Hi GVGK!

If I may be a bit selfish, I have a couple questions for you!

• How did you get into researching porn and sexuality after all? Was there a particular book or project that inspired you?

• If I was a totally new beginner to this type of research, what would you recommend I read?

• What does your advisor think of all of this? (Mine was totally bemused and not really sure what to do with me -- but now we're working together on a number of panels!)

This is such a cool AMA! I have two questions:

• Can you tell me a little bit about any specific issues or challenges you’ve run into with museums or archives and their handling of the content that you study? How do things change for these institutions when the focus is on queer sex, or trans sex, or sex between people who aren’t white?
• I’d love to know more about the use of phallocentric imagery in safe sex campaigns - specifically, how do you think this has fed into our modern-day ideas about what kind of sex is and isn’t risky and who needs to practice safe sex? How has this affected mindsets within queer communities? How has it impacted ideas among straight people about what queer behaviors should be considered risky or taboo?

Thanks so much for taking the time!

Thanks for doing such a fascinating AMA! I have two questions for you if you don't mind, and I'd love to hear your thoughts.

1. Your articles and research seem to span large periods of time & space -- how are you approaching or addressing the differences in research?

and 2) What's it like to be a public historian in this current time and political space?

Hi GVGK, thank you very much for joining us today!

The Wikipedia page for The Surprise of a Knight mentions that the film:

"...ushered in a brief period of homosexual hardcore pornography in the stag film era."

I have a few questions about this! The first is, how do we define the 'stag film era,' and what is its relationship to hardcore pornography? Second, how do we establish a relationship between Surprise of a Knight and other same-sex pornography that followed? Finally, what happened to make this era of homosexual stag / porn films brief?

Thanks!

I've written on the intellectual origins of queer identity politics in the western world using late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century German, English, and American activist treatises, diaries and correspondence. I've also written on the rise of the tongzhi (“queer”) community in Hong Kong amid decolonization, trans experiences in Ancient Rome, and the use of phallocentric imagery in late-twentieth-century safer sex campaigns.

Historians typically pride themselves on knowing the context: that we can't understand the significance of any particular data for understanding the past, without understanding that era and area. (With, of course, the hopes of shifting our understanding a little bit.) Multiple posts on AskHistorians have revealed errors of historians who try to tell centuries-spanning stories of, say, a single food or trade good. But--everyone loves reading those. :)

How do you prepare to address so many different contexts? Or rather, what's your general approach to each new one?

What drew you to researching queer identities?

So I really do want to know what its like to watch antique porn in public for 'research'. That sounds real fun.

I'm curious about the link between decolonisation and sexuality & identify politics. Did you start with one and move into the other? Are there strong links between the two, or is it about how the two shape an identify?

What's, in your opinion, (one of) the most interesting fact or event you've come across in your research?

I notice that in the article on Hong Kong, your transcriptions were largely in Mandarin (tongzhi, shengxiang), when of course locally these would be pronounced in Cantonese. I don't know how much you've done on recent Chinese history more broadly, but do you perceive a sense that there's a tendency to overgeneralise, even down to a linguistic level?

Oh, another one: how do you see the origins of specifically queer identity politics relating to the development of "identity politics" more broadly? Or, if identity politics is a preexisting category, how did the arrival of a sexuality-based flavor affect the concept/institution as a whole?