Where can I find books on queer history? Are there places online?

by PeachBlossomBee

Hello, all. Today, I kicked a rock with toothpicks in my foot. Metaphorically.

I referred to my sister’s friend as a tw/nk, which heretofore I hadn’t realized was a pejorative term. In the queer spaces I inhabited online the word was treated lightheartedly, so I understood it as a generic term for a skinny, non-traditionally masculine boy, much like a bear (b/ar?) was a burly man. I understand now that I was wrong, and I find it particularly egregious given that I’m also queer. I don’t know enough about LGBT+ history (even though I do seek it out), so I’d like to ask where I can find out more so I can start unlearning all the internalized prejudices I have.

Edit: some words

usedhandles

I don’t think that either of these texts will help with the language politics of queer history (and my goodness, what a great topic for research), but the classic introductory authors/texts on gay history are John D’Emilio’s “Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities” and Jeffrey Weeks’s work in general. Both authors are overwhelmingly focused on gay-men.

While I would love to read an intellectual history of the change in queer-nomenclatures, I don’t know of any. Starting searches might include:

  • Bisexual/pansexual/sapiosexual;
  • political debates about who owned the term “tranny”;
  • the shift from homosexual to gay/lesbian
  • The changing dynamics between writing “transwoman/transman/ciswoman/cisman”, “trans-woman, etc.”, and “trans woman... etc.”;
  • the development of a language around dyke/butch/femme;
  • the mainstreaming of the term two spirit;
  • the moves in non-binary pronoun trends and the difference between a language of gender queer vs non-binary, etc;
  • the move away from a medicalized language of hermaphrodite to intersex;
  • even the change over time re: GL, LG, the slow inclusions of B and T and then I, etc.

You might need to look piece by piece of the story as you are interested. I hope, if nothing else, this list above is a starting point for some of the language politics that have changed over the 20th/21st century.

My impulse is to say that much of these conversations are too close to the present for historians. It might also be worth flagging that intellectual history (which is the field I would turn to in studying the changing political semantics) is still, despite many authors’ attempts to push the field, a great white man’s game. And more likely to ignore these kinds of questions at the intersections of language and queer politics (even when they are super comfortable doing it for Hockheimer, Bejamin, and Freud).

My guess it that you might find some of these answers in activist lit, sociological lit, and queer theory. Alas, I don’t know of anything synthetic to give you.

If you write this book, imma read the fuck out of it.

EDIT: fixing typos from scribing this on my phone.