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Auditorium 4,

Thursday, 21 May, 10:15–12:00

Session chair: Elisabeth Engebregtsen

Heike Bauer, Five Old English Sheepdogs, all named Pan: centring human-animal relations in modern everyday queer life

Queer historiography tends to focus on the lives of humans yet many of the people who transgressed the gender and sexual norms and expectations of their time shared their life with non-human companions. This paper gives centre stage to some of the cats and dogs that roamed queer modernity to consider afresh the historical contours of queer life and love. It focuses on the period from around 1900 to the 1940s, which is an often returned to moment in queer history when many modern ideas about gender and sexuality gained traction and recognisable queer subcultures and cultural networks formed across Europe and North America. This was also a transformative time for human-animal relations, marked in the domestic sphere by a well-documented growth in pet ownership. The wealth of surviving photographs of queer people and their pets makes for an intriguing archival presence, promising glimpses at the domestic lives of people famous today for their artistic, literary and political work while also offering insights into the lives of people who have not left a deep historical imprint. The paper will discuss portraits of pets such as the Old English Sheepdogs of English composer Ethel Smyth and the cats of French artist Claude Cahun to trouble the normalization of inter-human relationships as the sole subjects of queer history. Asking what kinds of queer histories are submerged or brought into view in pet portraiture, it aims to expand understanding of everyday queer life beyond the human.  

Heike Bauer is Professor of Modern Literature and Cultural History at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on queer history and culture including The Hirschfeld Archives: Violence, Death, and Modern Queer Culture (2017) and the co-edited ‘Visual Archives of Sex’ (Radical History Review 2022). Her current work focuses on human-animal relations the role of pet portraits in queer modernism. A related piece on dogs and queer history, ‘In the Canine Archives of Sex: Radclyffe Hall, Una Troubridge and their Dogs’, is out with Gender & History (2022).

Aurora Eide, The Garden in the Archive: Elsa Gidlow’s Sapphic Garden Community

In 1954, lesbian poet Elsa Gidlow founded a queer community among the redwood forests north of San Francisco. She called the community Druid Heights, and there in the wild gardens she cultivated a countercultural hub for bohemian artists and writers. Gidlow’s philosophy relied upon a poetic partnership with nature—a lifestyle in tune with the seasons—and the heart of the Druid Heights community was the gardens. While the study of queer history is often occupied with stories of urban activism, the queer garden and the gardener are often forgotten, and Gidlow remains vastly understudied. This paper, which is based on my ongoing PhD research, will ask: What can we learn by unearthing forgotten stories about sapphic gardens from the archive, and how can these gardens guide modern queer identities? How does the garden shape Gidlow’s poetry and queer identity, and how does her queerness shape the garden? I propose that Gidlow’s garden at Druid Heights represents a counterarchive in queer history. Close readings of her pioneering poetry side-by-side with her community will reveal the queer joy located in soil and the sapphic self-creation inspired by plants. Gidlow disrupts the centuries-old ideal of the garden as a heterosexualized space and reclaims the garden as a lesbian heterotopia. As she reinstates the role of nature in the lives of sapphic modernities, Gidlow encourages us to rethink how we engage with the queer past. The garden in the archive embodies a queer futurity aligned with nonlinear cycles of rebirth, fostering cross-generational interconnectedness.

Aurora Eide is a PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Agder, Norway. Her research centers on queer ecology and the recovery of sapphic modernist poets. In her PhD project she investigates the understudied sapphic garden communities of Elsa Gidlow in the US, Natalie Barney in France, and Sylvia Townsend Warner in England. She has developed and taught courses at UiT – the Arctic University of Norway, including a course on queer literary history. In 2025, she won the Orm Øverland Prize for best graduate student paper at the NAAS conference in Turku for her research on Elsa Gidlow.

Colin R. Johnson, Queer Birds

The phrase “queer birds” was used commonly in nineteenth century America to describe eccentric people whose habits and manner of organizing their lives deviated notably from those of their neighbors. This talk, which is drawn from a book length work-in-progress that explores the interrelated histories of anti-social behavior and sexual alterity, investigates the life of one such eccentric, a woman named Nancy Luce, who lived in the rural hamlet of West Tisbury on Martha’s Vineyard during this period. Luce was regarded by nineteenth century Vineyarders as a “character” for many reasons, but she was especially notorious for prioritizing her relationship with her brood of much beloved Bantam hens (i.e. chickens) over relations with her fellow islanders. In addition to addressing the history of petkeeping as a queer practice, or at least as a practice that had the potential to queer people in the eyes of others when their interspecies affinities appeared to become morbidly intense, the paper also raises questions about gender, class and disability, each of which profoundly conditioned Luce’s everyday existence and the way in which she was viewed by others. Additionally, the paper briefly considers the peculiar afterlife of Luce’s eccentricity given the fact that her memory has come to be celebrated on Martha’s Vineyard, most notably in the form of a permanent exhibit at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum.

Colin R. Johnson is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and American Studies at Indiana University Bloomington (USA), where he is also affiliated with the Department of History, the Human Biology Program, and the Kinsey Institute for the Study of Sex, Gender and Reproduction. He is the author of Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America (Temple U Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and co-editor of Queering the Countryside: New Frontiers in Rural Queer Studies (NYU Press, 2016), which was named a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title.

Wigbertson Julian Isenia, What the Beach Remembers: Visual-sonic Traces of Queer Desire and the Beach

This paper reframes the beach as a queer-postcolonial archive of ordinary life. It asks how beaches reshape what counts as ordinary and why they are rarely considered critical sites of inquiry. For residents, the beach forms part of their daily routines, including family gatherings and rest. For visitors, it is marked as exceptional, a place to recover from a year of labor. In both cases, it is read as relaxation rather than analysis, even though leisure is inseparable from systems of labor, tourism, and control that organize who works and who rests. Mid-twentieth-century Curaçaoan and Jamaican photographs depict Black fishermen posing with spears and nets, often alongside white or light-skinned amateur photographers. Their muscular, water-slicked bodies were eroticized, yet the men also exercised agency, negotiating payments, travel, or access to facilities such as gyms. Male homosocial scenes often carry erotic charge even when not named as sexual; such bonds are policed to maintain heterosexual order. Similarly, postcolonial scholars show how laws criminalizing broader Black sexual practices under charges of indecency and immorality treated any non-respectable desire as suspect, so “queer” here must be read beyond same-sex acts alone. Viewed through these lenses, the fishermen's photographs become sites where queer feeling remains thinkable amid the pressures of colonial respectability. Although framed by white photographers and coded as queer (due to close male proximity, casual touch, and poses that exceeded ordinary friendships), the fishermen negotiated their terms. 

Wigbertson Julian Isenia (they/e) is a cultural studies scholar from Curaçao and assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. Their work appears in Small Axe and Feminist Review and includes chapters in the Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism. They are completing MARIKU!, a book on archives, performance, and language politics.

Seminarrom 2 

Thursday, 21 May, 10:15-12:00

Session chair: Jennifer Evans

David Minto, Anton Walbrook On Film, Off Camera

This paper explores candid, non-publicity or otherwise domestic visual material relating to the queer film actor Anton Walbrook. Born in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century, Walbrook (under his original name of Adolf Wohlbrück) became a movie star in Weimar and Nazi Germany, before leaving in 1936 to forge an émigré career in Britain. Appearing in some of mid-century British cinema’s most popular hits, Walbrook established a formidable presence in feature films and surrounding publicity materials (despite his fierce insistence on privacy). Nevertheless, there is an alternative, scattered visual archive of images of Walbrook at different stages of life – photos that were placed on bureaucratic documents, that pictured him in his Hampstead home, or that were apparently taken by his wartime Norwegian boyfriend, Ferdinand Finne. My paper addresses this ordinary, seemingly mundane, and sometimes secret repository as a counterpoint to Walbrook’s public image, to developments in his career, and to surrounding political events. By examining contrasts between Walbrook’s curated public performances and this more haphazard, quotidian archive, the paper seeks to locate some of the queer visual tells in which radical commitments might lie in the ordinary. It relates most strongly to the conference’s key themes of domesticity, intimacy, in/visibility, queer inarticulacy and discretion, and ordinariness.

David Minto is an Assistant Professor in History at Durham University. He is currently working on a monograph titled Special Relationships: Transatlantic Sexual Politics and Transnational Homophile Activism. He has particular interests in the private/public divides of homosexuality and articles on this topic have appeared in venues such as the American Historical Review and British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives. Current research interests include transnational queer connections and counterpublics, the intimacies of Cold War espionage and secret agents, and homosexuality as it relates to mid-twentieth century film.

Krzysztof Witczak & Marek Jedliński, Everyday life of gay people through the lens – the work of selected queer amateur filmmakers and performance artists in the 1970s and 1980s in communist Poland

Documentary films and amateur footage produced in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s are now a key source for reconstructing the queer microhistory of the Polish People's Republic. Although they existed outside the official circulation – often as private recordings, social chronicles, semi-secret recordings from clubs or cruising spaces – these documents show the everyday life of gay people in the context of systemic oppression and social invisibility. These images reveal complex strategies for survival and community building: from intimate gatherings in apartments, through informal support networks, to performative practices of presence in public space, described today in terms of ‘queer kinship’ and ‘everyday resistance’ (Warner 1993; Scott 1990). The analysis of this material is part of the trend of research on queer archiving and ‘affective archives’ (Cvetkovich 2003), emphasising the importance of unofficial records in the process of recovering the history of marginalised groups. In his film Nieporozumienie (Misunderstanding), Piotr Majdrowski uses queer narrative and aesthetic tools, placing his work in the tradition of research on the invisibility and performativity of non-heteronormative identities (Butler 1990; Sedgwick 1990), as well as in the context of Polish studies on the history of sexuality (Tomasik 2012; Mizielińska and Stasińska 2014). Performances created in Poland in the 1970s and 1980s constitute one of the most important, though long marginalised, sources of knowledge about queer everyday life in the realities of the Polish People's Republic. Artistic activities – often carried out in semi-private spaces, independent galleries, apartments or as part of ephemeral meetings of creative communities – made it possible to formulate alternative narratives about male desire, intimacy and community in conditions of systemic invisibility and surveillance.

Krzysztof Witczak – Ph.D., literary scholar, co-author of the Obcości. Szkice z filozofii i literatury [Strangeness. Sketches on Philosophy and Literature], 2017; co-authored with Marek Jedliński; editor of several scientific monographs on the problem of strangeness. He has published, among others, in “Images”, ,,Sensus Historiae’, ,,Czas Kultury”, ,,Filo-Sofija’, ,,Zoophilologica. Polish Journal of Animal Studies’. His research interests focus on literary text and cinema, especially in the field of queer theory.

Jedliński Marek – Ph.D., Professor at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, author of numerous scientific publications on Russian culture, the problem of strangeness, cultural aspects of Soviet traditionalism, Soviet sexophobia, the cultural face of Russian/Putin homophobia/transphobia and queer theory. Author of three monographs: Rosyjskie poszukiwania sensu i celu…(2015) [Russian Search for Meaning and Purpose...]; Obcości. Szkice z filozofii i literatury [Strangeness. Sketches on Philosophy and Literature], 2017; co-authored with Krzysztof Witczak; Ku przeszłości! René Guénon, Julius Evola i nurty tradycjonalizmu [Towards the Past! René Guénon, Julius Evola and the currents of traditionalism], (2019).

Molly Caenwyn, The Home Darkroom: Everyday Image Making in Queer Domesticities 

This paper focuses on home photographic darkrooms as previously unexplored sites of everyday photographic production for LGBTQIA+ image makers. It aims to explore the creative freedoms (or constraints) home darkrooms might have provided to practitioners living in rural Britain. I will additionally examine how photographs and photographic practices have helped shape LGBTQIA+ people’s perception of both the self (Rogerson 2008) and of their home environments. I will draw upon texts, images and objects from two archival collections: Franki Raffles’ early work from the late 1970s, which was processed in a renovated farmhouse on the Isle of Lewis; and the Reg Mickisch and George Walton collection, which includes images processed in their homes in rural Wales from the 1970s-80s. These collections were both generated within decades of changings attitudes towards the LGBTQIA+ community. This is exemplified through the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality by the 1967 Sexual Offences Act and later the 1980 Criminal Justice Act in Scotland, and the AIDS pandemic. By situating these collections in wider social, cultural and political contexts, I will also examine what (in)visibility home darkrooms affords queer practitioners in Britain. Overall, in this presentation I propose that an examination of the home darkroom is vital in developing current research in queer domesticities and expanding narratives of (queer) creative practice in the home (Elliott 2022). Furthermore, in utilising tangible photographic materials, I will also reflect on my approach to research the absence-presence of the home darkroom in photographic archives.

Molly Caenwyn (they/them) is an AHRC-funded researcher doing a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with the Museum of the Home and the University of Westminster (UK). Their PhD project “The Home Darkroom and the Freedom of Photographic Production in Britain, 1950s-present" explores the intersections of home, photographic practice and lived experiences of LGBTQIA+ people.

Dagmar Brunow, Joy and happiness in the archive: Lesbian home movies and mundane queer history

Lesbian home movies portray queer domesticity, showcasing moments of bliss with the loved one(s), being in the garden, having friends round for tea, or going for a walk. This makes home movies an invaluable source for historians and memory scholars alike. Documenting ordinary moments beyond hegemonic media representations of lesbians (or rather the lack of these), these amateur films carve out spaces for self representation. Their materiality (use of colour already in the 1930s) and the immediacy of video (no lab processing) has enabled representations of joy and happiness. Yet most of these films have not survived. Many have been left to decay, been discarded by homophobic families, their protagonists mislabeled as mere “roommates”, and their historical significance has been overlooked by archives. This paper presents the unique memory work of The Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP) in Maine which is dedicated to “seeking, preserving, documenting, and screening amateur home movies made by or featuring lesbians” (Thompson 2015). By engaging with LHMP’s archival gems, this paper shifts attention from the dominance of “expert discourse, activism, crimes and scandals” (cfp) in queer historiography toward representations of joy and happiness. Thereby, it follows Ann Rigney (2018)’s plea for a ‘positive turn’ in memory studies to move away from the field’ dominance of trauma, atrocities and social injustice. Presenting archival gems from the Lesbian Home Movie Project (Maine), this paper makes a case for the role of home movies as a historical source in the ‘mundane turn’.

