An Introduction

Y hello thar Internets. My thots, let me show u them.

It's been slowly dawning on me for a while now that I need a place to talk about my studies. I have a Livejournal, but I use it primarily for its journal feed feature as a reading list. I talk to my friends, but honestly, the primary reaction to sudden spoutings of factoids from gay history is complete incomprehension (unless you're Cody or Ashley). I need a place I can explain things, show sources, and just possibly teach someone something.

I'm a student at a university. I study queer theory and history. There's no program for that here, which is probably a sign that I need to transfer, but whatever. I started studying this sometime in high school- not seriously, because I didn't have the resources to find the books, but online. This man was my gateway drug. He's on my list of people whose brains I have absurd and inappropriate crushes on. His books- Mother Clap's Molly House, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual, and My Dear Boy: Gay Love Letters Through the Centuries are all available used through Amazon.

As a freshman, I wrote bits and bats of gay poetry and other things on the whiteboard on my dorm room door. Classy. I wrote an essay for english on the historical identities of gay men, and another for my Women in Asia class on lesbianism in India. I have successfully become That Girl. But it's not enough. I want to become a professor of queer studies. I might as well start teaching right here, right now.

This blog will be mostly about my sharing poetry, newspaper articles, bits from trials, satires, book reviews, anything, along with the appropriate historical context. There will be no laundry lists of famous dead white guys here. I'm against that kind of history on principle. History is a tapestry, with threads running from here to there, tangling, affecting each other, stories of how people lived and what they did and where they went and why.

Let's kick off with a short quote demonstrating this principle. This is a quote from an anonymous writer to the London Journal on May 14, 1726.

If the Legislature had not taken prudent Measures to suppress such base and irregular Actions, Women would have been a Piece of useless Work in the Creation, since Man, superior Man, has found out one of his own Likeness and Nature to supply his lascivious Necessities.

Oh, wait, now we're talking about sexism. Weird. So obviously men would pick other men, since obviously men are superior, right?

There's going to be all kinds of stuff on that tack here. Have fun, and hang on, we're in for quite a ride.