LGBTQ + History Book

Let me be clear about this book: it is AMAZING! Very densely informed, everything is clearly explained and not oversimplified but accessible to those who don’t know the subject well. It’s beautifully illustrated and the diagrams help to understand complicated concepts better. The writers tried not to be Eurocentric and the chapters are dedicated to different parts of the world and to different cultures. It is also intelligently organised through chronology and themes at the same time.

BUT there are also very big gaps in the book… I know that it’s hard to write about this kind of broad subject, and that we can’t be exhaustive in this type of book format. However, I found this book so well done that I thought it was a pity that certain key subjects in LGBTQ+ history were not covered. I give you here four topics that are definitely missing for me in this book…
-My biggest surprise was to not read a word about YAOI! Some sections talk about modern history of China, India, Thailand… but not a world about modern Japan, about the iconic writer Yukio Mishima, and above all about these gay romance manga genres that flourished in the 1970s!! What about the shounen-ai, the yaoi and mangakas like Moto Hagio and Keiko Takemiya. What about shoujo-ai, esu and yuri? What about the bara and the famous Gengoroh Tagame? Nowadays it’s not anymore only a Japanese art, Boy’s love (BL) is internationally renowned, and you can find yaois in bookshops all around the world! It’s one of the most widely read genres in Korean webtoons! This gap was very surprising for me…
-I was disappointed to not read a word about the marquis de Sade! It would have been nice to mention it in the pornography chapter, or maybe even add a chapter about libertinism (libertinage) in the 17th and 18th centuries. Most of writers from this philosophical movement were queer (Gassendi, Cyrano de Bergerac, Théophile de Viau, John Wilmot….), they promoted freedom of thought and liberation from religious and moral dogmas, and they wrote libertine novels, plays and poetry with gay characters.
-An other surprise, the writers beautifully wrote about the lesbian identities (butch and femme), but nothing about what we call today “gay tribes”. I am thinking especially about the history of the bear community and the rejection of gay beauty standards, and how it started in the 1980s in magazines like Bear magazine, etc. These tribes became mainstream through meeting apps like Grindr, and these apps changed queer sociability.
-And last key subject, but I was not surprised to not find it in this book because we don’t talk a lot about it in general and it can be quite controversial: the history of scientific discoveries about sexual orientation in biology, like the discovery of homosexual relations in the animal world by ethologists and primatologists, the controversy of the “gay gene” in the 1990s, and the more complex and nuanced theories of modern endocrinology and genetics (importance of prenatal hormones and genetic predisposition).

These topics were, I think, the big gaps of the book. I thought of other topics, less important, and I can understand that the writers didn’t talk about it, they had to make choices for having a reasonable size book and keeping it accessible… But I put here my ideas, and I hope it could help for a possible expanded reprint.
-I think the first parts about Antiquity are definitely too Eurocentric, and even too centered on Greco-Latin culture. It would have been nice to have a big chapter about same-sex relations and gender fluidity in the world mythologies. Egyptian and Mesopotamian legends are briefly evoked. But what about gender variance of Hindu deities? We could also talk about: the figure of Tu Er Shen in Taoist legends, the gay couple of Shinu no Hafuri and Ama no Hafuri and the homoerotic desire of Amaterasu in Japanese mythology, the third-gender representation in American mythologies (the Maya god Chin, the Inuit creator deity Sedna…), the Aztec god of male prostitutes Xochipilli, the queer figure of Loki in Norse mythology. It would also have been nice to talk about the sexual freedom of Celts mentioned by Aristotle and Strabo, and the mythical couples of Gilfaethwy and Goewin (two men changed in animals, one male and the other female, and giving birth!), Brigid and Darlughdacha… There are a lot of things to say about non Greek mythologies, that’s why it would have deserved its own 4 pages chapter.
-It would have been nice to explain somewhere the etymology of the world “buggery” which is related to the Bulgarian heresy bogomilism.
-A chapter about cultures of Polynesia would have been great, for talking about the fa’afafine, the androgynous aboriginal rainbow serpent god Ungud, the queer gods of Hawaiian and Tahitian mythologies, etc. The Takatapui chapter is amazing, but I think the other cultures of the regions deserve to be at least mentioned as it was made for Africa because they all have a unique vision of gender and sexuality, and had to face as well colonial ideologies.
-Some chapters are lesbocentric for no reason: in the pornography chapter, why mostly only talk about lesbian sex and not mention male gay sex (especially Sade)? Why talk only about lesbians in the french Belle époque? The emerging gay neighborhoods were not only lesbian, there were also male gay cafés and hotels, not to mention the iconic gay couple of poets Rimbaud and Verlaine…
-Last point: The writers talked about literature, art and cinema, but almost nothing about video games (They only mentioned Caper in the Castro in the small paragraph dedicated to representation p177). A little page about the emergence of LGBTQ+ gameplay in video games would also have been great. The Sims added for the first time the possibility of same-sex love and marriage in video games in 2000, and it’s becoming a natural feature nowadays in RPGs (Fable, Skyrim, Stardew Valley…). The Nintendo game Animal Crossing even changed the character customization option “gender” to “style” in 2020.
It could even have been an entire chapter dedicated to representation in medias, especially series, comics and video games a bit absent in this book. It could also have been an opportunity to mention gay pulp fictions.

I know that this book doesn’t claim to be exhaustive, and rather is supposed to popularize the subject. That’s why I didn’t put a lot of famous historical gay figures in my suggestions, because we could list a hundred of them (heroes, kings and queens, artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, adventurers...). I preferred to focus on these important periods, changes and themes related to LGBTQ+ history: creation of yaoi, creation of bear community and meeting app culture, libertinism, science discovery, original myths, cultural diversity, changing representations in medias.

After this long suggestion review, we could think that I didn’t like the book: it’s quite the opposite! I loved it so much that I couldn’t accept these gaps! And as a perfectionist, I had to write what I would have added in this book for being perfect! But I definitely recommend this book to anyone who wants to know more about LGBTQ+ history! I learned a lot of things thanks to it, and it’s definitely a must in my bookshelf.