New Thinking: Raiding Gay’s the Word & Magnus Hirschfeld

Customs officers raided the London bookshop Gay’s the Word on April 10th 1984 and seized 144 titles. A campaign was mounted after the directors were charged with conspiracy to import indecent books. Dr Sarah Pyke tells Diarmuid Hester about an oral history project which aims to raise awareness of Operation Tiger and how it ties into wider work on a history of queer reading. Dr Ina Linge has been looking at the way LGBTQ+ people used autobiographical writing to critically engage with the science of sexology and how their writing was used by and critiqued the work of sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and a book based on this research called Queer Livability: German Sexual Sciences and Life Writing is coming out in 2023. Ina also hosts a sex and nature salon https://www.comedysalon.co.uk/ and along with other researchers at Exeter University held workshops for LGBTQ+ teenagers exploring climate activism https://www.exeter.ac.uk/research/socialinequality/lgbtqplus/ https://ies.sas.ac.uk/people/sarah-pyke is taking part in an event at the Bodleian on June 8th Queer Bibliography: A Discussion

Diarmuid Hester is at the University of Cambridge and is a New Generation Thinker on the scheme run by BBC Radio 3 and the Arts and Humanities Research Council https://www.diarmuidhester.com/ His book Nothing Ever Just Disappears: Seven Hidden Histories is out in August 2023 You can hear him discussing Rita Mae Brown’s novel Rubyfruit Jungle on an episode of Free Thinking called Stories of Love https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hxhk

This New Thinking episode of the Arts & Ideas podcast was made in partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research Council, part of UKRI. You can find more in a collection called New Research on the Free Thinking programme website https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p03zws90