“But where’s the evidence?”
These two examples highlight a common problem that queer historians encounter in their research: that much of what we know about the lives of LGBTQ+ people, before the mid-twentieth century, has survived because of the criminalisation of male homosexuality.
Beyond these legal cases, explicit references to queerness in the historical record are extremely rare, as queer people had to hide their sexualities and gender identities or risked marginalisation and persecution in society. As women’s same-sex relationships were never criminalised, their voices are even harder to find. Often this absence of ‘evidence’ of queer people in archives has been used as a justification to present everyone in history as heteronormative.
I’m one of many historians working to find alternative methods for retrieving queer histories that avoid a lens of criminalisation. This can be achieved by attempting to unlock the systems that LGBTQ+ people were forced to use to communicate with one another and to signal their identities, intentions or feelings.
Between at least the nineteenth century and the 1970s, we know that gay men used a secret spoken language—Polari—which is the subject of Paul Baker’s book Fabulosa!. However, sexual and gender identities could also be communicated through presence in specific places and spaces or through actions, gestures, behaviours, visual motifs and fashions. For example, there has been much speculation about the significance of Oscar Wilde and his artistic social circle wearing an ‘unnatural’ green carnation in their jacket lapels.