Abstract
The relationship between queer place and queer history has been the subject of increasing academic inquiry over the past few years, by historians and geographers alike. This ambitious and wide-ranging collection seeks to extend the conversation further, bringing together an immensely varied set of places, time periods and disciplinary perspectives. It originated in a 2017 conference at Birkbeck, University of London, organized to mark the conclusion of the ‘Queer Beyond London’ project. That project has since produced another book (Queer Beyond London, co-written by Matt Cook and Alison Oram and published by Manchester University Press), which offers a specific comparison of the English cities of Manchester, Leeds, Plymouth and Brighton. This edited collection, however, covers a much broader territory. Although, as the title suggests, the collection focuses on the United Kingdom, some chapters also locate queer histories beyond these islands – one discusses the ‘Anglo colony’ of British and American queer migrants in Florence, and another the plant-hunter Reginald Farrer, who collected plants in the Himalayas to bring home to Yorkshire. The scale of the locations analysed varies, too, from Northern Ireland to a specific male-only bathing area in Oxford, and the timeframes range from specific moments to an entire century. Locating Queer Histories features a genuinely interdisciplinary group of 12 contributors, including historians and geographers, scholars of media studies, literature and social policy, as well as an archivist, a community historian and a filmmaker. They deploy a similarly diverse set of sources, including oral histories, literature, TV, photography, autobiographies, and horticulture.
The sheer range of approaches included in the collection makes it a challenge to draw out common themes and shared arguments, and in the Introduction, the editors themselves acknowledge that the collection is in part about ‘competing and jostling meanings’ (p. 3). This impression is intensified by reading the collection cover to cover: the editors argue that to divide the chapters into sections would be to restrict their potential, and so they are instead arranged in a wide geographical sweep from North (Edinburgh) to South (Florence), via Newcastle, London, and Plymouth. The editors are correct that this allows ‘very differently conceived and argued chapters to come side by side’ (p. 10), though whether the ‘unexpected resonances and dissonances’ provoke new understandings or a sort of intellectual whiplash will likely depend on readers’ openness to taking a tour through such disparate disciplinary perspectives. For this reviewer, it took some getting used to, but the diversity of approaches serves to emphasize an overarching argument about the importance of attention to place, demonstrating the numerous different ways in which this can produce rich and illuminating scholarship.
There are some shared themes that emerge from the essays in this collection, skilfully drawn out by Cook and Oram in their Introduction. One is the role of movement and migration. The conventional narrative of queer migration revolves around moving from one's family and place of origin – often small-town or rural – to a large metropolis. Various essays in the collection work to complicate this narrative, such as Alva Träbert's chapter on migration to Edinburgh between the 1970s and 2000s. Träbert highlights how interviewees’ multifaceted experiences did not conform to a simplistic narrative of migration providing freedom: such as the fact that one interviewee migrated from England, where sex between men had been partially decriminalized, to Scotland, where it was illegal at the time and remained so until 1980.
A second theme is about the specificity of different locations, highlighting how the distinct character of a place both shapes and is shaped by its queer inhabitants. Alan Butler's chapter on Plymouth is particularly strong in this respect, emphasizing how the continuing role of the Royal Navy (where sex between men remained criminalized until 2000) helped to create a culture where pride was taken in ‘passing’ rather than being ‘out’, making Plymouth ‘a queerly vibrant if not a queerly visible place’ (p. 146).
A final, more subtle theme is highlighted by the reference in the book's subtitle to ‘traces’ as well as ‘places’, indicating queer historians’ frequent negotiations with archival absences, silences, and evasions. Caroline Bressey and Gemma Romain's chapter takes up this theme particularly thoughtfully, using three black individuals, one nameless, who appear in one white photographer's private albums to highlight how queer black spaces can be traced in the small towns and rural areas of interwar Britain.
Even in a collection as wide-ranging as this, some areas are unexplored. There is no detailed consideration of transgender lives and histories, as the editors acknowledge, nor of bisexuality. Although it may be unfair (and unproductive) to complain about what has been left out, the increase in trans scholarship in recent years means that its omission here limits the collection's ability to speak to current debates in scholarship and British society more broadly. That said, the essays provide numerous fresh insights into different ways in which locations can be ‘queer’, and the many different ways scholars can research this. Opening up a wealth of new questions and avenues to explore, Locating Queer Histories emphasizes at its heart the profound importance of locality for histories of sex, desire and sexuality.