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Genders and Sexualities in Histor y

Queer Youth Histories

EDITED BY DANIEL MARSHALL

Genders and Sexualities in History

Series Editors
Joanna Bourke
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK

Sean Brady
Birkbeck College
University of London
London, UK

Matthew Champion
Australian Catholic University
Melbourne, Australia
Palgrave Macmillan’s series, Genders and Sexualities in History, accom-
modates and fosters new approaches to historical research in the fields
of genders and sexualities. The series promotes world-class scholarship,
which concentrates upon the interconnected themes of genders, sexuali-
ties, religions/religiosity, civil society, politics and war.
Historical studies of gender and sexuality have, until recently, been
more or less disconnected fields. In recent years, historical analyses of
genders and sexualities have synthesised, creating new departures in his-
toriography. The additional connectedness of genders and sexualities
with questions of religion, religiosity, development of civil societies, poli-
tics and the contexts of war and conflict is reflective of the movements in
scholarship away from narrow history of science and scientific thought,
and history of legal processes approaches, that have dominated these
paradigms until recently. The series brings together scholarship from
Contemporary, Modern, Early Modern, Medieval, Classical and Non-
Western History. The series provides a diachronic forum for scholarship
that incorporates new approaches to genders and sexualities in history.

More information about this series at

https://link.springer.com/bookseries/15000
 Daniel Marshall
Editor

Queer Youth Histories

Editor
Daniel Marshall
Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University
Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2730-9479 ISSN 2730-9487 (electronic)

Genders and Sexualities in History
ISBN 978-1-137-56549-5 ISBN 978-1-137-56550-1 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56550-1

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021

The author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work
in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction
on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are
exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and
information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication.
Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied,
with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have
been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published
maps and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: © Stockbyte/Getty Images

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Limited
The registered company address is: The Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW,
United Kingdom
 For my parents, Valda Lesley Marshall and Roger Arthur Marshall, who
first taught me about history, and to all the queer kids who grew up thinking
they were the only ones.
 Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the work of many hands and it is a daunting
task to acknowledge all of the labour that has brought it into the world.
In so many ways this book has been created from many different com-
munities and environments which have nurtured precious conversations
about sexual and gender difference and ideas about youth over time, so
any list of acknowledgements which singles people out will by defini-
tion fall short. So, please forgive any omissions, but I want to specifically
acknowledge the contributions of the following people.
As an edited volume, this book gathers together a variety of voices
and so my thanks are to the writers who have contributed to this col-
lection. As you will see as you make your way through the book, each
writer brings with them their own deep and profound engagement with
our central muse—this thing called ‘queer youth history’—even while
in each of their hands it becomes something quite different again and
again. Through their words, these writers craft a wide variety of accounts
which shed light not only on a particular approach to the subject, but on
whole histories of investigation behind each essay. Open the door of any
given chapter and there one finds corridors leading into different disci-
plinary traditions, a variety of socio-political contexts and an array of dif-
ferent research projects and lived histories. I thank the writers for sharing
their scholarship so that we can bring these pieces together in this way to
ask the collective question: what is queer youth history?

vii
viii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As part of the work toward this book I organised a symposium on

the topic at The Weeks Centre for Social and Policy Research at London
South Bank University. The Weeks Centre was a vibrant and exciting
venue to host these conversations and I am very grateful for its role in
helping nurture this book into being. I want to thank everyone at the
Weeks Centre who helped make the symposium happen—especially
Jeffrey Weeks, Yvette Taylor, Tracey Reynolds, Nicola Horsley and
Beverley Goring. I am also very grateful to everyone who presented at
and attended the symposium and to everyone who expressed interest in
being involved with the symposium and with the book. In particular, I
want to express my deep gratitude to Jeffrey Weeks for his longstand-
ing and generous support for this book, and for the inspiration of his
work. I’m also grateful to Jeffrey and Mark McNestry, and Anna Hickey-
Moody and Penny Moody, for their wonderful hospitality in London. I
also worked on this project during my time as a visiting scholar at The
Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York and I want to thank everyone there. I also want
to thank Jonathan Ned Katz, Joan Nestle and Matt Cook.
In Australia, Deakin University has supported work on this book
in a variety of ways and I am very grateful for the intellectual stimula-
tion provided by the Faculty of Arts and Education at Deakin, includ-
ing my colleagues and students in Gender and Sexuality Studies, Writing
and Literature and the School of Communication and Creative Arts
more generally. I also want to express my heartfelt appreciation to the
Australian Queer Archives and all of the volunteers who have built
AQuA and who keep the Archives going. I have been very fortunate to
receive encouragement and intellectual stimulation for this book in
many different ways from many people. In particular, many thanks to:
Peter Aggleton, Rob Cover, Robyn Dwyer, Laniyuk Garcon, Anna
Hickey-Moody, Don Hill, Dino Hodge, Gary Jaynes, Michal Morris,
Kevin Murphy, Di Otto, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Geoffrey Robinson,
Rachel Sanderson, Eliza Smith, Susan Talburt, and Zeb Tortorici. Special
thanks to my parents, Val and Roger, my sister Katrina and her children
(Caitlin, Ashley, Emily and Lachlan) and Duane Duncan for their love
and support.
I also wish to acknowledge the Wurundjeri People of the Kulin
Nations, the traditional owners of the land where I did much of the work
on this book.
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ix

Of course, this book would not have been possible without the tire-
less work of everyone at Palgrave. In particular, I am very grateful to
Carmel Kennedy, Emily Russell, Preetha Kuttiappan and the whole pro-
duction team for all of their work in helping to bring this manuscript to
publication. I am also very grateful to Clare Mence for initially reach-
ing out to me about the prospect of publishing this book with Palgrave,
and to Angharad Bishop. I am also very grateful to the editors of the
Genders and Sexualities in History book series for giving this book a
home. Thanks are also due to the design team for their work designing
the cover and to Zacharia Bruckner and Capstone Editing staff for their
help preparing the manuscript for publication. Thanks also to Sally Pope
for creating the book’s index. I also want to express my thanks on behalf
of the authors to the anonymous readers of this proposal and manu-
script. Bringing queer work into the world is never something to take for
granted and I have been very humbled by the work everyone has under-
taken to help create this book.
This book could not have been written without the queer histories
that have come before it—histories of political struggle, activist scholar-
ship, fierce living and defiant efforts to keep these things within living
memory. In many ways it is written for queer youth in history—includ-
ing all those queer kids we might have known but didn’t or could have
been but weren’t—and for queer kids today who might come to know
the past differently and thus see the prospect of new futures.
 Contents

1 What Is Queer Youth History? 1

Daniel Marshall

2 Toward Psychosexual Development: Preliminaries

to Queer Youth Prehistory 41
Diederik F. Janssen

3 G. Stanley Hall and Perverse Plasticity in Modern

Adolescence 75
Don Romesburg

4 Same-Sex Desire and Young New Zealanders Before

1950 107
Chris Brickell

5 “We Will Never Betray You, Brothers and Sisters”:

Queer Youth and the Intellectual History of Gay
Liberation Across the Anglo-American World 135
Scott de Groot

6 “Cherishing All the Children of the Nation Equally”:

Gay Youth Organisation and Activism in Ireland 169
Patrick James McDonagh and Páraic Kerrigan

xi
xii CONTENTS

7 The “New” Trans Child: Pioneering Families

and Documentary Television 193
Jessica Ann Vooris

8 Between Norms and Differences: The Online

Histories of Québec’s Queer Youth 225
Roberto Ortiz Núñez and Dominique Meunier

9 The Print Culture of Bombay Dost: Engaging the

“Recent Past” of Queer Sexuality in India 243
Pawan Singh

10 Tuning into Yourself: Queer Coming of Age

and Music 265
Marion Wasserbauer

11 Escaping to a Digital Congregation: LGBTQIA

Mormon Youth on Tumblr and the Rise and Decline
of Queerstake 291
David Eichert

12 Historical and Contemporary Silences:

The Experiences of Queer Muslim Youth 317
Shanon Shah

13 Schoolgirl Lesbians in Hong Kong: (A)Historicity,

Temporality, and Survival 347
Yuk Ying Sonia Wong

14 Coda: Growing Up Needing the Past—An

Activist’s Reflection on the History of LGBT
History Month in the UK 371
Sue Sanders

15 Coda: Being a Young Gay Person in the 1970s—

Reflections on Reading Young, Gay and Proud 381
Karen Charman
 CONTENTS xiii

16 Coda: Small Histories 393

Laniyuk

17 Afterword: Thoughts on “Queer,” “Youth,”

and “Histories” 403
Jeffrey Weeks

Index 411
 Notes on Contributors

Chris Brickell is Professor of Gender Studies at the University of

Otago, New Zealand. His research focuses on the connections between
sexuality, gender and identity, drawing on sociological and histori-
cal approaches. Previous books include Mates & Lovers: A History of
Gay New Zealand (2008), Teenagers: The Rise of Youth Culture in New
Zealand (2017) and, with Judith Collard, Queer Objects (2019).
Karen Charman is a Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Victoria
University, Melbourne, Australia. She is the founder of the Public
Pedagogies Institute and editor of the Journal of Public Pedagogies. Dr
Charman’s research interests are in the intersections of public pedagogy,
curriculum, memory, psychoanalysis and public history.
Scott de Groot is a Curator at the Canadian Museum for Human
Rights and an Associate of the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian
History at McMaster University.
David Eichert is a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics,
where he studies how sexual violence is interpreted by international law
experts. He holds degrees from Brigham Young University, New York
University, and Cornell Law School.
Diederik F. Janssen is completing a PhD in medical history at
Maastricht University, The Netherlands. His work has appeared in
the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, History of
Psychiatry, Medical History, the Canadian Bulletin of Medical History,

xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Psychoanalysis and History, the History of Psychology, the Journal of the

History of Sexuality, and elsewhere.
Páraic Kerrigan is a Teaching Fellow with the School of Information
and Communication Studies at University College Dublin. His research
pertains to the dynamics of diversity in the media industry and its pro-
duction cultures, specifically centered around Ireland’s LGBT com-
munity along with a focus on digital media cultures and platform
governance. He has just released his first book, LGBTQ Visibility, Media
and Sexuality in Ireland (Routledge 2021). He has also published a
number of articles on media work and workers in the creative industry
and has written about how social media technologies have responded
to contemporary identity politics. His new co-authored book Media
Graduates as Work (2021) is forthcoming from Palgrave.
Laniyuk is a Larrakia, Kungarakan, Gurindji and Breton writer and
performer of poetry and short memoir. She contributed to the book
Colouring the Rainbow: Blak, Queer and Trans Perspectives in 2015, and
has been published online, as well as in print poetry collections such as
UQP’s 2019 Solid Air and 2020 Fire Front. She is completing her first
collection of work to be published through Magabala Books.
Daniel Marshall is Senior Lecturer in Literature in the School of
Communication and Creative Arts, and the Convenor of Gender and
Sexuality Studies, at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. Daniel’s
publications include the co-edited books Secret Histories of Queer
Melbourne (Australian Lesbian & Gay Archives, 2011, reprinted 2017)
and Youth, Sexuality and Sexual Citizenship (Routledge, 2018), co-ed-
ited collections of the peer-reviewed journals Sex Education, Radical
History Review, The Review of Education, Pedagogy & Cultural Studies
and Hecate: an interdisciplinary journal of Women’s Liberation and
essays published in journals like Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical
Humanities, the International Journal of Cultural Studies and the
Journal of Homosexuality. Daniel is a former President of the Australian
Queer Archives, establishing its Queer Youth Education Project in 2012.
Patrick James McDonagh received his PhD from the European
University Institute in 2019. His thesis explored the history of gay and
lesbian activism in the Republic of Ireland from 1973 to 1993. He has
published articles in the Journal of the History of Sexuality and Journal
of Irish Economic and Social History as well as a book chapter in From
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Sodomy Laws to Same-Sex Marriage: International Perspectives since 1789,

eds. Sean Brady and Mark Seymour (Bloomsbury, 2019). He was the
guest editor of the 10th volume of Studi Irlandesi: A Journal of Irish
Studies, titled ‘Minorities in/and Ireland’. His first book, Gay and
Lesbian Activism in the Republic of Ireland, 1973–1993, will be published
by Bloomsbury Academic in 2021.
Dominique Meunier worked in the Département de Communication,
Université de Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada. Her research interests
concerned the everyday practices of teenagers and young adults, and
information and communication technologies.
Roberto Ortiz Núñez is part-time professor in the Communications
Department, University of Ottawa, Canada. He has been a community
organizer working with and for 2SLBGTQ+ communities in Canada
since 2009.
Don Romesburg is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at
Sonoma State University, USA. His research interests include sexual-
ity and gender in U.S. history, childhood and adolescence, transgender
studies, race and sexuality, and queer performance and popular culture.
Sue Sanders is Professor Emeritus of Harvey Milk Institute, USA, and
Chair of Schools OUT UK, the LGBT Education Charity. With the
help of the Schools Out committee, she instituted the UK’s first LGBT
History Month which launched in December 2004 at Tate Modern. She
regularly appears on TV and radio programmes dealing with equality and
LGBT issues and is a keynote speaker and workshop leader in many con-
ferences dealing with diversity, homophobia, and LGBT issues.
Shanon Shah is the Director of Faith for the Climate, a UK-based net-
work focusing on faith-based climate action, and conducts research at the
Information Network Focus on Religious Movements (Inform). He is
also Tutor in Interfaith Relations at the University of London’s Divinity
programme and previously lectured in religious studies at the University
of Kent and King’s College London. Previous publications include The
Making of a Gay Muslim: Religion, Sexuality and Identity in Malaysia
and Britain (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).
Pawan Singh is a media studies scholar and holds a PhD in
Communication from University of California, San Diego. His work
examines privacy contestations around sexual identity, biometric
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