Dagmar Brunow (she/her) is professor of film studies at Linnaeus University (Sweden). She is the author of Remediating Transcultural Memory: Documentary Filmmaking as Archival Intervention (de Gruyter, 2015), editor of Stuart Hall. Aktivismus, Pop & Politik (Ventil Verlag, 2015), and coeditor of Queer Cinema (Ventil Verlag, 2018, with Simon Dickel). Research projects “The Lost Heritage: Improving Collaborations between Digital Film Archives (2021-2024) and “The Cultural Heritage of Moving Images” (2016-2018) have been funded by the Swedish Research Council. For many years Dagmar has been part of the programming committee of the Hamburg Queer Film Festival (Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage).

Kata Benedek, Ethics of Release: Two Unreleased Documentaries on Gay and Trans Lives from State-Socialist Hungary

Access to documents of queer history remains uneven across the globe. In regions such as the former Eastern Bloc, the lack of archival material is often understood as resulting from the imagined ideological, anti-queer state repression. Yet my PhD research into East-Central European queer cultural history has uncovered extensive materials on queer artistic and social life, including two unreleased documentaries from state-socialist Hungary portraying gay and transgender experiences. Notably, these films were not suppressed by censorship; instead, their continued invisibility raises questions about representation, privacy, and the ethics of post-socialist release. Attila Janisch’s In the Shadows (22′, 1981) features interviews with M. (22) and L. (27), a gay couple, whose contrasting life experiences reflect different modes of self-understanding and perspectives. In 1986, Ferenc Grünwalsky began filming a documentary featuring a transgender woman, G. (18), in detention for attempted vandalism. Grünwalsky, exploring the alleged crime, delves deeply into G.’s past. Through interviews with her working-class family, coworkers at a laundromat, trained guards, and both official (court, psychiatrist) and alternative (the crew) forms of intellectual authority, the film gradually constructs a portrait of G.’s existence within the social and institutional frameworks of late socialism. Meanwhile, another transgender interviewee, Ali (25), provides a different worldview and approach to social coexistence. Beyond presenting these films as primary sources that offer rare insight into late-socialist queer lives, I also aim to address the ethical dilemmas involved in exhibiting such works beyond academic contexts. In my case, this is not merely a theoretical concern but a practical one: before his recent death, Grünwalsky granted me the rights to the sixteen hours of raw footage, entrusting me with the possibility of completing the film.

Kata Benedek is an art historian and researcher focusing on queer cultural history and memory politics in East-Central Europe. She completed her doctoral dissertation, El Kazovszkij Revisited: Queer In/Visibilities in State-Socialist East-Central European Cultural Fields, at Freie Universität Berlin in 2024. Her current research examines the transnational histories of the HIV/AIDS pandemic in socialist and post-socialist contexts.

Auditorium 4

Thursday, 21 May, 13:00-14:30

Session chair: Runar Jordåen

Linus Sollin, The female impersonator Carl Friedlew’s Sleepless Night – An Imaginary Scenario with the Purpose to Explore Queer Communities in Malmö around 1900

Linus Sollin from Malmö City Archives presents his research on historical queer communities in Malmö around 1900, a period before increased repression by authorities targeted queer individuals in Sweden. The presentation focuses on the question of how we can research and narrate everyday and less conflict-focused histories when narrative sources are either missing or shaped by legislation that criminalized same-sex sexual relations. Using Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading, applicable to sources shaped by repression and power structures, and inspired by the work of historian Saidiya Hartman, Sollin presents an imaginary scenario set around 1900. Following the female impersonator Carl Friedlew’s chain of thoughts after a performance in Malmö, the scenario depicts a historical context in which people at the time might have found the authorities’ repression of those with same-sex sexual attractions even stranger than the same sex sexual attractions themselves. Inspired by Richard Slotkin’s ideas on historical fiction, the scenario is presented as a miniature thought experiment. This means that the factual basis of the imaginary scenario is presented in a way that allows participants to form their own interpretations. Previously performed on Malmö LGBTQI radio, the scenario will also be part of forthcoming articles in Swedish and international historical journals.

Linus Sollin Is an archival educator at Malmö City Archives. In recent years he has been focusing on uncovering and sharing the city’s LGBTQI+ history. He collaborated with Malmö Art Museum for WorldPride 2021 to create a queer historical room, displaying curated archival material. Sollin co-authored the historical map guide A Ride to Pride (2021) and has presented his research on female and male impersonators in relations to the formations of early queer communities in Malmö 1880-1910 at the conference Queer Pasts: What’s Queer in Queer History? in Copenhagen in the spring of 2025. This research will be published in RIG - Kulturhistorisk tidskrift in 2026.

Tim Jerrome, An answer to absence in archives: queer rural histories and the importance of the mundane

Until recently, the study of queer histories in England has held an almost exclusively urban focus. The reasons for this are numerous, but the most critical factor is the greater availability of archival evidence depicting queer life in cities. For example, police archives relating to meeting spaces, such as gay bars, as well as archives of activism, provide insights which are simply not available to those seeking queer histories of the countryside. It is here that we start to see the commonality between rural queer histories and mundane queer histories; both have been overlooked in favour of the urban narratives of scandal and political action. In this paper I will demonstrate not only that queer people lived and worked in the English countryside during my period of study (c.1800-1950), but also that the mundane is absolutely critical to this field of research. Firstly, I will show that those who lived ordinary lives have a key role in this story, by sharing findings from farm records at the Museum of English Rural Life. Secondly, I will explore some examples of queer creatives who lived and networked in rural England in the early 20th century. Throughout these reflections I will discuss how the mundane can help address the aforementioned challenge of archival scarcity. Essentially, whilst very few documents amongst farm records and personal papers will explicitly mention a same sex relationship, those indicating queerness do exist. Such archive collections, consisting of dozens of boxes, may only contain one queer document, with the rest of the collection detailing everyday life. If we acknowledge the importance of the mundane, the entire collection is then transformed into a queer history resource. The mundane can tell us not only about the professional and personal life of a queer person, but also how the rural community responded to them, which often yields surprising results.

Furthermore, given my archive and museum background, I have a strong interest in how these rural, mundane collections are catalogued and exhibited, and will share some thoughts on the challenges posed by the speculative nature of queer research, particularly with regard to the principle of archival neutrality.

Tim Jerrome is a writer, historian and archivist who has a passion for uncovering LGBTQ+ stories amongst archive and museum collections. Having previously worked for the Museum of English Rural Life, he is now undertaking a PhD on this topic with the University of Brighton, with particular emphasis on the Victorian and early 20th century periods. His focus on rural England stems from a lack of existing research in this area, given that previous researchers have worked almost exclusively within the urban sphere.

Ben Nichols, Information Work: Memory Institutions and the Pre-History of Sexuality Studies in the UK

The intellectual history of Anglophone sexuality studies is well-documented and is a story of largely US-based high-profile names and elite higher education institutions. Yet the practices that enabled this trajectory—the research, teaching, and everyday knowledge work on queer sexualities unfolding between the gay liberation movements of the late 1960s and the institutionalisation of queer studies in the 1990s—remain far less visible and less well understood. This paper examines these under-acknowledged precedents in the relatively more decentralised context of the United Kingdom. Focusing on UK libraries, archives, and museums, I trace forms of labour that media studies scholar Cait McKinney (2020) terms “information work”: the often uncelebrated efforts of bibliographers, cataloguers, and database builders in the context of social movements. Understanding these activities as unglamourous “information work” helps explain their marginalisation within intellectual histories, but what perspectives on sexuality studies are possible from their position of marginality? I argue that these initiatives illuminate enduring sticking points within the field. For example, booklists produced by the organisation Lesbians in Libraries in the 1980s reveal a longer history that helps understand the privileging of literary writing in the study of queer sexualities. Furthermore, state-funded projects such as the Hall-Carpenter Archives (founded 1982) foreground the paradoxical role of the “liberal state”—often framed as antithetical to queer politics—in shaping the conditions of contemporary queer studies. By foregrounding the seemingly mundane labour of information work, this paper offers both a historical recovery and a theoretical reorientation for understanding the field’s development.

Ben Nichols is a lecturer in gender and sexuality studies at the University of Manchester, UK. He researches the intellectual histories of feminist, queer and trans studies and has published a book – Same Old: Queer Theory, Literature and the Politics of Sameness (2020) – and other writing in journals such as GLQ, Textual Practice and the Journal of Gender Studies.

Jennifer Shearman, Live, Laugh, Love: Domestic life at Queer Britain 

Queer Britain: the National LGBTQ+ Museum is the UK’s first bricks and mortar queer history museum based in London’s Kings Cross. In the three years since the museum first opened its doors it has presented a wide range of projects, programmes and exhibitions that center LGBTQ+ stories. Aiming to reclaim, preserve and inspire queer history and culture. In February 2026 the museum will present a new set of displays and a temporary exhibition built around a new programming strategy which centers collaboration, LGBTQ+ voices and underrepresented stories. This includes a new display and thematic framing titled Live, Laugh, Love. A tongue-in-cheek reference to the popular slogan in British home decor and hun-culture this theme will spotlight stories of everyday queer life including relationships, sex, romance, home, and family. This paper will explore the presentation of domestic life at queer Britain through its exhibitions, displays, collections and public programmes. It will posit some of the challenges of collecting and displaying domestic material and the ethical considerations needed when exhibiting intimate parts of queer life.

Jennifer Shearman (she/her) is Head of Programme and Collection (Curator) at Queer Britain: the National LGBTQ+ Museum. For 10 years she has worked across curation and cultural production developing exhibitions, displays, public and live programmes. Previously she was Curator, Public Programmes at Tate. She holds an MSc in Film, Exhibition and Curation from the University of Edinburgh and BA Hons in Film and Comparative Literature from Queen Mary, University of London. Currently she is researching her PhD thesis at the University of Leicester titled 'An exploration of how museums of gender and sexuality (from 1981-present) curate and disseminate alternative understandings of identity, and how their work affects public debate.' Supervised by Professor Richard Sandell.

Seminarrom 1

Thursday, 21 May, 13:00-14:30

Session chair: Jennifer Brier

Michael Nebeling Petersen, Camilla Bruun Eriksen and Tobias de Fønss Wung-Sung, University of Copenhagen, Everyday care and quiet resistance: Women in the Danish history of HIV/AIDS, 1981–2000

This paper explores what happens to the history of HIV/AIDS in Denmark when we begin with women rather than treating them as supporting figures or symbolic placeholders. Scholarship on the AIDS crisis has rightly centered the activism, grief, and political innovation of gay men, yet this focus has also narrowed how we understand queer activism and community care. By tracing women’s roles as nurses, bureaucrats, caregivers, politicians, sex workers, and people living with HIV, this paper argues that women were central to shaping both the lived experience and political response to the epidemic. Drawing on archival research, media analysis, and oral history, we examine how dominant cultural narratives framed women either as innocent victims or dangerous carriers, and how women unsettled those scripts through everyday forms of presence, advocacy, and care. The paper highlights forms of labour that often fall outside dominant accounts of AIDS activism: the emotional and bodily work of caring for dying friends, the slow building of supportive infrastructures, the creation of self-help spaces when none existed, and acts of disclosure that challenged stigma. By shifting focus away from street protest and toward intimate, relational, and institutional practices, we argue for a broader understanding of political action in the epidemic. Recentering women invites us to rethink what activism looks like and where we find it. It reframes Danish AIDS history as shaped by ordinary gestures, intimate solidarities, and embodied forms of care that produced gradual but significant social change.

Michael Nebeling Petersen is associate professor in Gender Studies at the Center for Gender, Sexuality and DiLerence at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has especially studied homosexual culture and citizenship, new technologies of reproduction and kinship as well as digital media and mediated cultures of intimacy – in particular, in the intersections between sexuality, gender, whiteness, and national belonging. Currently, he is PI for the collaborative interdisciplinary project The Cultural History of AIDS in Denmark, that aims to write the Danish history of AIDS and examines how AIDS emerged, became signified and became embedded in Danish culture 1981-2000.

Camilla Bruun Eriksen is associate professor in Gender Studies at the Center for Gender, Sexuality and DiLerence at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research is rooted in cultural studies and grounded in critical theory, particularly poststructuralist feminist theory and affect theory. Drawing inspiration from feminist and gender studies traditions such as queer, crip, and fat theory, her work explores how questions of health, power, gender, and sexuality operate across both aesthetic culture and everyday popular culture. Through a broad analytical approach, she investigates contemporary and historical cultural phenomena, media, institutions, and technologies, examining how bodies, emotions, and identities are produced and negotiated within these contexts.

Michael and Camilla will present the paper. The third author will not be present at the conference.

Monica Pearl, Everyday AIDS; ordinary queerness

It is hard to think of AIDS and the AIDS crisis as ordinary or everyday. But of course illness, dealing with illness on a day to day basis, is not in itself dramatic. In fact, it is dull. It was said during the emergency years of the AIDS crisis that just having AIDS (or even just worrying about having or contracting AIDS) made you queer. For those infected or at risk of infection who were not already a part of the gay world, AIDS made them so.

In fact, we could also say: while AIDS made queer, at the same time AIDS is also what made queerness ordinary. By being so momentous, AIDS (paradoxically) is what made queerness ordinary. Mortal infection and illness are levelers; they're democratizing.

AIDS memoirs are the evidence for this; they expose the ordinariness of a life with HIV. For women in particular, HIV diagnosis has often had to be incorporated into already fraught lives. For women, after the shock of diagnosis, HIV infection often becomes another matter to juggle, another difficulty in a life of challenging overload. My paper will present the everyday of AIDS in AIDS memoir, particularly in those written by women.

Monica Pearl is Senior Lecturer/Associate Professor in Twentieth Century American Literature and Film at the University of Manchester, UK. She has written extensively on AIDS representation, including her book AIDS Literature and Gay Identity: The Literature of Loss (Routledge). Her most recent publication is a short essay on the UK AIDS TV show It’s a Sin in The European Journal of Cultural Studies. She is a veteran of ACT UP/New York, a brief account of which experience has recently been published in Radical History Review. Her book, “Where Is Your Rage?”: American Culture Looks Back at the AIDS Crisis is forthcoming from Punctum Books.

