HISTORY

What is the Bury Your Gays trope? It’s a trope used in media in which a queer person, often in a romantic relationship, tragically dies. The trope isn’t just about death and loss, however, but is often used to undermine…

St Patrick was many things – a Christian missionary, an “Apostle of Ireland” – but one thing he most definitely was not was a sucker of nipples, according to his own writings. Because St Patrick lived so long ago, there’s been significant…

You may have never seen Paris Is Burning, but I’m willing to bet that your lexicon is shaped by it. Words like “shade,” “realness,” “over,” “work,” and “reading” have become popular in contemporary queer culture, and while you may credit…

The early 1970s were a watershed moment for LGBTQ people. Today, we remember the increasingly outspoken political movement for gay and lesbian rights. But as humanities scholar Lucas Hilderbrand writes, not all of the era’s new developments were quite so serious…

In many times and places, people who would fall under today’s LGBTQ+ umbrella have grown up with no framework to understand their identities. As historian Emily Rutherford writes, that was true for Victorian scholar John Addington. But, thanks to…

Often overlooked in the history of the Holocaust is the incarceration of the LGBTQ+ community, primarily gay men. In the early part of the 1900s, gay life in Germany was thriving. Liberal cities like Berlin had nightclubs and bars that…