History

A Pilgrimage to Rome

~ Cheryl

In February I was in Rome for a conference and I took the opportunity to visit a couple of ancient sites of interest to trans folks. I was planning on doing and LGBTQ+ History Month post, but I ran out of time, so I am doing one for Trans Day of Visibility instead. There’s a lot of photos in this one. Bear with me.

We start with a visit to the archaeological park at Ostia. This Roman settlement is less than an hour away from the city by train, and while it is not as well preserved as Pompeii it is certainly impressive. Ostia was the port of ancient Rome, so much of the wealth of the Empire would have flowed through its docks. The photo above shows a row of shopfronts on the main road into the town.

This is the Temple of Zeus, which is very imposing. But I was there for a very different religious shrine.

I was in Ostia to visit this place: the Field of the Great Mother. It is an area sacred to the goddess Magna Mater, or Cybele. No one quite knows why the goddess needed this big open area in addition to a temple, but clearly there were ceremonies of some sort taking place here. The guidebook suggests that they were orgies, because of course it does. The field was almost certainly used for the Megalesia festival, though exactly went on in it is the subject of much debate.

In one corner of the field you can find this shrine, dedicated to the god Attis. She (and I’m using female pronouns deliberately here) is said to have been the first person to become voluntarily castrated in the service of the goddess. Again why this happened is unclear, there being many different explanations for it in ancient writings, but there is no doubt that many people followed Attis’s example on joining the Cybele cult. These people were known as Galli.

Here is the statue of Attis in the shine. The sculptor carefully arranged her clothing so that you could see her smooth crotch. Whether many of the actual Galli opted for full castration is another matter. Removal of the testicles was a well-known and frequently practiced medical operation in Roman times and was compartively safe. It also had all of the hormonal effects that an ancient trans woman might have desired. Removal of the penis was more dangerous, but by no means necessarily fatal.

The bearded head on which Attis reclines is probably a representation of the god of the River Gallus, after which some sources say the Galli are named. The statue in the photo is a replica. The original is in the Vatican Museum. Goodness only knows what they have done to the poor girl there.

At the foot of the gates closing the shrine I noticed a pine cone. It looked far too carefully placed to have been an accident, and I assumed that someone, probably another trans woman, had placed it there as an offering. We know from the Iliad that pine trees were common on Mount Ida, the mountain near Troy where Cybele is said to have lived.

As I started to walk away, I felt something move under my foot. I figured that I had stepped on a pebble, but looking down what I saw in the grass was another pinecone. I can take a hint. There are now two offerings at the shrine.

Nearby is a strange and rare religious site. In the later Roman Empire the practice of castration, particularly of boy slaves, became frowned upon. But the day on which initiates to the Cybele cult received their surgery was known as the Day of Blood. (It was March 24th, should you want to celebrate it next year.) Clearly something needed to be done. We understand from the sources that a new rite was developed that involved the initiate standing in a pit underneath a metal grating. An animal (supposedly a bull though that would have been expensive) was sacrificed and the blood allowed to flow down through the grating onto the initiate. Romans, horribly gruesome at times. Anyway, the next photo shows what is believed to be an actual blood pit.

Across the field from the Attis shrine is the temple to Cybele herself.

The steps leading up to it are good quality stone, which tells us a lot about the wealth of the temple.

And here is the sanctuary at the top of the stairs where the statue of the goddess would have stood. In Roman times there would have been walls, a roof and an entrance with columns.

The Park’s museum contains a statue of the goddess. Her head is missing, but we can see the two lions flanking her throne which allows us to identify her.

Also in the museum is this statue which is described as either Ares or a Corybant. The Corybantes were young men who were part of the cult of Cybele. They are believed to have taken part in the Megalesia celebration by dancing in armour, waving their weapons about.

Ostia was of particular importance to the cult of Cybele because, back in 204 BCE, a ‘black stone’ representing the goddess was brought from Phrygia (modern Turkey) to Rome, ostensibly to help protect the Republic from Hannibal. Black stones, probably meteorites, were commonly used to represent gods in the ancient Near East. Cybele arrived by ship, and would have sailed up the Tiber to the city from Ostia.