Elizabeth Clement, Buddy Programs and the Queering of the American Home

Elizabeth Clement examines how buddy programs in the conservative and intensely religious state of Utah queered notions of the American family. The Utah AIDS Foundation provided many services, including that of “buddy”—where a trained volunteer was paired with a PWA. Because Utah’s epidemic struck almost exclusively white men who had sex with men, not only were most of the PWAs queer, but most of the volunteers were as well. Buddies provided emotional and physical support for PWAs, usually in their homes. In addition to prompting PWAs to talk about their feelings about their lives and their deaths, they also washed dishes, cleaned, and did all the other intimate work involved in care for the dying. This brought them into close contact with conservative straight kin, which in turn began the process of destigmatizing homosexuality. For much of the twentieth century straight people in the US saw homosexuality as a danger to family. The buddy program, and the shared caregiving it initiated, gradually changes straight kins’ attitudes by proving that queer people could do family labor. This in turn led to shifts in public opinion around gay marriage, adoption, and family formation that began in the early twenty-first century.

Elizabeth Alice Clement is the Aileen Clyde Professor of History at the University of Utah. Her first book, Love for Sale, won the Dixon Ryan Fox prize from the New York State Historical Society. Her current work focuses on preserving and disseminating materials about the AIDS epidemic in Utah. A documentary film based on her research, Quiet Heroes, premiered at the Sundance in 2018 and won an Emmy Award. Professor Clement has recently completed a monograph titled The Reckoning: AIDS in Conservative America which will be published by University of North Carolina Press. 

Jennifer Holland, In Living Rooms and Walmart Lingerie Stations: AIDS Care in Rural America

Jennifer Holland explores the unusual forms rural AIDS care work took in the US. Most AIDS Service Organizations began in and served urban areas, but people with AIDS also lived in rural areas. Rural doctors had little knowledge of the disease, small-town medical institutions were already stretched to the point of breaking, and anonymity—especially when it came to this stigmatized disease—was a virtual impossibility. Many PWAs lived in rural places or returned to their families of origin. These families often had to keep their loved one’s identities—be that queerness or IV drug use—and diagnosis a secret. Managing stigma and daily care in the intimacy of remote homes became part of the burden. They had to overcome long distances, trying to make buddy systems and relays of medical supplies function over hundreds of miles. Rural AIDS workers had to counsel and educate in unusual locations, from family living rooms to Walmart lingerie stations. Because no historians have analyzed the rural AIDS crisis, the shape of rural AIDS care has been unstudied. AIDS care in rural places was at once more covert than urban areas, as it had to operate within the rural codes of secrecy, and more public, as it could not be contained to gay groups or AIDS care institutions.

Jennifer L. Holland is the Sara Louise Welsh Chair and L.R. Brammer, Jr. Presidential Professor of History at the University of Oklahoma, specializing in histories of gender and sexuality, the American West, and twentieth-century US politics. She is the author of the award-winning Tiny You: A Western History of the Anti-Abortion Movement (2020). Her next project is entitled Straightening Out: How Anti-Queer Politics Captured Rural America. Jennifer Holland has spoken about her work to journalists in television, radio, podcast, and print media venues, including PBS Newshour, CBS News, NPR, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and The Guardian.  

Seminarrom 2

Thursday, 21 May, 13:00-14:30

Session chair: Niels Nyegaard

Varpu Alasuutari, The Mundane History of Nordic Queer Loneliness

Loneliness causes social suffering and has drastic effects on health and well-being. It is also an ordinary affect for humans as social beings. Across times, LGBTQ+ people have experienced loneliness when longing for romance and intimacy, shared domesticity, and a like-minded community. This longing may have been heightened in the past, in times before the community-building eBorts of the lesbian and gay movement. In my project Queer(ing) Loneliness in the Nordic Region, I explore queer loneliness as both a present-day and historical phenomenon. The project aims to shed light on loneliness as an affectively complex, political, and often forgotten issue in the lives of Nordic LGBTQ+ people. In this presentation, I will focus on the historical perspective. In my qualitative thematic analysis, I explore how loneliness comes up in the early volumes of the Danish gay magazine Vennen (1949–1955) and the Finnish gay magazine 96 (1969–1975). Loneliness appears in these magazines through articles, poems, letters from the readers, and contact ads. Thus, the magazines oBer an interesting cultural window into how queer loneliness was experienced and understood in the early years of the Nordic lesbian and gay movement, which started organizing in Denmark in the late 1940s and in Finland in the late 1960s.

Dr. Varpu Alasuutari is a postdoctoral researcher in Gender Studies at the University of Turku, Finland. Her work has centered on the affectivity of queer and trans intimate and activist lives, focusing on e.g. death and grief, political despair, friendship, and (lack of) belonging. In her current project, Queer(ing) Loneliness in the Nordic Region (funded by the Kone Foundation 2024–2028), Alasuutari studies the history and present of Nordic queer loneliness.

Yidong Wang, Documenting Mundane Queer Life in the American Heartland: Liberty Press, a Kansas Magazine

Kristi Parker was born in Wichita, Kansas, in 1968. A lesbian woman, Parker had her footprints in many areas of queer advocacy. Her most celebrated legacy was Liberty Press, the longest running queer magazine in Kansas that only ceased publication with her passing in 2018. For over two decades, Liberty Press documented queer life in a region that was often invisible in the mainstream cultural imagination of queerness. The American heartland is agrarian, conservative, and no place for queer people to thrive. This stereotype is partially true, as many queer people do leave for the coasts and bigger cities. But reading through the pages of Liberty Press, one would learn about the stories of queer people staying or coming back. The magazine depicts identity politics different from coastal metropolises. Lower visibility presents as a barrier to elevating collective actions, but such barrier releases queerness from being enacted in certain ways. Queer people in the heartland creatively carve out communal spaces, where they ground expressions of gender and sexual identity in the mundanity of everyday life. It may not be as heroic as the Stonewall riots, but the possibility for queerness to take spontaneous shapes where it is supposedly not wanted is healing. This study utilizes a periodical collection of the past issues of Liberty Press, the papers of Kristi Parker, and a published oral history interview with Parker to examine how the magazine and the circle of Kansans it touches navigate the relationship between queer identity and geographical belonging.

Yidong (Steven) Wang is a media and communication scholar who works with marginalized communities to reimagine and redesign our cultural infrastructures. He aspires to dismantle harm-enabling systems through communal, compassionate storytelling. His research and teaching intersect with media ecology, digital studies, public humanities, and queer theory. Currently, he studies how LGBTQ communities in different cultural contexts navigate emergent media spaces, sustain social networks, and construct alternative discourses on identity, well-being, and intimacy.

Johanne E. Christensen, Queer domesticity in the mainstream imagination: Queer representation in film and on TV in Norway and Sweden

The family plays an important role in Norwegian and Swedish mainstream comedy and crime film and TV, both in the plot and for the setting. As a part of my ph.d. project, focusing on the representation of queer parents in Norwegian and Swedish TV and film genres crime and comedy, I address the question of cultural recognition of queer parents in Norway and Sweden through the lens of mainstream culture. I am using genre to question queer parents’ opportunities within the most popular TV and film in Norway and Sweden, and how these representations can be understood in light of the notion of homotolerance, cultural recognition and chrononormativity. In this paper I will present a mapping of queer representation in Norwegian and Swedish film and TV between 1990 and 2025, to shed light on how "ordinary" the lives of queer parents can be in the mainstream imagination. The mapping is created by collecting data from blogs, IMDB-lists, and previous research. The findings are categorised by various tropes associated with queer representation in film and on TV. From this I am documenting the presence of queer characters and themes associated with queer lives in Norwegian and Swedish film and TV, to shed light on how queer parents and families are included/excluded from the mainstream notion of domesticity.

Johanne E. Christensen is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Agder, who research the representation of queer parents in Norwegian and Swedish film and TV. She has her background from English literature and gender studies, and her research interests are popular entertainment, trivial literature, and husmorporno.

Joe Jukes, At home in the countryside: views unto queer rurality in Finnish photographic archives

Conducting research into sexual and gender diversity in the countryside is difficult. Such difficulty arises from: vague terminology in reports of criminal offence procedures; rural archivists’ disinclination to catalogue queer ephemera as such (cf. Jerrome, 2025), or the ways in which some rural queers avoid living ‘out and proud’ in their communities (Thomsen, 2021). Where then to begin researching rural queers and the social environments in which they lived, if written records appear so partial and incomplete? And how might the historian access a ‘sense of place’ in such material? In this presentation, I share early findings from the photo collections of three rural queers, who each lived in the Finnish countryside. I suggest that prioritising visual collections in this way can attune historical researchers to non-normative senses of place, produced aesthetically through the lenses of, in this instance, rural queers. The photo collections produce an eclectic view of the Finnish countryside, including: a gay farmstead, a lesbian retreat and a ‘weird’ sculpture park. All three places are photographed by the people who lived and worked them, reflecting their everyday realities somewhat pragmatically. Taken together, however, they 1) powerfully depict queers ‘at home’ in environments they are not assumed to thrive within, and 2) aesthetically represent, or mediate, rurality itself through a queer lens. Hence, photo collections such as these encourage us to attend not just to queers in the countryside but also their queerings of country life.

Joe Jukes is a Postdoctoral Researcher at Tampere University on the Academy of Finland project Picture Me: presenting queer visual history. Joe is a cultural geographer and queer theorist, who researches rurality and sexuality through visual culture, space and place. Their current project considers the photographic archives and collections of four ‘rural queers’ who lived in Finland from 1914 to 2010. Joe gained their PhD in Humanities in 2024 from the University of Brighton and is working their doctoral manuscript into a monograph.

Auditorium 4

Thursday, 21 May, 14:45-16:15

Session chair: Stephen Vider

Juliane and Bodil Andersson, Public and Intimate – Uncovering and Sharing Someone’s Story

During the revision of a museum collection, an unregistered suitcase was discovered, containing personal belongings—photographs, jewelry, medals, and keepsakes. These objects conveyed an intimacy that sparked our curiosity. The contents led us to explore the life of Janken (Johanna Sofie) Wiel-Hansen (1868–1937), her pioneering achievements in women’s sports, and her life with her companion, Ida von Plomgren (Plom). Our first impressions inspired us to approach their story through a queer perspective. This research has resulted in a scholarly article and an exhibition at the Halden museum, which is also used for an educational program Prejudice and Dialogue, offered to local schoolchildren. The exhibition invites visitors into an intimate setting—a “room within a room”—evoking the atmosphere of upper-middle-class city life in the early 1900s. Drawing on a collection of letters, photographs, newspaper articles, wills, and estate inventories, we present private moments from Janken’s life alongside her public engagement in fencing and the women’s rights movement. Plom’s role is likewise central to the story. For the upcoming conference, we hope to share our discussions, curatorial choices, and interpretive process in reconstructing Janken and Plom’s shared life—how fragmentary traces can illuminate everyday queer experience as well as the textures of life together over three decades, marked by ordinary joys and sorrows, concerns about health, and financial uncertainty.

Juliane Derry is a conservator at Østfoldmuseene in Halden, Norway, where she works with collections management, preventive conservation, and exhibition development. Trained in both gender studies and conservation, she brings an interdisciplinary approach to material culture and museum practice. Her professional interests center on care — for both objects and the people and stories they represent — and she is particularly engaged in highlighting underrepresented perspectives within museum collections and histories. Juliane believes that museums hold a vital role in representing diverse identities and creating spaces of belonging.

Bodil Andersson is an ethnologist at Østfoldmuseene – Halden museum. She is project manager for the work on Janken-Wiel Hansen and researched the history expressed through exhibitions, articles, and lectures. She also coordinated the research part of Kjønnets verdi, run by the Museum Network for Women’s History. Her previous expertise concerns the cultural heritage of the Traveler minority and cross-border relations between Norway and Sweden. Currently, she studies the use and users of the historical Fredrikshald Theatre. Identity serves as the central theme of her work.

Jennifer Britt Lundberg Hansen, Reflections and examples of Queer curatorship

This paper is about the possibilities of queer curatorship to illuminate marginalized histories and to construct more inclusive museum narratives. Queer curatorship offers both a critical lens and experimental methodology in reimaging museum exhibitions. Museums are increasingly reflecting on their roles as authoritative agents of knowledge production rather than neutral mediators of the past. I argue that queer curatorship achieves this in praxis by disrupting normative frameworks for exhibition making. Based on findings of my dissertation on queering polar museum narratives, I explore how queering methods can be applied in exhibition making. Through reflections from current exhibitions on Norwegian polar explorer Roald Amundsen, I offer examples to present queer perspectives through queer curatorship. Particular attention is given to curatorial strategies of juxtaposition, multiple narratives and recontextualization to evoke queer visibility in museum exhibitions. These examples highlight the creative and interpretive possibilities of meaning making through queer curatorship. Ultimately, my reflections and examples position queer curatorship as a reflexive and transformative approach that challenges normative frameworks of meaning and opens space for alternative ways of knowing in museums. Although my focus is on polar exploration narratives, it can be applied to more broadly in historical museums.

Jennifer Britt Lundberg Hansen is a PhD-candidate in cultural studies at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø. Her research interests are in how history is made and communicated across cultures, especially in museums and media, emphasizing the complexities of social inclusion. In her master’s thesis, she researched how queer Norwegian films were disseminated in the Norwegian film history discourse, which won a prize for best master’s thesis with a gender perspective in 2021. Currently, she is interested in the creative potentiality of integrating traditional, queer, and Indigenous perspectives in museums. She is a member of the QUEERDOM project at ���ϳԹ���Դ.

Rebeka Pöldsam, Marriages of convenience in LGBT history exhibition at Vabamu

In June 2023, less than two weeks before Estonian parliament passed the equal marriage act, we opened a supplementary audioguide to the permanent exhibition “From “such people” to LGBT activism. Stories from sexual and gender minorities in the 20th century Estonia” at the Vabamu Museum of Occupations and Freedom in Tallinn. The 30-minute long journey starting from the interwar period and ending with a critical reflection on marriage equality is based on oral histories, print media and archival files. Six of the eight stories presented in the audioguide discuss marriage, mostly gay men’s reasoning for getting married in the late-Soviet Estonia in order to maintain their social respectability. Three stories tell about marriage normativity, one account presents a marriage of convenience between a gay man and a straight woman, which is based on an interview with the woman. In the paper, I will analyse the case-studies of marriage at the Vabamu exhibition in the context of queer domesticity in the Soviet state sanctioned heteronormativity: what was the queer trouble with normal marriage after all?

Rebeka Põldsam is a research fellow in ethnology at Institute of Cultural Research, University of Tartu. She is currently working on the project “Imagining Queer Aging Futures – A Study of LGBTQ Aging in Estonia, Poland and Sweden”. Her PhD research was dedicated to the history of discourses on non-normative sex-gender subjects in Estonia. Põldsam is also a freelance feminist art curator and a visiting lecturer at Estonian Academy of Arts.