verification and technological mediation of life in India within a transna-

tional framework of global privacy rights advocacy. As a New Generation
Network Scholar in contemporary histories at Deakin University, he
undertook a project on privacy, data protection and the politics of iden-
tity’s recognition in the Indian context. He has also worked as a lan-
guage translation and media consultant for the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology for a project to track Hindi media coverage of development
issues in India.
Jessica Ann Vooris (they/them) is a Visiting Assistant Professor
of WGSS at Depauw University, in Indiana. Jess has also taught at
Dickinson College and Amherst College, and their research focuses on
transgender and gender-creative children, and kids who perform drag.
Find more on their blog jvoor.wordpress.com.
Marion Wasserbauer obtained her PhD in Social Sciences at the
University of Antwerp, Belgium (2018). LGBTQ topics are cen-
tral in her work and activism. Her post-doctoral research at Radboud
University and University Medical Center in Nijmegen, Netherlands,
focuses on diversity in sex and gender; as a guest lecturer at the
University of Antwerp, she teaches on popular culture and diversity.
Jeffrey Weeks is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at London South Bank
University, UK, and is amongst the earliest academics of gay men’s stud-
ies in Britain that emerged from the Gay Liberation Front and the Gay
Left, of which he was a founding member. He has authored a number
of books on sexuality and homosexuality, including Coming Out (1977),
Sex, Politics and Society (1981), Sexuality and Its Discontents (1985),
Invented Moralities (1995), and What is Sexual History? (2016). His
most recent book is a memoir, Between Worlds: A Queer Boy from the
Valleys (2021). In 2012 he was appointed Officer of the Order of the
British Empire (OBE) for services to social science.
Yuk Ying Sonia Wong is currently working as Lecturer for the Gender
Studies Programme at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
 List of Figures

Fig. 4.1 Harry Perry (left) and Charlie Blackburn on the set
of Pirates of Penzance, taken by Robert Gant (1889)
(Courtesy of The Alexander Turnbull Library,
Wellington—PA1-q-962-12-3) 111
Fig. 4.2 Ernie Webber scrapbook cutting. “Maero” was Ernie’s
own nickname, although its origins are unclear (Courtesy
of Hocken Collections, Dunedin—MS-3333/019) 118
Fig. 4.3 Photograph of Ernie Webber with his dog (Courtesy
of Hocken Collections, Dunedin—MS-3333/020) 119
Fig. 4.4 Ernie Webber during Capping Week (Courtesy
of Hocken Collections, Dunedin—MS-3333/019) 120
Fig. 10.1 Ani di Franco and Skunk Anansie in Nina’s CD collection 273
Fig. 10.2 Screen captures from the music video to Skunk Anansie’s
“Secretly” 280

xix
 CHAPTER 1

What Is Queer Youth History?

Daniel Marshall

In reflections on living a queer life, from historical accounts of the diver-

sity of sexuality and gender in distant times to personal reflections on
the intimate vagaries of growing up, one of the recurring themes is won-
der.1 The memoirist looks back in awe at how one came to be at all—a
singular queer figure growing up in an apparently straight world. From
the vantage point of a secure queer adulthood, queer youth is often ret-
rospectively framed as a magical time, if also often a terrifying one, as
the queer adult reflects on how they managed to emerge out of such a
scene of impossibility. This is the queer youth as an aberration, a freak,
a mythical and fabled figure, a unicorn, an alien.2 Queer adulthood has,
historically, become the experience of living with the realisation that you
have been that thing that apparently could not exist—the strange arrival,
unexpected and unprepared for, emerging from a void or portal in every-
day life of which, inexplicably, most other people seem innocent and
unaware. Amidst the cis-normativity and compulsory heterosexuality of
regular arrangements, the queer child is retrospectively seen as having

D. Marshall (*)
Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin University,
Melbourne, VIC, Australia
e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2021 1

D. Marshall (ed.), Queer Youth Histories, Genders and Sexualities
in History, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56550-1_1
2 D. MARSHALL

instantiated a new possibility. As the queer adult looks back, their child-
hood becomes evidence not only that there was a space for their differ-
ence, but they themselves were the rupture that produced the space, a
space pregnant with all of the queer possibilities which the adult now
aligns with that starting point. As both the pregnant space and the sub-
ject issued from such fecundity, the queer subject is often described as
a miraculous happening. Queer life, then, becomes the expression and
unfolding of its own mysterious occurrence—an exquisite and profound
labour.
For queers and their spectators, queer life attracts attention because its
arrival is a riddle. Where do queers come from?3 This singular, powerful
question has given rise to vast enterprises that are startling in their diver-
sity: from eugenicist efforts to deduce the biological or cultural causes of
gender and sexual differences in order to stamp them out to queer pro-
jects of scholarship and community formation designed to honour and
encourage the very opposite.4 The work of queer history—that eclectic
field of scholarship which investigates the histories of sexual and gen-
der difference—has always had a unique, albeit troubled, relationship to
questions of aetiology, origins, and development because such questions
have been woven so tightly into conventional understandings of both
history and gender and sexual difference.5 Indeed, this doubling down
on the demand to engage with the past as a study of origins (whether
personal or far broader) (and resistance to this demand) is a unique,
defining feature of queer history as a field of investigation. This has been
demonstrated by the way in which queer history has been characterised
in the past by debates about things like essentialist, transhistorical lines
of homosexual heritage or teleological structures of narrating queer his-
tory in line with uncritical, unidirectional, and often racialised visions of
progress.
Contemporary queer history builds prominently on the groundbreak-
ing work of gay and lesbian historians of the 1970s who often resisted the
‘doubled’ expectation that queer history should speak to a question of
origins, by pointing not to aetiology but to the documentation of what
we might now describe as historical queer proliferation as the primary his-
torical project. In this transition from a focus on cause to effects, founda-
tional work in the 1970s developed as a project focused on unearthing,
accumulating, documenting, and presenting evidence of the queer lives
people had lived in the past. By doing this, such evidence demonstrated
that even though an aetiological explanation remained elusive, queer lives
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 3

had nevertheless continued to appear. By demonstrating the existence and

persistence of queer life over time, this early scholarship worked to lift the
burden of aetiology and explanation that fell disproportionately heavily
on queer people and queer history. Instead, this research worked to shift
the critical focus away from queers themselves and to the historical condi-
tions in which queers found themselves. By mapping out the proliferation
of queer lives over time, the 1970s’ historical scholarship focused on doc-
umenting the shifting social, cultural, legal, therapeutic, and economic
conditions within which queer life could be identified. In this way, gay
and lesbian historical scholarship of the liberationist era sought to reframe
historical work less as a practice anchored in the past, and more as one
with an investment in the future. By demonstrating the changes in his-
torical conditions at different points in time enabling queer life to be rec-
ognised in different types of ways, the scholarship of the period produced
historical knowledge as a resource for the future: as a documentation of
changes that had already occurred the historical past becomes evidence of
some future capacity to achieve the changes still required. The queer past
becomes a kind of promise of the changes yet to come.
It is precisely because of these reasons—queer life’s attachment to
both the mystery of aetiology and the phenomenon of rapid change, to
questions of the past and the future—that there has been a profound
naturalisation of the relationship between queer life and the historical
(and by ‘the historical’ I mean to refer to the variety of research ques-
tions, investigative methods, and knowledge forms which are assembled
to study the past). Perhaps more than any other disciplinary knowledge,
it is to history that early figures in gay, lesbian, bisexual and trans studies
turned in their desire to build a world that more fulsomely affirmed sex-
ual and gender difference.6 This emphasis on history reflects the endur-
ing importance of contentious questions about the past (aetiology) and
the future (progress) in understanding queer life. In turn, this histori-
cal emphasis on thinking about sexual and gender difference in histori-
cal terms has meant that ‘history’ as a way of knowing things about sex,
gender, and sexuality has developed a cultural profile and political signif-
icance which distinguishes it from other disciplinary approaches, such as
literature or psychology.
This centrality of history to understanding queer life has had a variety
of implications. Of these, one of the most enduring has been the way
in which it has privileged childhood or youth as areas requiring special
attention. Because, in hegemonic narrative conventions governing the
4 D. MARSHALL

subject, it is childhood as the period of life which is burdened by ques-

tions of origins and causation, it is upon the figure of the queer child
that the cloak of the mystery of aetiology has fallen so heavily. When
gender and sexual differences are recognised as achievements of maturity
that are identified in adulthood, then childhood or youth have typically
been framed as key scenes of development—and, thus, as key sites requir-
ing examination. As the period during which the queerness in the subject
is popularly understood to develop and harden into a certainty, it is to
the scene of the subject’s youth that people have often turned when they
have sought answers to questions of aetiology, causation, or origins: what
is it that happened during this person’s early years which might explain how
they have come to be the way they are today? The developmental cast of
childhood and youth becomes an effective figuration of these broader
questions of origins and development which are so often loaded onto
queer history and queer life. Through repeated questioning, the figure of
the queer child or queer youth has become a central figure in queer his-
tory because it is this figure which has come to embody, more than any
other, the enduring riddle of development or teleology—the riddle of
where queer people come from—which has been such a powerful motor
of the queer historical project. Thus, a study of the role performed by
ideas about childhood, youth, and age in how queer history is often
understood promises to reveal some of the ways that history has been
commonly investigated, structured, narrated, and valued.
Of course, the aetiological riddle of where queers come from is itself
historical, and in the post-liberation period it has undergone signifi-
cant renovation in the context of rapidly shifting depictions and expe-
riences of queer youth life. The historical question “Where do queers
come from?”, with its generalised assumption of cisgendered, heterosex-
ual parenting and the therefore apparently self-evident mystery of how
queer people might issue from such straight unions, no longer holds
with such certainty in a time when dramatic changes in reproductive
technology and the social and economic arrangements of child-rearing
have meant that parenting itself has been queered. At roughly the same
time, the riddle of aetiology and its classical expression in the figure of
the mysterious queer youth has itself been seriously demystified (though
only in specific ways) by the development of new norms and familiar-
ities in relation to youth and sexual and gender diversity which have
grown in tandem with an increased popular awareness, discussion, and
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 5

commodification of queer youth life since the last quarter of the twenti-
eth century. From education programmes in schools to social campaigns
against queer youth suicide,7 and from memoirs and television documen-
taries on growing up queer to YouTube videos and websites produced
by queer young people themselves,8 queer young people have become
practically commonplace features of everyday culture, when once upon
a time they were fabled, exceptional, marginal, and elusive.9 Indeed, the
early twenty-first century has seen the figure of the queer youth emerge
as an emblematic figure of the period, indexing the rapid social changes
which characterise the times. These historical developments in relation to
the figure of the queer youth underline how it continues to be aligned
with development and progress, even while the old questions of aeti-
ology might not carry the same force they once did.10 Here, then, the
enduring significance of the figure of the queer youth in thinking about
queer lives and their histories more generally becomes clear. If, then, we
are interested in pursuing these intersections between queerness, youth,
and history we might ask ourselves how such an investigation might pro-
ceed, and it is to this question that I now turn.

What is queer youth history?

