lost Gay Melbourne is particularly active, as is the Australian Queer Archives page. Do be aware that many of these groups are not designed for younger folks to be an active part in, and we’re often guests in those spaces ‘listening in’ to queer elders talking to each other.

Reliable bookstores:

The Bookshop Darlinghurst (Sydney)

Hares and Hyenas (St Kilda)

Both have online shopping options and YA specific sections, including non-fiction.

Australian historians or other academics working in gender and sexuality:

These are folks that I would personally vouch for, and whose work I’m reasonably familiar with. Most have a social media presence, but generally if you see their name on a site, essay, etc you can trust that they’re speaking from an informed position.

Noah Riseman (he/him)

Yves Rees (they/them)

Sandy O’Sullivan (Wiradjuri, they/them)- Indigenous Studies scholar, works specifically on relations between gender and colonialism.

Graham Willett (he/him)

Garry Wotherspoon (he/him)

Three postcards produced by the Australian Queer Archives (formerly Australian Gay and Lesbian Archives, though always fully inclusive in practice), where I volunteer. My write-up below is paraphrased from the text on the reverse.

The first shows Aboriginal South Sea Islander man Malcolm Cole dressed as Captain Cook for the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade of 1988. Text on back notes that this was a camp response to Bicentennial celebrations, in which Cole and friends created the first official First Nations float. It was a ‘ship’, pulled the length of the parade by white ‘convict’ men. Malcolm was a dancer, founding member of the Aboriginal Islander Dance Theatre and a HIV/AIDS activist. More about Cole, including footage of him at Mardi Gras, can be found at the Blak History Month website (which is also a great repository of Aboriginal history in general).

The second postcard shows Lyn Cooper, wearing her ‘I Am a Lesbian’ shirt at the International Women’s Day celebrations in Adelaide, 1974. Cooper was a photographer and member of both the Women’s and Gay Liberation movements in Australia, specifically Adelaide. Her image remains popular and commonly posted in pride images and celebrations of lesbian visibility.

In the context of Nazi persecution of gay men in Vienna, Schrefel’s persecution was in many respects typical. Same-sex desire was persecuted in Austria according to the §129 of the criminal code, which outlawed the behaviours of both men and women. Thanks to the research project “‘Warme’ vor Gericht” by QWIEN, who analyzed all accessible trials for §129 between 1938 and 1945, we know both the qualitative and quantitative trends of the trials against queer men and women. That both Schrefel and Varmuža were lower middle-class and working-class, respectively, is not surprising because persecution disproportionately targeted poorer people. In addition, Schrefel’s defense strategy is in keeping with that of many other queer men on trial for “unnatural fornication” at the time. He claimed that he was keeping away from women because of an STD he contracted from a prostitute a few years prior. Finally, the sentence was no different to what it would have been before the Nazi takeover. Schrefel was sentenced to four months in prison while Varmuža only got two, because he was younger and thus seen as less culpable. The two months of pre-trial custody were credited towards his sentence. Schrefel’s release should therefore have taken place on November 19. However, the Gestapo had added a “transfer direction” to his file. That meant that on the day of his release he was not to be set at liberty, but instead passed on for further Gestapo confinement. For many, this practice meant a de facto death sentence: they were sent to other concentration camps, most notably Sachsenhausen outside Berlin. By January 3, 1939, however, Schrefel was free, possibly because he could prove he was about to leave the country.

Heinrich Schrefel’s/Henry Stevens’s life is an ordinary, unglamorous story. It is, however, a very different account than what we usually hear from stories of Holocaust commemoration in Britain. It shows a lower middle-class Jewish man, living a life of economic and political concerns in Austrofascist Vienna, but also a life with friends, a lover, cinema, and socializing on the shores of the Old Danube and in the city’s cafés. It is a life of self-understanding as a man who loved other men, and one who was able to find his place against all odds – in two countries.

Note: Article contains language for trans people and sex workers that is now generally considered outdated or inappropriate- terminology in question was in common usage at the time (1999) and is not used maliciously. However, as I transcribe all articles as written, please consider your needs before continuing.

Archive source link.

Image: A woman with dark hair that appears to be tied back, wearing glasses and looking into the camera. She is smiling slightly and wears a business jacket, over which is draped a chain of office.

Text: Transsexual History- New Zealand’s Georgina Beyer is the world’s first known transsexual member of parliament. Rex Wockner’s interview inside. Article appears in Outlines newsletter, dated 1 December, 1999.

Transcription of article below. Wiki article on Georgina Beyer here.

