MRSpride: Queer British History - Sabrina Trinquetel, MRSpride Co-Chair
30 January 2025

I never listened much in my history lessons at school. It was all dates and wars and the Tudor Rose. But I know for certain I would have listened if it had been about queer history. Of course, growing up under Section 28 meant that couldn't happen but at our first MRS Pride event of the year, we started to put that right.

So that’s where I found myself on a sunny Monday morning. In the presence of excited and warm people, eager to listen to Ellie Reeves, delighting and enlightening us with a trip back in time to some of the very first records of Britain's queer history and the bumpy road to modern times. 

I did not envy Ellie’s job. Condensing the whole of British Queer history into under an hour is no meant feat. But what made it ‘easier’ was the fact that queer people were somewhat invisible in history for a long time. That was until the main records started to appear from court reports in 1553 when the Buggery Act was passed by the one and only Henry VIII, which was punishable by death. On the other hand, Ellie told us, there wasn’t even a word for ‘lesbians’ so there wasn’t anything to search for in many of the older records.

Like today, many freedoms come through access to money, power and status. Most of the individual examples then of ‘queer’ people in history, that we know about were those that had access to their own money or who had a position of reverence or power. For example the first suggested record of two women living openly together: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, two upper-class Irish women who retreated to Wales to live out their lives together. Or Roberta Powell, a racing driver and fighter pilot and the first transwoman known to have gender-affirming surgery. Or Anne Lister ‘the first modern lesbian’.

It was enlightening to hear of instances of acceptability, where war for example meant that the sacrifice made for your country gives permisability for queerness. 

The British queer history can’t be contained to just the islands themselves, the influence of the empire on so many other cultures meant that ancient traditional acceptance and communities were replaced with the weaponization of gender as an instrument of colonialism control.

Ellie noted the various instances of gender fluidity, ‘non-binary’, same-sex relationships and transgender people all rooted deeply within communities.  In India the law code Manusmriti (c. 1250 BCE) treats same-sex and opposite-sex relationships equally, and both this work and the famous Kama Sutra (c. 400 BCE) reference a third gender known as the Kinnar (also known as Hijra). The only stigma attached to male-male romantic relationships was one’s status and that of one’s partner.

The queer history is a complex narrative that is full of holes, controversies and injustice. Ellie reminded us that although we might think that issues like transphobia and homophobia might ‘age-out’ with the older generations, we shouldn’t just sit back and wait for this to happen. Actually, there is a rise in discrimination from Gen-Z and our trust that they will bring a new wave of acceptance is not completely true. 

For researchers and insight leaders, it should make us question whose stories we are hearing, do they really represent the whole community, or are they the opinions we think we want to hear now. Queer history has been unkind to those who were different but let’s make sure the same isn’t also true for the future.