Victor Hugo (Rojas)

Marc Zinaman

In the 2019 documentary film Halston, filmmaker Frédéric Tcheng questions Halston’s former illustrator and confidant Joe Eula about the nature of the fashion designer’s relationship with his lover, Victor Hugo. Tcheng asks, “Why did Halston put up with Victor?” to which Eula replies, “Because he was in love with him.” Tcheng then presses further, asking: “When did it fall apart?” and Eula, without skipping a beat, retorts, “The day they met.”   Victor Hugo was born Victor Rojas in Caracas, Venezuela during a coup d'état that took place on November 24th, 1948, when Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, Marcos Pérez Jiménez and Luis Felipe Llovera Páez overthrew the elected president, Rómulo Gallegos. Not much else is documented surrounding Rojas’ early life in Venezuela, but sometime in the early 1970s, he and his mother emigrated to the United States, landing in New York City.  

Ferdinand I of Bulgaria

Marc Zinaman

Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria made his mark in history as a boldly effeminate bisexual ruler with a petulant personality to boot, who, at numerous times during his reign, proved to be an actually effective world leader. The self-declared “Emperor of the New Byzantium”, though bewitched by frippery and flashiness throughout his life, showcased his strength as a politician when he successfully led his country to prosperity during times of peace. Ferdinand, who was prone to dressing in flashy, feminine clothing, sashayed into a position of power amidst a sea of naysayers who spewed homophobic derisions and doubted his leadership capabilities, only to initially prove them all wrong. It was solely through a series of missteps in two consecutive wars married with Ferdinand’s unwavering vision to expand his country’s territory and help usher in a Bulgarian Renaissance, that the Tsar’s glorious reign would ultimately come crashing down and render Ferdinand an exiled failure.

Dana de Milo

Harper-Hugo Darling

In the telling of history, certain names are linked together. This is the case for Carmen Rupe and Dana de Milo, two transgender women from New Zealand. In the later years of her life, Dana was often interviewed and quoted in discussing Rupe and their friendship, which has led to the story of Rupe eclipsing that of de Milo. But Dana, as a woman who ran away at 13 and lived openly as a transgender woman, is an interesting person in her own right and deserves more attention in the discussions of New Zealand’s queer history.

22 Stories to End 2022

Dean Strauss

2022 has been a contentious year for many of us, but amidst our shared struggles are also well-fought victories. As we wrap up 2022 and hope for a better 2023, let’s look at 22 of our community’s victories.

Karl M. Baer

Harper-Hugo Darling

As the first man to undergo modern gender affirmation surgery, Karl M. Baer’s name is a familiar one in the story of queer history. Tangled together with the legacy of Magnus Hirschfeld, a fellow queer Jewish man living through the rise of the Nazi party in Germany, Baer’s is an interesting and worthwhile story to tell. Growing up as an intersex child who was assigned female at birth, he would go on to become a fierce feminist who identified as a man years before he got the medical support he would stumble upon. Like many transgender people, he was able to carve out a way to authentically exist as himself before he received any level of validation and would go on to live through one of the darkest moments of human history and find life after it.

Canaan Banana

Marc Zinaman

Headlines were recently made when Netflix removed the “LGBTQ” tag from its series on Jeffrey Dahmer, after significant backlash from customers. As one viewer lamented, while it is "technically true" that serial killer Dahmer was gay, "this is not the representation we're looking for." Which begs the question, how are we meant to remember those who make queer history for criminal, immoral, or perceivably evil actions? As queer people–a people so often villainized throughout history based on the identity alone–our tendency now is to look for the role models, promote the do-gooders, and disassociate ourselves from the iniquitous, more controversial queers of the past. Constantly assuring the masses that we are not bad people because of our gender identity or sexual orientation, we eagerly tout our queer heroes while shoving the so-called queer villains of history under the rug. And while we know that one’s queerness and moral compass are not necessarily conjoined criteria, when it comes to a sinful queer figure, what often follows is an exploration of one’s relation to and effect on the other.

Sonia Rescalvo Zafra

Harper-Hugo Darling

Transgender Day of Remembrance is an impossible day no matter how it is observed. In a world with increasing visibility for transgender people, there is increasing danger. There are celebrities spending every cent of their social currency attacking the most marginalized amongst us and politicians scrambling to unravel every inch of progress that has been made. Most pressingly, the violence has not stopped. It has not stopped since the first vigil was held in Rita Hester’s honour. Not since Chanelle Picket’s murder. This year as the names are read, there will be too many to remember fully.

Roman Tam

Harper-Hugo Darling

Within the queer community, the connections between generations have always been strained. Outside of the queer community, there are many forces that are actively trying to inhibit the ability of queer people to connect, which are a large part if not all of this strain. The queer people that have been able to bridge these gaps, whether directly or indirectly, are massively important to the development of the queer community as a whole. There are costs that come with being able to defy the cultural norms and make those connections though, and those costs are clear when looking at the story of Roman Tam.