The Emperor Claudius is said to have made some important changes to the cult, including making the Day of Blood a public holiday, and instituting the post of Archigallus, the Chief Gallus. This was probably a way by which a wealthy Roman could have a well-paid job at the head of the cult, presumably without being castrated because that would lose him his citizenship. Ostia has a number of representations of archigalli. Here are a couple of plaques:

And here is a tombstone:

A couple of days later I took myself off to the main Archaeolgical Park in the centre of Rome. You can see the Colosseum, the Cirus Maximus, the Forum and various other famous spots, but I wanted to see something on the Palatine Hill. This is where Augustus built his palace when he founded the Empire. Augustus was a big fan of using Roman history to bolster his claim to a throne, and he built on the Palatine precisely because this is where Romulus, the fabled founder of the city, is said to have lived.

The Palatine is also host to a number of temples, including the one built for Cybele when she arrived in Rome back in 204 BCE. It is right next door to Augutus’s imperial palace. Here it is.

Italian archaeologists have done a lot of excavation work on this site. They have found the remains of an Iron Age settlement on the hill, and, while there was nothing to identify it as the home of Romulus, it shows that someone was living there at the right time. Unfortunately for Augustus, he could not build his palace on top of Romulus’s home, because the Temple of Cybele was already there. So he did the next best thing and built next door.

This final photo doesn’t look like much, but it shows another trans connection to Rome. These stone walls are all that remains of the Temple of Elagabal, the Syrian god who, like Cybele, was brought to Rome in the form of a black stone. This was done on the orders of the teenage Emperor Elagabalus, who was from the city of Emesa in Syria and was already High Priest of Elagabal when they became Emperor. While the story of Elagabalus asking for surgeon to give them a vagina is almost certainly an invention intended to discredit them, they were certainly a very genderqueer person and non-binary pronouns seem entirely appropriate for them.

An Academic Paper

~ Cheryl

I have been attending quite a few academic confderences this year. Several of them have been queer history events, at which I have been talking about a project I have been undertaking in collaboration with my friend Professor Margarita Vaysman who is a lecturer in Russian Literature at Oxford. The work concerns the life of the 19th Century Russian trans man, Aleksandr Aleksandrov. Last year I wrote about some amazing third party accounts of Aleksandrov’s life which make his self-identification as a man abundantly clear. English translations of those accounts were published on the queer history blog, Notches.

I am pleased to report that those tranlsations have now found their way into the first ever issue of a new Academic Journal, Slavic Queer Studies. It is an open-access journal, and you can find the article, plus links to the rest of the issue, here.

While Notches is peer-reviewed, it tends to get a little less academic respect than actual journals, so I am very pleased to this actual publication to my name.

Assuming all goes well (and who knows what craziness the Tangerine Tyrant will come up with next), Margarita and I will also have a paper in Trans Studies Quarterly in January.

Gender Stories in Bristol

~ Cheryl

Bristol Museum is currently running an exhibition called Gender Stories. The blurb says:

Challenging rigid definitions and binary narratives, Gender Stories dives deep into the intricate connections between sex, gender, sexuality, and identity. Discover how these fluid, and multifaceted ideas have been mythologised, stereotyped, expressed – and sometimes concealed – through art, history, politics, and daily life over time.

The exhibition includes work by David Hockney, Rene Matic, Zanele Muholi, Catherine Opie, Grayson Perry, and Del LaGrace Volcano.

In addition the fabulous Jack Shoulder is hosting LGBTQIAP+ tours of the museum. Jack and Mark Small are the team behind the wonderful Museum Bums book, so you can be guaranteed an entertaining tour. Dates are listed here.

And why am I telling you all this? Because on September 24th I will be appearing on a panel associated with the exhibition. The panel is titled ‘Gender, Identity, Culture, and Future – a frank panel discussion’. Appearing with me will be Sid Boyner (artist), Sacha Acheson (former England women rugby player), Ben Akers (CEO of a men’s mental health charity) and Dr Sarah Jones (historian of sexuality and gender, University of Bristol). Tickets are a mere £5, and you can buy them here.