Timothy May, Master of the Domestic in the House of the Jaguar

Na Bolom in San Cristobal de las Casa, Mexico is a unique museum based around the varied interests of its founders, the Danish explorer Frans Blom and the activist Trudi Blom. Opening its doors in 1950, Na Bolom became a bohemian hub and refuge for queer personalities fleeing American McCarthyism and the lavender scare. Through Frans and Trudi’s journals and letters, I uncovered their own extraordinary queer histories. In my role as curator and researcher in the museum, I was also tasked with cataloguing Na Bolom’s visitor books. Overflowing with photographs and newspaper clippings, they revealed queer artistic networks and the presence of famous queer guests such as Audre Lorde and Edward James. But it was the little-known figures who settled down in Mexico which interested me the most.  The artist Janet Marren and her photographer partner Marcey Jacobsen quietly lived out their lives in San Cristobal from 1956 until their deaths in the 1990s. I curated their story in the exhibition ‘From New York to San Cristobal’ in 2017. Similarly, Ken Nelson, a self-ascribed ‘master of the domestic’ effectively managed the museum from 1970-1988 along with his Mexican boyfriend Jorge. I’ve been collecting Ken’s oral history this year. My paper will explore how remarkably unremarkable these queer domestic lifestyles were viewed in this socially conservative and isolated Mexican town. I will also discuss the challenges I faced in curating the museum’s queer past and present through two exhibitions, ‘Beyond Black and White’ (2023) and ‘Transcending the Shadow’ (2023).

Tim May is a Geographer who graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2014 and obtained his PhD in Geography from the University of Durham in 2021. As Curator and Researcher for Museo Na Bolom (México), he was an active member of the queer activist collective ‘Colectiva Diversidad-es’. In his current role as Curator of Maps and Mobilities at Royal Museums Greenwich (UK), he strives to queer the archive and utilise critical cartography as a means of communicating complex and contested histories. He is also an active member of the museum’s ‘Queer History Club’.

Seminarrom 1

Thursday, 21 May, 14:45-16:15

Session chair: Jennifer Shearman

Maurice Casey, A Marriage of Inconvenience? A Jewish Refugee, a Queer Anarchist and the Bureaucracy of Love in London Exile, 1938-1945

In 1938 in London, Hilda Monte, a Vienna-born Jewish refugee, married John Olday, a German-born cartoonist and anarchist of British nationality. The pairing did not result from sexual attraction: Olday was a familiar figure in the liminal queer spaces of both German port cities and London. Monte, meanwhile, was a dedicated member of the ISK, an unusual anti-Nazi organisation that encouraged its leading members to refrain from sexual activity. Rather than physical attraction, this marriage came about as a form of political comradeship: Monte, by marrying Olday, secured British citizenship. Olday also ‘normalised’ his own position through becoming a certified heterosexual – at least in the eyes of the state. Both Monte and Olday would remain politically active throughout the war years. Olday published anti-war cartoons. Monte actively supported the British war effort through active resistance work, ultimately resulting in her death at the hands of an SS border patrol on the Austrian frontier in April 1945. This paper examines this relationship to reconsider what are traditionally termed ‘marriages of convenience’ in histories of migration and politics. I argue that this term obscures the import of these relationships, misleadingly casting them as more about paperwork than romance. On the contrary, these arrangements, which arose from deeply inconvenient realities of political persecution and border regimes, were often based on a visceral form of love: the intimate experience of political solidarity. This paper will pursue this line of thought by placing in context the queer worlds of Monte and Olday as their lives slipped between the ordinary, the unusual, the intimate and the bureaucratic. It will draw on sources that reveal the relationship as perceived in the eyes of the state - Olday was a target of British state surveillance, while Monte actively collaborated with Allied military intelligence - and through writings by the couple themselves. Ultimately, the paper seeks to underline how something as mundane as a 1930s marriage could be radically repurposed and reconfigured, troubling the lines between the ordinary and extraordinary.

Dr Maurice J. Casey (he/him) is a Research Fellow in Queen’s University Belfast. He is the author of Hotel Lux: An Intimate History of Communism’s Forgotten Radicals, and the PI on the AHRC funded project ‘Europe Speaks: The Transnational Intimacies of the ISK, 1927-1945’. This project explores the little-known history of the ISK, a world of vegetarian anti-Nazi resistance activists who pursued their vision of an elite-run socialist Europe through underground activity in Nazi Germany and exile political work in London, Paris and New York. Maurice was previously a postdoc on the Queer Northern Ireland project and has published widely on radical and queer history. Contact: M.Casey@qub.ac.uk

Laura C. Forster, Remaking Home: Friendship, socialism, and communal life in the late nineteenth century

In 1890, at 29 Doughty Street, London, socialist experimenters founded Fellowship House, the headquarters of the Fellowship of the New Life. Conceived as a cooperative household, it aimed to dissolve boundaries between public and private life. Around eight to ten residents shared meals, expenses, and domestic labour, creating a home where equality, friendship, and political commitment coexisted. The kitchen became a site of debate as much as routine - Irish anarchist Agnes Henry, for instance, reportedly ‘irritated everyone by discussing anarchism over breakfast.’ Here, political ideas were lived as well as argued. At the centre was Edith Lees, a queer feminist, novelist, lecturer, and Fellowship stalwart. A member of the WSPU and the radical Freewoman circle, Lees envisioned a new kind of domesticity. Inspired by the Fellowship’s manifesto, Vita Nuova (‘New Life’), residents practiced openness and self-reflection. Lees described the commune as offering ‘the advantages and obligations of a family without its drawbacks,’ where women could reject servitude and live as equals. Queerness shaped both inhabitants and ethos, reimagining domestic life beyond the nuclear family. Fellowship House also welcomed visiting socialists and anarchists, from Russian revolutionaries to Tolstoyan pacifists, fostering vibrant political and personal exchange. Yet, like many utopian ventures, it struggled with disputes over commitment, finances, and gendered labour divisions. This paper situates Fellowship House within late 19th-century experiments in fellowship as prefigurative politics. Its inspiration arose while I was researching at the Lesbian Herstory Archives in Brooklyn, an intentionally intimate space where the personal and political converge. Housed in a traditional brownstone and arranged something like a living room, the archive encourages visitors to feel at home among books, artifacts, and ephemera, blurring lines between research and personal encounter. Like Fellowship House, the LHA models relational and communal scholarship, offering a space to explore histories of queer life, feminist activism, and radical social experiments not just intellectually, but with lived intimacy and care.

Yana Kirey-Sitnikova, Quotidian experiences of trans women in Soviet Russia

Soviet trans history is currently in a nascent stage. Like everywhere else in the world, the main sources are medical and, to a lesser extent, criminal records. While legal and medical aspects of trans lives have been reported earlier, this presentation will focus on the quotidian experiences of trans women in Soviet Russia. So far, the author has identified 20 cases, half of them described in the Soviet medical literature, whereas another half comes from autobiographies submitted to doctors for the purpose of transsexualism diagnostics already in post-Soviet Russia. Their years of birth are between 1904 and 1980. The stories show extremely diverse experiences of interactions with the Soviet society at large, doctors and authorities. Discrimination, verbal, physical and sexual harassment, criminal persecution and medical violence stand next to acceptance, official recognition (in the form of amending legal names/gender and gender-affirming interventions) and career success (in the case of one trans woman who became the principle dancer of the Leningrad Music Hall). Very much appears to have depended on the microenvironment and agency: finding sympathetic doctors and officials, carefully regulating one’s visibility as a trans person, sometimes violating the law and exploiting legal loopholes. Together, these stories deconstruct the Soviet state’s and society’s image as inherently oppressive against individuals deviating from the sex/gender norm. By May, the author also hopes to analyze the stories of Soviet trans men.

Yana is an independent researcher working in the field of transgender studies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Her research interests span transgender health, social movements, political science, sociolinguistics, history, and biochemistry. Currently Yana is working on a book Transgender Russia: the rise and fall of trans rights in an autocracy (expected in 2027). She is also doing a PhD in Public Health at the Semashko National Research Institute of Public Health.

Sam Knapton, Searching for Domesticity: Queer displacement during post-war reconstruction

‘Even though I’d been liberated from the Nazi yoke, I could not resume my prewar existence.’ 

In 1994, Pierre Seel wrote his autobiography as a gay survivor of Nazi persecution and although much scrutiny has come to bear on his wartime account, his search for queer domesticity in the aftermath of war captures the frustrating experience of those who have been (perhaps permanently) displaced from their prewar lives. Soon after liberation, those who were queer and displaced quickly found their hopes for postwar ‘normality’ would be curbed by intense idealism focused on the heteronormative family. From the United States to Britain, and from Poland to occupied Germany, governments championed the cookie-cutter nuclear family as the ultimate sign of peace and stability. Idealising the home and hearth, day-to-day rhythms of family, the mundanity of life - something many longed for throughout the previous decade and more - made the contrast for those who did not fit into the mould all the more stark.

Although works on how the family unit became intrinsic to post-war planning abound, little attention has been paid to the place queer families and individuals undergoing displacement occupy within the immediate post-war world and how their search for domesticity was hampered. Through fusing memoirs, archival materials, and employing a historically led cultural studies methodology, this paper focuses on those who were both queer and displaced in the war’s aftermath as they searched for normality through domesticity.

Dr Samantha K. Knapton [she/her] is an Assistant Professor in History at the University of Nottingham, UK. She is the author of Occupiers, Humanitarian Workers, and Polish Displaced Persons in British-occupied Germany (2023) and a co-edited volume with Katherine Rossy, Relief and Rehabilitation for a Postwar World: Humanitarian Intervention and the UNRRA (2024) – both with Bloomsbury. Her current project (2023-) working with Queer Britain London and Queer Museum Warsaw has hosted a series of workshops on uncovering ‘hidden histories’ through researching, teaching, and curating, with a concentration on doubly-marginalised histories of queer displacement post-1945.

Seminarrom 2

Thursday, 21 May, 14:45-16:15

Session chair: Heike Bauer

Auksė Beatričė Katarskytė, Queer domesticity as a means to make Great Art. The case of Michael Field

The focus of my paper is the late Victorian and Edwardian poet Michael Field’s portrayal of (queer) domesticity as a requirement for and a specific form of artistic practice. Michael Field was the joint pseudonym of Katherine Bradley (1846−1914) and Edith Cooper (1862−1913), life-long artistic and romantic partners, “Poets and Lovers,” prolific lyricists, dramatists and diarists. In contrast with the ideal of the independent Romantic male genius, they worked in complete collaboration, rejecting the outsiders’ attempts to distinguish between Bradley and Cooper’s creative output. Unlike the more contemporary Aesthetes, such as Oscar Wilde, the women lived a comparably quiet life in the suburbs of London, celebrating their independence and simultaneously lamenting their lack of community and artistic visibility. Drawing mainly on published fragments of Works and Days, their collaborative diary, and existing research, I discuss Michael Field’s creation of a “married home” as inseparable from their artistic practice. In the context of fin de siècle, their celebration of domesticity can be called both reactionary and revolutionary. By living and writing under a male pseudonym and expressing themselves through queer two-someness in work and daily life, they both flirted with and eschewed the older, already outdated expectations for British middle-class women. My aim is to explore how their queer domesticity differs from the contemporary concepts of women’s role in the home, both revolutionary and reactionary, and how Michael Field conceptualises it as the requirement and the catalysator of their art.

Auksė Beatričė Katarskytė is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Gender Research, University of Oslo, with a background in Scandinavian philology and Old Norse studies. In my PhD project (2022−2026), I write on Old Norse medievalism in the late Victorian period with a specific focus on women writers and female heroines, drawing on contemporary women’s rights debates. Alongside that, I have been studying (mainly) nineteenth-century and (mainly) British queer women’s history. I have also worked on Victorian women’s travel to Iceland and Norway. At UiO, I have taught introductory courses in gender theory and given lectures on feminist thinking during the long nineteenth century.

Eliza Steinbock, “Holdings” 

In this talk I expand on the concept of ‘holdings’ from merely referring to the total number and mass of individual countable objects being held by an institution, to also include to the capacity for such objects to knit together a collective sense of shared feelings. The curatorial activism of the Museum of Transology project (2015-ongoing) collects the history of the present through amassing personal treasured objects from trans, non-binary, and intersex communities in the UK and Ireland, both urban and rural. Attached to each object is an identifier tag with a description written in the handwriting of the donor that narrates why it is valuable. The collection thus holds collective yet intimate feelings. My analysis focuses on their 10-year anniversary exhibition Transcestory that displayed 1000 objects and draws on my experience of the final Saturday with over 750 visitors. In my usage of the term ‘holdings,’ I wish for it to resonate to include those feelings and narratives that collected items carry as well as their possible affective activation by a viewing public. I argue that exhibitions of trans historical and/or artistic objects that harken trans ancestory form “a space of mediation in which the personal is refracted through the general […] a place of recognition and reflection,” which Lauren Berlant has termed an “intimate public” (2008, viii). People do not necessarily know each other but come to form bonds of attachment through sharing cultural forms that contain worlds highlighting their everyday struggles and a common cause (Flatley 2012).

Professor Eliza Steinbock holds the Chair in Transgender Studies, Art, and Cultural Activism at Maastricht University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. They investigate the change-making mechanisms operative in the art, culture, media, and heritage sectors. Steinbock authored the award-winning Shimmering Images: Trans Cinema, Embodiment, and the Aesthetics of Change (Duke, 2019), the recent edited volume The Critical Visitor: Changing Heritage Practices (Open Access in English and Dutch, 2023), and over 50 articles and chapters. Funded projects include “The Critical Visitor” (NWO 2020-2025) as project leader and “Perverse Collections” (JPI - Cultural Heritage 2023-2025) as PI of the Dutch team.

Esther Rutter, Women Astir: female creative and domestic partnerships in the Yorkshire Dales, 1930 – 1998

Yorkshirewomen Marie Hartley (1905 – 2006), Ella Pontefract (1896 – 1945) and Joan Ingilby (1911 – 2000) were lifelong creative collaborators and domestic partners, who produced trailblazing, historically-informed art and writing inspired by Yorkshire throughout the twentieth century. From the 1930s onwards, Hartley, Pontefract and Ingilby lived in a small village in the Yorkshire Dales and worked together to create over 40 illustrated works on Yorkshire landscapes, culture and heritage, as well as contributing to the foundation and development of major museums across the North of England. Yet there has been no critical or biographic engagement with their research, creative outputs, or legacy; Esther’s work represents the first significant study of their lives and works. Esther’s paper will explore the challenges of researching the lives of women living and creatively collaborating with other women, through archives held by the Dales Countryside Museum and the University of Leeds. Her paper will also examine the role of letters, diaries, photographs and sketchbooks in recording queer female lives in rural areas, across differing classes and identities. She will seek to contextualise the art and writings produced by Hartley, Pontefract and Ingilby alongside work produced by other domestic/creative female partnerships of the mid-twentieth century, focussing on writing and art that responds to, and creatively reimagines, ‘quiet’ queer female experience in rural Britain in the 1930–60s.

