A website supporting my switchingview YouTube Channel

Who is permitted to have a history and who is not is a vital issue.

Recorded history, imposed from above, is controlled history beyond whose boundaries are silence and darkness.

Those who have no memories or story have no life.

Philip Sheldrake, Spirituality and History (1991)

We must pay attention to the process of telling history. If we fail to study to how history is told, we may be blind to the distortions and inaccuracies that are present.

We must pay attention to power. We must ask ourselves who has the power to impose their own version of history, and who has the power to suppress the stories of those groups they disapprove of?

Until recently LGBTQIA+ history was told within a Western/Eurocentric worldview heavily influenced by Christianity which, being the state religion, had the power to impose its own teachings.

Within this worldview life was (and always had been) patriarchal and heteronormative. Expressions of homosexuality or gender variance were unnatural, or pathogenic, or criminal, or against the will of God.

In the past few decades however various supressed groups have begun to recover their own histories and to challenge these distortions of the powerful. If we can recover our own memories and stories it will help us to lead fuller and more authentic lives. Sheldrake describes this process as telling stories from the underside of history.

Edward Carpenter's Book Intermediate Types (published 1914) is a very early example of this challenge to embedded ideas. In the introduction to the book Carpenter wrote this:

THAT between the normal man and the normal woman there exist a great number of intermediate types - types, for instance, in which the body may be perfectly feminine, while the mind and feelings are decidedly masculine, or vice versa - is a thing which only a few years ago was very little understood. But to-day - thanks to the labours of a number of scientific men - the existence of these types is generally recognised and admitted; it is known that the variations in question, whether affecting the body or the mind, are practically always congenital; and that similar variations have existed in considerable abundance in all ages and among all races of the world. Since the Christian era these intermediate types have been much persecuted in some periods and places, while in others they have been mildly tolerated; but that they might possibly fulfil a positive and useful function of any kind in society is an idea which seems hardly if ever to have been seriously considered.

My own switchingview thesis is as follows. This has been copied and then expanded from Carpenter's original ideas.

• Across history, in a pre-patriarchal world, homosexual and other Intermediate Type people have often been accepted and valued by the cultures they lived within.
• In many cultures there are reports of such people being closely involved with a spiritual vocation, as priests, shamans or other forms of spiritual leadership, or in warfare.
• Sadly, many of these cultures were supressed or destroyed when patriarchy came into the world, and then patriarchal Jewish and Christian faiths imposed anti-gay values wherever they had influence. This supression was initially in the Middle East and Europe, then later across the world through colonialism.
• Because of the suppression this Intermediate Type history has been forgotten or denied, but the evidence is still there, and can be uncovered with care.

Intermediate Types is an umbrella term used by Carpenter, in the very early years of LGBTQIA+ research, to denote people who appear to fit somewhere between the poles of male and female in some aspect of their being. Such people might be labelled LGBTQIA+ in a modern Western culture, but those people living in different historical cultures may have had different understandings about their own identity and behaviour, and applied different labels to themselves.

How we use such labels and cultural understandings is a contested field, especially when comparing different societies across history. In the last video in this theme I describe the approach I use in my own work.

For more information - the Definitions and Laws webpage lists, defines and explains the various ideas used in the project in significant detail, and with supporting references.

	Int1.1. Edward Carpenter's Intermediate Types. How to uncover LGBTQ+ History YouTube Video - (February 2024) Describing Edward Carpenter's theories on how to explore LGBTQIA+ history. One should look across the world and across history, outside the sphere of influence of patriarchy and Christianity, to escape the distorting effects of anti-gay prejudice.
	Int1.2. Intermediate Types - The Evidence. Stories of Queer People in History Int1.2. Intermediate Types - The Evidence. Stories of Queer People in History - (February 2024) Following on from part 1 - Eight historical examples showing how Intermediate Type people were valued and accepted in cultures across the world and across history. Such people often served their communities in two roles, In the service of Religion (Queer Ministry) and in the service of Warfare (Warrior Love).
	Int1.3. Suppression and Genocide. How Colonialism damaged LGBTQ+ History YouTube Video - (February 2024) This recording describes how as European Colonialism spread across the world, many of the indigenous cultures in which Intermediate Type people had lived were supressed and damaged, to the extent that the memory of them is now all but forgotten. It is time to recover these lost histories.
Texts and Resources Document - A list of all the texts and references used in all three Intermediate Type recordings, also giving recommendations for further reading. The full text of Carpenter's book "Intermediate Types" is available here - Intermediate Types full text. For more about Edward Carpenter see Theme 6 of the switchingview project.
	Int2. How do you tell the History of Homosexual People? YouTube Video - (August 2024) A recording discussing questions like "What exactly is homosexuality?", and "Who gets to define who or what can be described as a homosexual person in history?" These are contested and controversial questions, so it is important I explain the approach I will be using in this switchingview project. Texts and Resources Document - A List of all the texts and references used in this recording, also giving recommendations for further reading.

Finally, can I ask you a favour. I put a lot of work into these recordings, and it would be good if they can be seen by the largest number of people. If you have a friend or colleague who you think would benefit from knowing about these issues, please do pass it on. TELL A FRIEND! - SPREAD THE WORD! I would welcome comments and suggestions on this work - Contact Me. Thank You