Making the Human Gesture: History, Sexuality and Social Justice

I feel privileged and honoured to have been invited to give the 2009 Raphael Samuel Memorial Lecture. Like so many apprentice radical historians in the 1970s and after, I benefited enormously from Raphael Samuel's enthusiasm, encouragement and support, and his many acts of personal kindness. I also learned a practice of engaged intellectual work that has continued to influence me, even as my own trajectory has gone in different directions. More broadly, History Workshop Journal, on which Raphael was such a forceful presence, became one of the key focal points of my intellectual and political life in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, and has indelibly shaped my own intellectual practice since.

I had seen Raphael in action long before I really got to know him, mainly at Ruskin History Workshops. I subsequently became an associate editor then an editor of History Workshop Journal, and worked with him on a number of projects, including a workshop group on the history of sociology, contributions to the Communist University, countless informal discussions – usually late in the evening just as I was sitting down to eat – and of course editing the Journal, where Raphael was a permanent mentor, critic and intellectual entrepreneur and enforcer, regardless of whoever might actually be editing that particular issue. HWJ was dedicated to 'making history a more democratic activity and more urgent concern',¹ but no-one could avoid the fact that some editors were more equal than others.

The History Workshop movement was born in the midst of the intellectual and political ferment of the 1970s. We now live in a culture that has been transformed radically since those early days in many, many ways. This is perhaps most apparent for me in attitudes towards sexuality and intimate life, and especially what was not then known as LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender) life, which since the 1970s has been a major focus of my research and a central political preoccupation. The fustiness and traditionalism of university history in the 1970s, that the History Workshop movement was in revolt against, may not have completely disappeared, but many of the absences we complained about then – such as, in my case, the blank page where sexual/homosexual history should be – are now lively, even respectable articles, books and web presences. The journal itself, once passionately insurgent, at least in ambition, has become a leading international academic journal, no longer needing to proclaim its politics ('A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians') on its collective sleeve or even masthead. The radical historians of the 1970s are the professors and leaders of the profession today. We live in a different world. That of course begs the question whether changes have happened in the ways we hoped for or expected or even wanted in the 1970s (though I personally believe most of them are overwhelmingly positive changes). But it also raises a host of questions about the relevance of the transformative ambitions of the radical history of the 1970s to the complexities of the present. That is my focus today.

I begin by exploring my own personal trajectory in the 1970s in working towards a new history of sexuality in general and of homosexuality in particular. Inevitably this will be a very personal take on all that. I will suggest what the key elements of this new history were, and the questions it opened up. Then I will try to relate this brief history of sexual and lesbian and gay history to wider questions about the relevance of a historical approach to issues of social justice in a globalized and conflicted world. Can a sexual history rooted in the grassroots practices of the 1970s help us to understand the chasms of difference in the 2000s? What do global battles over sexual rights tell us about the historic present? And what can the critical linkage of history and sexuality tell us about the human project? This is not a Goodbye to all that' account. I am talking about a living history, which has shaped me profoundly, and which I have tried to document, often as it was...