About Queerness
The modern word queer has been adopted by the LGBTQ+ community as a handy way to cover the whole spectrum of lesbian, gay, bi-/pansexual, asexual, trans+, intersex and non-binary people. That is, anyone whose sexual orientation or behaviour, or gender identity or expression go against society’s sexual and gender norms.
Labels
On this website, we use the term queer interchangeably with LGBTQ+.1
Queer is also a helpful word for blurring the boundaries between sexuality and gender, highlighting the fundamental interplay between these two aspects of identity. Sexuality is often orientated towards gender as well as sex and people we might now understand as gay, bi or lesbian have long been associated with gender-bending behaviour (think of the London mollies and the female husbands of the 18th century, or ‘first modern lesbian’ Anne Lister). Everyone’s gender and sexuality lies on an interconnected spectrum but queer people break from the social expectations of biological sex, by identifying as the ‘wrong’ gender, or being attracted to the ‘wrong’ sex, or having no gender or sexual attraction.
When looking at historical people, terms like queer and LGBTQ+ are anachronistic, but useful. Queer history is largely about seeing ourselves reflected in the past. Recognising aspects of our own identities in historical people can be interesting, reassuring and validating. But we must be careful not to impose modern identities onto the past. As well as the anachronistic but vague queer, more neutral terms like same-sex and gender non-conforming are used here to avoid mislabelling people or making assumptions about their experiences.
Pronouns
When discussing gender variance, care has been taken, where possible, to use the pronouns that an individual themselves used. Where these are not known and there is clear evidence of gender non-conformity, or where a person’s gender identity is uncertain, the neutral pronoun they/them may be used.
Queerness in History
Historians and sociologists continue to argue about the nature of queerness, which impacts how they look at history. Are queer people fundamentally different to the ‘general’ population? Or is our concept of queerness a product of the society we live in? This isn’t the same as the nature/nurture debate (are we ‘born this way’ or shaped by our environment?), but is about the extent to which social categories or labels impact how we perceive our own gender and sexuality. If you were born 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago, would you have recognised your queerness? And would it have been a core part of your identity, as it may be today?
These are not questions we will attempt to answer on Queer History Cumbria, but it’s helpful to be aware that people in the past would not necessarily have understood their gender or sexuality in the ways we might today.
We also need to take a balanced approach when looking for queerness in history. Although many modern historians are open about gender and sexuality in the past, queerness is often overlooked or actively dismissed in general histories. In many cases, sexuality is reduced to sex. Where there is no evidence for same-sex sex for an individual (which is unlikely to survive in almost all instances anyway), then the case for queerness is thrown out, as if friendship and romance aren’t also important aspects of sexuality. On the other hand, there may be a tendency among queer historians, working with limited evidence, to emphasise any evidence of queerness, no matter how slight.
In most cases, it is impossible to prove someone’s sexuality or gender identity based on available evidence. This becomes increasingly difficult the further back in history we go. Unless the case is clear-cut, it is much better to simply present the evidence we have and leave it up to the reader to interpret it based on their own knowledge and experience.
Notes
- LGBTQ+ is the preferred acronym for most queer people according to a 2023 Yougov poll. ↩︎