By Hannah McCann “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Juliet, Romeo and Juliet. There is much in a name. Take a moment to truly consider the horror of the name ‘Jack the Ripper’. He was a serial killer who brutally murdered his victims …
By Molly Churchill As a kid at school, I was bombarded with the likes of Winston Churchill, John Lennon, William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Galen, Stalin, Martin Luther King Jr… I’m angry at this exhaustive list of male figures that I was taught about as a child as it put a deep-rooted belief in me that …
By Zac Fairbrother In 1995, designer Yamaguchi Yuko, according to her biography, overheard a conversation between three high schoolers about their plans to take part in enko – ‘compensated dating’. The term referred to young women selling sex to older men for money and had been the centre of a media frenzy that year, so …
By Anya Goulthorpe Everyone had heard of Madonna. Whether it’s hearing ‘Get into the Groove’ full blast on your mum’s radio or seeing the iconic 2012 Superbowl halftime performance on the TV – even if she stopped the football for 40 minutes – a stint of evocative pop numbers that have stamped their stead in …
By Ben Danbury History can often be understood through the lens of individual struggle. LGBTQ+ history is no exception; for every act of persecution, there were brave people willing to defy societal norms and fight for a more just future. As a bisexual man, I count myself lucky to live in a society that, for …
by Bethan Davis Princess Seraphina, whose real name was John Cooper, was the first recognisable drag queen in English history, who took Thomas Gordon to court for stealing his clothes in 1732. The trial of Princess Seraphina was a captivating and enigmatic moment in LGBT+ history; sodomy was a capital punishment, and whilst Gordon outed …
by Mark A Jones On 11th July 1726, William Brown was making his way along a walk in Moorfields, London. This was a notorious place where men could pick up other men. He spotted somebody he thought he knew would be interested in sex and stopped by a wall to pretend to ‘make water’. Brown …
By Hannah McCann There seems to be an incorrect assumption within the LGBTQ+ community that before the Stonewall riots in the summer of 1969, queer individuals lived in secrecy. However, we only have to turn to the vibrant night-life of 1920’s Berlin and the pioneering work of the Institute of Sex Research to uncover a …
By Hannah McCann If you were to travel to St. Louis, Missouri, to the Union Station in the early 1900s, you would see a young black girl playing in the railway yard and making her money by dancing on the street corner. This girl is Freda Josephine McDonald who was born in St. Louis on …
By Hannah McCann The grand country house of Knole is situated in 1,000 acres of Kent countryside near Sevenoaks and has been around since the 14th century. Knole is the setting of our story.