This book brings together a range of contributions under the idea of

‘queer youth histories’. This idea is a provocation—a provocation to crit-
ically reflect on the roles performed by ideas about youth in the identifi-
cation, production, narration, interpretation, and valuing of histories of
sexual and gender difference. The terms—queer, youth, and history—are
placed alongside each other as an act of agitation. I want the terms to
produce friction: when you place these words next to each other, what
do they do? The formulation ‘queer youth history’ takes as its starting
point that each of these terms is marked by its own categorial insta-
bility. Queer youth history as an idea is situated within those schools
of thought which have long held that the referents of these terms are
not clearly settled or straightforward.11 For instance, since the work of
figures like Margaret Mead and Philippe Ariès, and the critiques and
6 D. MARSHALL

developments prompted by this earlier work, the category of ‘youth’

is now commonly approached from a set of more or less construction-
ist and post-structuralist perspectives, evident in any number of critical
discussions and histories of ideas about ‘childhood’, ‘adolescence’, the
‘girl’, the ‘teenager’, and so on.12
Similarly, ‘queer’ as a term emerged from post-structuralist critiques
of essentialist identity categories and has explicitly been fashioned as a
destabilising term.13 In the queer tradition of shifting a critical focus
from identities to practices, from nouns to verbs, ‘queer’ is a reminder
not only of the historical and cultural contingency of sexual and gender
identity, but also of a particular way in which this term might work ana-
lytically or critically. Rather than using it to designate something, I am
using it here so that it does something. As a designative term—designat-
ing something as loosely defined as sexual and gender difference (against
a similarly volatile idea of the ‘normal’)—it is in many ways a failure
because what it designates is so shaky.
Of course, however, the failure of ‘queer’ is not restricted to its ina-
bility to successfully designate sexual and gender difference, regardless of
how productive that failure may be. As Maddee Clark has argued, part of
the failure of queer politics and thinking has been demonstrated by the
extent to which these efforts remain in many ways so deeply enmeshed in
the power structures of settler colonialism.14 Despite the common desire
to characterise queer work as occupying a renegade space, Clark (affirm-
ing the work of Damien Riggs and Scott Lauria Morgensen, among oth-
ers) has demonstrated how work in this space can often be reluctant to
critically reflect on its own “possessive investment[s] in settler colonial-
ism”,15 and the privileging of non-Indigenous knowledges, languages,
and experiences which this entails.16
Reflecting on “the writing of a history of queer Aboriginality, and of
representing that history and naming that history as queer or LGBTI,”17
Clark resists “the urge for a linear historical recovery of gay Aboriginal
identity”18 and “wonder[s] about the problem of legibility, and the trap-
pings of writing or reading a history with intentions to reveal something
you or someone reading you can recognise”.19 No doubt, ‘queer’ fails to
shake off these problems, as much as it might try to resist the “homog-
enising instinct”20 through a variety of tactics including the problemati-
sation of narrative structure and of an identity-based cultural politics of
recognition which I will expand on later. Thus, Clark is not convinced
that
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 7

the framework of ‘queering’ as a lens from which to understand the experi-

ences of Aboriginal people living under sexualised colonisation can capture
all of the complexity and the violence of the sexual and intimate relation-
ship of settlers to Indigenous peoples.21

Resisting simple legibilities within a settler colonial frame,22 Clark draws

on the work of Aileen Moreton-Robinson to explore “methods to read,
write and articulate an Aboriginal queer history” which “mov[es] away
from the urge to homogenise” by emphasising “difference and multiplic-
ity.”23 As the history of ‘queer’ lengthens, its concerns become more and
more institutionalised and its investments in settler colonialism deepen;
the term becomes more and more problematic, even while that history
can remind us to keep coming back to what we take ‘queer’ to mean and
unpick it by opening up to “difference and multiplicity.”24 As a state-
ment of a problem, then, and not a designation of a solution, the ‘queer’
in queer youth history is here to signal this ongoing history of unsettled
critique. Queer—for want of a better word—is here to remind us that
the problems of recognition and colonial erasures which Clark and oth-
ers draw our attention to are central to the business of how we know
things (or not) about sex, gender, and sexuality and we won’t arrive at
a better word because the problem is less in queer itself and more in the
idea that any one word might be able to adequately do the job of accu-
rate designation. Queer’s failure then is entirely its point—if historical
and cultural contingency is to be taken seriously then any singular term
which aspires to represent or designate all of that difference is bound to
fail. So, we make failure our starting point and as the grounds for our
work: ‘queer’ is here to do the work of always calling into question the
terms under which we come to know anything at all about sex, gender,
and sexuality—including ‘queer’ itself—and how this knowledge links to
prevailing ideas of the normal and the broader regimes of power, espe-
cially within the context of settler colonialism, which produce such ideas.
As ‘queer’ and ‘youth’ are ideas that are situated within their own
intellectual and political histories that present them as troubled propo-
sitions, so too is ‘history’ itself framed by large bodies of work which
call into question what history itself is. Prominent for my purposes
here is the gay and lesbian work towards a people’s history of sexual
and gender difference beginning in the 1970s which I introduced ear-
lier. A key starting point for much of this work was a critical approach
to a singular, authoritative definition of history from which it argued
8 D. MARSHALL

sexual and gender difference had been elided.25 In the introduction to

his field-making work, Gay American History, Jonathan Ned Katz writes,
“We were outlaws against the universe…we were a people perceived out
of time and out of place – socially unsituated, without a history - the
mutant progeny of some heterosexual union, freaks.”26 In a similar vein,
Joan Nestle writes that:

To live without history is to live like an infant, constantly amazed and chal-
lenged by a strange and unnamed world. There is a deep wonder in this
kind of existence, a vitality of curiosity and a sense of adventure that we do
well to keep alive all of our lives. But a people who are struggling against
a world that has decreed them obscene need a stronger bedrock beneath
their feet.27

For Katz and Nestle, it is from histories of sexual and gender differ-
ence that this “bedrock” can be built. As argued earlier, the historical
project which solidified throughout the 1970s set the terms for much of
the work that has happened since as people have laboured to construct
links between sexual and gender difference and understandings of the
historical. Key amongst those terms is a fundamental challenge to the
authority of a dominant model of history. Arguing that gay men, lesbi-
ans, transgender people, and a whole cast of diverse people (in terms of
sex, gender and sexuality) had been written out of, hidden from or mis-
represented in what had thus far passed as history, early scholars in this
field described their work as necessarily involving a wholesale reimagin-
ing of what history was. It was not simply the fact that queer people had
been left out of historical narratives, but a much wider problem about
the production of historical knowledge itself. Prompted by the drama
of exclusion, early scholarship came to ask compelling questions about
the venture of history as an enterprise: not only who counts and who
is included, but who does the work of history, how does it get done,
what forms does it take, who is it for, who ‘owns’ it, and so on. The
leftist politics of many of those people involved in the work in the 1970s
meant that the gay and lesbian or queer historical project was established
not only through the inclusion of new queer content in history, but also
through the innovation of new practices in research, authorship, and dis-
semination. The production of historical scholarship outside of universi-
ties (as with Katz and Nestle), the distribution of historical scholarship
in activist and community journals as opposed to academic journals28
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 9

and the invention of new spaces for the doing of historical work (such
as the Lesbian Herstory Archives in New York and the Australian Queer
Archives in Melbourne) all reflect how the doing of the history of sexual
and gender differences necessarily involved a thoroughgoing, and ongo-
ing, re-evaluation of what ‘history’ was and how it was done.
The trouble with authority which histories of doing LGBTIQ history
install at the heart of a queer understanding of ‘history’ as an idea means
that it sits alongside ‘queer’ and ‘youth’ in productive tension. If none
of these terms is settled, then what could assembling them together as
‘queer youth history’ possibly mean? As outlined at the beginning of this
section, I mean for it to be a provocation—as unstable ideas themselves,
I bring queer, youth, and history together so that these ideas might rub
up against each other, create uncertainty, and thereby help sponsor crit-
ical reflections on the roles performed by age in histories of sexual and
gender difference. In the idea of ‘queer youth history’, I want each of
these individual terms to, as it were, ask questions of the others. How
does the idea of ‘youth’ change when we think about it historically and
in terms of sexual and gender difference? How does our thinking about
sexual and gender difference change when we think about the histo-
ries of these differences and the roles performed by ideas about youth
in understanding these histories and differences? How does the idea
of ‘history’ change when we think about it as a knowledge form struc-
tured in various ways by ideas about sexual and gender difference and
ideas about youth? In other words, how do we think differently about
history when we consider it as a knowledge form focused on sexuality,
gender, and youth as intersecting types of difference? If some of us are
sure enough there are things called ‘queer history’ and ‘youth history’
(as shaky as those ideas might be), what are the implications of bringing
them together? And if histories of sexuality or gender can be identified as
having particular defining characteristics, what might distinguish histories
of queer youth? Because age, gender, sexuality, and history are all ideas
which, as we have begun to explore, are intermeshed in various ways, I
am introducing the term as a thinking space to investigate their interrela-
tionships more deeply. As a somewhat heuristic gesture, this next section
outlines five key characteristics of investigations in queer youth history.

Characteristic one: Seeing queer youth in history

10 D. MARSHALL

Insofar as queer youth history is designed to provoke a particular set of

reflections and draw attention to important questions in queer history
and contemporary studies of queer youth, it can be characterised by five
key themes. Not all queer youth history work will exhibit these charac-
teristic themes but fleshing them out provides a useful way of character-
ising much of the work in the field that has already been done, while also
pointing towards important future work. This discussion of characteris-
tics will also provide the framework for a more detailed discussion about
what queer youth history might be.
The first characteristic of queer youth history is the observation that
queer youth appear almost everywhere. Queer youth histories recog-
nise that young people and ideas about youth have long played roles in
queer history, and they draw attention to these roles. Therefore, queer
youth histories in this instance reference a way of looking at the histo-
ries we already have—a way of recognising and focusing on young peo-
ple amidst the broader historical narrative. For example, young people
featured heavily in the emergent gay and lesbian historical narratives
produced since the 1970s. For instance, in Kennedy and Davis’s Boots of
Leather, Slippers of Gold, women’s recollections of their girlhood experi-
ences formed an important part of the new historical knowledges emerg-
ing from that groundbreaking work. Similarly, Katz’s Gay American
History features young people throughout. From “Thomas Granger,
a teen-ager” who was executed in 1642 after having been “discovered
in an act of bestiality (or ‘buggery’)”29 to nineteenth century “Juvenile
delinquents,”30 and from institutionalised boys and girls who were for-
cibly castrated to “prevent ‘excessive masturbation and pervert [sic] sex-
ual acts’”31 to a young man committed to undergo “electro-convulsive
treatment” against his will by his parents in 1964,32 young people appear
almost everywhere in foundational gay and lesbian history.
These examples are indicative of how young people have often
appeared in queer history—as criminals, victims, vulnerable figures,
and recollections of adult selves. Dig deeper, and we can observe how
young people have been central not only to the rise of modern gay and
lesbian or queer history, but also to the emergence of the modern tax-
onomy of gender and sexual difference itself. This is demonstrated by
the crucial role of youth in seminal work by founding figures in the
modern sciences of sex and sexuality, including Richard von Krafft-
Ebing, Havelock Ellis, and Sigmund Freud. Indeed, the central role
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 11

of youth in queer thinking persisted throughout the twentieth cen-

tury, as is demonstrated by the significance of youth in influential work
theorising sexuality in the context of a nascent sexuality studies (the
importance of the “masturbating child” as one of Foucault’s four fig-
ures in his History of Sexuality33 and the prominence of discussions
about youth sexuality in Gayle Rubin’s “Thinking Sex”34 are two influ-
ential examples). Queer youth histories’ first manoeuvre is to identify
this ubiquity of queer youth in queer history—and then to start trou-
bling the homogenising effects of making such a totalising, and risk-
ily essentialising, recognition. The acknowledgment of ubiquity must
be followed by the critical practice of attentiveness—if queer youth are
everywhere, then what distinguishes one appearance from the other?
How are they different? The queer child in the case notes of the sexol-
ogist must surely be different to the one on the couch for Freud, and
Foucault’s masturbating child is distinct from the young people who
Rubin marshals together in her call for developing a theory of sexuality.
The identification of ubiquity is an occasion to remind ourselves that in
the study of sexual and gender difference it is always the difference that
threatens to remain most elusive. Queer youth histories are not, there-
fore, a call for a grand narrative of all the queer youth lost in history
but, rather, a study of the myriad ways in which queer youth—whatever
that means35—can be brought to the front of the stage and seen on
their own terms. They have been standing in plain view of everyone
in the queer histories that we currently have, and by more intensively
focusing on the difference that they present—in terms of gender, sexu-
ality, and age—we can explore new ways to pluralise what queer history
is and how it is done. Queer youth history, then, entails a recognition
of the ubiquity of queer youth and the cultivation of a relevant atten-
tiveness to the differences comprising such apparent ubiquity.
If this first critical move is to recognise the apparent ubiquity of queer
youth, and the foundational role performed by youth and ideas about
youth in the new knowledges and theories of sex, gender, and sexuality
which have developed since the late nineteenth century, then the second
and related move is to bring more explicitly into focus the ways in which
histories of youth have shaped queer history. Generally speaking, queer
histories (and gay, lesbian, and trans histories in particular) have been
produced as fields of knowledge through, among other things, the com-
mon legibility of anxieties about and scandals linked to youth.
12 D. MARSHALL

