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A review by shanaqui
Forbidden Lives: Lgbt Histories from Wales by Norena Shopland
informative
slow-paced
3.0
Unfortunate thing to note first: Forbidden Lives was badly in need of an editor (or a better editor). Duplicated words, bad grammar, misspellings, etc; I try not to be too prescriptive or demanding about it, but when it's an error per chapter it really starts to stick out to me.
In any case, the book tries to take a number of Welsh lives and pick out the threads of queerness in them. As the author notes, in some (many) cases we don't have any direct evidence of sexuality, only of affection or circumstance, and that means we may misread the evidence. Shopland is careful to qualify that it can't be certain whether certain people were having sex or not, but nonetheless confidently states that these people are queer because they stepped over certain boundaries in how they showed affection to members of the same sex. I'm not sure about this one, and think maybe it could've used more hedging than ever: asexuality and aromanticism are possibilities, too, and they're not explicitly included here as options (Shopland writes about LGBT people, rather than "queer" people, or LGBT+).
Later in the book it all gets more specific and certain, of course, and a narrative starts to emerge: the march of history, from incomprehension to condemnation to tacit acceptance... and omits, for the most part, celebration (though there's a little about Pride parades in the final chapter). It's a stark reminder that progress has been slow -- and I'm not as sanguine as the author is that no one will ever try to put the genie back in the bottle, either.
It was interesting to read about queer Welsh people I didn't know about, at least.
In any case, the book tries to take a number of Welsh lives and pick out the threads of queerness in them. As the author notes, in some (many) cases we don't have any direct evidence of sexuality, only of affection or circumstance, and that means we may misread the evidence. Shopland is careful to qualify that it can't be certain whether certain people were having sex or not, but nonetheless confidently states that these people are queer because they stepped over certain boundaries in how they showed affection to members of the same sex. I'm not sure about this one, and think maybe it could've used more hedging than ever: asexuality and aromanticism are possibilities, too, and they're not explicitly included here as options (Shopland writes about LGBT people, rather than "queer" people, or LGBT+).
Later in the book it all gets more specific and certain, of course, and a narrative starts to emerge: the march of history, from incomprehension to condemnation to tacit acceptance... and omits, for the most part, celebration (though there's a little about Pride parades in the final chapter). It's a stark reminder that progress has been slow -- and I'm not as sanguine as the author is that no one will ever try to put the genie back in the bottle, either.
It was interesting to read about queer Welsh people I didn't know about, at least.