From the article:

In 1928 Panama Al Brown became the first Latin American to win a world title. However, within a day of the outgoing association president announcing his title, the incoming president rescinded it. According to Jose Corpas, “There is no definitive record of why he was stripped of the title, whether it was racism or homophobia or merely favouritism for others.”

...

During the 1930s, Panama Al Brown lived mainly in Paris, traveling back to America to defend his title. He spoke English, French and Spanish from childhood so adapted easily to life in the French capital. In addition to fighting, Al Brown joined Josephine Baker’s La Revue Nègre as a tap dancer. Later, he performed a cabaret song-and-dance show with a live orchestra which he also conducted.

Panama Al Brown became a wealthy man, buying property, expensive cars and renowned for his sartorial style. He also went home to Panama and built his mum a new house.

“By around 1800, writers of all sorts were determined to base what they insisted were fundamental differences between the male and female sexes, and thus between man and woman, on discoverable biological distinctions and to express these in a radically different rhetoric. In 1803, for example, Jacques-Louis Moreau, one of the founders of “moral anthropology”, argued passionately against the ‘nonsense’ written by Aristotle, Galen, and their modern followes on the subject of women in relation to men. Not only are the sexes different, but they are different in every conceivable aspect of body and soul, in every physical and moral aspect. To the physician or the naturalist, the relation of woman to man is ‘a series of oppositions and contrasts’... Doctors claimed to be able to identify ‘the essential features that belong to her (woman), that serve to distinguish her, that make her what she is’:

‘All parts of her body present the same difference: all express woman; the brow, the nose, the eyes, the mouth, the ears, the chin, the cheeks. If we shift our view to the inside, and with the help of the scalpel, lay bare the organs, the tissues, the fibers, we encounter everywhere...the same difference.’

From the article:

Trương Tân’s breakout work might not have changed laws directly, but they certainly played a part in encouraging other artists to attempt resistance and overcome self-censorship.

Today, queer cultural production is much more visible in Vietnam’s public sphere, and Vietnamese artists have continued to foster awareness of LGBT issues through their work.

The multidisciplinary artist Himiko Nguyên‘s 2011 photography installation, Come Out, aimed to counteract what she sees as public ignorance on gender and sexuality issues.

Like Tân,  Himiko laments the unwritten rules and constraints that she finds in Vietnamese society. Her comments indicate a thoughtful understanding on how ideology is implemented through national education and how it is naturalised by the general population.

From the article:

“The (New York) underground was primed to take notice of Puerto Rican queers, owing to pop-culture artefacts of the Good Neighbor Policy of the 1930s and ’40s. As the United States pulled back from active military intervention in Latin America, it sought lucrative, and exploitative, commercial connections there.

...

The queer Puerto Rican Mario Montez was one commanding figure of the underground. In Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures (1962), quickly suppressed as obscene for its explicit orgiasticity, Montez appears “arrayed like a baroque Madonna” and “coyly flees before a number of avid pursuers,” in the words of Suárez. Montez later appeared in several Warhol films and was a mainstay of Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company. As Suárez writes, “No one gave so much for so little.”

Near a tobacconist's brightly-lit window, they were standing among a crowd of people. Their eyes met by chance, and expressed timidly, hesitantly, the deviant desire of their flesh. Then, a few uneasy steps on the sidewalk— until they smiled and slightly nodded.

And after that, the closed carriage . . . the sensuous closeness of the bodies; the joined hands , the joined lips.

- Κωνσταντίνος Π. Καβάφης (K.P. Kavafis), The Collected Poems w. Parallel Greek Text, trans. Evangelos Sachperoglou

From the article, which I strongly recommend reading in full:

“In her book, (Zoe) Playdon (Emeritus Professor of Medical Humanities at the University of London) reveals that in the 1930s, the media ran stories “predominantly about trans men”, and that “being trans was a mystery and trans women, who were considered far rarer than trans men, were especially mysterious”.

At the time, trans people could take hormones, have gender confirmation surgery, and then change their birth certificates. There were no panels of psychiatrists and endocrinologists, as we have today, deciding whether to grant you a gender recognition certificate, which since the 2004 Gender Recognition Act has provided certain legal protections. There was no need; you could simply change your birth certificate and therefore other necessary paperwork.

It was the case of Ewan Forbes that changed that. He became a GP, corrected his birth certificate, and married a woman. Having been accepted as a man, he never considered that it all might be threatened until his father, Lord Sempill, died, and then his elder brother, William, in 1965.