As we have seen, almost everywhere you look in queer history there

are stories about youth. Whether it is people reflecting on their experi-
ences growing up, anxieties about how people become queer, moral pan-
ics about seduction of the young and recruitment, or political debates
over the age of consent, parental custody, media classification, sex educa-
tion or the appropriate age to commence gender affirmation (and much
more besides), stories about youth are a staple of how the queer past has
been discussed.36 It is significant that young people in queer history have
often received most attention when they index or evidence some type of
trouble. Moral panics appear prominently in homophobic and transpho-
bic versions of queer history as part of a broader political tactic of univer-
salising a conflation of gender and sexual difference with being a danger
to children. This conflation has been so effective that it is part of the
reason why greater attention has not been paid to youth in queer his-
tory. A focus on youth has been seen as risking a reiteration of the hom-
ophobic and transphobic conflation. Queer history has avoided more
explicitly discussing the young people who feature so heavily throughout
queer history, in fear of inciting further allegations which wilfully confuse
homosexuals and transgender people with child abusers. This trauma,
one could argue, has structured queer history in enduring and as yet
largely unexplored ways.
In one sense, then, queer youth histories might be regarded as the
site—a grave site, a marker—to mourn the founding trauma of the his-
torical allegation or suspicion which hangs over so much of queer his-
tory. But, in another sense, queer youth histories might also be fashioned
as a way of speaking back to that foundational trauma or injury. As a
thing in the world—as a mode or type of historical investigation, as an
epistemological field, as a subheading within an archival search or a key-
word for a conference paper or a theme for a public forum—queer youth
histories challenge the stigma produced by conflating gender and sexual
difference with being harmful to children precisely because it does the
vital work of historicising the past which is so often obscured by the ahis-
torical gloss of moral panic. Because queer youth histories draw attention
to the role of youth in queer history, such historical investigations can
explore how these anxieties and moral panics have played such a promi-
nent role in shaping queer history and, crucially, how they have changed
over time. By historicising moral panic and homophobic and transphobic
anxieties linked to youth, it becomes more difficult for these anxieties
and moral panics to play out in the future in the same way as they have
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 13

in the past. What queer youth histories provide, in contrast to the reac-
tionary ahistoricism of moral panic, are the complex and diverse histo-
ries of queer youth lives, and it is in this diversity that we can find the
resources for a more nuanced politics of how to tell stories about the
past as well as the future of queer youth life.
In short, this first characteristic of queer youth histories is about ways
of seeing queer youth in history and how ideas about youth have struc-
tured queer history. As a way of looking at the queer histories that we
already have, it promises to bring into focus new critical and historical
resources for understanding historical differences regarding sexuality,
gender, and youth. It also provides avenues for reflecting on how anx-
ieties in relation to youth, sexuality, and gender have shaped historical
accounts of queer life, thereby encouraging further historicisation of
such. In these ways, forging the identification of queer youth histories
as a field of investigation draws greater attention to scholarship already
doing this work. Having organised this disparate work into a loose col-
lectivity it also promises to reorient the broader field of queer history as
it draws attention to the often-unremarked role of youth in those histo-
ries. By historicising things like moral panics and conflations of gender
and sexual difference with being a danger to children, queer youth his-
tories open up new spaces for queer history to be expressed beyond the
trauma of such allegations and thus cultivate new ways of seeing, talking
about, and understanding queer history in general.

Characteristic two: Building a youth-positive queer history

If the first characteristic of queer youth history is to promote certain

ways of seeing the queer histories that we already have, then the second
characteristic is to gather more histories of youth and gender and sexual
difference. As it is now commonplace to understand any piece of histori-
cal scholarship as an actively built endeavour, replete with the values and
priorities of the builder, it makes sense then to talk about how historical
work can be understood as having ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ values. Taking
this nomenclature from the discourse of sex-positive feminism which was
popularised throughout the 1980s, ‘positive value’ can be understood
as referring to how a particular politics or endeavour can be character-
ised by the way in which something is positively prized or valued. For
14 D. MARSHALL

sex-positive feminism, the term referred to how feminist culture and pol-
itics affirmed and celebrated diverse experiences of sex, gender, and sexu-
ality and prioritised these things in generalist feminist work.37
What does ‘youth-positive’ history mean?38 First, it means allocating
positive value to young people—to their experiences, knowledges, lan-
guages, and the changes in these over time. It also means valuing youth
in and of itself in the context of histories of sexuality and gender—not
just as contextual background or developmental pre-history to the main
game of investigating adult lives. In Willful Subjects, Sara Ahmed dis-
cusses histories of the “willful child”, suggestive of how a youth-positive
history might recognise young people on their own terms.39 Given that
‘youth’ as a period of life is under constant renovation, queer youth his-
tories ask pressing questions about the various factors that comprise the
subject’s experience of youth. How are histories of sexual and gender
difference and youth different according to time and place? For exam-
ple, how do these histories look different before and after the populari-
sation of theories of developmental adolescence, or before and after the
invention of the teenager, or before and after the decriminalisation of
male homosexuality? Building on foundational insights in feminist schol-
arship and politics which explored difference in multiple and intersect-
ing ways,40 youth-positive histories work to identify the differences—in
terms of class, race, bodies, and abilities, among others—that comprise
young people’s historical lived experiences. In doing so they offer pro-
ductive ways to engage with feminist legacies of intersectional theory and
politics by providing a new context for asking old questions about age
as a vector of discrimination, oppression, and resistance. Queer youth
history encourages us to see youth on their own terms and not just as
appendages to a particular identity or set of practices associated with
their eventual adulthood. A history of queer youth who do not become
queer adults and a history of ‘straight’ youth who do are just some of the
types of historical investigation which a youth-centred focus encourages.
If ‘youth-positive’ history describes historical research which values
young people then questions need to be asked not only about the subject
of the history being recorded but about the methods as well. That is, if I
stick with this feminist definition of positivity, then I also need to address
questions about inclusion and participation. Sex-positive feminism of
the 1980s grew out of a particular—and influential—interpretation of
Women’s Liberation as a politics of and for the people, grounded in
their experiences of everyday lives. For sex-positive feminists, it followed
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 15

that if diverse experiences of sex were important to many women then

this difference needed to be part of feminist politics if this politics was
going to stay true to its liberationist origins. In this tradition, if queer
youth history is to be a knowledge practice which values young peo-
ple then it needs to be a practice which is embedded in their everyday
lives and which involves them. In different parts of the world you can
see youth-positive initiatives underway, as more and more young people
are actively getting involved in the work of queer history.41 The active
involvement of young people in the work of queer youth history is key
because one of the limitations of the contemporary expansion in rep-
resentations of queer youth life is that these representations are usually
depicted in ahistorical terms, as if the gay teen emerged fully formed as
a concept out of thin air sometime in the late twentieth century. As the
twenty-first century witnesses the expanding growth of a whole pano-
ply of well-being programmes, policies, and resources to promote queer
youth belonging and inclusion, youth-positive queer history has the
potential to bring young people today into contact with the queer past in
ways which depathologise approaches to queer youth support and pro-
mote new ways for queer young people to engage in culture—and life—
beyond a therapeutic frame.42
Of course, involving young people in the doing of queer youth his-
tory raises challenges not radically dissimilar to the challenges of collab-
orating with young people in historical research in general. With much
historical research concentrated in academic settings, there are many
obvious differences regarding how academic adults and school-aged
children might be able to work together. These differences include, but
are not limited to: different ways of talking about the work (e.g., how
accessible are the sometimes technical vocabularies of queer history?);
different interests regarding what ought to be investigated; different
motivations in doing the work; different skills in conducting the research
and the analysis; differences in terms of what a valuable outcome, out-
put or expression of the research might be; and different conditions for
the work (e.g., the emphasis on academic publication, the culture of peer
review, the professionalised space of tenured academic work, and the
often lengthy timelines linked to academic research are in sharp contrast
to young people’s often unsalaried engagement with these questions,
their different schedules of school and part-time work, and their situa-
tion not within professionalised spaces of the university but in the spaces
of the school, home, and other social youth settings).
16 D. MARSHALL

Thus, this second characteristic of queer youth history means not only
reflecting on who is in the histories that are collected and how these his-
tories might more explicitly focus on youth; it also means reflecting on
the concerns about how this history work is done which are prompted by
the first question of inclusion: how can queer young people be included
in the gathering of historical research, in its analysis and in its dissemina-
tion? And, how might historical methods, topics of investigation, analy-
ses, and styles and modes of dissemination change and grow as a result
of the involvement of queer young people? Indeed, in what ways might
young people’s contemporary cultural practices be seen as new ways of
doing youth-positive queer history? The mass social media of the early
twenty-first century entail many affordances, including the work by
queer young people of documenting, archiving, analysing, discussing,
and sharing materials about queer life at specific points in time. By put-
ting young people at the centre of the discussion about history, it is not
only queer history which changes but broader understandings of what
history in general is, what it looks like and how it gets done.

Characteristic three: Critical reflection on narrative structure in

history

Ideas about youth are central to narratives of queer history from the
outset—even while moral panics over youth, gender, and sexuality have
given cause for the central role of youth to be elided. The plot of child-
hood and the typical narrative entailments of growing up, coming into
identity, and then coming out into the world in various ways are so cen-
tral to the story of gender and sexual difference that it is hard to imagine
such difference without childhood, youth, adolescence, and the teenage
years as supporting narrative devices. These narrative devices are readily
observable in accounts of queer life which draw developmental lines from
a past to a future in familiar ways, straightening the queerness of the life
through the telling. The familiarity of narrative structures of aetiology
and progress in accounts of queer youth life tell us that such structures
have played an important role in making such lives legible. However, the
exhausting repetition of familiar accounts about growing up queer also
suggests the ways in which these narrative structures burden and over-
determine understandings of queer youth life.43 The repetition invites
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 17

a critical perspective and a critical focus on ‘queer youth histories’ can,

therefore, foreground dramas of narrative on which this formulation
rests while also encouraging a reflection on how we tell stories about sex,
gender, sexuality, time, and difference more generally. In short, a critical
reflection on narrative structure in history promises to help us identify
new ways of talking about these things, and to develop greater narrative
diversity which would then have greater capacity to convey the sexual
and gender diversity under discussion.
The third characteristic of queer youth history is, then, that it incor-
porates a critical reflection on narrative structure. Insofar as history is
always a story about something it is always a form of knowledge which
is expressed through a particular narrative structure. Although a severe
simplification, historical scholarship has traditionally relied on a develop-
mental or progressivist narrative structure, characterised by a beginning,
middle, and end where the ‘beginning’ is framed as the origin of the
‘end’, the ‘middle’ is framed as the difficulties necessarily overcome to
arrive at the ‘end’ and the ‘end’ is presented in conclusive terms, ration-
alising the terms of the whole investigation, and as the denouement
which makes sense of everything that has preceded it.44
And the point here is that narrative structure is hardly an innocent
mechanism—knowledge is never simply presented in narrative, narrative
actively structures the knowledge which is being conveyed. The way we
tell a story encourages people to think about or understand the subject
of the story in particular ways. This is the case here. As suggested at the
beginning of this essay, queer youth history has a unique relationship to
developmental narratives of history because sexual and gender identity, as
well as youth itself, have traditionally been understood in developmen-
tal terms. Thus, the use of developmental narratives in queer history is
always a risky business, threatening as it does to reiterate developmen-
tal understandings of sexuality, gender, and the subject. For queer youth
history, a critical approach to developmental narratives is crucial because
it is developmental understandings of sexuality, gender, and the subject
which have worked to erase and elide queer differences in youth. If queer
youth history maintains that sexual and gender difference are not the
sovereign property of adults—again, acknowledging the historical and
cultural variability built into that term—then it must cultivate ways to
recognise and discuss sexual and gender difference and youth over time
without recourse to the generic developmentalism which has been the
hallmark of popular discussions on this topic.
18 D. MARSHALL

If a youth-positive approach requires that queer young people are rec-

ognised on their own terms and historicised as such, then a crucial part
of this work is narrating young people’s experiences of sexual and gen-
der difference in ways that pertain to the historical and cultural specificity
of those lived experiences, without necessarily needing to make sense of
queer youth life through some kind of anticipatory or retrospective rela-
tionship to adult life.45 As Angus Gordon has demonstrated, throughout
the twentieth century queer youth life was often narrated in anticipatory
or retrospective ways—where the queer youth is discussed in the context
of a future queer identity which the youth will attain in adulthood, or
they are discussed in the context of retrospection, where the queer adult
looks back on the queer young person they once were. In these narra-
tive formulations, Gordon argues, the queerness of the youth is deferred
(either to the future or to the past): the queer youth’s queerness can only
exist in the future or in the past, never in the present. There is no expres-
sion of the queer youth in the present tense.46
Of course, as indicated earlier in this essay, cultural knowledge about
queer youth has changed dramatically in the quarter century since the close
of the twentieth, and along with these changes, there has been a renovation
of narrative forms which clearly focus on the queer youth in the present. In
an ironic inversion, however, a feature of these contemporary narratives is,
as already discussed, the frequent elision of the historical itself. The queer
youth narratives of the early twenty-first century are the narratives of the
cultural vanguard—the new, the unprecedented, the ahistorical. And this is
little wonder given, as I set out at the beginning, the long cultural history
of the queer youth being figured as a mythical, impossible, alien arrival.
Thus, while twentieth-century narratives would often displace the present
of queer youth by focusing on the historical tropes of past and future, the
emergent narrative frames of the early twenty-first century have performed
the neat inversion of turning those narrative approaches inside out, empty-
ing them of their historical frames of reference, and leaving an empty space
to focus on narratives of the now and the new. In exploring new ways to
write queer youth history, there is a need to think of ways to discuss queer
youth in an array of historical ‘presents’ so that there can be a focus on the
specificity of queer youth lived experience rather than telling it as a story
annexed to the subject’s adulthood, or as a story with no history at all.
Sharing some similar concerns to Gordon, Elspeth Probyn has also
drawn attention to the ways in which narratives of queer youth expe-
rience which developed throughout the twentieth century ironically
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 19

effaced difference, flattening queer youth experience by pressing it into

narrative structures of sameness. Clearly, youth-positive histories which
value sexual and gender difference need to necessarily identify narrative
forms that have the capacity to convey this difference. Critiquing “the
rush for commonality”47 which Probyn identifies as characteristic of
twentieth-century queer youth narratives, Probyn is keen to foster the
development of new ways of telling stories about sexuality, gender, dif-
ference, and young people:

