History
Conservative ‘Gay Pardon’ for the dead is a strategic distraction that harms the living
November, 2016 · By Justin Bengry
On 21 October, Conservative Justice Minister Sam Gyimah was instrumental in the failed second reading of the Sexual Offences (Pardons Etc.) Bill. The private members bill sought to clear the names of men convicted for historic homosexual offences that are no longer crimes. Introduced by Scottish National Party MP John Nicolson, who is openly gay, the bill would have expanded the number of offences for which pardons—and more importantly, ‘disregards’, which effectively erase convictions—could be extended to living men as well as to the dead.
Speaking for some 25 minutes in the House of Commons, Gyimah ‘talked out’ the time allowed for debate, a parliamentary strategy that effectively killed the bill. Gyimah accused that the bill could lead to pardons being claimed by men convicted of offences that remain crimes, ‘including sex with a minor and non-consensual sexual activity’. But these are scare tactics. Nicolson’s bill unambiguously excluded non-consensual offences or those committed with anyone under the age of 16. To be clear, Gyimah’s justification for killing the bill was not that it would actually grant pardons to men convicted of non-consensual or underage sex offences, but that such men might claim to have been pardoned.
The previous day Gyimah had announced the government’s own strategy for pardoning men convicted for homosexual offences. Rather than righting the wrongs of the past, the government’s preferred approach to pardons exploits LGBTQ issues and people for political gain, a perverse outcome of the Conservative government’s ongoing attempt to appear progressive, inclusive, and LGBTQ-friendly.
Continue reading at History Workshop …
This post was originally published at History Workshop on 23 October 2016. It was subsequently published at the Policy and Politics blog at the London School of Economics and as ‘In Britain, the Conservative Party’s “Gay Pardon” for the Dead Harms the Living‘ at Slate for US audiences.
Why I Oppose a General Pardon for Historical Convictions for Homosexual Offences
August, 2015 · By Justin Bengry
UK Labour Party leadership contender Andy Burnham recently proposed automatic pardons for all men convicted of historical homosexual offences that are no longer crimes. This has been an ongoing conversation in the UK, which in 2013 granted WWII Enigma codebreaker Alan Turing a posthumous royal pardon. The issue reappeared in the lead up to this year’s May 7 general election, when Labour’s then-leader Ed Miliband came out in favour of case-by-case pardons for living individuals and also posthumous cases. David Cameron and the Conservatives soon followed suit, likewise promising that if were they to form the next government, men convicted of historical offences would be pardoned. Burnham’s announcement has reinvigorated this question of whether all men should have similar convictions deemed spent, pardoned or erased.
A well-publicised petition supported by Turing’s family, activists like Peter Tatchell, and celebrities like Benedict Cumberbatch and Stephen Fry demands that a royal pardon be extended to all men convicted under ‘anti-gay’ laws. More than 600,000 people have signed the petition demanding the state ‘Pardon all of the estimated 49,000 men who, like Alan Turing, were convicted of consenting same-sex relations under the British “gross indecency” law (only repealed in 2003), and also all the other men convicted under other UK anti-gay laws’. As a historian of Britain’s LGBTQ past I cannot sign this petition nor support anything more than pardons for living individuals.
Continue reading at Pink News…
This post was originally published at “NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality” on 4 August 2015 and subsequently republished at The Huffington Post and Pink News.
The Case of the Sultry Mountie, or, We Need to Talk about Cecil
July, 2015 · By Justin Bengry
I never knew my great uncle Cecil Bengry. Affectionately known as Cic’, this bachelor uncle seems to have lived in the background of other people’s lives. Even the pictures of Cic’ in old age that I found among my own grandfather’s (his brother) papers are faded and overexposed, their physical condition seemingly recreating the fog that surrounds Cic’s life. We know that he spent most of his life caring for others: animals on the ranch, his mother in her old age, and his brother’s grandchildren in his own later years. They remembered Cic giving them treats of ‘sugar sandwiches’, and knew him as well as anyone could, yet they didn’t know if he had an education, if he had friends, even what he did during the day. He is remembered simply as ‘always there. Good to us.’ Though always around, Cic’ somehow remained unknown. When he died, Cic’ left only one record behind: a small cigarette tin of photos. Inside, along with a child’s glass marble and a few family pictures, were snapshots of numerous men, including one of a Royal Canadian Mounted Police officer I call the ‘sultry Mountie’.
