Shouldn’t every month be LGBT History Month?

This is the first in History Matters’ series of blogs for LGBT History Month. All of the blogs will appear here as they are posted.

February is upon us again and with it comes LGBT History Month. Like other celebratory events such as Black History Month, Women’s History Month and Disability History Month, it offers the space to promote and prioritise the kind of history that can be perceived as outside the mainstream. The positives to such an event are clear, throughout February LGBT history is given a public platform that is denied for much of the rest of the year. Local archives, museums, community groups and members of the public often work together to unearth the stories that are hidden in boxes of documents and in people’s lives. It gets people talking about the LGBT past. So far so obvious.....

But there’s another implication to this sectioning off of the past that is potentially problematic both for the history of sexuality and social and cultural history more generally. Claire Hayward has recently blogged about the way that designating a specific month to a particular type of history has the potential to make it even more invisible for the rest of the year. It also has the potential to ghettoise types of history as only relevant to certain groups of people.

Considering the fact that I spend my historical life in the company of northern, working-class men who had sex with each other, I should be exactly the type of historian that LGBT history month is perfect for. But in many ways, I’m not. By it’s nature the event is politicised. It was set up in response to the repeal of the draconian Section 28 and continues to perform a valuable service in bringing LGBT issues, both historical and contemporary to the forefront of public debate. My men would not have understood how they fit into this reading of history.

I should explain. When I started my research, I thought that I was going to write a gay history of working-class men in the north of England. This is not what happened. The sources that I found and the world in which these men lived turned me from a historian of sexuality to a historian with an equal interest in sexuality, class, gender, regionality and the emotions. In fact, it turns out that for the majority of working-class, northern men in the first half of the twentieth century, issues of class, region and gender were intimately and inextricably linked to sexual practice and desire. I couldn’t begin to interpret their lives without taking this into consideration.

The majority of the men that I encountered had no problem fitting their encounters with other men into the rest of their lives. They didn’t affect their identity, sense of masculinity or their relationships with friends, families and sometimes even wives. In fact, it is probably more difficult for us to accept their ease regarding their sexual behaviour than it was for them to live it. In our world of self-reflection and identity politics such disregard for sexuality and what it might mean can seem bizarre. At the risk of falling into cliché, the often used quote ‘the past is a foreign country, they do things differently there’ seems particularly relevant to the study of same sex desire.