Esther Rutter is an AHRC-funded PhD student at the University of Leeds, and the author of popular non-fiction books. Her first, This Golden Fleece: A Journey Through Britain’s Knitted History (Granta, 2019), traces the cultural history of knitting and won a Society of Authors' Roger Deakin Award. Her second, All Before Me: A Search for Belonging in Wordsworth’s Lake District (Granta, 2024), explores the importance of creativity, place and community. An honorary Research Fellow at the University of St Andrews (2021-25), she has also worked for the Wordsworth Trust, Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, and UNESCO City of Literature in Edinburgh.

Sandro Weilenmann, Uncovered windows, Blank Stares: Probing for intimacy in Dries Verhoven’s The NarcoSexuals

The artist Dries Verhoven’s work The NarcoSexuals (2022) features a performance dealing with the culture of sexual drug use between queer men. Over the span of 50 minutes, visitors could walk around the replica of a single-family home and peek through the windows at the scenes of a chemsex party. Inside the makeshift house, a group of semi-clad or nude performers reenacted the particular protocols of such encounters, moving wordlessly between the different rooms and bodies. In its physical and affective liminality, the performance rebukes traditional expectations of intimacy and centers a more opaque and inaccessible form of relationality. At the same time, circling the display, the audience becomes complicit as voyeurs of these private and clandestine interactions. The staging thus lays bare an ambivalent relationship towards intimacy, hovering between identification and estrangement. Alongside Verhoven’s piece, this paper considers recent instances of artistic and curatorial strategies of staging intimacy – such as Party Office’s architectural installation Queer Time (2022) and the director Bruce La Bruce’s transgressive film The Visitor (2024) – that signal a broader exploration of subversive and alternative domesticities. Drawing on Laurent Berlant’s conception of intimacy, I argue for the exploration of affective ‘closeness’ in The NarcoSexuals as moving between the public and the private. The formal arrangement of the installation – its protocols, lines of sight, shapes, and rhythms – becomes the place where intimacy manifests. It asks viewers to engage with such structures that produce intimacy, rather than simply reveal it. Furthermore, this engagement leads to ethical questions regarding boundaries and consent, which mark queer intimacy as a problematic site of narration and control.

Sandro Weilenmann is a post-doctoral junior fellow at the Walter-Benjamin-Kolleg, University of Bern, Switzerland. He is an art historian, specialising in art after 1960, voice & sound studies, and archival discourses. He earned his doctorate at the University of Fribourg. From 2023 to 2025, he was a postdoctoral researcher at Maastricht University for the JPICHfunded “Perverse Collections” project. Beyond his academic scholarship, he has curated contemporary art exhibitions in Switzerland and the Netherlands. His writings include exhibition and literature reviews for Art Papers, ARTMargins, and sehepunkte, and he also edited the podcast series PERCOL Talks.

Auditorium 4

Friday, 22 May, 09:00-10:30

Session chair: Bjørn Sverre Hol Haugen

Niklas Koskinen, ”Was he gay?” Approaching hidden queer history: A case study from Amos Anderson’s home museum

This presentation offers a case study from Amos Anderson’s home museum, where museum staff are exploring ways to acknowledge and discuss the possibility that Anderson may have been gay or bisexual. The presentation follows the museum’s internal journey from first avoiding the topic for decades, to recognizing the need to discuss it but lacking the tools to do so, to ultimately developing ways to discuss it openly. Amos Anderson (1878–1961) was a businessman, art patron, and one of the wealthies men in Finland in the early 1900s. He cultivated a carefully crafted public image, preserved after his death by a foundation that became his sole heir. Eventually, three museums were established in his name, reinforcing this public image. In recent years, however, questions have emerged about what lay behind the facade, prompting a reconsideration of how to represent the person behind the public image, including aspects that were long hidden. Addressing the topic of Andersons sexuality is made difficult by the fact that he left behind no information about his private life – a situation common to many historical figures whose queer identities were hidden. Many museums face a similar challenge: how to bring light to queer history when direct evidence is absent from collections. This case study offers one example of how hidden history can be approached, interpreted and made visible within a historical home. By examining the ongoing process at Amos Anderson’s home museum, it offers tools for museum professionals to approach absent and uncertain aspects of personal histories.

Niklas Koskinen is a museum worker, queer history activist and independent writer whose work focuses on Finnish queer history. He works as a guide at Amos Anderson’s Home Museum and serves as secretary and board member of the Friends of Queer History association. He holds a Master’s degree in Political History from the University of Helsinki.

Tuula Juvonen, Hide and Seek at Bachelors’ House Museums

It is a joy to be hidden and a disaster not to be found.

– D. W. Winnicott. 

In the 20th century, some wealthy Finnish bachelors bequeathed their homes to foundations with the instruction to create a house museum to commemorate their professional achievements and their lives as collectors. In my presentation, I will focus on two such country homes and their owners: Söderlångvik, built by the businessman Amos Anderson (1878–1961), and Harjula, the home of the artist Emil Cedercreutz (1879–1949). Although both men were Swedish-speaking and almost the same age, their class backgrounds, spiritual perspectives, and professional interests were quite different – and so were their respective rural country houses. Although for both men discretion about their homosexual inclinations was self-evident, their houses reflect quite different takes on making – or not – their homosexuality readable in the materiality of their homes. By leaning on biographies of Anderson and Cedercreutz as well as analysing their house museums, I propose ways of reading the materiality of the bachelors’ homes together with their strategies to hide and express their queerness at a time when an understanding about homosexuality started to emerge in Finnish society.

Dr Tuula Juvonen works as a university lecturer in Gender Studies at Tampere University, Finland. Currently, she leads a Research Council of Finland funded research project Picture Me: Presenting queer visual history (2025–2029). She has published on local and national lesbian and queer history, queer activism, and methods of queer history writing. Juvonen has been awarded for her ongoing collaboration with memory institutions to preserve Finnish LGBTQ histories, and she is a cofounder and a former chairperson of the registered association Friends of Queer History. 

Emily Stokes, The Interior World of East German Collector Siegmar Piske (1942-2009)

Siegmar Piske lived a relatively quiet life in his East Berlin apartment on Torstraße. He was, however, an avid collector, perhaps most colourfully manifested in a series of scrapbooks containing an abundance of smuggled pornography, cut from the original magazines and carefully arranged by Piske. More tacitly, however, in Piske’s apartment he had also ‘collected queerness’. Piske assumed the role of collector, curator, as well as himself becoming a living piece of this installation through which he was able to assert a sense of self, ultimately constructing a queer counterpublic. More than this, Piske’s apartment reflected the phenomenon of ‘zoning’, referring to the manner in which desire influences and is influenced depending on the sites it occupies. This is particularly important for queer bodies, who feel these boundaries more acutely and are expected to ‘fold’ themselves to fit these particular zones. Piske divided his spaces along the boundaries of permissibility, absorbing the socially-negotiated divisions of the public and the private and playing them out in his own space; a bedroom adorned with mirrors and pornographic imagery is made separate and distinct from a living room, the ‘public’ zone, in which sexuality is quietly sublimated into less legibly queer art and objects, and yet queerness can still be found there. This paper will examine the negotiation of space in Siegmar Piske’s East Berlin apartment and the carving out of alternative queer sites of living and domesticity. 

Emily Stokes is a doctoral candidate in the department of Art History at the University of Birmingham. Her thesis, titled, ‘Murmurs of Affect, Queer Sexuality, and (Extra-)Archival Practice in the German Democratic Republic, 1979-1990’, examines the material relationship between East German queer visual culture and the Ministry for State Surveillance in the 1980s, with a methodology based upon theories of affect. She completed her MA in Art History at the Courtauld Institute in 2022, with a dissertation focused on individualism and collectivism within Stasi photography. Prior to this she completed her BA at The University of Nottingham, graduating first class.

Tea Dahl Christensen, Queering a Historic House Museum: Old House, New Ways

This paper explores how curatorial practices and master narratives within a regional museum are profoundly shaped by local contexts and historical trajectories. 

The historic house museum, Museum ERNST, is in the provincial town of Assens in western Funen, Denmark. Until 1976, it was the private home of silverware manufacturer and merchant Frederik Ernst. Frederik lived as a discreet homosexual in the small town, while being more open within a wide-ranging network of friends and lovers. Since the mid-1970s, his home has been open to the public as a collector’s home and only recently has the museum begun to integrate homosexuality into its master narrative. Focusing on this specific case the paper adopts a practice-oriented approach, to discuss the local, personal, spatial and temporal factors that have influenced curatorial practices at Museum ERNST. Whose voices and which mechanisms over the last fifty years have shaped the dominant narrative, one that, up until now, excluded queer aspects from the historic house museum? And, pointing to the future, the paper will reflect on and discuss how present-day curatorial work might move forward by employing queer methodologies to re-read the historic house museum as a home and thereby adding new and more transparent curatorial layers to the house and to the everyday queer life lived within. 

Tea Dahl Christensen is a curator at Museum Vestfyn/Museum ERNST. Her research focuses on the uses of history, community formation, and memory culture, and she is currently exploring queer provincial history in connection with curatorial practice, research, and collections. She serves on the steering committee of the Network for LGBTQ+ Perspectives in Cultural History Museums (in Denmark) and is co-editor of the book Queer i provinsen (Queer in the Province), published in January.

Seminarrom 2

Friday, 22 May, 09:00-10:30

Session chair: Hans Wiggo Kristiansen

Justin Bengry, ‘The Ideal Homo Show’: Gay Capitalism and its Failures in 1990s Britain

The Gay Lifestyles Exhibition, playfully known as ‘the ideal homo show’, a reference to the long-standing Ideal Home Show running since 1908, operated in London from 1992-1994. It included stalls from personal beauty and health companies, travel agencies, sportswear and clothing, media outlets, sex and fetish product retailers and others who sought to attract what they understood to be the increasingly lucrative pink pound. In the post-decriminalisation expansion of commercial interest in gay (and to a lesser extent lesbian) consumers through the 1970s and 80s the Gay Lifestyles Exhibition should have been the culminating success of gay capitalism in twentieth-century Britain, the seemingly obvious conclusion of a linear and progressive story leading inevitably to a fully commercialised gay community. Ahead of the 1994 exhibition at Earl’s Court, in fact, boosterism was in full swing. The Independent reported that ‘More than 30,000 people are expected to attend Gay Lifestyles, which attracted 10,000 in its first year - 1992. But 1994 was the Gay Lifestyles Exhibition’s final year. It failed to attract even 10,000 visitors or to break even. It was unable to sufficiently monetise gay identities and desires for a commercial sector needing to be convinced of the profitability a gay minority market. Having reviewed promotional materials, collected media coverage and interviewed key organisers and participants, this paper explores why the Gay Lifestyles Exhibition, exemplifying peak gay capitalism in 1990s Britain, fizzled out and was soon forgotten.

Justin Bengry was Director of the Goldsmiths Centre for Queer History at the University of London, where he also led the MA Queer History from 2017-2024. Today he has honorary appointments at the Universities of Oxford and Exeter, and King's College London. He is a member of the editorial collective of History Workshop Journal, a founder and editor of NOTCHES, the leading history of sexuality blog, and co-editor (with Matt Cook, Rebecca Jennings and E-J Scott), most recently, of A Queer Scrapbook: Britain and Ireland since 1945. He is currently completing a book on Britain's pink pound.

Tomasz Basiuk, Obstacles overcome? Queer domesticity in late state-socialist Poland

This proposal stems from the CRUSEV project (2016-2019), focused on queer cultures of the 1970s. My work on this project included conducting oral history interviews with queer individuals who either grew up in or who were adults in state-socialist Poland. (Some of these findings were presented in a chapter of the recently published Routledge Handbook of Sexuality in East Central Europe, edited by Agnieszka Kościańska, Anita Kurimay, Katerina Lišková, and Hadley Z. Renkin). The paper I propose for the conference discusses queer domesticity in late state-socialist Poland as complicated by an acute scarcity of living quarters and by some queer individuals being compelled to marry opposite-sex spouses. The shortfalls of centrally planned state-socialist economy and the prevailing conservative morality combined to make queer domesticity not only materially difficult to achieve, but also unimaginable and unintelligible to many. At the same time, some queers have invented lifestyles which successfully circumvented these limitations.

Tomasz Basiuk (University of Warsaw) published on the novelist William Gaddis (2003) before taking an interest in queer studies and studying with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a Fulbright scholar. In 2006, he co-founded the queer studies journal InterAlia. His second authored book, Exposures (2013), is on American gay men’s life writing. He co-edited Queers in State Socialism (2020), Reading Literature and Theory at the Intersections of Queer and Class (2025), and Odmieńczość (transl. Queerness, 2025) among other volumes. PI in “Cruising the Seventies” (CRUSEV) and in “Queer Theory in Transit,” a project examining queer theory in German and Polish contexts.

Jasmin Lilian Diab, Archiving the Quiet: Everyday Digital and Domestic Lives of Elderly Queer Syrians in Lebanon

This paper explores the mundane queer histories of elderly Syrian LGBTQ+ persons (aged 50+) who fled to Lebanon decades ago in search of safety, anonymity, and a more livable queer futurity. Far from exceptional narratives of flight or activism, their stories reveal quiet, everyday forms of queer survival shaped by aging, displacement, and the intimate labor of making a life in exile. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 15 elderly queer Syrian participants and complementary digital ethnography, the paper examines how these individuals construct “ordinary queer lives” through domestic routines, chosen-family arrangements, and subtle practices of care and concealment within Beirut. A central focus of the paper is the micro-archives that elderly queer Syrians create, often unintentionally, through digital traces such as saved text messages, private Facebook albums, WhatsApp voice notes, deleted photographs, and long-held digital mementos. These intimate archives, rarely recognized as history, reveal how older queer refugees document love, loss, friendships, and everyday domestic scenes across decades of displacement. They form fragile, deeply personal queer historiographies that challenge dominant narratives of Middle Eastern queer life as only clandestine or crisis-driven. By centering aging, digital memory, and mundane domesticity, this paper contributes to a global conversation on ordinary queer histories beyond Euro-American and youth-centric frames. It argues that the lived experiences and quiet archives of elderly queer Syrians offer an essential rethinking of what constitutes queer history, intimacy, and survivability in conditions of prolonged exile.