That Time of Year

~ Cheryl

You might not think it, but it is LGBTQ+ History Month, at least in the UK. It certainly isn’t in the USA, where the Fascist Coup is busily trying to erase queer people from history, but here we can at least do some events.

Last weekend I headed down to Llanelli for their first ever such gig. My friend Norena Shopland did a great presentation of the Carmarthen Timeline. What is that, you ask? Well, a while back Norena was charged by the Welsh government to do some training for museums, libraries etc. to encourage them to make queer history more visible. The trainees responded that this was absolutely great, but they had no time, and no money, and were likely to have even less of both in the future. So Norena and some friends set about producing a queer history timeline for each county in Wales that could be used by local authorities with minimum effort by their staff. We believe that Wales is the only country in the world to have such a thing. Cool.

This weekend sees the annual OutStories Bristol event at M-Shed. I’m not speaking at that one, and I suspect I won’t have time to get to it either, but it looks like being a great day.

At the end of the month I am off to Abertystwyth to do an actual talk. The poster for the event is shown above. My talk is the one on Trans Celts (freshly updated with a bunch of new stuff). I am really looking forward to the one on The Mabiniogion. I know that for many of you Aberystwyth is at the arse end of nowhere, but if you can make it booking details are here. It is a great venue. The town museum is housed in a restored Edwardian theatre. Sadly I won’t be on stage, but I can guarantee an excellent audience.

I hope to take advantage of being in town to visit the National Library and do some research.

Just prior to that I will be spending a couple of days in That London, partly for things I can’t talk about yet, and partly to take advantage of being there. The lovely people at Strawberry Hill House are doing a candlelit open evening on the Wednesday (26th), and before going home I plan to take in the Mediaeval Women exhibition at the British Library. They have material by Christine de Pizan and Julian of Norwich, and most amazingly a letter signed by Jean d’Arc herself. Wow.

All of this travel means that Salon Futura may be a day or two late, but I’m not worrying about that.

A Little (Trans) History

~ Cheryl

The anti-trans brigade loves to claim that trans people are a modern invention (so much so that I am apparently much younger than my calendar years as I hadn’t been invented when I was born). When you provide them with examples of gender diversity from history they will claim that you can’t really know how people from the past felt about themselves, and anyway being trans would have been illegal back then so they would have been killed if they were really trans.

But what if there is evidence? Not autobiographies, because they can be unreliable, but evidence from independent witnesses who knew the person in question and can testify to how they behaved.

This is the subject of a new post that I have up on Notches, in collaboration with my friend Margarita Vaysman who is a professor of Russian Literature at Oxford. Having discovered the story of Aleksandr Aleksandrov, she started doing some digging. As a Russian speaker (she’s Ukrainian, as was Aleksandrov) she has been able to look at archives written in Russian and she has turned up some remarkable articles by late 19th century Russian historians. These two men were keen to know more about the famous hero of the Napoleonic Wars – allegedly a young woman who abandoned home and family to fight as a man for her country. What they found was clear evidence that Aleksandrov – a name he was given by the Tsar, alongside a Cross of St. George – continued to live as a man for decades after the end of the war.

She was always in male attire: a long black frock coat and narrow trousers, a tall black hat on her head and a cane in her hands, on which she leaned. She endeavoured to walk as upright as her years and strength would allow and had a firm step. She always conducted herself as a man and was offended if she were addressed as a woman; if this happened, she would get angry and respond harshly.

As you’ll see, there is a fair amount of misgendering going on. The learned gentlemen were not quite sure what to make of this strange person, but they were quite clear about Aleksandrov’s sense of self, and also that most of the people in the town where he lived were happy to accept him as a man.

I’m writing this because there is not a lot of background in the Notches articles. The two translated articles are quite enough material for one blog post. They are also rather too long for a typical paper in an academic journal. However, Margarita and I are working on papers, and we want to be able to cite these two pieces. We can’t do that unless they are published somewhere. Justin Bengry and the Notches team kindly agreed to put them online for us, for which we are deeply grateful.

