There’s plenty of evidence of Oscar Wilde and Alan Turing’s sexuality, for example, because they went to jail for it. Queer historians and enthusiasts know to look for terms like ‘pervert’ and other homophobic slurs if we want to find our community in a nation’s archives. Queer historians today tirelessly search for traces of those who were brave enough to leave them behind and then preserve them in excellent places like the Australian Queer Archives (AQuA).ĭiversity of all stripes has been policed for decades, so there isn’t a shortage of criminal records of queer people who were persecuted for being themselves. Diaries, letters and photos are excellent ways of discovering the truth about private lives from earlier periods but a diary, letter or photo could get you thrown into jail. Trailblazing activists from the 1950s helped queer people come out of the shadows but we existed many centuries before then. That said, same-sex desire can still be found by many different names and expressions throughout history.īeing anything but heterosexual has been illegal in many cultures and for the majority of Western history. One example is from the early 20th Century, when men who practised the ‘female role’ of gay sex, or bottoms, were ‘inverts’, but the heterosexual status of the other participant, the top, was untarnished. Ideas of sexuality are defined by time and place and we must avoid transplanting our current understandings onto historical times. Read: Reclaiming Australian history one gay at a time
Perhaps it needs to be reiterated here: being queer isn’t a bad thing. I often wonder if the explanation behind this discomfort is a misguided assumption that acknowledging someone’s homosexuality is somehow defamatory or tarnishes their memory. Alexander the Great, Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Gandhi people are reluctant to even raise the question over available evidence or hear the gaydar blips through time. Two women who lived together, wrote love letters and asked to be buried in the same tomb? They were close companions, says the history teacher. There’s a meme that floats around the internet about our tendency to straight-wash history. The detectives themselves remarkably posed the question over Warwick’s sexuality and a handful of possible leads looked hopeful but nothing that could stand up in court. Despite my decade long investigation, I couldn’t find any conclusive evidence about Warwick’s sexuality or sexual behaviour, straight or otherwise. My book is as much about my desire to learn about my possible gay ancestor as it is about discovering the truth behind Warwick’s murder.