Dr. Jasmin Lilian Diab (she/هي) is the Director of the Institute for Migration Studies at the Lebanese American University, where she also serves as an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Migration Studies at the Department of Communication, Mobility and Identity. In 2025, her research was awarded the Lisa Gilad Prize from the International Association for the Study of Forced Migration (IASFM), as well as the School of Arts and Sciences’ Distinguished Achievement Award. Dr. Diab is a Research Affiliate at the Centre for Refugee Studies at York University, and a Senior Associate on Migration at the Tahrir Institute for Middle East Policy (TIMEP).

Brian Lewis, The Diary of an Invert: Sixty-Three Years of Queer Jottings

George Cecil Ives (1867-1950) was a scion of the English gentry, a sexologist, and a criminologist who founded a clandestine “gay rights” organization, the Order of Chaeronea, in London in the 1890s. More significantly for the historian, he wrote a 3-million word diary, observing and chronicling a sexual revolution: the period when new categories of sexual and gendered identity crystallized in a complex interplay between emerging sexological science and queer subjects. It would be tempting just to dwell on “the public Ives”—to analyse his writings, his campaigning, and his reading: his contributions to what he called “The Cause.” But that would be misleading. The bulk of the diary deals with the mundane pleasures and irritations of everyday life. He began life in Hamburg, born out of wedlock; was brought up by his grandmother in a mansion in Hampshire, a townhouse in London, and a villa on the French Riviera; was educated at the University of Cambridge, when he began writing the diary; migrated to lodgings in London; and ended up in a semi-detached suburban house in North London with his “family of choice,” a succession of younger, lower-class males. This paper will draw on the diary and correspondence to describe how he negotiated his often turbulent relationships with his family, his lovers, and his friends and acquaintances, as well as his daily round of visiting and leisure pursuits (swimming, cricket, soccer, chess, clubs, cycling, etc.). It will also assess the extent to which he was “out,” closeted, or hiding in plain sight in his daily interactions.

Brian Lewis (BA Oxford, MA, PhD Harvard, FRHistS), is Professor of History at McGill University, Montreal. His principal publications include The Middlemost and the Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England (Stanford, 2001); ‘So Clean’: Lord Leverhulme, Soap and Civilization (Manchester, 2008); and Wolfenden’s Witnesses: Homosexuality in Postwar Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). He is guest editor of a special queer edition of the Journal of British Studies (July 2012) and the editor of a collection of essays, British Queer History: New Approaches and Perspectives (Manchester, 2013). He is President Elect of the North American Conference on British Studies.

Seminarrom 3

Friday, 22 May, 09:00-10:30

Session chair: Antu Sorainen

Tonje Louise Skjoldhammer, The widow, the maids and the rumours

In 1847, a farmer’s widow in northern Norway was sentenced to a year of hard labour for having indecent relationships with two of her maids. In this paper, I will examine what this case can tell us about the different understandings and ideas surrounding intimate relationships between women in Norway in the first half of the nineteenth century. Particularly, how ordinary people in a rural, local community interpreted such intimacy.

Very little has been written about queer female history in early 1800s Norway, and the available sources are limited. Most previous research has focused on the period from 1880 onwards. This case is one of the very few rich sources concerning intimacy between women in Norway from the first half of the nineteenth century, and can therefore give us a unique insight into this period. Based on Anna Clark’s theoretical concept, Twilight Moments, I will argue that sexual intimacy between women was a known phenomenon in rural Norway, and that it was not condemned by most.

Tonje Louise Skjoldhammer is a historian and PhD candidate at the University of Bergen. She has specialised in Norwegian, queer women’s history in the nineteenth century.

Michaela Malmberg, Queer Temporality in the Lives of Single Female Gymnastics Directors, 1880–1920 

In this paper, I will demonstrate how, during the decades around the turn of the 20th century, women in the profession of gymnastic directors created alternative families and strong social relations outside of the institution of marriage. In these relationships, work and a non-normative private social life were intertwined. 

During the last decades of the nineteenth century and onwards, women from Sweden and abroad came by the hundred to Stockholm to study and qualify as gymnastics directors at the Royal Central Institute of Gymnastics. Although it was a very masculine profession at the time, it had opened its gates to women as early as 1864. The training included exams to qualify as both a gymnastics teacher and physiotherapist, with the right to start and run their own gymnastics institutes. This meant a relatively high degree of independence and income. However, it was difficult to combine with marriage and having children, as women from their background were expected to quit work when getting married. In this particular profession, they also often travelled extensively between workplaces in different countries. The physical nature of their work, as well as its authoritative aspects, meant that they developed their own form of femininity. Most remained unmarried, deviating in several ways from the expected heteronormative life course, several choosing to live with other women. I will analyse this as a form of queer temporality, discussing the interconnections between work and life outside heterosexual norms. 

Bio: I am a PhD student at the Department of History at Stockholm University. My dissertation, ‘The spirit of camaraderie carries within itself a great power’ – Work-life, identity-making and emancipation among female gymnastic directors 1820-1940, will be completed in 2026. Analyzing their collectively written diaries, I explore how these women’s relationships shaped their careers, life paths, and constructions of femininity. My research has been presented at international conferences and published in a peer-reviewed medical history anthology. Currently, I am a visiting researcher at Western Sydney University, collaborating with Professor Alison Downham Moore to deepen my expertise in the history of medicine, gender, and sexualities.

Tijmen van Voorthuizen, “A queer walks into a bar”: The everyday history of queer bars in the Low Countries in the twentieth century

Bars are often given an exceptional place in queer historiography. Some historians have for example called the gay bar the ‘unlikely hero’ in the formation of queer political identities. Lesbian bars too have had their share of celebration, argued by some to be sites central to ‘lesbian twentieth century resistance’. And of course, the Stonewall Inn comes to mind. This paper departs from this view of queer bars as primarily sites of political resistance and explores the non-exceptional history of queer bars.3 Situated in the Low Countries, which have their own stories of exceptional bars and bar owners, this paper highlights the everyday practices of queer people going to bars in cities and rural towns. Taking concepts from the history of emotions and urban history, it argues that bars are first and foremost emotional spaces where people practice certain emotional styles in close interaction with their material environment. Such an approach opens up ways to learn how queer persons moved through cities, which barriers (like class-dynamics) they encountered in accessing bars and how they interacted with the material environment within bars. This perspective then offers a view of how queer people gave meaning to bars they visited in the past through different emotional and spatial practices, moving beyond the political.

Tijmen van Voorthuizen is a PhD-candidate at Utrecht University. He currently researches the history and heritage of queer bars in the Low Countries from the 1900s until the present.

Gry Bang-Andersen, “Bad Elements” at sea? Denial of employment in the postwar Norwegian Merchant Fleet

This paper examines how denial of employment was used to control seafarers' behavior and morals in the postwar Norwegian merchant fleet, and how homosexuality was regarded as one of several factors that could lead to a seafarer being labeled a “Bad Element” at sea. Despite heavy losses of ships and crew during World War II, the Norwegian merchant fleet was the world’s fourth largest in 1945. After the war, there was a severe shortage of crew. At the same time, shipping companies faced increased costs related to welfare schemes for seafarers that had been established during and immediately after the war. It was imperative for shipping companies to retain skilled seafarers and to dismiss those who performed poorly, the “Bad Elements.” In this context, the cultivation and disciplining of seafarers, by the Norwegian state, employer organizations, and trade unions, served as an intentional strategy. The means was the distinctly Norwegian practice of ‘forhyringsnekt’—a form of blacklisting that prevented fired seafarers from obtaining further employment at sea. Using archival material from the Norwegian Directorate of Labor, this paper analyzes documented cases where homosexuality was cited as grounds for employment denial. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of power, I argue that the state and related institutions actively sought to define and enforce standards of decency among seafarers by regulating bodies, morality, and identity, using employment as leverage. At the same time, silence and a lack of open discussion about same‑sex relationships could contribute to a kind of tacit acceptance at sea. Through the individual cases, the mundane and personal aspects of various narratives about queer everyday life at sea become apparent.

Gry Bang-Andersen is a PhD candidate in cultural studies at the University of Bergen and a museum curator at Bergen Maritime Museum. She is currently researching cultural understandings of masculinity and queer practices in the Norwegian merchant navy in the period 1950-1980. As a cultural historian, she is interested in everyday practices, masculinity, oral memories, visual history, and museum collections.

Auditorium 4

Friday, 22 May, 10:45-12:15

Session chair: Silje Gaupseth

Bodie A. Ashton, “[She] is fearful of shopping, and is unsure of [good] taste”: Trans West Germany and the Chimera of the Private pre-TSG

In September 1977, a journalist from the West German current affairs magazine Stern visited a small suburban family in Munich. The resulting story touched on many issues familiar to the West German readership: economic anxieties, the spectre of unemployment, the challenges of raising a young family. The human interest of the piece, however, lay elsewhere, as betrayed by its title when it was eventually published: “Vati wird jetzt eine Frau” (“Daddy is becoming a woman”). Stern’s visit to Munich reflected a growing tension within contemporary West German public discourse: as trans issues increasingly gained visibility in the public eye, so too did trans and gender-diverse West Germans, who had otherwise sought to carve out their own private lives, find themselves, their identities, and their very existence instrumentalised and politicised. This paper takes as its starting point the explosion of media coverage concerning trans people in West Germany in the 1970s. While acknowledging the sensationalised nature of such coverage, I contend that reporting rested to a large degree not on scandal or larger-than-life figures, but on ordinary individuals who sought neither the spotlight nor notoriety, but instead a mundane, everyday life. This mundanity, conversely, made them irresistible to a press apparatus slowly waking up to trans Germany, and to a Federal Republic redefining its social boundaries and norms. Ultimately, I question whether trans West Germans could escape the politicisation of their lives in the charged environment of the pre-Transsexual Law (TSG) years, ensuring that trans domesticities nonetheless remained public property. 

Bodie A. Ashton (they/them) is a historian of queer identity with a specific focus on Germany and Europe in the twentieth century. They are a research fellow at the Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF), Potsdam, Germany. Together with Jonah I. Garde, they are the co-editor of the book series Transnational Queer Histories, published by DeGruyter Brill. Their most recent work includes The Pet Shop Boys and the Political: Queerness, Culture, Identity, and Society (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Denisa Vídeňská, The Home of Lída Merlínová: From the Personal Archive of One of the Most Significant Queer Authors of the Czechoslovak Republic

This presentation examines the Czech writer and dancer Lída Merlínová (1906-1988) and the personal materials that have been preserved from her life. From the 1920s onward, Merlínová wrote and published numerous articles and essays devoted to queer people, the decriminalization of homosexuality, and lesbian love and intimacy. She was, among other things, the author of the first Czech lesbian novel, Exiles of Love (1929), and contributed to Voice (Hlas), the only periodical in 1930s Czechoslovakia that published queer authors. Little is known about her life after the Second World War. Merlínová lived in a shared household in Prague with her partner, Květoslava Lukašovská. Although almost no written sources from their shared life have survived, a private archive contains around one hundred annotated photographs documenting their life together, including their household pets. This presentation will explore the theme of the author’s home in the second half of the twentieth century.

Mgr. Denisa Vídeňská, Ph.D., is a Czech historian and a graduate of History at the Institute of Historical Sciences, University of Pardubice. Her early research focused on the everyday life of the aristocracy and childhood in the 19th century. She later turned to queer and gender history, dedicating her dissertation to the previously unexplored topic of lesbian love and sexuality in the first half of the 20th century in the Czech Republic. She is currently a researcher at the Research Center of the Faculty of Fine Arts in Brno, examining the history of the body, love, and sexuality.

Emelie Jonsson, Queer Fragments of Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) is among the first names mentioned in any account of poetry from the first world war. He is included even in general accounts of the war due to his colorful achievements as a soldier. However, his story is often told in literary or military contexts without reference to his well-established queerness. His poetry and life remain puzzling—intermingling battle zeal and outbursts of horror at the war, repeated medal-worthy combat actions and a public protest that left him open to being court martialed. I argue that this complexity is incomprehensible without acknowledging that he lived a queer life. His most famous war action was inspired by a romantic attachment to a fellow soldier, his protest against the war was prompted in part by Edward Carpenter and Robbie Ross, and his poems are suffused with queer sensibilities. Alongside his world-historical actions, Sassoon was living ordinary queer moments that have been documented in photographs, private poems, and letters. His life spanned immense events in queer history as well as in military history: he was born less than ten years before the trials of Oscar Wilde and died two years before the burgeoning Gay Liberation movement took a stand at Stonewall. Though Sassoon did not take active part in these political developments, he reflected on his queerness and lived domestic moments with male lovers that remain available to us in image and word. His everyday queerness deserves recognition beyond a purely biographical context. 

Emelie Jonsson is associate professor of English literature at the University of Tromsø, Norway. Her research centers on the friction between human psychology and naturalistic cosmology, with interests expanding into queer culture, naturalism, Americana, and science fiction. She has published evolutionary interpretive arguments on a number of authors, including E. M. Forster, H. G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad, as well as collaborated on quantitative projects concerning intellectual history, biocultural theory, and poetic archetypes. In 2021, she published the monograph The Early Evolutionary Imagination (Springer).

Håkon Hermanstrand, «A remarkable man»: the life of Henrik Liljestrand

Henrik Severin Liljestrand (1868 – 1952), who preferred to use his Saami first name, Hinthe, was a South-Saami preacher, artisan and activist. Hinthe was a cousin of the well-known Saami politician and editor Daniel Mortenson, but unlike his cousin, Hinthe is more or less forgotten. Hinthe never married nor had children, specialized in what was considered majority female handcraft and taught handcraft skills to Swedish and Norwegian women. He was a lay preacher and was an active participant in missionary work. Occasionally and in retrospect, suggestions have been made that he was queer.

The paper investigates Hinthe’s life as queer history through an intersectional approach to a variety of historical sources. By creating a narrative ordered around his Christian commitment, Saami commitment and livelihood as well as photographs and memories by others, the paper argues for a queer reading of his life. The sources show that he challenged gender norms as well as ethnic norms, however differently in Saami and majority contexts. Even though we cannot know, it is possible that he had romantic relations to other men. The paper argues that this approach adds valid new insights to Hinthe’s life and Saami and queer history.

