Locating Queer Histories: Places and Traces across the UK
Justin Bengry, Matt Cook, Alison Oram, eds, Locating Queer Histories: places and traces across the UK (London: Bloomsbury, 2022).
Ranging from the mid-19th century to the present, and from Edinburgh to Plymouth, this powerful collection explores the significance of locality in queer space and experiences in modern British history.
The chapters in Locating Queer Histories cover a broad range of themes from migration, movement and multiculturalism; the distinctive queer social and political scenes of different cities; and the ways in which places have been reimagined through locally led community history projects. The book challenges traditional LGBTQ histories which have tended to conceive of queer experience in the UK as a comprising a homogeneous, national narrative.
Edited by leading historians, the book foregrounds the voices of LGBTQ-identified people by looking at a range of letters, diaries, TV interviews and oral testimonies. It provides a unique and fascinating account of queer experiences in Britain and how they have been shaped through different localities.
The theme of this book is that locality matters. Queer lives and queerscapes are illuminated across a multiplicity of places, spaces and times: from polities to gardens, synagogues, photography collections, racial interminglings, English beaches and Florence estates. Queerness is not so much about being as becoming, celebrating difference and belonging in all its varieties.
Jeffrey Weeks, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, London South Bank University, UK, Author of Between Worlds: A Queer Boy from the Valleys.