Unlike every other photo in the tin box, the picture of the Mountie included no information: no caption, no name, no date. He simply stands there, anonymous, leaning casually against a wooden rail with hips thrust forward, looking confidently and directly at the camera. Posing for effect, he invites observation and perhaps objectification. I struggled to understand this image and the homosocial collection of photos with which it came. The tin of photos inspired me to organize, with Amy Tooth Murphy, workshops on what we called ‘Queer Inheritances’ at the London Metropolitan Archives in December 2014. We wondered: How do we discern a queer life from incomplete personal effects whose existence and content are often mediated by other family members? How do we, as queer inheritors, navigate lives lived before many could proclaim to be ‘out and proud’? Ultimately, I wondered, was Cecil queer?
This post was originally published at “NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality” on 26 May 2015 and subsequently as ‘The Case of the Sultry Mountie: Doing Family History Queerly‘ on the Huffington Post on 24 June 2015.
Before Grindr, or, The Dangers of the “Gay Bachelor”
October, 2014 · By Justin Bengry
In June 1967, opposition Conservative UK parliamentarians encountered a new and threatening queer danger. They feared that the Sexual Offences Bill then before them — a measure that would partially decriminalize male homosexual acts — might appear to sanction, and even promote, homosexual activity. Conservative MP Sir Cyril Osborne therefore proposed an amendment that would make publicizing and publishing lists of homosexuals, in other words printing “gay bachelor” or queer personal ads, a new “serious punishable offence.”
Even if the government was on the verge of partially decriminalizing male homosexual acts, Osborne’s proposed amendment would nonetheless criminalize what he saw as the commercial promotion of homosexuality.It demanded that,
Anyone who indulges in activities tending to promote acts of homosexuality between consenting adults through the publication of lists of names and addresses of known homosexuals or otherwise, shall be guilty of a criminal offence and shall be liable on conviction to imprisonment for a term of five years or a fine of £5,000.
In other words, were the act to pass, anyone who “promoted” entirely legal acts of consensual homosexuality would themselves be committing a criminal offence. Punishment for this new commercial crime would in fact be even more stringent than existing laws for most homosexual offences; acts of gross indecency were then punishable by up to two years imprisonment.
This post was originally published at “NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality” on 7 October 2014.
“Coming Out” in the Classroom: When the Personal is Pedagogical
June, 2014 · By Justin Bengry
I’ve never come out to my students. I’ve never stood at the front of a classroom and told my students that I’m gay, and I’ve never told them witty anecdotes about my husband. That isn’t to say that I’m not completely out both professionally and personally (as google will immediately tell anyone). All of my academic bio pages highlight my work in queer history, and when introducing myself to new classes I describe my research on homosexuality and capitalism. Few students would be surprised to know I’m gay.
Still, I’ve wondered what impact explicitly identifying my sexuality would have on teaching, learning, discussions and the overall atmosphere of the classroom. That being said, my teaching so far has mostly included broad surveys of traditional European political history, courses whose structure and content was largely already determined for me. While I had the freedom to reorganize some lectures to explore topics in gender and sexuality, my own sexual identity has had little overlap with what I teach, at least so far. But looking ahead, I wanted to know how others navigate this potentially challenging terrain. So, I put the word out to friends, colleagues and mentors whose sexual identities are various and not always static. Each has chosen either to come out or withhold identifying their sexuality in the classroom for a variety of reasons, personal, pedagogical and political.
This post was originally published at “NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality” on 10 June 2014.
Male Order: Tom of Finland and the Queer Iconography of Postage Stamps
April, 2014 · By Justin Bengry
On April 13, 2014, Itella Posti Oy, the Finnish postal service, announced the release in September of what are possibly the most openly erotic postage stamps to appear anywhere in mainstream circulation. The series of three stamps commemorate the work of Touko Laaksonen (1920-1991), better known as Tom of Finland (link NSFW). The Finnish stamps are remarkable for their unambiguous and deliberate depiction of homoerotic images, nudity, and dom/sub sexuality that Itella lauds as “confident and proud homoeroticism.” They are also remarkable for their memorialization of a queer man through explicit depictions of the erotic art for which he became an icon to other queer men around the world from the 1950s onward. But looking at the Tom of Finland stamps, and recognizing postage stamps as an incredibly accessible and widely distributed site for history and commemoration, it is worth considering how other queer men and women have recently been featured. How do postage stamps contribute to a public history of queer lives and sexualities?
This post was originally published at “NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality” on 14 April 2014.
The Erotics of Shaving in Victorian Britain
April, 2014 · By Justin Bengry
Beardedness, or alternatively clean-shavenness, has long been an important signifier of manliness, inscribing crucial gender and sexual meanings onto the male body. But fashions in shaving are notoriously unstable, even in the nineteenth century, that idyll for the hirsute among us. Beardedness in nineteenth-century Britain, in fact, only reached its zenith in 1892, while the frequency of clean-shaven faces, lowest in 1886, continued to increase in popularity for the next 80 years. The necessity and expense of daily visits to the local barber, however, prohibited many from indulging in such luxury and before savvy marketers rooted the fear of the five o’clock shadow into men’s minds, a few days’ growth was often acceptable. Indeed, before the advent of the safety razor, many men might have agreed with the proverb: “It is easier to bear a child once a year than to shave every day.” Beardedness, and its intermediate variations, nonetheless had (and continue to have) definite implications for manliness and sexuality.