As the second son, Forbes would inherit both paternal titles: the barony and the baronetcy, which could only be passed down the male line. But a cousin called John “turns up at William’s funeral”, says Playdon, and tells him he’ll contest the succession in court “because you’re not a real man”.

What followed in 1968 was a trial in which Forbes fought for his male birth certificate to be judged legitimate. His defence had to contend with a recent and radical change in medical thinking. Up until the 1960s, doctors largely regarded trans people as intersex; that is, a physiological difference in which individuals have elements of both sexes.

This idea was then engulfed by a new American psychiatric ideology, “which classifies being trans as a mental illness,” says Playdon, “as floridly psychotic”. The only way for Forbes to bypass this legally would be to prove he had physical male traits.

From the article:

The repressions which began in the early years of Bolshevik power, and even more the great terror of the 1930s, have obscured many revolutionary social processes that escape a narrowly political definition. One such phenomenon was gender emancipation, which touched gay people across the whole country. The Bolsheviks repealed the law on ‘sodomy’ in 1917, in a move that had already been actively discussed and prepared in Tsarist Russia. Other processes also played an important part: the increased mobility of the population, secularisation, the spread of literacy, and the changing nature of the patriarchal family. Leftist ideas, which had been circulating in society since the end of the nineteenth century, allowed abstract conceptions of justice to be understood in more tangible ways, in relation to the specific circumstances of concrete individuals. Moreover, the weakening of censorship after the revolutionary events of 1905 opened the way for numerous translations of popular European medical literature. In this literature, gay people were often pathologised, but they were at least described and analysed in scientific terms, rather than in terms of religious morality.

From the article:

“In the late 1970s, the historian Judith Brown was researching the Medici family when she came upon a mysterious seventeenth-century ecclesiastical investigation. The subject was Mother Superior Benedetta Carlini, an Italian Catholic nun accused of being a heretic and of having sexual relations with another women in her convent, Sister Bartolomea Crivelli.

...

(Carlni’s) visions took on an even more macabre quality: She died and went to Purgatory, only to be brought back to life by confessor Father Paolo Ricordati. But the tension within the Theatine convent—particularly around Carlini’s increasing power—caught the attention of a new papal nuncio in Florence, who sent officials to investigate.

In their report, investigators critiqued Carlini’s “immodest and lascivious language,” and “the great display of vanity” that was her mystical marriage (to Christ). Even her fellow sisters turned on her, detailing how she faked the stigmata and wedding band. But the most damning was the confession of Bartolomea Crivelli. She described a more than two year long affair during which the women met frequently, both at night and in Carlini’s study, under the guise of teaching Crivelli to read. Carlini would start “kissing her as if she were a man, she would speak words of love to her. And she would stir on top of her so much that both of them corrupted themselves.”

As noted in the article, and lest anyone fear a tragic end for our nuns: Carlini died at the age of 71 of natural causes, and while the sister recording her death mentions her ‘imprisonment’ there was no evidence of Carlini ever having been formally imprisoned. Carlini remained revered by the local populace, and the doors of the church had to be barred to avoid chaos during her funeral as people vented their grief and sought relics. Had she and Crivelli been charged with sodomy*, they might have been burned at the stake.

Yesterday marked the thirtieth anniversary of the death of the iconic Touko Valio Laaksonen, better known as Tom of Finland. Born on 8 May, 1920 in Kaarina, Finland, Laaksonen’s art is probably best known for its connection to leather culture.  

(Physique Pictorial Vol.17, No. 1, 1968)

Laaksonen’s art reveled in sex, hypermasculine imagery, and confidence- one might well say pride- at a time when gay/bi/msm+ expressions of sexuality were predominantly externally defined through their associations with ‘effeminacy’, lingering connections with aestheticism, and implications of disgrace, shame and death. Laaksonen’s art also existed beyond the respectability politics of the homophile movements of the period, which sought to de-emphasise the importance of sex between men in favour of advocating that msm desire be controlled, curtailed, and de-emphasised in order to conform to the norms of broader, cishet society.

     - Aldo Mieli, preface to Il libro dell’amore, 1916

(Drawing of Aldo Mieli, a man with short, swept-back hair and a dark, trimmed mustache. He wears round-framed glasses and is smiling slightly.)

Aldo Mieli was a Jewish Italian gay man, socialist, internationalist and pacifist, a pioneer of early gay rights, and one of the founders of the history of science. Born in 1879, he founded the journal La Rassegna di studi sessuali in 1921, through his publishing house (Leonardo da Vinci, or L.D.C): opening the door to contributions and debates encompassing the perspectives of Catholic moralists, laymen, psychologists, endocrinologists, sexologists, creatives and scientists on a range of topics related to sexuality and gender. Mieli, along with a mysterious collaborator known only as Proteus, contributed extensively on the topic of homosexuality.