The proposed paper was part of a postdoctoral work in the project South Saami Memory Culture (2021 – 2025) at Nord University funded by the Research Council of Norway.

Håkon Hermanstrand is a Norwegian historian (Phd) specialized in South-Saami history. He works at the South-Saami museum and cultural centre Saemien Sijte. He has previously worked with South-Saami coastal and regional history, memory culture and land rights and has published on these topics. One recent publication (together with Ann-Kristin Solsten) is the article Between Sundsvall and Smøla. A microhistorical study of two Saami families in the 19th century https://doi.org/10.18261/heimen.61.3. Hermanstrand is also part of a project discussing historical perspectives on gender and sexuality diversity in Sápmi, commissioned by the The Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs (Bufdir).

Seminarrom 2

Friday, 22 May, 10:45-12:15

Session chair: Tone Hellesund

Eszter D Kovács, Hungarian Lesbian Community Building and the Creation of a Rural ‘Lesbian Colony’ in the 1980s-1990s

Despite the impressive growth of Hungarian queer history in recent decades, there continues to be a limited focus on lesbians, particularly on their lesser-known, informal efforts of community building before the 1989 fall of the state-socialist regime. This paper utilises the recently-published oral history collection by the Hungarian Labrisz Lesbian Association titled Secret Years to redress such invisibility by illustrating that everyday lesbians made conscious efforts to explore their identities and meet one another in the underground artistic and musical scenes of 1980s Budapest, which later on allowed these circles and groups to flourish in the post-socialist years of more open visibility. In particular, I focus on the gradual emergence of a ‘lesbian colony’ in the small countryside village of Szatina throughout the 1990s and how this migration to the rural was actively facilitated by the lesbian friend groups and casual underground circles formed in urban Budapest the decade prior. Therefore, I will analyse the role of informal community building during the state-socialist years as well as how this became linked with the later romanticisation of the Hungarian countryside by many lesbians. Moreover, I also argue that historians must consider the utility of oral history sources to trace the pre-1989 activities of the often-forgotten lesbian community in Eastern Europe. By centring the experiences mentioned in the Secret Years recollections, I plan to amplify the voices of everyday women whose stories have often fallen in between the cracks of both Hungarian and European queer historiography.

Eszter D Kovács is a doctoral student at the University of Oxford, working on the cultural history of the Cold War and its intersections with the histories of science, gender, sexuality, and race. Her thesis focuses on the history of ‘normality’, sexuality, and the space race. Previously she completed an undergraduate degree at University College London and an MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Queer History at Oxford. Her Master’s research investigated the complicated relationship between government-critical feminists and the official state-socialist women’s council in Hungary, as well as the informal community building efforts of Hungarian lesbians during the 1980s.

Katie Burke, “My mailbox is covered in cobwebs, but I still wait by it…”: Materiality, rurality and erotic subjectivity in lesbian personal advertising

This paper explores a trove of personal advertisements from the 1980s lesbian erotic magazine On Our Backs (OOB) for the insights they offer into lesbians’ conceptions of space and sexuality in the late-twentieth-century United States, proposing that we read these historical ephemera as a rich ‘archive of desires’. By connecting the floating fantasies articulated through the personals column to the located, embodied actors who wrote them down, I examine the meaning and materiality of expressing lesbian desire through personal advertising. This paper also explores contested conceptions of the rural in the classifieds as both romantic idyll and claustrophobic closet. Moreover, by mapping the locations of ad writers, it troubles the notion of an isolated rural queer existence by pointing to the real and imagined connections which could be engineered between lesbians through engagement with OOB’s personals column. The paper lays particular emphasis upon the seemingly-mundane material acts of writing and reading personal advertisements. Behind each individual 50-word ad was an ‘ordinary lesbian’, often missing from accounts of queer history. Once OOB published her ad, she enacted the repetitive pleasure of checking her mailbox for replies sent from interested paramours across the States. Through consideration of these embodied, erotic participatory acts, I thus seek to counter historiographical invisibility of lesbian desires and sexual subjectivities. While the personal advertisement itself is a only textual trace of the possible, this paper argues that the processes surrounding it are active, interactive and material, facilitated through OOB as a magazine-medium.

Katie Burke is a DPhil student at the University of Oxford whose thesis focuses on the 1980s American lesbian sex magazine On Our Backs, exploring how this countercultural erotic publication developed within the context of the feminist “sex wars”. The thesis uses On Our Backs as means of interrogating the impact of queer publications upon lesbian identity-formation by tracing a living social world of lesbian sexual subcultures, as well as considering the multiple meanings and challenges of queer erotic countercultural publishing. Her chief research interests are lesbian sex-radicalism, butch-femme relationships, DIY publishing, and the intersections between queer production and capitalism.

Maggie Schreiner, Finding Lesbian Housing Practices in the Lesbian Switchboard Call Logs

This paper will share the process and findings of a digital humanities project focused on understanding lesbian housing needs and practices in New York City during the 1970s through an analysis of the Lesbian Switchboard of New York City call logs. The Lesbian Switchboard was a telephone peer counselling service and information hub which operated from 1972 through 1997, and their call logs document the date, time, and, with a widely varying degree of detail, general subject of each call. As a result, the Switchboard call logs form a unique window into understanding lesbian housing experiences during the post-Stonewall era. Due to the quotidian nature of housing, the frequent understanding of housing challenges as individual and not structural, and the pervasive shame surrounding housing insecurity and homelessness, housing is infrequently referenced in the historical record. This project employs open source digital tools to approach the Switchboard call logs as a data source. The analysis reveals consistent calls to the Switchboard on the topic of housing, including women looking for apartments, experiencing homophobic harassment from roommates, neighbors, and landlords, seeking support following evictions by landlords or rejection by family members, and more. This project aims to simultaneously uncover the mundane (and extraordinary) experiences of lesbians’ daily lives, while simultaneously demonstrating how sexuality and gender expression amplified housing insecurity for poor women in New York City.

Maggie Schreiner is a PhD candidate in History at the City University of New York Graduate Center, where her research focuses on queer and trans housing activism in New York City between 1970 and 2008. Her research is supported by a Doctoral Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Graduate Center Fellowship. She was awarded the 2023 Graduate Student Paper Award from CLAGS: the Center for LGBTQ Studies. Maggie is an adjunct faculty member in New York University’s Archives and Public History MA program and at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.

Astrid Joutseno (Swan), Finnish Music Stars at Home: Violinist Kerttu Wanne (1905-1963) & pianist Astrid Joutseno (1899-1962) in the 1930s

Kerttu Wanne and Astrid Joutseno spent most of their lives from the 1920s until the end of the 1950s as traveling musicians –– a duo who performed in front of church crowds, concert halls, politicians and presidents all over Scandinavia, Europe and the USA. Kerttu Wanne was a star in Finland. She became the first woman principal violinist in the country and one of the first in the world in 1927 withTurku Philharmonic Orchestra. Both Kerttu and Astrid were educated in Paris and Berlin in the 1920s and early 1930s and from then on moved together from show to show playing repertoires of classical music, some so-called folk songs and a few compositions by Wanne. When they were not touring, Wanne and Joutseno shared homes in Turku and the nearby areas. They lived downtown in an apartment, built a cottage on a remote island off Naantali in the mid-1930s and a “winter palace” in Raisio in the 1950s. As famous musicians, their dwellings were documented in numerous interviews conducted at home, cottage and hotel rooms by newspapers and magazines. In this presentation I examine the portrayal of this couple’s home lives in digitized media articles and archival material from the Sibelius museum Kerttu Wanne Archive. I suggest that Wanne and Joutseno’s everyday queer intimacy is in full view and protected by the simultaneous emphasis on the professional musicianship of both women. Yet it is possible that the quick disappearance of both musicians from the Finnish canon of music after their deaths can be interpreted as a silence that fell over their queer lives. 

Dr. Astrid Joutseno is a researcher in “Counter-Narratives of Cancer” (Research Council of Finland 2023-2028). Her research focuses on grief of the dying and its expressions in life writing. Joutseno is interested in studying grief as a cultural affect and from this perspective has published a research article on her great aunt pianist Astrid Joutseno and her life and professional partner Kerttu Wanne titled “Säveltaiteilijat kotioloissaan: Kerttu Wanne, Astrid Joutseno ja 1930-luvulla pilkahteleva outous “ (2024). As an award-winning songwriter and performer Astrid Swan, she celebrates 20 years as a published artist in 2025.

Seminarrom 3

Friday, 22 May, 10:45-12:15

Session chair: Bjørn Sverre Hol Haugen

Tom Hulme, A hut of one’s own: queer self-fashioning in the Northern Irish countryside

David Strain (1896-1969) was a relatively minor linen merchant who lived his entire life in Belfast. He came from a strict Presbyterian family that had long and deep roots in the commercial scene of Ulster, and balanced a keen sense of family duty with his business and religious observance. From his youth, Strain kept a daily diary, of which two series – 1920-1943 and 1962-1969, totalling approximately 2 million words – survive, along with photo albums, letters, and scrapbooks. The early years of the diary demonstrate that he had been already been grasping towards an understanding of male love for some time, defining himself as a “confirmed bachelor.” By the end of the 1930s, he had discovered a rich world of sexology, “homosexualist” novels, and the city’s cruising scene, and had come to embrace a sense of queerness.  In this paper, I focus on one key element of David Strain’s coming out into the queer world: the country hut he built in the Northern Irish countryside. Important scholarly works by John Potvin, Deborah Cohen, and Matt Cook have now detailed how central the domestic sphere was in the lives of rich or prominent bohemians, liberal intellectuals and theatrical types, commonly in the south of England. These primarily metropolitan elites expressed their sense of sexual difference through their interior style, decoration, and furnishing. David Strain’s more mundane hut offers a different example: a man of far lesser means – the reason he built a hut was because he could not yet afford his own house - and from a distinctly conservative, devoutly religious background. I argue that his hut – which brought together scavenged relics of local history, Oscar Wildean aesthetics, and a personal library of American pulp literature – demonstrates the potential tensions of queer self-making in a decidedly non-metropolitan environment. 

Dr Tom Hulme is a Reader in Modern British History at Queen’s University Belfast and lead of the Arts and Humanities Research Council funded project, ‘Queer Northern Ireland: Sexuality before Liberation’. He has published broadly in urban and cultural history, most recently in the history of sexuality, including articles in Irish Historical Studies, The History of the Family, and the Journal of the History of Sexuality. His second book – Belfastmen: An Intimate History of Life before Gay Liberation – will be published by Cornell University Press in early 2026. 

Jo Brydon-Dickenson, Queering the Stitch: Textile Work and Trans Self-Expression in the Life of Percy Grainger

For many in the first half of the twentieth century, Percy Grainger was the epitome of the celebrity pianist. Hyper-masculine and virile, with performances punctuated by athletic showboating, little has been made of the queer significance of their private letters and diaries. Their domestic life and crafting practices also reveal a sensitivity to gender codes that is of singular significance, providing fresh perspectives to more traditional archival methodologies. From the flattening ‘sports bras’ they designed for their partner to the silhouette-obscuring garments they constructed for their own use, Percy Grainger’s interests in textile-based innovations often facilitated the presentation of more queerly coded bodies for both Grainger and those they loved. However, underlying this sartorial queerness was a racial anxiety that permeated through every aspect of their life and restricted their ability to engage in liberatory forms of trans self-actualisation. This paper explores how designing, sewing, and beading allowed Grainger opportunities for queer self-expression, how these garments can support queer readings of the pianist’s life, and how the racial significance of clothing is intimately connected to the ideologies that forced Grainger into a life of self-denial and suppression. Building on Virginia Woolf’s claim that clothes ‘change our view of the world and the world’s view of us,’ this paper makes a case for a trans biography informed by materiality (and especially self-constructed material artefacts) as well as the more traditional confessional documents associated with the genre.

Jo Brydon-Dickenson has recently completed a PhD in history at Birkbeck, University of London. Her work explores the circulation, articulation, and rejection of trans knowledges in early twentieth-century London. Incorporating musicological, literary, and photographic methodologies to build a more complete picture of the range of trans discourses in the city’s cultural output, her research demonstrates how notions of race, class, and nation helped to inform early twentieth-century understandings of sex and gender. 

Frieda Pattenden, Family photos from the 70s and 80s: re-reading the queer when writing a memoir/(auto)biography

There is scarcely anything quite so ordinary as a family photo album, especially before the age of digital photography when family photos could not be so easily manipulated before and after being taken. Childhood and teenage photos often show what could be regarded as mundane activities: playing with a doll, playing an instrument, dressing up in national costume, going to a school party…. The importance of photos in a memoir/(auto)biography cannot be underestimated. Often a potential reader will flick to the photos first and decide whether to read the work (or not) partly based on them. This has led to much debate online among authors about whether personal photos should be included in a memoir/(auto)biography or not. In this presentation, I would like to investigate and discuss re-reading childhood and teenage images from a queer perspective using family photos from the 70s and 80s. This is not to identify any sort of ‘queer code’, but to acknowledge that childhood and teenage photos in a memoir/(auto)biography add a further and significant visual dimension to a written work. The impact of this visual dimension must be closely examined as it could enhance and/or detract and/or distract from the final product of a queer memoir/(auto)biography.

Dr. Frieda Pattenden has been teaching English language and literature at the University of Munich (LMU) for more than 20 years. In her PhD, research and teaching, she has particularly focussed on visually reading source texts (tv, film, all types of visual images) from a variety of social perspectives. She has examined and recorded how making a reader change their reading perspective can lead to revealing differences in that individual’s reading of a text.

Hannah Stovin, “Do you recall the first time you wanted to be a boy?”: Queer Childhood within the Hall Carpenter Archive Oral History Collection

Between 1985 and 1988, a group of volunteers undertook what has become one of the most significant archival projects documenting queer experience in modern Britain: the Hall-Carpenter Oral History Collection. Comprising extensive life-story interviews with sixty gay and lesbian individuals, the project sought to record the full scope of each participant’s life. Nevertheless, scholarship engaging this archive has tended to privilege adulthood- foregrounding narratives of political activism, sexual relationships, and responses to the shifting legal and cultural conditions of late twentieth century Britain. Consciously countering such a narrow lens, this paper turns its attention to a less examined aspect of these life narratives: the recollections of childhood embedded within them. By foregrounding these formative experiences, it interrogates how queer subjectivities are retrospectively constructed, mediated, and remembered within oral history. In doing so, it seeks to highlight the ongoing psychic and affective resonance of childhood in the constitution of queer adulthood, and to explore how such experiences complicate linear, developmental models of identity and temporality. Further, it makes the simpler but no less significant argument that these memories are valuable in themselves; illuminating domestic and familial life in early twentieth-century Britain from a perspective often excluded from the dominant heteronormative accounts. It asks: how were queer feelings experienced, understood, and expressed by young people; how was queerness made legible- or rendered invisible- within the domestic space of the home; and what do these dynamics reveal about the norms, tensions, and emotional contours of family life in early twentieth-century Britain.