This post was originally published at “NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality” on 10 April 2014.
Incoherent or Invigorated? The History of Sexuality
January, 2014 · By Justin Bengry
By what metric do we measure the vitality
of the History of Sexuality? If the overwhelming attendance at the launch of the new IHR seminar asking ‘What is the History of Sexuality?’ is anything to go by, it is far from dead, and scholars remain eager to further question what the field is, what it can be, and where it will go.
[Full disclosure: in addition to being an editor of this blog, I am also a co-convener of the IHR seminar and its social media dude.]
Tuesday evening I arrived at Senate House with fellow Notches editor Amy Tooth Murphy. At the door to the Court Room we stood gawping in surprise. The room was full beyond capacity with some folks spilling outside to stand or sit in the hall. Certainly a small flurry on twitter demonstrated interest in the upcoming seminar, but we never imagined this level of enthusiasm.
This post was originally published at “NOTCHES: (re)marks on the history of sexuality” on 10 January 2014.
Chick-fil-A and the History of Queer Boycotts
August, 2012 · By Justin Bengry
Recent furor over Chick-fil-A president Dan Cathy’s funding of organizations explicitly opposed to same-sex marriage has made consumers across the political and social spectrum evaluate how their spending habits are in fact political decisions.
Opponents of marriage equality and some free market supporters have asked what gay men and lesbians hope to achieve by calling for boycotts against Chick-fil-A. Many see economic action against Cathy and Chick-fil-A as anti-Capitalist, even un-American, arguing incorrectly that it violates his freedom of speech. The history of queer economic activism, however, demonstrates just what is at stake, and what boycotting can achieve.
Even before the modern homosexual rights movement gained momentum in the 1970s, gay men and lesbians recognized the relationship between economic forces and human rights. Already in 1963, in response to UK tabloid press sensationalism that vilified homosexuals, author Douglas Plummer called on gay men and lesbians to boycott publications that demonized them. “If homosexuals stopped buying those particular newspapers,” he foresaw, “some circulations would drop by many hundreds of thousands of copies.” Plummer recognized the economic clout that homosexuals might have, but before a larger coordinated community existed, his call for economic action went unanswered.
Following the 1969 Stonewall Rebellion, in which gay men and lesbians stood against police raids and harassment in New York, a greater community began to form. This wider community soon saw economic action as a strategic tool against state and legal oppression. Just five years after Stonewall the Los Angeles Police Department responded to the threat of a boycott against Hollywood businesses by revising its policies toward gay Angelenos.
And in 1977 the most famous gay boycott demonstrated the potential of economic action to oppose anti-gay sentiment and further build a cohesive community. In January, Dade County (Miami) passed an ordinance to prohibit discrimination in the areas of housing, employment and public accommodations on the basis of sexual orientation. In order to overturn it, Florida Citrus Commission spokeswoman, entertainer and former Miss Oklahoma Anita Bryant formed Save Our Children, which collected sufficient signatures to force the issue to a voter referendum. The stage was set for the first time for coordinated national action among a broad spectrum of gay men and lesbians.
Responding to Bryant’s anti-gay positions and her links to the Citrus Commission, calls for a boycott of Florida orange juice rang out across the nation. As today, gay leaders and ordinary citizens were mixed about the tactic of using a boycott to oppose personal beliefs and business interests. Some questioned the desirability of silencing Bryant or threatening her employment through economic action against her employer. Others worried about a boycott’s effects on economically vulnerable farm workers. In California, however, columnist Harvey Milk, who would become the first openly gay man elected to public office in the United States, called on the city, unions, and gay leaders to boycott Florida orange juice. He argued that buying orange juice amounted to “supporting a person who is preaching hatred towards every Gay person.” Milk, who continued to promote gay equality while he sat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, would be assassinated the following year.
According to Herndon Graddick, president of the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Cathy and Chick-fil-A are responsible for some five million dollars in donations to “anti-gay” organizations like the American Family Association and the Family Research Council as well as support for organizations that promote therapies to “turn” homosexuals straight. Chick-fil-A’s support for “the biblical definition of the family unit” has now made this an issue not only for gay men and lesbians, but for a broader range of consumers. The debate is not restricted to those whom it most directly affects, but instead to anyone who might use their money to support Cathy’s business and his cause, or to deny them funds by boycotting Chick-fil-A and spending their money elsewhere.
