Queer Youth Histories

434 Pages·2021·5.348 MB·English

by  Daniel Marshall (editor)

Genders and Sexualities in History
Queer Youth Histories
EDITED BY DANIEL MARSHALL
Genders and Sexualities in History
Series Editors
Joanna Bourke
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK
Sean Brady
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK
Matthew Champion
Australian Catholic University
Melbourne, Australia
Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accom-
modates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the fields
of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship,
which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexuali-
ties, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war.
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been
more or less disconnected fields. In recent years, historical analyses of
genders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in his-
toriography. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities
with questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, poli-
tics and the contexts of war and conflict is reflective of the movements in
scholarship away from narrow history of science and scientific thought,
and history of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these
paradigms until recently. The series brings together scholarship from
Contemporary, Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and Non-
Western History. The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship
that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.
More information about this series at
https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15000
Daniel Marshall
Editor
Queer Youth Histories
Editor
Daniel Marshall
Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
ISSN 2730-9479 ISSN 2730-9487 (electronic)
Genders and Sexualities in History
ISBN 978-1-137-56549-5 ISBN 978-1-137-56550-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56550-1
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021
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For my parents, Valda Lesley Marshall and Roger Arthur Marshall, who
first taught me about history, and to all the queer kids who grew up thinking
they were the only ones.
A
cknowledgements
This book is the result of the work of many hands and it is a daunting
task to acknowledge all of the labour that has brought it into the world.
In so many ways this book has been created from many different com-
munities and environments which have nurtured precious conversations
about sexual and gender difference and ideas about youth over time, so
any list of acknowledgements which singles people out will by defini-
tion fall short. So, please forgive any omissions, but I want to specifically
acknowledge the contributions of the following people.
As an edited volume, this book gathers together a variety of voices
and so my thanks are to the writers who have contributed to this col-
lection. As you will see as you make your way through the book, each
writer brings with them their own deep and profound engagement with
our central muse—this thing called ‘queer youth history’—even while
in each of their hands it becomes something quite different again and
again. Through their words, these writers craft a wide variety of accounts
which shed light not only on a particular approach to the subject, but on
whole histories of investigation behind each essay. Open the door of any
given chapter and there one finds corridors leading into different disci-
plinary traditions, a variety of socio-political contexts and an array of dif-
ferent research projects and lived histories. I thank the writers for sharing
their scholarship so that we can bring these pieces together in this way to
ask the collective question: what is queer youth history?
vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
As part of the work toward this book I organised a symposium on
the topic at The Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at London
South Bank University. The Weeks Centre was a vibrant and exciting
venue to host these conversations and I am very grateful for its role in
helping nurture this book into being. I want to thank everyone at the
Weeks Centre who helped make the symposium happen—especially
Jeffrey Weeks, Yvette Taylor, Tracey Reynolds, Nicola Horsley and
Beverley Goring. I am also very grateful to everyone who presented at
and attended the symposium and to everyone who expressed interest in
being involved with the symposium and with the book. In particular, I
want to express my deep gratitude to Jeffrey Weeks for his longstand-
ing and generous support for this book, and for the inspiration of his
work. I’m also grateful to Jeffrey and Mark McNestry, and Anna Hickey-
Moody and Penny Moody, for their wonderful hospitality in London. I
also worked on this project during my time as a visiting scholar at The
Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York and I want to thank everyone there. I also want
to thank Jonathan Ned Katz, Joan Nestle and Matt Cook.
In Australia, Deakin University has supported work on this book
in a variety of ways and I am very grateful for the intellectual stimula-
tion provided by the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin, includ-
ing my colleagues and students in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Writing
and Literature and the School of Communication and Creative Arts
more generally. I also want to express my heartfelt appreciation to the
Australian Queer Archives and all of the volunteers who have built
AQuA and who keep the Archives going. I have been very fortunate to
receive encouragement and intellectual stimulation for this book in
many different ways from many people. In particular, many thanks to:
Peter Aggleton, Rob Cover, Robyn Dwyer, Laniyuk Garcon, Anna
Hickey-Moody, Don Hill, Dino Hodge, Gary Jaynes, Michal Morris,
Kevin Murphy, Di Otto, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Geoffrey Robinson,
Rachel Sanderson, Eliza Smith, Susan Talburt, and Zeb Tortorici. Special
thanks to my parents, Val and Roger, my sister Katrina and her children
(Caitlin, Ashley, Emily and Lachlan) and Duane Duncan for their love
and support.
I also wish to acknowledge the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin
Nations, the traditional owners of the land where I did much of the work
on this book.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix
Of course, this book would not have been possible without the tire-
less work of everyone at Palgrave. In particular, I am very grateful to
Carmel Kennedy, Emily Russell, Preetha Kuttiappan and the whole pro-
duction team for all of their work in helping to bring this manuscript to
publication. I am also very grateful to Clare Mence for initially reach-
ing out to me about the prospect of publishing this book with Palgrave,
and to Angharad Bishop. I am also very grateful to the editors of the
Genders and Sexualities in History book series for giving this book a
home. Thanks are also due to the design team for their work designing
the cover and to Zacharia Bruckner and Capstone Editing staff for their
help preparing the manuscript for publication. Thanks also to Sally Pope
for creating the book’s index. I also want to express my thanks on behalf
of the authors to the anonymous readers of this proposal and manu-
script. Bringing queer work into the world is never something to take for
granted and I have been very humbled by the work everyone has under-
taken to help create this book.
This book could not have been written without the queer histories
that have come before it—histories of political struggle, activist scholar-
ship, fierce living and defiant efforts to keep these things within living
memory. In many ways it is written for queer youth in history—includ-
ing all those queer kids we might have known but didn’t or could have
been but weren’t—and for queer kids today who might come to know
the past differently and thus see the prospect of new futures.
c
ontents
1 What Is Queer Youth History? 1
Daniel Marshall
2 Toward Psychosexual Development: Preliminaries
to Queer Youth Prehistory 41
Diederik F. Janssen
3 G. Stanley Hall and Perverse Plasticity in Modern
Adolescence 75
Don Romesburg
4 Same-Sex Desire and Young New Zealanders Before
1950 107
Chris Brickell
5 “We Will Never Betray You, Brothers and Sisters”:
Queer Youth and the Intellectual History of Gay
Liberation Across the Anglo-American World 135
Scott de Groot
6 “Cherishing All the Children of the Nation Equally”:
Gay Youth Organisation and Activism in Ireland 169
Patrick James McDonagh and Páraic Kerrigan
xi