The academics amongst you can look forward to a paper or two in due course. And hopefully I’ll be appearing at one or two conferences on queer history.

My Finncon Schedule

~ Cheryl

It is almost July, and that means I will be heading to Finland for Finncon. This year the convention is being held in Jyväskylä, home of my dear friend, Irma Hirsjärvi. I will be on programme. The convention website is here, but to read it all you will need to know a bit of Finnish. In the main menu: Ohjelma = Programme. In that menu: Perjantai = Friday; Lauantai = Saturday; and Sunnuntai = Sunday. The programme grids for each day describe the English-language items in English. My assignments are:

Friday 5th: 15:00
On Writing, in which I interview Guest of Honour, Ursula Vernon (a.k.a. T. Kingfisher) about her writing practice.

Saturday 6th: 14:00
Wales in the Time of Arthur, in which I talk about Welsh history in the 5th and 6th centuries, CE.

Saturday 6th: 17:00
Masquerade – Ursula and I will be among the judges

Sunday 7th: 10:00
Queer Fantasies, in which a panel of queer-identified folks talk about their favourite fantasy books with queer elements.

Following the convention, I will be attending Rencontre Assyriologique Internationale at the University of Helsinki. And because my life is a bit mad, on Saturday 13th I will dialing in to the Marginalised Writers’ Day at Abertystwyth University, from the Finnair Lounge at Helsinki airport.

Talking of that day, my pals at Inclusive Journalism Cymru now have a blog post up about it. Two of my colleagues will be attending in person and reporting on social media: one in English and one in Welsh.

Introducing Tir y Dail

~ Cheryl ~ 2 Comments

Ah, the Spring Equinox (in the Northern Hemisphere, at any rate). It is a time of new beginnings, and so perhaps a time to talk about new things. Things, at any rate, that have been gestating over the winter.

When I lived in Wiltshire, I knew hardly anyone else who lived near me (which was probably just as well, given how very patriotically English and Tory most people there were). Most of my friends were in Bath or Bristol, so I could visit them, but not hang out for any great amount of time.

Here in South Wales I have several good friends who live locally, and who have many of the same interests as me. Those interests include role-playing; something I have not been able to do seriously for around three decades due to lack of a suitable local group (not to mention lack of time).

At the same time I have read Nicola Griffith’s Spear, and am keenly aware that the place where I live was once the home of the great boar, Twrch Trwyth. This area is as steeped in Arthuriana as the area around Glastonbury where I grew up.

Now it so happens that one of my favourite role-playing game systems is Chaosium’s Pendragon. I ran a campaign many years ago. But Pendragon is very much based on Malory and Le Morte d’Arthur. It is a high mediaeval and English version of the Arthur cycle. Would it be possible, I wondered, to do something more Welsh? Something that was rooted instead in The Mabinogion?

Well, never fear. I did, after all, grow up on Original D&D (the white box version). As a consequence, I never met a role-playing system that I didn’t want to customize. I could do this.

Out of such thoughts grew Tir y Dail, a role-playing campaign set (at least initially) in South Wales, and using a variant of the Pendragon rules to create a distinctly Welsh feel to the game. Specifically the campaign begins in Ystrad Tywi, the same location in which we find ourselves at the start of Spear. But Tir y Dail is not the stylized, mythical land of Griffith’s story. It is something much more similar to the world of Hild and Menewood. Whereas in Spear, Ystrad Tywi is a wild land occupied only by a few peasants and bandits, in Tir y Dail it is a bustling post-Roman culture just beginning to learn to live with the absence of colonial rule.

The most obvious sign of Roman presence is the still-busy port town of Moridunum (Carmarthen), the most westerly outpost of the Roman Empire. From here, local goods can be traded for wine and pottery from the continent. There are two sizeable villas in the region, one south-west of the city, and one north-east. Hill forts are everywhere. Tir y Dail (The Land of Leaves) is the name of the local settlement here in Ammanford, but there are many others dotted about the region. To the north, keeping watch over the Tywi, are the impressive Dinefwr Castle and the stately home that stands in its shadow. Those are more modern constructions, but in the 5th Century the hill on which they stand still boasted a Roman fort, guarding the road west to Moridunum.

