This special issue has been curated by Lara Short, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant at the Institute of Historical Research, in celebration of LGBT+ History Month 2025. This issue highlights some of the vital contributions to the history of sexuality and showcases a variety of interdisciplinary approaches to writing queer history. Many of these works provide deeper understandings of the complex relationships between homosexuality and areas such as law and science. Some of these key texts focus on comparative perspectives, while others use case studies to focus on critical reassessments of same-sex histories during various periods, from early modern Italy to 20th century Wales. Though the titles in this special issue offer thought-provoking insights into queer experiences and identities, they also acknowledge the limitations and silences within historical discourses, paving the way for future scholarship.
A Little Gay History of Wales / Daryl Leeworthy
Review Date: 23 October 2020
In January 1988, hundreds of people gathered in Cardiff for a rally organised by ‘Wales Against Clause 28’. Held aloft ‘were signs identifying the places the mainly lesbian and gay marchers had lived and where they were from to disprove the popular notion that “there were no gays in Wales”.’ (p.
Sex, Time and Place: Queer Histories of London c.1850 to the Present / eds. Simon Avery, Katherine Graham
Review Date: 30 March 2017
The age of lesbian and gay, in which those were the dominant terms for homoeroticism and other things that seemed (sometimes arbitrarily) to be related to it, appears to be over.
Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain / Brian Lewis
Review Date: 02 March 2017
As Brian Lewis writes in his introduction to Wolfenden's Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain, although the Wolfenden Report is one of the most well known documents pertaining to the history of homosexuality in Britain, the rich material gathered from which to prepare the report has often been overlooked.
An Intimate History of the Front – Masculinity, Sexuality and German Soldiers in the First World War / Jason Crouthamel
Review Date: 13 August 2015
In his classic thriller Greenmantle, first published in 1916, John Buchan describes his hero Richard Hannay’s first encounter with his adversary, the German officer Colonel Ulrich von Stumm, in a fashion which hints at a hidden strain of sexual deviance within the German armed forces: We went up a staircase to a room at the end of a long corridor.
The Sciences of Homosexuality in Early Modern Europe / eds. Kenneth Borris, George Rousseau
Review Date: 01 December 2008
In Thomas Cannon’s 1749 pamphlet Ancient and Modern Pederasty Investigated and Exemplify’d, the author recounts a chance meeting with a ‘too polish’d Pederast’ who, ‘attack’d upon the Head, that his Desire was unnatural, thus wrestled in Argument; Unnatural Desire is a Contradiction in Terms; downright Nonsense.
Homosexual Desire in Revolutionary Russia. The Regulation of Sexual and Gender Dissent / Dan Healey
Review Date: 01 January 2003
Dan Healey's study of same-sex love in revolutionary Russia is an impressively argued, well documented examination of one of the most 'obscure' 'blank spots' in Russian history. A radical revision of the 'myth of a universal, natural, and timeless Russian or Soviet heterosexuality' (p.