We can start thinking about ways of using and recounting childhood

that do not place it as a beginning. This is to move childhood outside of
a regime of origins, to displace both the question of psychology (‘why is
she a lesbian’) and the question that recurs in gay and lesbian narratives of
childhood: ‘Why am I a lesbian?’ The point is…not to negate the impor-
tance of childhood; it is, however, to deny childhood its founding status.48

Tell histories of queer youth, Probyn says, but “not…as a beginning”—nei-

ther as the beginning of a story about developing identity, as Gordon
observes, nor as the beginning or start of some year zero moment in cul-
ture, where the queer youth apparently arrives out of nowhere fashioned
as some kind of totem of cultural progress, as is so often the case in so
many of the popular narratives of the new and the now. What would his-
tories of queer youth look like if adulthood was excised entirely? What
would they look like if queer youth were not historicised in a develop-
mental way, bound hand and foot to a wheel of progress? Kathryn Bond
Stockton asks questions about the narrative fortunes of queer youth, the-
orising new ways of thinking about the queer child in narrative, and how
the queer child’s non-developmental sideways growths are expressed
through different narrative forms.49 Similarly, Jack Halberstam and Lee
Edelman develop different reflections on relationships between queer-
ness, youth, and narrative, investigating how knowledges about queer
youth can be produced when disarticulated from dominant logics of
reproduction and developmental progress.50 Indeed, the critical atten-
tiveness to narrative which characterises queer youth history provides a
further hybrid space linking together the fields of LGBTQ history and
queer studies of temporality, providing a renewed focus on these inter-
sections. Through the fostering of these critical intersections, queer
youth histories encourage reflections on links between queer youth
and historical narrative more generally. If, as discussed in the second
20 D. MARSHALL

characteristic, anxieties about youth can be seen to have structured queer

history in various ways, then it also follows that a critical reflection on
how queer histories have leaned on and been structured by develop-
mental understandings of youth will yield productive reflections for
diversifying narrative forms within the general field of queer historical
scholarship.
As the quest for narrative forms expands, there can be further
engagement with the rich and diverse history of narrative engagements
with sexuality, gender, time, and difference. This includes developing
deeper understandings of how different disciplinary tendencies have
produced historical knowledge about youth and sexual and gender
difference. From the sexologist’s case file to the anthropologist’s field
notes, from the literary theorist’s interpretive analysis to the psycholo-
gist’s diagnosis, and from the activist’s political campaign to the queer
theorist’s deconstruction, an examination of disciplinary narrative styles
and how they produce different knowledge about youth and sexual and
gender difference highlights the importance of historicising the multi-
or trans-disciplinary past of queer youth histories. And in clear ways,
such a historical investigation into the function of different disciplinary
ways of knowing will also enrich the general fields of queer history and
contemporary queer youth cultural studies through its historicisation
of the operation of these different disciplinary orientations. Indeed,
such an endeavour is not merely academic. As scholars and activists in
queer Indigenous studies demonstrate, the need to query the narrative
expressions and epistemological perimeters of youth, gender, sexuality,
and, indeed, history itself is a pressing matter as part of the work of
decolonisation.51

Characteristic four: Foregrounding the problems or slipperiness of

experience as a historical resource

Because queer youth history is stitched so intricately to the vagaries of

memory, recollection, and interior recognitions of self and difference, it
foregrounds the problems of experience bound to queer history.52 The
reliance on the felt experience of early childhood and the widely shared,
though only fuzzily described and thus presumably wildly different, expe-
rience of feeling different means that queer youth history as a field of
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 21

knowledge is characterised by a troubled relationship to the authority of

experience, and to histories or narratives which approach such authority
in straightforward and non-reflexive ways. The prominence of the genre
of the memoir and personal recollection in queer youth history is a good
example of how queer youth histories often get retrospectively embroi-
dered by stitching together accounts of perspectives, embodied feelings,
and narrated memories. This draws attention to the important function
of narrative (as discussed earlier), and how it is put to work to make sense
of the ‘ephemeral’ evidence of queer youth life. In these stitched-together
narratives the powerful work of retrospective recognition becomes more
visible—how so many random fragments of recollection, embodiment,
taste, affect, politics, and desire get processed by a retrospective rational-
isation of all the ephemeral evidence of experience which organises them
into a neat, flattened design of queer youth, a design achieved by recog-
nising the mess of the past as just so many tell-tale signs of a queerness
which, once designated, seems flamingly obvious.53
As discussed earlier, a key achievement of early work in gay, lesbian,
and trans history has been the value it has placed on sexual and gen-
der difference as it exists in people’s everyday lives. Drawing, in varying
degrees, on Marxist, postcolonial and anti-racist activism and scholarship,
queer historical work since the 1970s has emphasised the importance of
lived experience. Since this time one of the most prominent develop-
ments in queer historical studies has been the way in which this empha-
sis on lived experience as a focal point for scholarship and activism has
been put under pressure and renovated in various ways. The emergence
of national gay and lesbian histories, for example, have sometimes (and
often as a necessity dictated by form) emphasised a focus on prominent
figures at the expense of ordinary people.
Another development which has applied pressure to the idea that
gender and sexuality studies should focus on everyday people has been
an increasing awareness of how different people are to each other. The
proliferation of historical and contemporary knowledge about the queer
lives of people, both famous and ordinary, since the 1970s has troubled
the idea that sexual and gender difference can be commonly experienced.
This increase in the available archive of historical queer lives meant that
it became increasingly clear that experiences which were being organised
under the banner of queer history were increasingly diverse, complicat-
ing the role of experience in queer scholarship and politics. For exam-
ple, Judith Butler’s reflections in Gender Trouble on how to do a feminist
22 D. MARSHALL

politics while problematising the unitary category of ‘woman’ is indica-

tive of how scholarship increasingly developed a complex relationship to
experience as a central organising focus for queer studies.54 Queer youth
history inherits and redeploys this historical focus on lived everyday
experience from the foundational work in gay, lesbian, and trans history
while it also generates more and more knowledge about how the lived
experience of queer youth life is by no means homogenous and therefore
sits as a troubled centre at the heart of the queer youth historical pro-
ject. In this way, queer youth historical narratives represent a retooling of
the ‘personal as political’, rerouting a feminist and Gay Liberationist pol-
itics of the everyday through accounts of youth lived amidst sexual and
gender difference. Queer youth histories, then, are simultaneously stories
about queer youth experience over time and the problems attached to
recognising, relying on, and communicating that experience.
Despite the complex relationship to experience as evidence which
queer youth histories can help us to think about, knowledge about queer
youth in history has often been overdetermined by approaches which
ignore the diversity of experience and flatten growing up queer into
more or less a common, ‘universalised’ experience. This is another rea-
son (in addition to the anxieties generated by moral panics, etc.) why
queer youth histories have so often resisted sustained scholarly attention.
As flattened, generic stories, often it has appeared that there is little to
investigate beyond the common narrative of a difficult, yet transform-
ative youth. Rather than being seen in their own idiosyncratic terms,
queer youth histories have often been presented as sites for articulating
shared identifications, and the power of this identification work has often
meant that specific differences residing in any given queer youth histor-
ical moment have been washed away amidst a flood of apparently com-
mon recognitions.
For example, as someone who carries my own queer youth history of
life in a country town in Australia, I was intrigued when I incidentally
came across a photo called “Young boy presents his black sheep” at Te
Papa Tongarewa (Museum of New Zealand), featuring an image of a
boy, face downcast, wearing shorts and bright pink socks, parading his
black sheep in front of a large crowd at an agricultural fair. The pasto-
ral scene recalled my own childhood in country towns—and how I gave
my own queerness away with my own figurative ‘pink socks’ as a flam-
ing sign of me as the figurative ‘black sheep’ long before I had enough
awareness to try to manage the signs of my own queerness in a more
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 23

directed way.55 The boy’s downcast face before the spectatorship of the
townsfolk gathered at the fair seemed, in some ways, to sum up my own
feelings about small-town surveillance and disapproval. While I know
nothing specific of that boy, or of that fair or of those pink socks or of
that black sheep, I am still able to pull it within the frame of a discussion
about queer youth history because of the forcefulness of my own recog-
nitions and the depth of my attachment to my own historical experience.
In the place of historical knowledge about the boy with the literal
black sheep, what there is instead is an expression of my own vernacu-
lar knowledges which appear to be very adept at finding in the face of
difference, that day in the museum, something which I rapidly claim as
the same and assimilate into my own common narrative. However, that
my identification with this image means that I tell a false history of that
boy as a way of trying to tell something authentic about myself does not
necessarily invalidate the moment—how could it, when so much of queer
youth history proceeds on the basis of mistaken recognitions? For exam-
ple, the “Born This Way Blog” is a wonderful example of how many dif-
ferent queer ways of doing childhood can all be recognised as more or
less depicting the same thing.56 Although there are many different ways
of being a queer young person the way stories often get told about this
difference is to tell stories about people’s recognition of themselves in
someone else’s story. That is, queer youth histories are often told as sto-
ries about difference in which whoever is telling the story time and again
sees themselves. Like the interpretive frames that I applied during my visit
to the museum, material within the archive of queer childhood is often
framed in such a way as to encourage a shared identification, but the
proliferation of difference in that archive actually troubles such straight-
forward identifications. Despite the call to see sameness in the face of dif-
ference, that difference still persists. Meanwhile, however, these popular
ways of exploring queer youth identity—by recognising it in sites where it
might not exist (or at least not in the same way as one imagines)—are an
important part of queer youth history, demonstrating how queer youth
history needs to be capacious enough not only for queer youth difference,
but for all the different types of queer youth sameness which we can rec-
ognise in the world around us. Queer youth history, then, can provide a
constructive forum for extending older discussions about the recognition
of ourselves in the difference of others and the difference of the past.57
The point, then, is that queer youth history underlines the importance
of historicising not only the practices and recognitions that comprise
24 D. MARSHALL

experience but also the misrecognitions as well. It is important to find

a way to historicise experience without construing it in a narrow sense
of authority, similar to Probyn’s call to historicise childhood, but not in
a narrow sense as a beginning or founding ground of mature sexual and
gender identity. If mistaken recognitions form a key part of queer youth
history—I might think I see myself, my sameness, in others, when what
is actually there is difference—then queer youth history needs to accom-
modate so many diverse experiences of authenticity and identification. In
other words, if faulty recognitions like my own are important to my own
queer youth history—to how I have seen myself in the world and assem-
bled an identifiable sense of myself (through faulty recognitions of same-
ness)—then such things necessarily make up what queer youth histories
come to be. Thus, what queer youth histories yield, then, are not straight
accounts of queer youth life, but histories of so many misrecognitions.
Like seeing one’s self in a hall of mirrors, queer youth histories tell the
story of recognitions moving in multiple contradictory directions.
Queer youth histories as a field demands a critical approach to expe-
rience as evidence, but a tender approach too, one which sees the limits
of the authority experience bestows while also acknowledging the signif-
icance in people’s lives of the kinds of misrecognitions and the univer-
salizing of personal experience which we have been discussing. Such an
approach keeps the space open for a more capacious politics and schol-
arship—one that keeps reiterating the differences which inhere in queer
youth histories. Queer youth histories, thus, is characterised by a poli-
tics and theory which has room enough for honouring lived experience
but can do so without endowing it with an unexamined authority. Queer
youth histories necessarily must proceed in part as reflections on lived
experience, but not where experience authorises a theoretical or politi-
cal point in a closed way. Experience may evidence some things, but this
evidence must be gathered not as the confirmation of a point, much like
how a barrister gathers up the threads of evidence into a conclusive knot
in a juridical setting, but as an ever-expanding elaboration. And this is
because it is only through this continued emphasis on difference that
claims to a homogenous idea of queerness or youth or history can be
denaturalised and the lure of easy essentialisms and easy certainties can
be resisted. Such things are not representative, rather they are hegem-
onic, and in their name they narrow how sexuality, gender, youth, and
history might be understood and thus work against the spirit which inau-
gurated this endeavour in the first place.
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 25

This commitment to difference underlines how this work of queer

youth histories is not a project focused on the individual, but on the
collective. If the authoritarianism of an insistence on sameness is to be
resisted while also avoiding the risk of an emphasis on difference slid-
ing into a solipsistic individualism, then an ethics for the accumulation,
analysis, and distribution of queer youth histories which is grounded in
a commitment to the shared collective experience of difference must be
actively cultivated. If benign variation is a foundation of the work,58 then
the question of ethics must keep coming back to how it as an endeavour
nourishes the larger whole. It might be hoped, through such labour, that
how this whole is imagined—call it society, community, a people, fam-
ily, whatever—gets transformed by the possibilities opened up by seeing
the queer youth past. And, in time, the ways in which the gathering up
of the past has helped to reimagine the future will provide the ongoing
grounds for assessing why anyone might want to do something called
queer youth history in the first place.