I’m telling you all this now for a number of reasons. I am NOT planning to keep a campaign diary. However, I do want to talk about the worldbuilding, and the historical research that went into it. Some of that I will only be able to drop once the players have moved past the events in question. Also I see from BlueSky that my good friend Hal Duncan is working on something similar but based in Scotland (and presumably fiction). I hope people will find the contrast illuminating.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with doing Arthurian stories set in Scotland. We should remember that, before the Romans came, “Wales” – the country of Prydain, inhabited by the Cymry – covered the entire island, at least to the edge of the Highlands. (I’ll talk about the problem of the Picts in a later post.) Glasgow is a Cymric city. The name, Glas Cae, means “blue field”, and is indicative of especially good grazing.

In the time of Tir y Dail, the Ystrad Clut (the valley of the Clyde) is ruled over by the Damnonii tribe whose capital was the imposing fortress of Alt Clut (Dumbarton Rock). It stayed that way until around 870 when Ivar the Boneless and his Viking buddies finally managed to sack the place. The Damnonii then moved their capital to Glasgow – specifically to the area called Govan which is just over the river from the Event Campus where Worldcon will be held. They also fell under the influence of their Gaelic-speaking neighbours, the Scotii of Dál Riada. The new kingdom, known as Strathclyde, remained independent until just after the Norman invasion of England, at which point they joined the kingdom of Alba (possibly because they were conquered by MacBeth).

But I digress. There’s a huge amount of Welsh history that I want to talk about. The Irish will be in on it as well (though mostly as villains to begin with). I’ll stop for now, but there will be more.

LGBTQ+ History Month is Here

~ Cheryl

This Wednesday at 13:00 (UK time) I will be giving a free online talk on trans history for The Diversity Trust. It will be fairly general and basic as it will cover around 2000 years, but there will be a couple of new things in it if you’ve seen my talks before. For registration details, click here.

Also, if you can be in Bristol on the 24th, I’ll be taking part in the event at M Shed.

February Looms

~ Cheryl

And that means that LGBT+ History Month is on the horizon. Interest in this sort of thing seems to have waned a bit over the past few years. That’s partly because the sorts of institutions that put on events are increasingly demanding something recorded that they can use for years to come. The problem with that is that you have to ensure that your presentation is free of copyrightable images, and that takes a lot of effort. Also, of course, there’s a good chance doing such things, especially if they involve trans issues, is likely to become illegal soon, regardless of who wins the next general election.

However, the lovely folks at M-Shed in Bristol are still doing good work. They have a fine program of talks scheduled for Saturday, Feb. 24th, and only one of them is by me. Excitingly there will also be a talk by Mark and Jack, the Museum Bums boys. I’m looking forward to it. I’ll be talking about the search for trans people in Celtic Britain. OutStories Bristol has a long post about the various talks.

I will be doing a couple more talks, including one at Oxford University, and one online for a university in Canada, but I don’t yet know of anything else that will be open to the public. If something turns up, I will let you know.

December Salon Futura

~ Cheryl

As I say in the editorial, this was a strange issue. For a variety of reasons most of the SF&F reading I did in December was now reviewable, but there was a bunch of other stuff that I could put in. Highlights of the December Salon Futura include:

There may be no issue in January because I still have a heap of Crawford reading to do, and work is still very busy.

August in Glasgow

~ Cheryl

Later this month I will be making the long train journey up to Glasgow for an event at the university. This is not anything to do with the Fantasy Centre, but rather a queer history thing that happens to involve Glasgow academics. The event is aimed primarily at early career humanities scholars, looking for ways to engage with professionals outside of academia. However, it is free, and will be broadcast on Zoom, so if you are intersted I’m sure you’d be welcome. Details are available here.

