Telling the stories
of LGBT lives is previous centuries and decades can be challenging.
How far should one
draw people into the LGBT community or cannon who never (publicly)
self-identified as LGBT?
Most LGBT people,
even today, will at times self-edit their identity, and it seems the
majority of biographers have applied a heavy edit to any evidence
that might have been past down to us.
So for many we have
only hints, glimpses, assumptions about our LGBT forebears – we
can’t say how individuals would self-identify it they were alive
today, but we can probably say that they lived outside the
heretonormative cookie cutter identity.
But it is telling
the level of outrage that can be felt when we then claim someone for
the LGBT community, as the National Trust found out a couple of years
ago
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/08/04/national-trust-facing-membership-boycott-gay-campaign/
This is deeply
troubling – people still fear damage to someone’s reputation if
we suggest they were gay – and that fear is exactly why books such
as this must be written and celebrated.
No comments:
Post a Comment