Characteristic five: Reflections on the role of queer history in young

people’s lives, or of histories of youth in queer adults’ lives, including
how and in what ways people’s knowledge or experience of the histori-
cal matter (or not) in the present

The final characteristic of queer youth history describes work which

reflects on the role of queer history in young people’s lives, or of histo-
ries of youth in queer adults’ lives. This can include examining how and
in what ways people’s knowledge or experience of the historical (e.g., at
the macro level as in Gay History with a capital G and a capital H, or at
the micro level as in their own recollections of when they were a queer
youth) matter (or not) in the present. In a world marked by the prolif-
eration of knowledge about sexual and gender difference, the weight of
the past grows, although it is always an open question what relationship
people have to this mass of information. In different ways, many peo-
ple are voicing their relationships to queer history. This includes wit-
nessing accounts (accounts of the past by people looking back), such as
are often found in memoir, non-fiction essays, and social media posts.
This witnessing can be of shared queer historical events (protests, par-
ties, scenes, etc.) or of personal events narrated in ways that presume a
26 D. MARSHALL

common shared experience (e.g., narratives of queer childhood, coming

out, being queer at school, first gay love, etc.). It also includes observant
accounts—accounts by people of things that they did not directly expe-
rience but which they are observing because the observance serves some
function. Observant participation in queer history can include things like
participating in events connected to LGBT/Queer History Months or
engaging with a historical artefact or a textual depiction of queer his-
tory. What relationships do young people have to queer history? What
relationships do queer adults have to histories of youth (either theirs or
others)? What, if any, roles do these different histories play in these peo-
ple’s lives? In what way might these histories matter in the present for
them, and what form might such mattering take? In what ways might the
queerness of young people today be understood by the ways in which it
is structured by their various engagements with and evasion or ignorance
of queer history? Similarly, how too might queer adulthood be under-
stood by its relationship to personal or collective histories of youth? In
other words, how have ideas about history shaped queer youth life, and
how have histories of being young shaped queer adulthood? As a study
of how the living of a queer life might rest in different ways on various
understandings of queer youth history, this field of investigation can
open new ways of thinking about the relationship between the queer past
and the crafting of a possible life.

The Chapters
To put some flesh on the bones of this idea of queer youth history, and
to dig into some of the questions which this idea provokes, this book
brings together a series of essays investigating sexuality, gender, youth,
history, and difference. Among these chapters are historical accounts of
queer youth lives and of the careers of ideas about gender, sexuality, and
youth which encourage an examination of queer youth as a historical cat-
egory of investigation. Through these discussions, the reader is invited to
situate queer youth at the centre of historical reflection and to reflect on
how queer history gets reframed when it is narrated through this focus,
including a focus on how the lives of young people are important com-
ponents of queer histories, as well as how ideas about youth have influ-
enced the overall structure and concerns of queer history in general. This
book does not, however, seek to provide anything like a comprehensive
revision of queer history which writes queer youth prominently back
 1 WHAT IS QUEER YOUTH HISTORY? 27

into focus. Because ‘queer youth’ is, as I have established, an unstable

idea, the questions raised by queer youth history cannot be settled by a
straightforward reparative project of inclusion or renewed emphasis with
regard to youth in history. Indeed, by focusing on the historical and cat-
egorial instability at play in the constituent terms queer/youth/history,
this book seeks to problematise queer youth history as much as it seeks
to draw people’s attention to it. If part of the project of queer youth his-
tory is to put flesh to the bone, to help see queer youth in history, then
the other key part, as demonstrated above in the discussion of the five
characteristics, is to pick away at the flesh at the same time, asking, but, is
this queer youth history? What is ‘queer’ here? Or ‘youth’? Or ‘history’? This
constant process of unsettling the meanings of our key terms stands as
a key way that queer youth history might be useful—as a constant agi-
tation, scratching away at the surface, it continually asks us to account
for how we are stitching together ideas and knowledge about sexuality,
gender, time, and difference. Thus, contributions in this collection offer
portraits of queer youth in history while also picking away at what such
a thing might be, reprising the opening introduction of queer youth his-
tory as principally a provocation, a venue for convening critical and his-
torical reflections about intersections between sexuality, gender, youth,
and difference.
The first two essays in this collection take up these questions by exam-
ining the constitutive role performed by youth and ideas about youth
in the formulation of modern understandings of sexuality and gen-
der. In “Toward Psychosexual Development: Preliminaries to Queer
Youth Prehistory” Diederik F. Janssen examines (largely European and
American) nineteenth and early twentieth century discussions in the
developing sciences of sex and sexuality of the period. Identifying ways in
which youth have featured prominently in historical accounts of homo-
sexuality and sexual difference from that period, Janssen demonstrates
how youth has been installed at the very centre of modern sexual differ-
ence through the emphasis placed on childhood experience in the sex-
ological case study. Through this discussion, Janssen demonstrates how
homosexuality and youth sexuality are bound together in the shared
project of giving rise to “modern sexuality’s developmentalization”. Don
Romesburg expands on this discussion about the central role of ideas
about youth in the emergence of developmental theories of gender, sex-
uality, and identity in “G. Stanley Hall and Perverse Plasticity in Modern
Adolescence”. Here, Romesburg situates Hallian adolescence within a
28 D. MARSHALL

queer youth history frame, providing a suggestive account of the many

ways that Hall’s intellectual legacy continues to influence contemporary
thought regarding sexual difference in informal ways (e.g., contagion,
vulnerability, etc.).
What emerges from Romesburg’s critical portrait of Hallian adoles-
cence is how it rests on a nest of contradictions. Should young people’s
bodies be measured for deviance or not? Will the instrument to inhibit
actually work to inspire perversion? Romesburg demonstrates how con-
tradictions like these build on fundamental contradictions so crucial
to sexology, including most prominently the ongoing push and pull
between theories of heredity and theories of environment, of nature
versus nurture, as discussed by Janssen. That both turn-of-the-century
sexology and Hallian adolescence provided large-scale models for circu-
lating these contradictions is part of their success, suggests the authors,
because the irresolution at the heart of this work was taken up as reason
enough to keep intensifying the work to try and craft a scientific-psycho-
logic understanding as to why some people grew up different to what
had been expected. In these opening chapters, Janssen and Romesburg
set the scene for the elaboration of modern theories of sexuality, gender,
and development throughout the twentieth century, and how this elabo-
ration rested time and again on the figure of the youth.
Through these discussions, the looping, unresolved question of aeti-
ology—the circular quarrel between heredity and culture—is placed in
the historical context of the categorial emergence of the homosexual and
the adolescent, emphasising how modern understandings of gender and
sexuality have been built not on the resolution of these questions but,
rather, on the endlessly productive irresolution of them. With no clear
answer in sight to the question of where do queers come from, mod-
ern theories of sexuality, gender, and youth have been able to elaborate
themselves endlessly. By taking the impossible riddle of aetiology as the
central raison d’être of these theories, they have been able to rationalise a
proliferation of any number of bizarre ways to study, surveil, document,
treat, and account for sexual and gender difference in youth. The genius
of these modern theories is that they are purpose-built as quests with no
conclusions. By taking on a question which is impossible to answer as the
central motivating principle for the work, these approaches ingeniously
fomented the conditions for the work to continue throughout the twen-
tieth century with a zeal not daunted but only encouraged by the elu-
siveness of the solution that was apparently the subject of their search.
Another random document with
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 We made a straight course of it across the plains for about thirty miles,
changing horses occasionally at some of the numerous wayside inns, and
passing numbers of wagons drawn by teams of six or eight mules or oxen,
and laden with supplies for the mines.
The ascent from the plains was very gradual, over a hilly country, well
wooded with oaks and pines. Our pace here was not so killing as it had
been. We had frequently long hills to climb, where all hands were obliged
to get out and walk; but we made up for the delay by galloping down the
descent on the other side.
The road, which, though in some places very narrow, for the most part
spread out to two or three times the width of an ordinary road, was covered
with stumps and large rocks; it was full of deep ruts and hollows, and roots
of trees spread all over it.
To any one not used to such roads or to such driving, an upset would
have seemed inevitable. If there was safety in speed, however, we were safe
enough, and all sense of danger was lost in admiration of the coolness and
dexterity of the driver as he circumvented every obstacle, but without going
one inch farther than necessary out of his way to save us from perdition. He
went through extraordinary bodily contortions, which would have shocked
an English coachman out of his propriety; but, at the same time, he
performed such feats as no one would have dared to attempt who had never
been used to anything worse than an English road. With his right foot he
managed a brake, and, clawing at the reins with both hands, he swayed his
body from side to side to preserve his equilibrium, as now on the right pair
of wheels, now on the left, he cut the “outside edge” round a stump or a
rock; and when coming to a spot where he was going to execute a difficult
maneuver on a piece of road which slanted violently down to one side, he
trimmed the wagon as one would a small boat in a squall, and made us all
crowd up to the weather side to prevent a capsize.
When about ten miles from the plains, I first saw the actual reality of
gold-digging. Four or five men were working in a ravine by the roadside,
digging holes like so many grave-diggers. I then considered myself fairly in
“the mines,” and experienced a disagreeable consciousness that we might
be passing over huge masses of gold, only concealed from us by an inch or
two of earth.
 As we traveled onwards, we passed at intervals numerous parties of
miners, and the country assumed a more inhabited appearance. Log-cabins
and clapboard shanties were to be seen among the trees; and occasionally
we found about a dozen of such houses grouped together by the roadside,
and dignified with the name of a town.
For several miles again the country would seem to have been deserted.
That it had once been a busy scene was evident from the uptorn earth in the
ravines and hollows, and from the numbers of unoccupied cabins; but the
cream of such diggings had already been taken, and they were not now
sufficiently rich to suit the ambitious ideas of the miners.
After traveling about thirty miles over this mountainous region,
ascending gradually all the while, we arrived at Hangtown in the afternoon,
having accomplished the sixty miles from Sacramento city in about eight
hours.
 CHAPTER VI

