Viewing the past through a contemporary lens can be problematic – while England’s King Richard the Lionheart and Rome’s Julius Caesar certainly had sexual and romantic relationships with men, they definitely wouldn’t have described themselves as ‘homosexual’ or ‘gay’, two distinctly contemporary terms for a consciously homo-social identity that emerged in major urban centres from the 18th century onwards.
Once a term of derision and contempt, ‘queer’ was reclaimed in the early 1990s as a term of pride – initially by radical protest groups like Queer Nation, and more gradually by the wider LGBTI+ community. Such cultural evolution was not always smooth: when the Melbourne Queer Film Festival changed its name from the Melbourne International Lesbian & Gay Film and Video Festival in 1992, there were vociferous complaints from some sections of the community.