While I am in Glasgow I am hoping to swing by the SECC and do a quick check of the Worldcon site. It is a while since I was there and I know things have changed quite a bit.

Dear British Museum

~ Cheryl

I have had a Friends membership for several years now and have enjoyed many of your exhibitions. I have a keen interest in ancient history and am passionate about discovering and preserving knowledge about the past.

However, I am also involved in the publishing industry and have put considerable effort into promoting the work done by translators. There is much good work out there in modern fiction that is inaccessible to English-speaking readers without their help. The same is of course true of the ancient world, because no one wrote in English until comparatively recently in the history of language.

I was therefore deeply distressed at your shabby treatment of Yilin Wang in putting together the “China’s Hidden Century” exhibition. Translators should be acknowledged, and they should be paid fairly for their work.

I have given you some time to make things right, but all I have seen from you is a press release that is one of the worst examples of a corporate non-excuse I have ever seen. As someone who has been involved in diversity training, I’m astonished that a high profile organisation such as yours could be so bad at this.

Consequently I am resigning my membership of the British Museum Friends. I have cancelled my direct debit, and the money I would have paid for my next renewal has been donated to Ms. Wang’s crowdfunder.

Yours, deeply disappointed,

Cheryl Morgan

Happy Day of Blood

~ Cheryl

Yes, this is a bit gruesome. It is about Romans, what did you expect?

As regular readers probably know, the cult of the goddess, Cybele, was something of a safe space for trans women in the Roman Empire. Anyone assigned male at birth and wanting to live as a woman could join the cult as a gallus, and get genital surgery in the process (generally just removal of the testicles which was simpler and safer than taking everything). You lost a huge amount legal rights and social prestige, but trans people have always made those trade-offs.

Cybele, being a goddess of the wild places with connections to the Greek Gaia, and also with connections stretching back to Inanna and Ishtar, was very much associated with spring. There were a whole lot of celebrations around this time of year, including what amounted to a massive pride parade through Romne. But today, March 24th, was the Day of Blood — the day on which new recruits to the cult got their surgery. And thanks to dear old Claudius it became a public holiday. So we should all celebrate.

Personally I have got a nice piece of venison from my favourite butcher, and will have a glass or two of red wine. Your mileage may vary.

A Welsh Garden

~ Cheryl


One of the things you can’t miss if you drive around here is that the Welsh Botanical Gardens are nearby. The road signs are very prominent. Last weekend I got to pay them a visit, and was well impressed.

Those of you who know me will be aware that I am not a gardener. Plants tend to keel over and die if they so much as see me coming. But the Welsh Botanical Gardens are much more than that. They are located in the grounds of the former Middleton Hall (now demolished), a stately home built with proceeds from the East India Company. The Middleton brothers, who originally built the mansion, all died on voyages to and from India, and the estate was purchased by one William Paxton, who had made a ridiculous fortune from being Master of the Mint in Bengal. Thankfully the estate is now owned by the nation, and is doing its best to admit to its colonial legacy.

The point about building a Botanical Gardens on the site of a country estate is that you have ridiculous amounts of space. So yes, there are ornamental gardens. There are also tree collections. In the back of the picture you can seen the dome of the giant greenhouse that has plants from as far away as Australia and Chile. And there is still ridiculous amounts of space. There are lots of walks, many of them around the landscaped lakes and rivers that were built for the estate. Some of these are wooded, and are now inhabited by faeries and, recently arrived, a Gruffalo. Others are out in the open and have magnificent views over the Tywi Valley. There’s a bird of prey centre too. And a rock garden containing rocks from the many different geologies of Wales. A bunch of Presceli blue stones have been carved with Celtic symbols and set in a ring, as is right and proper.

I can see myself spending a lot of time at this place. That will be primarily for the walks and views, but also communing with raptors.

At the beginning of April they will have a food and craft festival. I am hoping for interesting cheeses.