LOOKING FOR GOLD

T HE town of Placerville—or Hangtown, as it was commonly called—

consisted of one long straggling street of clapboard houses and log
cabins, built in a hollow at the side of a creek, and surrounded by high
and steep hills.
The diggings here had been exceedingly rich—men used to pick the
chunks of gold out of the crevices of the rocks in the ravines with no other
tool than a bowie-knife; but these days had passed, and now the whole
surface of the surrounding country showed the amount of real hard work
which had been done. The beds of the numerous ravines which wrinkle the
faces of the hills, the bed of the creek, and all the little flats alongside of it,
were a confused mass of heaps of dirt and piles of stones lying around the
innumerable holes, about six feet square and five or six feet deep, from
which they had been thrown out. The original course of the creek was
completely obliterated, its waters being distributed into numberless little
ditches, and from them conducted into the “long toms” of the miners
through canvas hoses, looking like immensely long slimy sea-serpents.
The number of bare stumps of what had once been gigantic pine trees,
dotted over the naked hillsides surrounding the town, showed how freely
the ax had been used, and to what purpose was apparent in the extent of the
town itself, and in the numerous log-cabins scattered over the hills, in
situations apparently chosen at the caprice of the owners, but in reality with
a view to be near to their diggings, and at the same time to be within a
convenient distance of water and firewood.
Along the whole length of the creek, as far as one could see, on the
banks of the creek, in the ravines, in the middle of the principal and only
street of the town, and even inside some of the houses, were parties of
miners, numbering from three or four to a dozen, all hard at work, some
laying into it with picks, some shoveling the dirt into the “long toms,” or
with long-handled shovels washing the dirt thrown in, and throwing out the
stones, while others were working pumps or baling water out of the holes
with buckets. There was a continual noise and clatter, as mud, dirt, stones,
and water were thrown about in all directions; and the men, dressed in
ragged clothes and big boots, wielding picks and shovels, and rolling big
rocks about, were all working as if for their lives, going into it with a will,
and a degree of energy, not usually seen among laboring men. It was
altogether a scene which conveyed the idea of hard work in the fullest sense
of the words, and in comparison with which a gang of railway navvies
would have seemed to be merely a party of gentlemen amateurs playing at
working pour passer le temps.
A stroll through the village revealed the extent to which the ordinary
comforts of life were attainable. The gambling-houses, of which there were
three or four, were of course the largest and most conspicuous buildings;
their mirrors, chandeliers, and other decorations, suggesting a style of life
totally at variance with the outward indications of everything around them.
The street itself was in many places knee-deep in mud, and was
plentifully strewed with old boots, hats, and shirts, old sardine-boxes,
empty tins of preserved oysters, empty bottles, worn-out pots and kettles,
old ham-bones, broken picks and shovels, and other rubbish too various to
particularize. Here and there, in the middle of the street, was a square hole
about six feet deep, in which one miner was digging, while another was
baling the water out with a bucket, and a third, sitting alongside the heap of
dirt which had been dug up, was washing it in a rocker. Wagons, drawn by
six or eight mules or oxen, were navigating along the street, or discharging
their strangely-assorted cargoes at the various stores; and men in
picturesque rags, with large muddy boots, long beards, and brown faces,
were the only inhabitants to be seen.
There were boarding-houses on the table-d’hôte principle, in each of
which forty or fifty hungry miners sat down three times a day to an oilcloth-
covered table, and in the course of about three minutes surfeited themselves
on salt pork, greasy steaks, and pickles. There were also two or three
“hotels,” where much the same sort of fare was to be had, with the extra
luxuries of a table-cloth and a superior quality of knives and forks.
The stores were curious places. There was no specialty about them—
everything was to be found in them which it could be supposed that any one
could possibly want, excepting fresh beef (there was a butcher who
monopolized the sale of that article).
 On entering a store, one would find the storekeeper in much the same
style of costume as the miners, very probably sitting on an empty keg at a
rickety little table, playing “seven up” for “the liquor” with one of his
customers.
The counter served also the purpose of a bar, and behind it was the usual
array of bottles and decanters, while on shelves above them was an
ornamental display of boxes of sardines, and brightly-colored tins of
preserved meats and vegetables with showy labels, interspersed with bottles
of champagne and strangely-shaped bottles of exceedingly green pickles,
the whole being arranged with some degree of taste.
Goods and provisions of every description were stowed away
promiscuously all round the store, in the middle of which was invariably a
small table with a bench, or some empty boxes and barrels for the miners to
sit on while they played cards, spent their money in brandy and oysters, and
occasionally got drunk.
The clothing trade was almost entirely in the hands of the Jews, who are
very numerous in California, and devote their time and energies exclusively
to supplying their Christian brethren with the necessary articles of wearing
apparel.
In traveling through the mines from one end to the other, I never saw a
Jew lift a pick or shovel to do a single stroke of work, or, in fact, occupy
himself in any other way than in selling slops. While men of all classes and
of every nation showed such versatility in betaking themselves to whatever
business or occupation appeared at the time to be most advisable, without
reference to their antecedents, and in a country where no man, to whatever
class of society he belonged, was in the least degree ashamed to roll up his
sleeves and dig in the mines for gold, or to engage in any other kind of
manual labor, it was a very remarkable fact that the Jews were the only
people among whom this was not observable.
They were very numerous—so much so, that the business to which they
confined themselves could hardly have yielded to every individual a fair
average California rate of remuneration. But they seemed to be proof
against all temptation to move out of their own limited sphere of industry,
and of course, concentrated upon one point as their energies were, they kept
pace with the go-ahead spirit of the times. Clothing of all sorts could be
bought in any part of the mines more cheaply than in San Francisco, where
rents were so very high that retail prices of everything were most
exorbitant; and scarcely did twenty or thirty miners collect in any out-of-
the-way place, upon newly discovered diggings, before the inevitable Jew
slop-seller also made his appearance, to play his allotted part in the newly-
formed community.
The Jew slop-shops were generally rattletrap erections about the size of a
bathing-machine, so small that one half of the stock had to be displayed
suspended from projecting sticks outside. They were filled with red and
blue flannel shirts, thick boots, and other articles suited to the wants of the
miners, along with Colt’s revolvers and bowie-knives, brass jewelry, and
diamonds like young Koh-i-Noors.
Almost every man, after a short residence in California, became changed
to a certain extent in his outward appearance. In the mines especially, to the
great majority of men, the usual style of dress was one to which they had
never been accustomed; and those to whom it might have been supposed
such a costume was not so strange, or who were even wearing the old
clothes they had brought with them to the country, acquired a certain
California air, which would have made them remarkable in whatever part of
the world they came from, had they been suddenly transplanted there. But
to this rule also the Jews formed a very striking exception. In their
appearance there was nothing at all suggestive of California; they were
exactly the same unwashed-looking, slobbery, slipshod individuals that one
sees in every seaport town.
During the week, and especially when the miners were all at work,
Hangtown was comparatively quiet; but on Sundays it was a very different
place. On that day the miners living within eight or ten miles all flocked in
to buy provisions for the week—to spend their money in the gambling-
rooms—to play cards—to get their letters from home—and to refresh
themselves, after a week’s labor and isolation in the mountains, in enjoying
the excitement of the scene according to their tastes.
The gamblers on Sundays reaped a rich harvest; their tables were
thronged with crowds of miners, betting eagerly, and of course losing their
money. Many men came in, Sunday after Sunday, and gambled off all the
gold they had dug during the week, having to get credit at a store for their
next week’s provisions, and returning to their diggings to work for six days
in getting more gold, which would all be transferred the next Sunday to the
gamblers, in the vain hope of recovering what had been already lost.
The street was crowded all day with miners loafing about from store to
store, making their purchases and asking each other to drink, the effects of
which began to be seen at an early hour in the number of drunken men, and
the consequent frequency of rows and quarrels. Almost every man wore a
pistol or a knife—many wore both—but they were rarely used. The liberal
and prompt administration of Lynch law had done a great deal towards
checking the wanton and indiscriminate use of these weapons on any slight
occasion. The utmost latitude was allowed in the exercise of self-defence.
In the case of a row, it was not necessary to wait till a pistol was actually
leveled at one’s head—if a man made even a motion towards drawing a
weapon, it was considered perfectly justifiable to shoot him first, if
possible. The very prevalence of the custom of carrying arms thus in a great
measure was a cause of their being seldom used. They were never drawn
out of bravado, for when a man once drew his pistol, he had to be prepared
to use it, and to use it quickly, or he might expect to be laid low by a ball
from his adversary; and again, if he shot a man without sufficient
provocation, he was pretty sure of being accommodated with a hempen
cravat by Judge Lynch.
The storekeepers did more business on Sundays than in all the rest of the
week; and in the afternoon crowds of miners could be seen dispersing over
the hills in every direction, laden with the provisions they had been
purchasing, chiefly flour, pork and beans, and perhaps a lump of fresh beef.
There was only one place of public worship in Hangtown at that time, a
very neat little wooden edifice, which belonged to some denomination of
Methodists, and seemed to be well attended.
There was also a newspaper published two or three times a week, which
kept the inhabitants “posted up” as to what was going on in the world.
The richest deposits of gold were found in the beds and banks of the
rivers, creeks, and ravines, in the flats on the convex side of the bends of
the streams, and in many of the flats and hollows high up in the mountains.
The precious metal was also abstracted from the very hearts of the
mountains, through tunnels drifted into them for several hundred yards; and
in some places real mining was carried on in the bowels of the earth by
means of shafts sunk to the depth of a couple of hundred feet.
 The principal diggings in the neighborhood of Hangtown were surface
diggings; but, with the exception of river diggings, every kind of mining
operation was to be seen in full force.
The gold is found at various depths from the surface; but the dirt on the
bed-rock is the richest, as the gold naturally in time sinks through earth and
gravel, till it is arrested in its downward progress by the solid rock.
The diggings here were from four to six or seven feet deep; the layer of
“pay-dirt” being about a couple of feet thick on the top of the bed-rock.
I should mention that “dirt” is the word universally used in California to
signify the substance dug, earth, clay, gravel, loose slate, or whatever other
name might be more appropriate. The miners talk of rich dirt and poor dirt,
and of “stripping off” so many feet of “top dirt” before getting to “pay-dirt,”
the latter meaning dirt with so much gold in it that it will pay to dig it up
and wash it.
The apparatus generally used for washing was a “long tom,” which was
nothing more than a wooden trough from twelve to twenty-five feet long,
and about a foot wide. At the lower end it widens considerably, and on the
floor there is a sheet of iron pierced with holes half an inch in diameter,
under which is placed a flat box a couple of inches deep. The long tom is
set at a slight inclination over the place which is to be worked, and a stream
of water is kept running through it by means of a hose, the mouth of which
is inserted in a dam built for the purpose high enough up the stream to gain
the requisite elevation; and while some of the party shovel the dirt into the
tom as fast as they can dig it up, one man stands at the lower end stirring up
the dirt as it is washed down, separating the stones and throwing them out,
while the earth and small gravel falls with the water through the sieve into
the “ripple-box.” This box is about five feet long, and is crossed by two
partitions. It is also placed at an inclination, so that the water falling into it
keeps the dirt loose, allowing the gold and heavy particles to settle to the
bottom, while all the lighter stuff washes over the end of the box along with
the water. When the day’s work is over, the dirt is taken from the “ripple-
box” and is “washed out” in a “wash-pan,” a round tin dish, eighteen inches
in diameter, with shelving sides three or four inches deep. In washing out a
panful of dirt, it has to be placed in water deep enough to cover it over; the
dirt is stirred up with the hands, and the gravel thrown out; the pan is then
taken in both hands, and by an indescribable series of maneuvers all the dirt
is gradually washed out of it, leaving nothing but the gold and a small
quantity of black sand. This black sand is mineral (some oxide or other salt
of iron), and is so heavy that it is not possible to wash it all out; it has to be
blown out of the gold afterwards when dry.
Another mode of washing dirt, but much more tedious, and consequently
only resorted to where a sufficient supply of water for a long tom could not
be obtained, was by means of an apparatus called a “rocker” or “cradle.”
This was merely a wooden cradle, on the top of which was a sieve. The dirt
was put into this, and a miner, sitting alongside of it, rocked the cradle with
one hand, while with a dipper in the other he kept baling water on to the
dirt. This acted on the same principle as the “tom,” and had formerly been
the only contrivance in use; but it was now seldom seen, as the long tom
effected such a saving of time and labor. The latter was set immediately
over the claim, and the dirt was shoveled into it at once, while a rocker had
to be set alongside of the water, and the dirt was carried to it in buckets
from the place which was being worked. Three men working together with
a rocker—one digging, another carrying the dirt in buckets, and the third
rocking the cradle—would wash on an average a hundred bucketfuls of dirt
to the man in the course of the day. With a “long tom” the dirt was so easily
washed that parties of six or eight could work together to advantage, and
four or five hundred bucketfuls of dirt a day to each one of the party was a
usual day’s work.
I met a San Francisco friend in Hangtown practising his profession as a
doctor, who very hospitably offered me quarters in his cabin, which I gladly
accepted. The accommodation was not very luxurious, being merely six feet
of the floor on which to spread my blankets. My host, however, had no
better bed himself, and indeed it was as much as most men cared about.
Those who were very particular preferred sleeping on a table or a bench
when they were to be had; bunks and shelves were also much in fashion;
but the difference in comfort was a mere matter of imagination, for
mattresses were not known, and an earthen floor was quite as soft as any
wooden board. Three or four miners were also inmates of the doctor’s
cabin. They were quondam New South Wales squatters, who had been
mining for several months in a distant part of the country, and were now
going to work a claim about two miles up the creek from Hangtown. As
they wanted another hand to work their long tom with them, I very readily
joined their party. For several days we worked this place, trudging out to it
when it was hardly daylight, taking with us our dinner, which consisted of
beefsteaks and bread, and returning to Hangtown about dark; but the claim
did not prove rich enough to satisfy us, so we abandoned it, and went
“prospecting,” which means looking about for a more likely place.
A “prospector” goes out with a pick and shovel, and a wash-pan; and to
test the richness of a place he digs down till he reaches the dirt in which it
may be expected that the gold will be found; and washing out a panful of
this, he can easily calculate, from the amount of gold which he finds in it,
how much could be taken out in a day’s work. An old miner, looking at the
few specks of gold in the bottom of his pan, can tell their value within a few
cents; calling it a twelve or a twenty cent “prospect,” as it may be. If, on
washing out a panful of dirt, a mere speck of gold remained, just enough to
swear by, such dirt was said to have only “the color,” and was not worth
digging. A twelve-cent prospect was considered a pretty good one; but in
estimating the probable result of a day’s work, allowance had to be made
for the time and labor to be expended in removing top-dirt, and in otherwise
preparing the claim for being worked.
To establish one’s claim to a piece of ground, all that was requisite was
to leave upon it a pick or shovel, or other mining tool. The extent of ground
allowed to each individual varied in different diggings from ten to thirty
feet square, and was fixed by the miners themselves, who also made their
own laws, defining the rights and duties of those holding claims; and any
dispute on such subjects was settled by calling together a few of the
neighboring miners, who would enforce the due observance of the laws of
the diggings. After prospecting for two or three days we concluded to take
up a claim near a small settlement called Middletown, two or three miles
distant from Hangtown. It was situated by the side of a small creek, in a
rolling hilly country, and consisted of about a dozen cabins, one of which
was a store supplied with flour, pork, tobacco, and other necessaries.
We found near our claim a very comfortable cabin, which the owner had
deserted, and in which we established ourselves. We had plenty of firewood
and water close to us, and being only two miles from Hangtown, we kept
ourselves well supplied with fresh beef. We cooked our “dampers” in New
South Wales fashion, and lived on the fat of the land, our bill of fare being
beefsteaks, damper, and tea for breakfast, dinner, and supper. A damper is a
very good thing, but not commonly seen in California, excepting among
men from New South Wales. A quantity of flour and water, with a pinch or
two of salt, is worked into a dough, and, raking down a good hardwood fire,
it is placed on the hot ashes, and then smothered in more hot ashes to the
depth of two or three inches, on the top of which is placed a quantity of the
still burning embers. A very little practice enables one to judge from the
feel of the crust when it is sufficiently cooked. The great advantage of a
damper is, that it retains a certain amount of moisture, and is as good when
a week old as when fresh baked. It is very solid and heavy, and a little of it
goes a great way, which of itself is no small recommendation when one eats
only to live.
Another sort of bread we very frequently made by filling a frying-pan
with dough, and sticking it upon end to roast before the fire.
The Americans do not understand dampers. They either bake bread,
using saleratus to make it rise, or else they make flapjacks, which are
nothing more than pancakes made of flour and water, and are a very good
substitute for bread when one is in a hurry, as they are made in a moment.
As for our beefsteaks, they could not be beat anywhere. A piece of an
old iron-hoop, twisted into a serpentine form and laid on the fire, made a
first-rate gridiron, on which every man cooked his steak to his own taste. In
the matter of tea I am afraid we were dreadfully extravagant, throwing it
into the pot in handfuls. It is a favorite beverage in the mines—morning,
noon, and night—and at no time is it more refreshing than in the extreme
heat of mid-day.
In the cabin two bunks had been fitted up, one above the other, made of
clapboards laid crossways, but they were all loose and warped. I tried to
sleep on them one night, but it was like sleeping on a gridiron; the smooth
earthen floor was a much more easy couch.
 CHAPTER VII

