Meant to flag this up before for anyone who's interested: Chuck Upchurch, A Masterclass: Queer History: When did the popular ‘GAY’ LGBT+/Human Rights Campaign really start?
How about the ‘Gay’ Reform Movement of the 1830’s!?
Pioneering research by US Historian Charles Upchurch, whose specialist area is the first half of the 19th century, has ( Read more... )

Heritage things:

This year's English Heritage blue plaques to include the 1888 Matchgirls' Strike, the Ayahs' Home in Hackney, and a pioneer of humane psychiatric care, Dr John Conolly and the Hanwell Asylum.

Campaigners are celebrating a victory in the battle for public access to the countryside, after the government agreed to cancel a deadline to ( Read more... )

And I am really not sure that when GK Chesterton was going on about the people of England and whether they had or had not spoken yet, whether he included making direct debits to institutions one deemed worthy of support or pulling down statues or civil protest or, being on jury duty, acquitting people who did the latter, as the sort of speech acts ( Read more... )

Suspend your belief on a very fragile thread - though it is a rom-com, so being prepared to accept the dubiously realistic is there from the get go: Tartan and tinsel: a Scottish castle-dwelling novelist on Brooke Shields’ new romcom: [T]his is not a film you want to get into authenticity arguments with.... Obviously, they have never had a ( Read more... )

No, literally, gaslight, in the streets, still: Two centuries after the first gas lights appeared on the streets of London, casting a romantic glow through the gloom, a few hundred remain in some of the most historic areas of the capital. But not for much longer. Westminster city council is planning to convert 299 gas lights to electricity, saying ( Read more... )

A bit late for World Menopause Day, but ugh: New Study shows Vaginal Laser Therapy Ineffective for Menopause Symptoms: Vaginal rejuvenation is a sham.: We have a very long history in gynecology of under tested medications and therapies gaming the system in some way or another with women paying the price. Diethylstilbestrol (DES, birth defects and ( Read more... )

I mean, really, those people who say this kind of thing: A former naval surgeon whose Wiltshire constituency includes Stourhead - named in the colonialism and slavery report because its 18th-century owner inherited money made partly from trading shares in the South Sea company, which supplied slave labour to central and southern America - Murrison ( Read more... )

Am a bit miffed to discover that I became a member of the National Trust just a bit too late to qualify for a vote in the forthcoming Council election. Sigh.
Though looking through the candidates' manifestos, there were some I was slightly side-eying for the possible dog-whistles about tradition, but most of them did at least indicate long ( Read more... )

What I read
Finished Grumpy Fake Boyfriend - a bit on the slight side.
Somehow found myself diverted into a re-read of Tony Fennelly's Matt Sinclair mysteries (he was the gay proprietor of a posh furniture store in New Orleans, scion of a family with deep roots in the region, and also at one time legally qualified): The Glory Hole Murders (1985), ( Read more... )

Spotted in passing on Twitter the other day, that cri de coeur vis-a-vis climate change and Saving The Planet, which was more or less, 'Why do those selfish boomers not think about the world they are leaving for their children and grandchildren and subsequent generations? Surely this must move their hardened hearts?'
(Never mind those Boomers who ( Read more... )