Introducing Outremer

~ Cheryl

It is late in 2003 and I am in Stafford in Middle England for FantasyCon. It is an up and down event. On the downside, it takes place on the same weekend as the final of the Rugby World Cup. The English win. That chap Wilkinson. I am unhappy. But I am at the convention, at least in part, for the awards. China Miéville is busy finishing writing The Iron Council and has asked me if I will stand in for him at the award ceremony where The Scar is up for Best Novel. So I get to make a speech on China’s behalf, and I get given an ugly little Cthuloid statue to take back to him. Ah well, at least it wasn’t a bust of Lovecraft.

At the banquet I am sat next to a lad from Newcastle called Chaz. We bond over a number of things, including a shared devotion to the San Francisco 49ers. “What have you written?” I ask. “Well,” says Chaz, “I have this fantasy series set in an alternate version of the Crusades, and it has just started to come out in America…”

It is 2003, two years since 9/11 and two years into George W Bush’s quest for vengeance. Crusader rhetoric is the order of the day. The West is cast as Christian, Iran and Iraq are obviously Muslim. Tony Blair has recently deployed the Dodgy Dossier; David Kelly is dead; and the invasion of Iraq is well underway. This man wants me to read a fantasy series based on the Crusades? It had better be bloody good.

Of course it was.

Outremer is the collective name given to the four Crusader kingdoms founded after the First Crusade. Their actual history is deeply fascinating, and some great historical novels could doubtless be set in them. Brenchley, however, is doing that fantasy thing where a thinly disguised version of real history, with added magical seasoning, allows him to talk about the real world without the associated baggage that readers are likely to bring to it. He can’t have known, when he started writing the books, how appropriate they would become. The first one was published in the UK in 1998. But sometimes we luck into things.

What Chaz didn’t luck into was recognition for what he had created. I did my best with reviews in Emerald City, but the books didn’t capture the imagination in the way I’d hoped. Maybe they were too timely. Maybe there was too much queer stuff for the audience of 20 years ago. Regardless, I am absolutely delighted to have been given the opportunity to bring them to a new audience.

I’m particularly pleased to have the first book nearing completion during LGBT+ History Month. The mediaeval world has been presented to us as relentlessly heterosexual for decades, but we now know that was far from the truth. Human beings have always been queer, and a lot of what actually happened in those days has been carefully excised from history. Slowly modern historians are undoing that erasure. There have even been questions asked of that most macho of men, Richard Couer de Lion. Brenchley is not writing about real people, so there can be no one to say that there is no proof they were queer. Having them in the book is simply portraying the period as it existed, which is a good thing to be doing.

There will be more publicity for Outremer in the coming weeks. I very much hope that the books manage to find a new audience.

One Night in Stratford #LGBTHM22

~ Cheryl

On Thursday evening I will once again be participating in the LGBT+ History Month event at the Shakepspeare’s Birthplace Trust in Stratford-on-Avon. Sadly I won’t be in Shakepeare’s birthplace this time, but a virtual event means that you folks can get to see me in action from all over the world.

The talk I’m doing for them is a short version of my “Girls on Stage” talk, focusing solely on the theatre of 16th and 17th Century England. So no Greeks or Kabuki in this one, but there is so much batshit genderqueer stuff in the plays of the period that there will be no trouble filling the time.

To give folks a flavour of what I’ll be talking about, I have done a blog post for the SBT website. You can find it here.

To book a free place for the entire programme, go here.

Girls On Stage: A Trailer #LGBTHM22

~ Cheryl

The fabulous Gigi from A New Normal asked me if I would mind doing a little chat for LGBT+ History Month. I suggested maybe a bit of a teaser to encourage people to attend my M Shed talk on cross-dressing in the theatre. So we did. Now it is online and you can watch it below.

And if that sparked your interest you can catch the whole talk here. It is on February 24th, and it starts at 7:00pm so it is convenient for some of you folks across the Pond too.

LGBT+ History Month is here

~ Cheryl

Yes, it is February again, which means I am going to be busy doing talks. There will be only two public ones this year, and both will feature my new theme for this year: crossdressing in the theatre. This was inspired by reading some great research on the boys who actually played women in Shakespeare’s plays. I hope that the Shakespeare’s Birthplace Trust would pick up on it, and they did. I will be part of an Outing the Past event on February 17th. See here for details.