Hannah Stovin (she/her) is a second year PhD student at the University of Oxford, under the supervision of Prof. Christina de Bellaigue and Prof. Matt Cook. Her doctoral research is an examination of the social, cultural and medical understandings of the queer youth in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. She holds a BA in History from the University of Oxford and an MPhil in Modern British History from the University of Cambridge. Prior to undertaking the DPhil, she also worked as a Trainee Archive Assistant at the National Gallery.

Seminarrom 2

Friday, 22 May, 13:00-14:30

Session chair: Dag Hundstad

Hans Wiggo Kristiansen, Reassessing Queer Nostalgia

Nostalgia is generally understood as a longing to go back to a glorious past or to a phase of one's own life, usually childhood or youth, that is remembered as happy or at least better than the present. Furthermore, nostalgia is often associated with politically conservative, populist and even fascist political ideologies. When it comes to gender and sexuality, nostalgic discourses tend to imagine a society free of sexual and gender deviance, a society built on traditional family values and where no one would even imagine crossing the gender divide or fall in love with someone of the same sex. On the other hand, gay and lesbian liberation narratives in the so called post-Stonewall era have tended to confirm major aspects of cisheteronormative nostalgia by highlighting the hidden and oppressed character of queer lives in the past, and particularly in the decades following World War II. Considering such descriptions, nostalgia for queer life in the past may seem awkward and untrustworthy. Drawing on life history interviews with Norwegian homosexual men born in the 1920ies and 1930ies and on ethno-historical fieldwork in a region of central Norway (Innlandet), this paper reflects on the following questions: How are we to understand queer nostalgia, and can nostalgic renderings of mundane queer lives in the past serve to disrupt what may be called cisheteronormative nostalgia? May nostalgic representations of the queer past help queer people today find ways to avoid what many queer critics have seen as an unrelenting march towards assimilation and normalization?

Hans Wiggo Kristiansen is associate professor of social sciences at Oslo Metropolitan University. He is a social anthropologist and has done fieldwork in Chile, Sweden and Norway. His doctorate thesis was based on fieldwork with older Norwegian homosexual and bisexual men. He has also written the book Masks and Resistance, on discreet queer life in Norway between 1920 and 1970 (published in Norwegian only) and several articles on queer history and queer aging. Kristiansen has been affiliated with the Queerdom-project since 2021.

Marit Anne Hauan, Anecdotes, gossip and everyday life and ideas

Johan Grundt Storstad (1902–1967) was connected to the polar professional community in Tromsø, a small town north of the polar circle. His father and brothers were tanners, and he himself a furrier. According to his family, it was no secret that he preferred men, and this was widely known among the local population. Due to his profession, liveliness and many acquaintances Storstad is described as a kind of public institution in town.

Despite that it is very difficult to find traces of him in public sources from his own lifetime to this day, a unique "Johan lore" lives on among the older people in the Tromsø. A few small anecdotes associated with Johan Grundt Storstad are still told. These stories can probably be defined both as anecdotes and gossip. Both genres have tended to escape scholarly attention, however.  What can they tell us about queer culture, particularly about the small-town perceptions of queer men during this era of prohibition in Norway?

Romain Jaouen, Beyond the Crime Scene: Recovering the Queer Mundane from Parisian Homicides Files (1930s-1950s)

In this paper, I reflect on a methodological paradox of queer research, which is that the extraordinary can sometimes be our best window into the ordinary. Much like histories of agency sometimes rely – paradoxically – on archives of repression, I contend that criminal files for homicide – in appearance, a most extraordinary event – are useful to uncover the everyday life, habits and struggles of queer individuals in the past. I say this not because death by murder is an ordinary fact of queer existence, but because criminal investigations offer much more than the account of a crime scene for those who know how to read them. To make this point, I draw from 20 homicides files from the archives of the Parisian police, dating from the 1930s to the 1950s. What brings these files together is that the police, for various reasons, suspected each of the victims of having had same-sex partners during their lifetime. Beyond the hunt for the murderer, which is the focus of investigation, I show that the police’s methods allow us to peak at the material situation, neighborhood relations, professional activity, friends’ groups, and even love life of the deceased. This stems not just from the collection of evidence at the victims’ house, but from oral interviews conducted by the police with their acquaintances, which reflect their social networks. The fact that these men are dead plays a big role here: unable to protect their intimacy, their lives can be searched without restraint. This makes the homicides files unique among other police records. Leaving aside the history of crime, scandal and violence, I argue that a life-affirming everyday history of these men’s existence can be written based on these files. This history showcases the role of class, gender, race, and matrimonial status in opening up (or foreclosing) windows of opportunity for the conduct of a queer existence in mid-20th century Paris. Even more, it allows us to explore the role of discretion, secrecy and the urban environment in the lives of unexceptional queer men, those whose names have not made it into the historical record.

Romain Jaouen is an associate researcher at the Centre d’histoire de Sciences Po and a postdoctoral researcher at the Ecole Normale Supérieur de Lyon (/Triangle research unit). He wrote his PhD thesis at Sciences Po Paris (De mauvaises moeurs. Vie(s) homosexuelle(s) et régulations urbaines à Paris, 1919-1982, 2025), the first comprehensive study of police regulation and urban relations surrounding queer life in Paris over the core of the 20th century. He has published works on male sex work, youth sexuality, and is currently working on consent in 20th century queer sexualities.

Ruo Wang, Me and My T Mama: Spectrality, Everydayness, and Queer Time in Huang Hui-chen’s Small Talk

Small Talk (2016) is a Taiwanese documentary about the life story of the director Huang Hui-chen and her lesbian mother A-Nu. Structured around everyday conversations in domestic spaces, the film gradually uncovers unspoken traumas embedded in the ordinary. This paper uses Derrida’s spectrality as a central guiding thread, refracting it through posthumanist and queer lenses to examine how the film depicts traumatic memories of queer subjects in their everyday lives. This paper argues that Small Talk embodies different forms of spectrality, each of which challenges normative understandings of trauma, memory, and time. Spectrality emerges in the invisible, small-town lesbian figure A-Nu who haunts the heteronormative timeline; in both A-Nu and Huang’s unspoken trauma that linger within their peaceful everyday life; and in the ordinary household items that carry affective traces of trauma and healing. This paper shows that Small Talk articulates an alternative queer subjectivity by foregrounding everydayness over activist narratives, treating spectrality as a mode of visibility, and recognizing silence as a form of expression. Through close textual analysis and cultural contextualization, this paper contributes to the ongoing discussion about East Asian queer lives by offering a new account of how precarious queer life stories are remembered and retold.

Ruo Wang is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at the University of Exeter. She holds a Master’s degree in English Language and Literature, and her current research focuses on East Asian queer cinema, queer theory, and critical posthumanism.

Auditorium 4

Friday, 22 May, 13:00-14:30

Session chair: Elisabeth Engebregtsen

Liv Tønnessen, Mari Norbakk and Samia al-Nagar, The Emergence of a Queer Pre-Movement in Sudan

This article explores how many members of the queer community in Sudan participated in the youth led December revolution, but since then no public visible social or political movement manifested. The revolution represents a window of opportunity to demand freedom, dignity and rights, but the queer community is not ready to politicize its identity in a full-blown social movement. The article claims that we may view the current stage of queer activism in Sudan as a ‘pre-movement’ for social and political change where the first and necessary step is to create circles of social acceptance and empowerment within the community itself, before it can engage in identity politics and mobilize as a collective group. The work of the pre-movement should not be underestimated or deemed apolitical as it is an informed strategy that aims to empower LGBTQI+ persons to embrace their sexual and gender identity, disclose experiences of discrimination and queerphobia and ultimately empower them to speak out, come out and demand respect and rights. The pre-movement work therefore signals an important arena of queer intentionality and of projects of empowerment and identity.

The paper is authored by Liv Tønnessen, Mari Norbakk and Samia al-Nagar. Only Mari and Liv will attend the conference.

Michael Nebeling Petersen, Niels Nyegaard and Tea Dahl Christensen, Queer Life and Politics in Provincial Denmark, 1965–1985: Ambitions and Early Design of the QProvince Project

This paper introduces QProvince, a new research project that explores queer lives and politics in provincial Denmark during the long 1970s. Rather than treating the province as a quiet backdrop to metropolitan change, QProvince starts from the assumption that rural towns, suburbs, and smaller cities were active sites where queer worlds were imagined, negotiated, and lived. Our aim is to rethink the geography of queer liberation and broaden what counts as political action, belonging, and community in queer history.

In this presentation, situate the project within scholarship on metronormativity, intimate and counterpublics, and late-modern sexual citizenship. Drawing on feminist and cultural theory, we take everyday life seriously and approach the domestic sphere, neighborhood ties, and small-scale associations as spaces where norms were both reproduced and quietly unsettled. Building on emerging work on non-metropolitan queer lifeworlds, we focus on what we call a provincial grammar of activism: forms of engagement that are often less confrontational than urban protest cultures, grounded in local networks, pragmatism, slow shifts, and the emotional labour of staying put and making space in familiar environments. We outline our early research design, which combines archival work, oral history, microhistorical perspectives, and visual ethnography across three thematic work packages. We also reflect on questions of scale, locality, and memory, and how to capture subtle, affective, and everyday practices that often fall outside established activist narratives.By presenting our conceptual and methodological foundations, we invite feedback on how to write a provincial queer history attentive to the mundane, the affective, and forms of agency that do not always resemble activism yet helped shape queer life in late twentieth-century Denmark.

Michael Nebeling Petersen is associate professor in Gender Studies at the Center for Gender, Sexuality and Difference at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He has studied homosexual culture and citizenship, new technologies of reproduction and kinship, as well as digital media and mediated cultures of intimacy, particularly in relation to sexuality, gender, whiteness, and national belonging. He is PI for the collective project The Cultural History of AIDS in Denmark and for the collective project Lesbian and Gay Liberation Beyond the Metropolis (project starts fall 2026), which explores queer activism and community formation outside urban centers.

Niels Nyegaard is Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Research at the University of Oslo, Norway. He has studied genealogies of heteronormative citizenship and cultures of silence and discretion around male same-sex intimacy in early twentieth century Denmark. Among his recent publications are the books Den store homoskandale (2021) and Pervere forbrydere og gode bogere (2025, both published at Aarhus Universitetsforlag.

Ave Palm, External Perspectives: Lesbian Women in 20th-Century Estonian Literature

In 20th-century Estonia, women’s sexual conformity was enforced through strategic discursive silences and repression. Fiction with its creative ambiguities is, thus, one source for exploring the perception of modern sexual discourses about women’s same-sex relationships in the popular consciousness. The traces we can find of sapphic relationships in Estonian literary prose of the time are scarce; yet, the rare findings are all the more interesting since they distinctly evoke very different representational tropes. So far, these examples have not been comprehensively overviewed as a part of Estonian LGBT+ history and culture alongside discussions of literature about gay men; though, the works have been explored individually by literary scholars (e.g., Ross 2018; Kirikal 2021). This presentation will discuss these texts from three different decades: Johannes Semper’s story “Niidukressid” (Meadow Cresses, 1927), Edgar Sein’s novel “Purjus väärjumalad” (Drunk False Gods, 1934), and Aino Pervik’s novel “Kaetud lauad” (Laid Tables, 1979). From the pitiable ‘invert’ figure of Semper’s Mrs Liibeon and the seductive bisexual femme fatale of Sein’s Emmi to Pervik’s convincingly lifelike homely spinsters Juss and Anne, these characters and their narrative framing will be explored to map the available modes of expression for the early representations of lesbian women in Estonian-language literature. What can these examples reveal about people’s external perspectives on queer women’s domestic cohabitation in 20th-century Estonia?

Ave Palm is a Junior Research Fellow at the University of Tartu (Estonia), who is currently working on her PhD thesis in English literature. She is studying the way 21st-century readers interpret non-normative gender and sexuality in early 20th-century novels. This combines her interest in queer history, literature, gender and reception studies, with a focus on how people perceive queer pasts in the present day.

Elisabeth Stubberud, Runar Jordåen, Håkon Hermanstrand, Torjer Olsen, Historical gender- and sexual diversity in Saepmie/Sábme/Sápmi

Over the past ten years Saepmie has seen substantial changes politicallt, socially and organizationally when it comes to queerness and gender- and sexual diversity. While previous research has highlighted the silence in Saepmie around queer issues (Løvold 2014; Grønningsæter&Nuland 2009), we are now in a situation where queerness in becoming increasingly visible across Saepmie. However, contermporary understandings of gender and sexual diverstity in Saepmie largely rests on anglo-american coneceptions. Within queer Saemien movements there is an acknowledgement that queerness may have had other expressions in Saepmie in the past. Colonisation, assimilation policies, loss of language and culture, Christianity, archival practices driven by majoritarian culture and norms around gender and sexuality are some of the factors that may have contributed to rendering queerness in Saepmie in the past hard to spot. These issues are to some extent overlapping with more general issues faced by historians and others who are interested in exploring queerness in the past (Hundstad, Hellesund og Jordåen 2022). We would like to present a work-in-progress that aims to map gender- and sexual diversity in Saepmie in the past. Drawing on archival material and interviews we explore the following questions: What has gender- and sexual diversity, and queerness looked like in Sámi communities in the past? How did we talk about this, with what words? What did people's experiences and practices look like? The overall aim of the project is to initiate a conversation on queer Saemien pasts in which we can anchor present and future queer language and practices.

Elisabeth Stubberud is project leader for the project investigating queer Sámi history, commissioned and funded by The Norwegian Directorate for Children, Youth and Family Affairs. Stubberud works as an associate professor at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies of Culture, NTNU, focusing in particular on the intersection between queer research and Sámi and Kven research. She has published, among other things, on queer living conditions in Norway, historical conditions for contemporary Sámi and Kven identification, and on research ethics and issues that arise as we research “close to home”.