Economic action against Chick-fil-A is unlikely to dissuade Cathy from supporting or funding groups dedicated to fighting marriage equality. But despite the media interest and apparent success of former Arkansas Governor and Fox News contributor Mike Huckabee’s August 1 “Chick-fil-A Appreciation Day,” history shows us that queer economic action and boycotts can in fact have broader successes beyond the immediate issue at hand. Economic action against Chick-fil-A implicates all consumers of fast food, asking them to make decisions with their dollars either to support marriage equality or to fund Cathy and anti-equality groups. The explosion of support across social media suggests increasing demand for marriage equality beyond just gay men and lesbians.
In the end, the boycott against Florida Orange Juice and the backlash against Anita Bryant failed to prevent the overturning of Dade County’s anti-discrimination ordinance. In the immediate context of Miami, the boycott seemed to have failed. But most local and national gay and lesbian organizations nonetheless highlighted the action’s success in creating a national movement devoted to gay and lesbian human rights that contributed to the mobilization of a national consciousness.
Twenty years after the Stonewall Rebellion, protesters on Fifth Avenue in New York rallied together around the cry “We’re Here, We’re Queer, and We’re Not Going Shopping.” By 1989 they recognized that their choices as consumers could be strategically employed to support some businesses or boycott others for their employment practices, marketing and advertising or promotion of social and political causes. In 2012, a US election year, consumer choices are even more political as they become mainstream news and affect policy statements among future candidates.
Like the Florida orange juice campaign, which solidified a national gay and lesbian political movement, non-violent economic action against Chick-fil-A is likely to have greater impact beyond protesting the specific policies of this fast food restaurant and its executives. It may in fact galvanize a broad coalition of gay men, lesbians but significantly also allies in support of marriage equality in the US. This concrete expansion of the movement for marriage equality beyond those whom it affects directly to include progressive men and women, religious leaders, and average folks everywhere may turn out to be the greatest strength of this economic action.
This blog was originally published at History Compass Exchanges on
28 August 2012.
McArts Degree
September, 2011 · By Justin Bengry
Throughout the fall term last year, every time I entered the Arts Building of my campus I had to walk over the words “McArts Degree.” In the first week of term someone had painted them in two-foot-high, whitewashed letters at the entrance to the building. They were impossible to miss. It dominated the small outdoor plaza. These words remained there, confronting me and everyone else who entered the building, until they were finally obliterated by the snow and cold.
This message affected me every day that I went to the university.
I can only imagine how this message felt to undergraduates (or even graduate students) who saw it every single day. I’ve earned a PhD, been selected for a Postdoc at a respected institution, and proven myself to my intellectual peers. And yet, I still felt that this simple insult took something away from me. But what about new students? What message might they take from this prominently placed message at their university?
This year I came back to the university after a summer away and the first thing I remember noticing was that the words were not there. In their place, using half-foot-wide masking tape, someone had marked out the words “Use a Condom.” I was thrilled. Not only were the offensive words gone, but someone had co-opted this space for a useful and important message that new undergrads away from home should hear often and loud.
Days later my optimism was undermined by a new insult. Painted in even larger blue letters, and obliterating the healthy message advocating safer sex, was another jibe at arts majors: “I have an Arts degree. Can I take your order?”
I’ve written elsewhere on the History Compass about the denigration of the humanities. It is a pervasive problem. Messages like these tell students that the arts and humanities are impractical, selfish studies without the merit of science programs and professional schools. Funding priorities that sacrifice the arts and humanities further reinforce this message (while making it more and more difficult to teach them well.) At the History Compass we’re particularly concerned about this. Jean Smith has written about the value of history specifically, while Angela Sutton has sought to debunk the myth of the humanities as a financial burden on institutions.
At their worst, these messages of denigration and attacks on funding are mutually reinforcing. In a culture that dismisses and denigrates the arts and humanities, it is hardly surprising that those with the authority to do so remove their funding and deprioritize them further. In the UK, Middlesex University closed its History and then its Philosophy Department. The Conservative government has advocated removing state funding entirely. In the US, SUNY Albany cut language and theatre programs. And in Canada, the $200 million Canada Excellence Research Chairs initiative included no scholars in the Arts and Social Sciences. Not one. Bombarded with messages such as these, it’s hard enough to contemplate study in the humanities. It’s even more difficult when your own studies are dismissed as merely a “McArts Degree.”
What can we do?
Happily, the best course of action is to prove these accusations wrong. Our many successes are our best response. They are examples of the value in the arts and humanities. But we must also confront these attacks. I hope to be able to write an update to this blog soon, where I can congratulate my university for recognizing the harm of this kind of message and removing it.
This blog was originally published on History Compass Exchanges on
15 September 2011.