HAPPY LGBT HISTORY MONTH?

What use is gay history to us today? In an age when homosexuals enjoy greater rights and freedoms than ever before, isn’t the past rather irrelevant? Isn’t it all a bit of a waste of time?

This was certainly not the view of the audience gathered at The British Library last Tuesday as presenter and writer Amy Lame was joined by Librarian Bart Smith to give a fascinating glimpse into our country’s LGBT archives.

Describing the evening as an “historic occasion,” the infinitely charismatic Smith regaled the captivated gathering with tales of our hidden past, citing newspaper cuttings from the seventeenth century right up to the 1990s.

The more familiar scandals of yesteryear such as the Peter Wildeblood and Lord Montagu of Beaulieu affair stood alongside lesser known insights into LGBT identity. Buggering Bishops and amorous aristocrats executed in the 1700s once more discredited concepts of middle class respectability, not to mention the hypocrisy of preachers – some things will never change.