(Frontispiece of the first issue of La Rassegna di studi sessuali)

La Ressegna embraced the contribution of German sexologists, and in fact Mieli became a close friend of Magnus Hirschfeld. Frustrated by Italy’s more tentative approach to the emerging status of what we would now call gay rights, Mieli advanced the work on sexuality and gender being done at the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft in Berlin. The example that Germany provided led Mieli to organise the second World Congress of the League for Sexual Reform, originally slated to be held in Rome in June, 1922 (the location was later switched to Germany for economic reasons).

Mieli moved to France in 1928, however in 1939- unable to return to fascist Italy, and at risk from the advancing Nazi front in France- Mieli fled Europe for Buenos Aires, where he took up a teaching position and worked to found and direct South America’s first institute for science and history. Towards the end of his life, he poignantly wrote:

“In Italy, Fascism has destroyed all movements for redemption by introducing a true reign of hate. However, there is no doubt that I have been able to awaken a sense of human solidarity in some souls. For years I have fought, written, and taken action in support of a better comprehension of sexual life in an effort to overcome strongly rooted false ideas and proclaim a kingdom of physical and spiritual love. I am sure I have obtained some results and convinced some dubious souls. However, it appeared as though all my efforts had ended in failure when another morality based on power, imposition, and superstition began to dominate and reduce populations to slavery.”

Strongly recommend this article in full- please check tags for triggers (all non-graphic). It explores the history of gender testing by the IOC, its relationship to right-wing politics- including the involvement of Nazi supporters, and the part it played in Cold War, anti-Soviet, anti-Communist scare-mongering, its misogynistic and intersexophobic origins, as well as some of its intersections with racism and classism. It also details the stories of lesbian, intersex and trans people impacted by IOC rules: Mark Weston, Zdenek Koubek, Helen Stephens, Heinrich Ratjen, Ewa Kłobukowska, Stella Walsh, and María José Martínez-Patiño.

From the article:

The key player in the sordid tale of Olympic gender testing was not female, intersex, or transgender. Avery Brundage was a man, and he wouldn’t like you to forget that!

He was also anti-Semitic, racist, and sexist. Life magazine summed up the popular sentiment in 1948.

“Brundage became celebrated as a tyrant, snob, dictator, and stuffed shirt, as well as just about the meanest man in the whole world of sports.”

...

While Brundage became involved in numerous controversies, his biggest stoushes always concerned female athletes. That, said Life, was no coincidence.

“He has always been suspicious of athletic women… [He suspects] that some of them — perhaps even a considerable number — are really men.”

Brundage would eventually dominate the IOC. In 1936, he began a long campaign to expose the men snatching Olympic medals by posing as women. But finding male imposters proved difficult. In fact, impossible. They didn’t exist.

So Brundage moved the goalposts from sex to gender. If he couldn’t find men, he would settle for athletes with intersex traits.

Also noteworthy are the following two quotes, written in the 30s in response to the transition of Zdenek Koubek:

(Picture of Zdenek Koubek, a young man with short blond hair. He is wearing a long-sleeved black sweatshirt with sweat marks under the arms, and has his hands on his hips. He is grinning while watching something off-camera.)

Academics and serious publications alike described a spectrum rather than a binary.

Time said, “To sober medical men, it does not seem strange that Nature sometimes blurs sexual development in men & women. Biologists say there is no such thing as absolute sex.”

Physical Culture agreed.

This blog is trans inclusive. I check every single blog that follows, reblogs and likes the content that I post here, and I immediately block any and all terfs, just as I block the occasional homophobes that come along. I don’t consider this blog a ‘safe space’, as such- in that, given our collective history, much of what I post isn’t emotionally safe- but I am committed to maintaining an environment where everyone in the community can access information that can be hard to find independently, particularly if one doesn’t have institutional access to things like JSTOR.

The reason that I exclude terfs/tehms/gc folks, swerfs and the ‘kink-critical’ from this space is because their presence is antithetical not just to that environment, but to the ability to share and discuss community history in an open and honest manner, in all its complexity. That cannot be done with people who devote their lives to waging conservative-aligned hate campaigns. Hate campaigns, I might add, that anyone with a basic knowledge of lgbt+ history- let alone lived experience- should recognise as having always been leveraged by cishet people to target our communities.