A Gay History of Britain

This is an admirably concise yet comprehensive survey of our current state of knowledge concerning the history of British homosexuality. The chronological organisation suggests a uniformity of treatment, but each author's methodology and outlook differs from that of his colleagues, and the overseeing editor, Matt Cook, was not quite able to draw his contributors together for a genuine ‘conversation’. For example, Trumbach's and Cocks's citations refer almost entirely to primary sources (such as trial and newspaper reports, and contemporary writings), while those of Mills and Cook refer almost entirely to secondary sources rather than their primary research. More importantly, a coherent historical overview does not quite emerge, because the authors employ different theoretical definitions and perspectives, and sometimes disagree outright with one another. Mills, for example, says (rightly) that there is no evidence to support Trumbach's major claim that a kind of indifferent bisexuality was the universal norm prior to the eighteenth century

Conversation · Epistemology · Homosexuality · Media studies · Newspaper · Norm (philosophy · Sociology · Gender Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Philosophy