Posts by Sofia:

On this day in queerstory: fashion designer Mary Quant is born

On February 11, 1930, Mary Quant was born in London. While not publicly identified as queer, Quant’s impact on gender, sexuality, and self-presentation was unmistakable. Her designs—most famously the miniskirt—helped dismantle rigid post-war norms around femininity, propriety, and sexual expression. For queer women, gender-nonconforming people, and those experimenting with presentation outside traditional binaries, Quant’s work […]

On this day in queerstory: playwright Bertolt Brecht is born

On February 10, 1898, Bertolt Brecht was born in Augsburg, Germany. While Brecht’s sexuality has long resisted neat categorisation, his work—and the personal networks surrounding it—played a formative role in queer readings of power, desire, and social performance. His theatre dismantled bourgeois morality, exposed masculinity as constructed, and made space for ambiguity rather than resolution. […]

On this day in queerstory: trans progress in the Netherlands

On February 9, 1897, medical and legal debates around same-sex desire were circulating openly in parts of Central Europe, particularly within German-language sexological journals. Correspondence dated to early February shows physicians and jurists exchanging case studies that challenged the idea of homosexuality as criminal pathology. These discussions—often cautious, often compromised—nonetheless marked a shift: queer lives […]

On this day in queerstory: fighting for equality through history

On February 8, 1901, debates around sexuality and criminal law were already circulating in medical and legal circles across Germany and Austria, where sexologists associated with early reform movements exchanged drafts, letters, and case studies arguing against the criminalisation of same-sex desire. While these discussions rarely appeared in popular press, archival correspondence dated to early […]

On this day in queerstory: Suzy Eddie Izzard is born

On February 7, 1913, medical and legal discussions around homosexuality were already circulating publicly in Germany, where sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and allies continued to press for reform of Paragraph 175. Correspondence and committee notes from early February that year show renewed coordination between physicians, jurists, and activists arguing that same-sex desire should be understood as […]

On this day in queerstory: Oscar Wilde’s legal troubles begin

On February 6, 1895, the fallout from Oscar Wilde’s confrontation with the Marquess of Queensberry was already hardening into legal inevitability. Wilde’s decision to pursue libel proceedings earlier that winter had triggered a chain reaction that, by early February, had mobilised police surveillance, legal preparation, and press speculation about homosexuality at the highest levels of […]