Francisco Moncion

Marc Zinaman

One way or another, in 1938 Monción was offered a scholarship to the recently established School of American Ballet, founded by the renowned Russo-Georgian-born choreographer George Balanchine, alongside Edward Warburg, and of course, Lincoln Kirstein. The school, which had only opened in 1934, had just begun recruiting male students at a time when few males in America were making their way into classical ballet. The School of American Ballet was looking to fill their roster, and so they accepted Monción as a scholarship student despite his dearth of experience. As a result, Monción only began professional dance training at twenty years old, an incredibly late age for any dancer to be starting out. Nevertheless, he immediately found himself in technique classes taught by the likes of accomplished dancers such as Pierre Vladimiroff, Anatole Oboukhoff, and Balanchine himself. Much like someone thrown into the deep end of a pool without knowing how to swim, Francisco was forced to adapt quickly.

Jiří Langer

Harper-Hugo Darling

Within every avenue of history, is the history of queerness. Not only due to the queer people who have inhabited every corner of the world, but also due to the influence every queer person has had on their little corner of the world. This is true within the history of religion as well. Though many people have made it their mission to exclude and remove queer people from various religious spaces, queerness is a sacred part of humanity, and every religion has found queer people in their midst. The queer people in question have shaped not only their direct religious community, often making it more accepting and open to people like them, but they have also played a large part in the vital task of interpreting religious texts. Despite what modern Christianity has said, queerness and religion are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the opposite is often true. There have been, and continue to be, religions and religious spaces where queer people and voices are heard and valued. Jiří Langer is one of the queer voices in history that can be seen in this specific journey.

Agniva Lahiri

Harper-Hugo Darling

Within the queer community, the work of activists is vital. Just as in every avenue of culture, people fighting for change are a necessary and often underappreciated section of the population. When one is born queer, there is a set of circumstances one can end up in where stepping into activism seems like the next obvious step. While many decide to take other paths, and those paths are no less worthy of praise, and often have drastic effects on the society around them even without the active decision to do so, the path of the activist is a difficult one. Queer people, both historical and contemporary have been put in a position where their very existence is a form of activism, and while that can be a rewarding path, it is not without its’ sacrifices. In the life of Agniva Lahiri, while there is a clear and obvious passion for advocating for the rights of the marginalized, it is not a situation where there were many other options left open to Agniva.

Peter Allen

Harper-Hugo Darling

Australian singer-songwriter Peter Allen is not only known for his success in the musical realm, but also for who he knew when he was alive. While the start of his life in small-town Australia, the son of an abusive alcoholic was not a glamorous one, he had his eyes set on stardom. Starting his act by copying a blackface performer at the age of five, and transitioning to playing the piano at a bar at the age of eleven, he was ambitious. Once graduating high school he would go on to join Chris Bell to create a duo act, claiming they were brothers who were from England. Through this, he would secure television performances and slowly work show to show to make his way in the competitive world of music.

Olive Yang

Marc Zinaman

Not all people who make queer history do so for their contribution to bettering the world. Queerness and criminality have in fact gone hand in hand for centuries, whether because queer expression in any form was outright outlawed or simply because an individual’s queerness pushed them to struggle amongst the dregs of society. For the time and place in which she lived, Olive Yang’s gender expression and sexual attractions were criminal offenses, and while those were not the malfeasances for which she was ultimately imprisoned, they likely rendered Yang fraught with the idea of leading the life of a traditional Burmese woman.

Homosexuality in Qing Chinese Fiction

Melody Britton
Guest Author

Literature is often an excellent way to gain insight into a culture, as well as the overall accepted and perpetuated views of a certain subject held by said culture. Even more so are the genres of fiction and fantasy something that can be looked to for this kind of insight, as the settings allow for a full exploration of characters and their interactions, without the limitations of the rules of reality. For those reasons, the subgenre of homoerotic fictional literature is a great resource for the discussion of the topic of male-male homosexuality in Imperial China. With few contemporary sources written on homosexual relationships during this period, fiction is the main way in which historians are able to understand the popular, general public view of homosexuality. Generally speaking, it can be argued through an examination of these sources that representations of homosexuality in fiction written in Qing China set a precedent for how such relationships were viewed by the general public, as opposed to the reality of these relationships.

Kate O'Brien

Harper-Hugo Darling

There are more ways to affect change than most will credit. For any queer person living in a society that villainizes and stigmatizes their very existence, simply living and finding moments of happiness can be enough to shift public discourse. Openness about one’s identity has never been a qualifier for this type of life, neither historically nor contemporarily. There have been, and still are, queer people who had a deep and lasting impact on their communities without ever being explicit about their identity and desires. While there is some part of this reality that is a tragedy, a life unlived, a possibility for radical acceptance never experienced, the whole of the situation is not bleak. Public knowledge of someone's sexuality or gender identity does not equate to happiness, and the reverse is just as true.

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