In a recent blogpost John D’Emilio argued that AIDS and its impact upon LGBT individuals and organisations, the militancy it provoked, and the heightened attention it drew to LGBT causes needs to be more fully documented and appreciated. This is certainly applicable to Scotland, and its responses, both social and medical, to the significant challenges…
Andrew King’s recent piece about older people and homophobia published on the website The Conversation got me thinking about my own research interviewees with gay and bisexual male (GBM) elders, which I undertook in the mid 2000s. One of the notable issues concerning the homosexual law reform movement in Scotland during the late 1960s and…
Throughout early modern and modern history homosexual acts have been the focus of condemnation, religious outrage, penal sanctions and considerable suspicion. In the 16th century further connections between the act and sinister superstition were made, contradicting earlier works which suggested that even demons drew the line at buggery. The new narrative claimed that witches, in…
Few names will stir the emotions amongst LGBT Scots, who were alive during the deliberations of the Wolfenden Committee, than James Adair OBE. Adair wasn’t the only Scot to sit alongside John Wolfenden, but he is probably the most in/famous. He was to disagree fundamentally with the recommendations of the committee regarding homosexual offences and…
Recently I inherited (after a colleague retired) a large collection of LGBT magazines and ephemera stretching back to the early 1980s. These include numerous editions of Gay Scotland and Gay Times, which are helpful resources when examining the development of LGBT culture over the past 30 years. Take, for example, this issue of Gay Scotland…
Queer Scotland 