This Pride Month, join us in celebrating LGBTQ+ history with our specially curated collection of queer history books from Manchester University Press. Our selection offers a rich exploration of the diverse narratives that have shaped the LGBTQ+ community over the centuries. From academic research to captivating personal stories, these books highlight the resilience, struggles, and triumphs of queer individuals throughout history.
Explore our featured titles and gain deeper insights into the pivotal events and figures that have influenced the course of LGBTQ+ rights and culture.
Use code PM30 for 30% off any of the books below!
£12.99
Looking beyond the London-centric narratives of British LGBTQ life, this exciting book explores the queer dimensions of four English cities - Manchester, Leeds, Plymouth and Brighton.
£20.00
A new edition of Jill Liddington's classic work on Anne Lister's extraordinary diaries, which inspired Gentleman Jack
£13.99
Examines the transformation of homosexual men from 'odd' to 'normal' during the tumultuous decades of the 1950s and 1960s.
The history of marriage equality in Ireland
£30.00
Tracing the campaign for marriage equality, this book highlights how this movement and the related referendum result have propelled Ireland from a country perceived as one repressed and controlled by the Catholic church to a country that is now admired as a leader in equality of human rights.
£25.00
This book examines US gay and lesbian leather archives alongside contemporary artistic practices that reframe and renegotiate historical source material, creating a queer politics of the present.
£19.99
This book is an experiment in writing an American sexual history, spanning the spectrum of queer, trans, and the allegedly 'normal'. The sexual histories in this book are those where pornography and sexual research are indistinguishable; where personal obsession becomes tomorrow's archive.
£19.99
An edited collection on Alan Hollinghurst, one of Britain's leading contemporary novelists with an outstanding international reputation.
£19.99
Takes stock of the 'new British queer history'. Topics range from newspaper reporting of sodomy cases, to homoerotic representations in art, to queer autobiographical accounts, to oral histories of Scottish lesbians, and much else besides.
£19.99
Detailed study of same-sex desire and military authority in the British Armed Forces between 1939 and 1945
£25.00
Carefully considers the complicated relationships between the modern queer bachelor and interior design, material culture and aesthetics in Britain between 1885 and 1957
£85.00
Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. Much of Jarman's powerful, imaginative response to HIV/AIDS can be found in his remarkable books, which Alexandra Parsons argues were critical in changing the cultural terms of queer representation in the 1980s and 1990s.
£85.00
This book historicises Anglo-American queer theory by excavating a rival epistemology that advanced a communist sexuality during the Cold War. It proposes a new dialectical theory that inserts socialist ideas and films in the epistemology of queer studies.
£25.00
A major study of solo performance in the UK and Europe that examines the significance of exceptional lives in neoliberal times. With case studies drawn from theatre, comedy and live art, it combines insights from gender studies, politics and sociology to present a new queer account of subjectivity at the start of the twenty-first century.
£85.00
Horizontal together is an up-close look at the cultural and political power of the langourous queer body, combining historical research, queer theory and the analysis of bodily gestures. The book presents a dancerly story of 1960s art focusing on Andy Warhol, underground filmmaker Jack Smith and experimental dance star Fred Herko.
£19.99
A first rate collection of essays on queer Gothic, ranging from 'Frankenstein' to George Eliot, E.M.Forster to Michael Jackson. Provides a chronological investigation of the Gothic from the eighteenth century to the present day and in doing so produces a new way of reading the Gothic tradition.
£25.00
This book provides a new way of understanding queer culture. The frameworks offered by queer theory-steeped in philosophical, theoretical and political commitments to 'difference'-have obscured the important investments in 'sameness' that have been central to queer history. Same old dwells on these investments and elucidates their significance.
Regulating homosexuality in Soviet Russia, 1956-91
£85.00
This book examines the way homosexuality snaked through expert discourse in Soviet courts, prisons, science and education, helping us understand the history of sexuality in Russia and the USSR.
£19.99
One of the few books to address the horror film from any kind of critical position.. Unique - The first history of the horror film to approach it from a queer perspective.. Written with detail and thoroughness...
£18.99
This exciting history of male prostitution in New York, the first detailed history of the hustler, draws the reader into the fascinating sexual culture of postwar America. its subject matter and style will appeal to a wide range of readers, especially those interested in the histories of sex, the city, masculinity, and American culture.
£17.99
Based on unique and previously undiscovered sources, this is the first book to tell the story of the oppression of LBGT people in the USSR.
£18.99
The authoritative sequel to Female Fortune, continuing the diaries of Anne Lister up to 1838, when she was at her most powerful.
£30.00
What makes an object queer? This collection considers the question in relation to lesbian, gay and transgender communities across time, cultures and space. Written by established and up-and-coming authors, the sixty-three chapters range from ancient Egyptian tomb paintings to political placards, snapshots, sex toys and the smartphone.
Gay men and the Left in post-war Britain
£19.99
When the personal became political it changed British politics for ever. Gay men and the left, available in paperback for the first time, explores the enormous impact that gay politics had on the landscape of post-war Britain.
£25.00
Luminous presence: Derek Jarman's life-writing is the first book to analyse the prolific writing of queer icon Derek Jarman. Much of Jarman's powerful, imaginative response to HIV/AIDS can be found in his remarkable books, which Alexandra Parsons argues were critical in changing the cultural terms of queer representation in the 1980s and 1990s.
£25.00
This book historicises Anglo-American queer theory by excavating a rival epistemology that advanced a communist sexuality during the Cold War. It proposes a new dialectical theory that inserts socialist ideas and films in the epistemology of queer studies.
£20.00
The fascinating story of fearless and innovative publishers and authors who wrote their own sexual revolution before the sexual revolution.
Now that's what I call a history of the 1980s
£14.99
Now that's what I call a history of the 1980s is a political and cultural History of Britain in the long 1980s in ten objects or moments. Neither a top down history, nor nostalgic celebration, it reframes the decade around local, national, and global politics of gender, race, age and sexuality.
The history of marriage equality in Ireland
£85.00
Tracing the campaign for marriage equality, this book highlights how this movement and the related referendum result have propelled Ireland from a country perceived as one repressed and controlled by the Catholic church to a country that is now admired as a leader in equality of human rights.
£19.99
Drawing on a rich array of source materials including previously unseen, fascinating (and often quite moving) oral histories, archival and news media sources, 'Curing queers' examines the plight of men who were institutionalised in British mental hospitals to receive 'treatment' for homosexuality and transvestism, and the perceptions and actions of the men and women who nursed them.
Queer Muslim diasporas in contemporary literature and film
£25.00
This book interrogates the depiction of same-sex desire in contemporary literature and film by artists of Muslim heritage. .