The making of British Queer History: George Ives and his diary, 1886-1949
Join DRAGEN Lab for an in-person lecture by Dr. Brian D. Lewis from McGill University. George Cecil Ives (1867-1950) was a scion of the English gentry, a sexologist and a criminologist who founded a clandestine “gay rights” organization, the Order of Chaeronea, in the 1890s. More significantly for the historian, he wrote a massive diary, observing and chronicling a sexual revolution: the period when new categories of sexual and gendered identity crystallized in a complex interplay between emerging sexological science and queer subjects. This paper aims to capture the Ivesian bricolage, in context, during this time of momentous change.