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What do we want from our LGBTQI+ history
How we record, collate, story, and study history is as much a matter of personal caprice as it is about events, people, and the outcomes they create. Bruno Latour captured this when he said that “modern” is in the moment, because the point we call something modern is a specific moment in time, and that it immediately becomes the past. History is a field of study, a marker point we harken back to, a site of memory we recall, and a contest space we project our personal understanding onto. There is no such thing as an absolute truth when it comes to any history event or moment, rather, there is our framing and reframing of events, and for LGBTQI+ history this is vital to remember.
This is not to say there is no such thing as bad history. Indeed, the point of history as an academic discourse is to create narratives which best fit the evidence we have at hand. An academic historian is someone who understands how to weave a narrative which overlocks the evidence which can then be scrutinised, critiqued, and then agreed with, tinkered with, or rejected. Unlike biology, chemistry, and physics history cannot be undertaken using empirical research methods precisely because every historian uses their own positionality to scrutinise the evidence at hand. You cannot inhabit the past, indeed, all you can do is piece together an incomplete puzzle and try to make the best picture. Queer…
