For a British-based publication, this column may sometimes seem to focus unduly on American websites. This is not (at least consciously) due to some pro-American bias but rather because the United States still has an overwhelming majority of the biggest and best English-language sites, despite notable exceptions like the superb BBC domain.
The irony is that the Web was invented by an Englishman. Tim Berners-Lee, born in London, spent most of his early life in England, then France and Switzerland – where he wrote the original proposal underlying the Web in March 1989 – before later moving to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1994 to set up and head the World Wide Web Consortium which has coordinated its ongoing development ever since. More than any other individual, “TimBL” has influenced the development of the Web as an open and accessible medium of communication to the point that it’s now virtually synonymous in some people’s minds with the Internet itself.
Like Alan Turing, Tim Berners-Lee is one of Time’s twenty most important scientists and thinkers of the twentieth century. Like Turing, fifty years earlier, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in May 2001 in recognition of his contribution to computing. Like Turing, he was brought up with the dogmas of the Church of England but outgrew them in adolescence – no doubt a consequence rather than a cause of clear thinking! He has been called a humanist, and perhaps he is. At any rate, after moving to the US he joined the Unitarian Universalist Association, the ultra-liberal broad church that welcomes theists and non-theists alike. In a rare insight into his personal philosophy, on a page cleverly titled “WWW and UU and I”, he draws parallels between Unitarian Universalism and the Web.
It may be significant that the currently highest-ranking UK-based personal gay website in the Google stakes – and deservedly so – is the work of a transatlantic migrant in the other direction. I mentioned Rictor Norton’s Gay History and Literature site four years ago (Web Watch, Summer 1999). What I wrote then remains true, but the site has since gone from strength to strength with a number of important new sections. They include, for example, a 28-page classified “Bibliography of Gay and Lesbian History”, a sourcebook of primary documents relating to homosexuality in 18th-century England, and a lengthy polemic – in 27 chapters with a promise of “more to come” – entitled “A Critique of Social Constructionism and Postmodern Queer Theory”, in which Norton sets out in detail his argument with certain other theorists over the nature of gay history.
Fine articles can languish unread in the pages of back issues of magazines and newspapers. Rictor Norton has done a great service by republishing lightly edited versions of many of his historical articles that originally appeared in Gay News in the 1970s. His History of Homophobia, first published in four parts during 1975 and 1976, traces the origins of homophobia back to the religion of the ancient Hebrews. The series includes some of the original illustrations and is augmented by a more recent essay on “The Medieval Basis of Modern Law”. The History of Homoerotica includes not only the short series of articles published under that name by Gay News in 1977 (this time without the original illustrations!) but also some earlier and some more recent ones. For a bit of light entertainment, try the Bawdy Limericks.
The most recent addition to the site is a section on lesbian history and its particular problems, not least the difficulty of uncovering the evidence. Norton asks “Should lesbian history and gay male history be separately considered?” and seems to conclude that there is a case for keeping them together.
Outside of the Knitting Circle (also mentioned in Web Watch, Summer 1999), British lesbian and gay history of the later twentieth century remains seriously under-represented on the Web. The Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE), for example, once England’s largest gay campaigning and social organisation, has no Web presence whatsoever, although nominally it still exists. However, a few green shoots are starting to appear.
Last year the veteran activist Allan Horsfall, founder of CHE (and a longstanding member of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association), launched a small website called Gay Monitor in conjunction with the broadcaster Ray Gosling, who is modestly described as “a journalist of sorts”. One of their aims is to monitor and highlight continuing injustices – and not just high-profile cases like that of the “Bolton Seven”, in which they played an active part. Another is to record memories of the way things were. Let’s hope this down-to-earth site continues to develop.
The Hall-Carpenter Archives (HCA), one of CHE’s family of surviving offspring, is the UK’s main lesbian, gay, and (they claim) bisexual archive. Its holdings comprise the Archives of Gay Organisations and Activists (stored at the London School of Economics), a Periodicals Collection (also at LSE), a Press Cuttings Collection, known since 2001 as the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (at Middlesex University), and an Oral History Collection (at the British Library’s National Sound Archive). Oliver Merrington, HCA’s chairperson, provides a short history of the archive up to September 2001.
Despite all the work that’s gone into the Hall-Carpenter Archives over the years, hardly any of this treasure store is accessible online beyond a summary description of each of the 30 major component collections of the core archives of organisations and activists. Although the National Sound Archive provides a full online catalogue of its substantial holdings, remarkably few of the recordings themselves are to be heard, considering how easy it should be to digitise them. The sole fragment from the HCA collection appears to be a 42-second Real Audio clip taken from a 1986 interview with Gilli Salvat. But the Newsmedia Archive is showing welcome signs of renewed development. Indexes of the cuttings collection from 1938 onwards have started to appear, albeit initially only as PDF or – even worse – Word files.
What better place to find a lesbian and gay local history society than Brighton and Hove, “Gay Capital of the South” and birthplace of such luminaries as Edward Carpenter and the Gay Humanist Group? The Brighton Ourstory Project’s website, originally launched in 1998, is still quite small, but well presented. It includes a full collection of newsletters from 1998 onwards, and an interesting history of Brighton’s lesbian and gay community going back to the early 1800s. And this is one site where use of the phrase “lesbian and gay” is not just tokenism.