Thinking Sex in the Transnational Turn: An Introduction

Abstract

UNDERGRADUATE, MY INITIAL EXPOSURE to what was then called gay history was a volume titled Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past. 1 It was published in 1989, the year I started college, an early anthology in a field that was also just then emerging. I read not only about the United States, but also about pederasty in ancient Greece, lesbians in medieval Europe and early-twentieth-century Paris, homosexuality in late imperial China, male love in early modern Japan, English boarding school friendships, Russia's gay culture during the revolution, and sexuality between men in the South African mines. As I look back on the anthology now, especially in light of the current preoccupation with internationalizing historical practice, the volume certainly seems ahead of its time. Yet in contrast to the way historians now think about their craft, neither the editors nor the contributors expressed skepticism about the nation-state as a unit of scholarly study. It seems more likely that the internationalism of the project emerged out of debates that raged in the 1980s between essentialist and social-constructionist points of view. 2 Was there a homosexual who existed across time and cultures? Answering that question-affirmatively or, as most historians eventually did, negatively-meant looking beyond any particular national or cultural frame. I suspect as well that the editors of a volume in a new and marginal field found something empowering in discovering scholars