One of the things that delighted me about this is that, in researching the talk, I discovered that our Will was really quite conservative. Other plays written by his contemporaries were much more queer, including some actual trans material.

I’m doing a related talk for my friends at M Shed Museum in Bristol. It turns out that they have a fine collection of Japanese prints, including a number of portraits of kabuki actors. Also they wanted a much longer talk, so this one will visit ancient Greece, mediaeval China and Japan as well as Elizabethan/Victorian England. It is on February 24th, and you can book here.

M Shed also has a bunch of other talks that I have helped curate, including ones by my friends Andrew Foyle and Norena Shopland, and one by a Chinese queer activist, Qiuyan Chen. Check out the What’s On listing for details.

There are, of course, talks happening all over the country. This year some of the hubs are doing in person events again, but I suspect that quite a few will be virtual still. You can find a list of all the events here.

I’m doing a bunch of talks for private clients too. That doesn’t mean I’m getting big bucks, it means it is for a local or company LGBT+ group and they want to restrict access to members. This is mainly repeats, but I’ll possibly be doing one for Trans Day of Visibility in March that might turn into next year’s public talk.

Dydd Santes Dwynwen Happus!

~ Cheryl

Or Happy Saint Dwynwen’s Day to you English speakers.

But who is Saint Dwynwen, and why should we be happy on her day? Well, she is the Welsh patron saint of lovers, so today is the Welsh version of Valentine’s Day. These days it is associated with almost as much ritual consumerism as the better known love festival.

Valentine was an early Christian martyr, executed for trying to convert the Emperor to his beliefs. He died on February 14th, 269 (according to Catholic Online). It is unclear how he came to be associated with being in love. Dwynwen has a much better claim to the job.

Dwynwen was one of the 24 daughters of King Brychan Brycheiniog, whose territory is the region we now call the Brecon Beacons. She was, naturally, the prettiest of them, and there was competition for her hand. A young man called Maelon Dafodrill was particularly smitten with her. What happened next varies a lot from one story to the next.

Some say that Dwynwen rejected Maelon’s advances and he became furious with her, perhaps even raped her. Others say that she loved him in return but she had been promised to someone else by her father. Whatever happened, she prayed to God for help and he proved remarkably willing to get involved.

There may have been a potion of forgetfulness, provided by an angel, which either erased the pain of the rape, or the pain of losing her love. Also the unfortunate Maelon was turned into a pillar of ice. And finally God granted Dwynwen three wishes.

For the first wish she asked that Maelon be unfrozen forthwith, which shows that she had a rather better understanding of compassion and forgiveness than God.

For the second wish she asked that God take good care of all true lovers, that their lives might prove happier than hers, which is where she got the patron saint job from.

And finally she asked that she be allowed to never marry. She lived out her life in a nunnery, and founded a small church on a little island near Anglesey.

So what are we to make of all this? Was Dwynwen a broken-hearted lover? If so, why did she not just ask God to allow her to marry Maelon? Was she put off men by Maelon’s bad behaviour? Perhaps, but she seemed willig to forgive him. Or maybe she just wasn’t interested in men at all.

What we do know is that she was a kind-hearted girl who wanted the best for others. (She is also the patron saint of sick animals.) And I rather like the idea that the Welsh patron saint of lovers might be lesbian or asexual.

Buy Me for Christmas

~ Cheryl


If you missed my HistFest talk on trans Romans first time around, you have a second chance. It will be available for a number of days over the holiday period. What’s more, for the ridiculously low sum of £8.68 (that’s £7.50 plus EventBrite fees) you get not just me, but five other great history talks by actual, genuine historians too. That has to be better than watching Christmas movies, right? If you would like to purchase access, you can do so here.

By the way, I don’t get a cut of this. I was paid a flat fee for creating the talk. But if you do watch my bit that will help encourage the lovely HistFest folks to commission more trans-related material, which would be a very good thing.