Queer and Trans Histories in an Urgent Present
- Jarett Henderson
- Jun 5
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 9
Across the globe we are seeing renewed attempts to censor LGBTQ+ lives, as queer and trans people are again written out of textbooks, archives, and classrooms through school curriculum bans, restrictions on public programming, and attacks on trans rights. These actions distort history and endanger lives. In response to this urgent situation, Broadsides presents a collection of sharp and reflective pieces to commemorate Pride 2025 that delve into how British queer and trans histories (broadly defined) are being mobilized and written today. They underscore the pressing need to engage with LGBTQ+ history, not just as an academic exercise, but as a crucial act of remembrance and resistance. We hope that they serve as a powerful reminder of the importance of the past to the present and that telling queer and trans histories is essential to the ongoing struggle for a more just and equitable future.
The essays in this series, then, are shaped by, and respond to, this broader political moment in which queer and trans lives are under increasing threat both rhetorically and institutionally. In the UK, public museums and libraries have removed LGBTQ+ content, and schools are increasingly constrained in what they can teach about sexuality and gender identity. Across the former British Empire, colonial-era laws still criminalize queer life in many jurisdictions, while in places like Australia, Canada, and the US, queer cultural institutions and pride-related events have faced defunding, censorship, or forced closure. Just this year, the UK Supreme Court narrowed the legal definition of “woman,” while the US Federal Parks Service has removed transgender references from the Stonewall National Monument. These efforts to silence, revise, or erase our histories lend this Broadsides series its urgency. As Marc Stein writes at OutHistory, “now more than ever, we need civil society to step up.”
But this is also a moment of vibrant queer cultural production and global visibility. In the past two years, places like Thailand, Greece, and Namibia (to name but three) have taken historic steps to advance LGBTQ+ rights, including marriage equality and decriminalization. Museums like Qtopia in Sydney, Queer Britain in London, and the Stonewall Visitor Center in New York have opened their doors to tell richer histories. Exhibitions such as “Love in a Dangerous Time: Canada’s LGBT Purge” at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in Winnipeg, and “Myth Makers” in Hong Kong have centered queer lives and resistance. Even the UK National Archives now has a rich online repository documenting LGBTQ+ Rights in Britain for students and teachers alike.
Popular culture has also become a powerful site of queer historical storytelling. The RuPaul's Drag Race franchise from the UK to Canada, Down Under, Spain, and the Philippines has brought aspects of LGBTQ+ histories into the mainstream, often illuminating the legacies of race, empire, and queerness. In an episode of Canada’s Drag Race (S3), queens Chelazon Leroux (who is two-spirit from the Buffalo River Dene Nation) and Bombae (who grew up in India before migrating to Canada in 2016) reflect on how colonialism disrupted Indigenous understandings of gender and sexuality. In different ways, their exchanges in the Werk Room ultimately drew public attention to what Chumash scholar Deborah Miranda has termed gendercide and Jessica Hinchy’s work on the vital role of the hijra in South Asian communities. Another striking example from RuPaul’s Drag Race (S16) that we discuss in the Queer North America course I teach at UC Santa Barbara, features the drag queen Q who performs in a sketch as the Brick from Stonewall wherein she frames the brick as a symbol of collective resistance and direct action that gave its body to queer liberation.
The contributions brought together here reveal the rich and striking diversity of approaches to queer history in 2025. Some pieces draw on in-depth case studies to explore the entanglements of sexuality, bureaucracy, and state power. Adrian Kane-Galbraith (University of Washington) writes about a 1950s case in which an English trans man and his legal husband sought to emigrate to Australia. Through newspaper reports and National Insurance documents, Kane-Galbraith traces how competing institutional definitions of “biological sex” shaped state responses, offering us a powerful lens for understanding how sex and state authority have long been entangled.
Other pieces are grounded in the complexities of doing queer historical work across geographies and institutions. Tom Hulme (Queen’s University Belfast) offers a vignette drawn from his research for his forthcoming book, Belfastmen. He reflects on how a research trip to Wheaton, Illinois—coinciding with the 2022 NACBS conference in Chicago—opened up unexpected paths for investigating local queer histories from within international archives. Hulme’s reflection resonates at a time when queer archives are precariously supported, particularly in regional and more rural contexts.
Martha Robinson Rhodes (Royal Holloway, University of London) reflects on the challenges and possibilities of making bisexuality legible in the archive. Drawing from her research that includes her work on Bi-Monthly, the UK’s first bisexual magazine (1984–89), the Hall-Carpenter Archives Gay and Lesbian Oral History Project and her own oral histories, Robinson Rhodes raises questions about the archival visibility of attraction to multiple genders and how queer methodologies can create space for marginalized forms of identity and desire.
Focusing on Anne Drysdale and Caroline Newcomb, or the so-called “Lady Squatters” of colonial Victoria, Jacobin Bosman (University of Melbourne) contributes a case study rooted in settler colonial Australia. Bosman interrogates how narratives of female exceptionalism on the frontier made space for certain queer intimacies, even as settler structures continued to enact violence on Indigenous lands and people. The piece situates the women’s lives within ongoing Indigenous truth-telling efforts and asks how queer historical recovery must also reckon with complicity and settler capitalism.
Scott Terlouw (University of California, Santa Barbara) adds another temporal and thematic layer to this series by turning to 18th-century London. His piece explores the case of Princess Seraphina, a transgender woman who, in 1732, brought a man to court for robbery. Drawing on the Old Bailey court records, Terlouw reconstructs how Seraphina’s gender identity was openly discussed during the trial, with many of her neighbors and friends using she pronouns in their testimony, offering us a glimpse of a community that recognized and supported transness.
Katrina-Eve Manica (University of Toronto) looks to the visual to explore William Burges’s
designs in the Summer Smoking Room at Cardiff Castle. Manica’s work details the references to queer and same-sex desire that appear alongside depictions of straight partnership, demonstrating that Burge’s designs for this homosocial space use polyvalence to articulate a Christian end-of-world iconography alongside a queer eschatology.
A history of queer censorship and resistance comes into view in the work of Averill Earls (St. Olaf College), who traces parallels between today’s book bans in the U.S. and earlier moral policing in Ireland. Drawing on cases like the banning of Kate O’Brien’s Land of Spices for its portrayal of same-sex desire, Earls shows how the Irish state, guided by Catholic moral authority, sought to suppress information about sexuality, contraception, and abortion. But as Earls argues, censorship often backfired and ultimately prompted authors to challenge repression by writing more boldly about the very subjects deemed unspeakable.
In this era marked by political backlash the stakes of doing queer and trans history take on an added significance because they make visible what others seek to suppress. This collective intervention, then, celebrates pride, challenges the terms of visibility, and reminds us that LGBTQ+ history is not just about the past. It is also about fighting for a livable present and a more inclusive future. We must confront who is remembered and who has been erased. So read the banned books. Teach the silenced stories. And visit queer museums and archives. Because if we do not tell these stories, others will decide which histories matter and whose lives count.
Jarett Henderson is a historian at UC Santa Barbara, specializing in the histories of gender, sexuality, and settler colonialism in 19th-century Canada. His research situates Canadian colonial governance within broader trans-imperial debates about sodomy, whiteness, masculinity, and political authority. His current project, Unnatural Sex and Uncivil Subjects, explores how the re-criminalization of sex between men shaped the development of white settler self-government in the early Canadian colonies.
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