INDIANS AND CHINAMEN

W ITHIN a few miles of us there was camped a large tribe of Indians,

who were generally quite peaceable, and showed no hostility to the
whites.
Small parties of them were constantly to be seen in Hangtown,
wandering listlessly about the street, begging for bread, meat, or old
clothes. These Digger Indians, as they are called, from the fact of their
digging for themselves a sort of subterranean abode in which they pass the
winter, are most repulsive-looking wretches, and seem to be very little less
degraded and uncivilizable than the blacks of New South Wales.
They are nearly black, and are exceedingly ugly, with long hair, which
they cut straight across the forehead just above the eyes. They had learned
the value of gold, and might be seen occasionally in unfrequented places
washing out a panful of dirt, but they had no idea of systematic work. What
little gold they got, they spent in buying fresh beef and clothes. They dress
very fantastically. Some, with no other garment than an old dress-coat
buttoned up to the throat, or perhaps with only a hat and a pair of boots,
think themselves very well got up, and look with great contempt on their
neighbors whose wardrobe is not so extensive. A coat with showy linings to
the sleeves is a great prize; it is worn inside out to produce a better effect,
and pantaloons are frequently worn, or rather carried, with the legs tied
around the waist. They seemed to think it impossible to have too much of a
good thing; and any man so fortunate as to be the possessor of duplicates of
any article of clothing, puts them on one over the other, piling hat upon hat
after the manner of “Old clo.”
The men are very tenacious of their dignity, and carry nothing but their
bows and arrows, while the attendant squaws are loaded down with a large
creel on the back, which is supported by a band passing across the forehead,
and is the receptacle for all the rubbish they pick up. The squaws have also,
of course, to carry the babies; which, however, are not very troublesome, as
they are wrapped up in papoose-frames like those of the North American
Indians, though of infinitely inferior workmanship.
 They are very fond of dogs, and have always at their heels a number of
the most wretchedly thin, mangy, starved-looking curs, of dirty brindle
color, something the shape of a greyhound, but only about half his size. A
strong mutual attachment exists between the dogs and their masters; but the
affection of the latter does not move them to bestow much food on their
canine friends, who live in a state of chronic starvation; every bone seems
ready to break through the confinement of the skin, and their whole life is
merely a slow death from inanition. They have none of the life or spirit of
other dogs, but crawl along as if every step was to be their last, with a look
of most humble resignation, and so conscious of their degradation that they
never presume to hold any communion with their civilized fellow-creatures.
It is very likely that canine nature cannot stand such food as the Indians are
content to live upon, and of which acorns and grasshoppers are the staple
articles. There are plenty of small animals on which one would think that a
dog could live very well, if he would only take the trouble to catch them;
but it would seem that a dog, as long as he remains a companion of man, is
an animal quite incapable of providing for himself.
A failure of the acorn crop is to the Indians a national calamity, as they
depend on it in a great measure for their subsistence during the winter. In
the fall of the year the squaws are busily employed in gathering acorns, to
be afterwards stored in small conical stacks, and covered with a sort of
wicker-work. They are prepared for food by being made into a paste, very
much of the color and consistency of opium. Such horrid-looking stuff it is,
that I never ventured to taste it; but I believe that the bitter and astringent
taste of the raw material is in no way modified by the process of
manufacture.[1]
As is the case with most savages, the Digger Indians show remarkable
instances of ingenuity in some of their contrivances, and great skill in the
manufacture of their weapons. Their bows and arrows are very good
specimens of workmanship. The former are shorter than the bows used in
this country, but resemble them in every other particular, even in the shape
of the pieces of horn at the ends. The head of the arrow is of the orthodox
cut, the three feathers being placed in the usual position; the point, however,
is the most elaborate part. About three inches of the end is of a heavier
wood than the rest of the arrow, being very neatly spliced in with thin
tendons. The point itself is a piece of flint chipped down into a flat diamond
shape, about the size of a diamond on a playing-card; the edges are very
sharp, and are notched to receive the tendons with which it is firmly secured
to the arrow.
The women make a kind of wicker-work basket of a conical form, so
closely woven as to be perfectly water-tight, and in these they have an
ingenious method of boiling water, by heating a number of stones in the
fire, and throwing a succession of them into the water till the temperature is
raised to boiling point.
We had a visit at our cabin one Sunday from an Indian and his squaw.
She was such a particularly ugly specimen of human nature that I made her
sit down, and proceeded to take a sketch of her, to the great delight of her
dutiful husband, who looked over my shoulder and reported progress to her.
I offered her the sketch when I had finished, but after admiring herself in
the bottom of a new tin pannikin, the only substitute for a looking-glass
which I could find, and comparing her own beautiful face with her portrait,
she was by no means pleased, and would have nothing to do with it. I
suppose she thought I had not done her justice; which was very likely, for
no doubt our ideas of female beauty must have differed very materially.
Not many days after we had settled ourselves at Middletown, news was
brought into Hangtown that a white man had been killed by Indians at a
place called Johnson’s Ranch, about twelve miles distant. A party of three
or four men immediately went out to recover the body, and to “hunt” the
Indians. They found the half-burned remains of the murdered man; but were
attacked by a large number of Indians, and had to retire, one of the party
being wounded by an Indian arrow. On their return to Hangtown there was
great excitement; about thirty men, mostly from the Western States, turned
out with their long rifles, intending, in the first place, to visit the camp of
the Middletown tribe, and to take from them their rifles, which they were
reported to have bought from the storekeeper there, and after that to lynch
the storekeeper himself for selling arms to the Indians, which is against the
law; for however friendly the Indians may be, they trade them off to hostile
tribes.
It happened, however, that on this particular day a neighboring tribe had
come over to the camp of the Middletown Indians for the purpose of having
a fandango together; and when they saw this armed party coming upon
them, they immediately saluted them with a shower of arrows and rifle-
balls, which damaged a good many hats and shirts, without wounding any
one. The miners returned their fire, killing a few of the Indians; but their
party being too small to fight against such odds, they were compelled to
retreat; and as the storekeeper, having got a hint of their kind intentions
towards him, had made himself scarce, they marched back to Hangtown
without having done much to boast of.
When the result of their expedition was made known, the excitement in
Hangtown was of course greater than ever. The next day crowds of miners
flocked in from all quarters, each man equipped with a long rifle in addition
to his bowie-knife and revolver, while two men, playing a drum and a fife,
marched up and down the street to give a military air to the occasion. A
public meeting was held in one of the gambling-rooms, at which the
governor, the sheriff of the county, and other big men of the place, were
present. The miners about Hangtown were mostly all Americans, and a
large proportion of them were men from the Western States, who had come
by the overland route across the plains—men who had all their lives been
used to Indian wiles and treachery, and thought about as much of shooting
an Indian as of killing a rattlesnake. They were a rough-looking crowd;
long, gaunt, wiry men, dressed in the usual old-flannel-shirt costume of the
mines, with shaggy beards, their faces, hands, and arms as brown as
mahogany, and with an expression about their eyes which boded no good to
any Indian who should come within range of their rifles.
There were some very good speeches made at the meeting; that of a
young Kentuckian doctor was quite a treat. He spoke very well, but from
the fuss he made it might have been supposed that the whole country was in
the hands of the enemy. The eyes of the thirty States of the Union, he said,
were upon them; and it was for them, the thirty-first, to avenge this insult to
the Anglo-Saxon race, and to show the wily savage that the American
nation, which could dictate terms of peace or war to every other nation on
the face of the globe, was not to be trifled with. He tried to rouse their
courage, and excite their animosity against the Indians, though it was quite
unnecessary, by drawing a vivid picture of the unburied bones of poor
Brown, or Jones, the unfortunate individual who had been murdered,
bleaching on the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, while his death was still
unavenged. If they were cowardly enough not to go out and whip the
savage Indians, their wives would spurn them, their sweethearts would
reject them, and the whole world would look upon them with scorn. The
most common-sense argument in his speech, however, was, that unless the
Indians were taught a lesson, there would be no safety for the straggling
miners in the mountains at any distance from a settlement. Altogether he
spoke very well, considering the sort of crowd he was addressing; and
judging from the enthusiastic applause, and from the remarks I heard made
by the men around me, he could not have spoken with better effect.
The Governor also made a short speech, saying that he would take the
responsibility of raising a company of one hundred men, at five dollars a
day, to go and whip the Indians.
The Sheriff followed. He “cal’lated” to raise out of that crowd one
hundred men, but wanted no man to put down his name who would not
stand up in his boots, and he would ask no man to go any further than he
would go himself.
Those who wished to enlist were then told to come round to the other
end of the room, when nearly the whole crowd rushed eagerly forward, and
the required number were at once enrolled. They started the next day, but
the Indians retreating before them, they followed them far up into the
mountains, where they remained for a couple of months, by which time the
wily savages, it is to be hoped, got properly whipped, and were taught the
respect due to white men.
We continued working our claim at Middletown, having taken into
partnership an old sea-captain whom we found there working alone. It paid
us very well for about three weeks, when, from the continued dry weather,
the water began to fail, and we were obliged to think of moving off to other
diggings.
It was now time to commence preparatory operations before working the
beds of the creeks and rivers, as their waters were falling rapidly; and as
most of our party owned shares in claims on different rivers, we became
dispersed. A young Englishman and myself alone remained, uncertain as
yet where we should go.
We had gone into Hangtown one night for provisions, when we heard
that a great strike had been made at a place called ’Coon Hollow, about a
mile distant. One man was reported to have taken out that day about fifteen
hundred dollars. Before daylight next morning we started over the hill,
intending to stake off a claim on the same ground; but even by the time we
got there, the whole hillside was already pegged off into claims of thirty
feet square, on each of which men were commencing to sink shafts, while
hundreds of others were prowling about, too late to get a claim which
would be thought worth taking up.
Those who had claims, immediately surrounding that of the lucky man
who had caused all the excitement by letting his good fortune be known,
were very sanguine. Two Cornish miners had got what was supposed to be
the most likely claim, and declared they would not take ten thousand dollars
for it. Of course, no one thought of offering such a sum; but so great was
the excitement that they might have got eight hundred or a thousand dollars
for their claim before ever they put a pick in the ground. As it turned out,
however, they spent a month in sinking a shaft about a hundred feet deep;
and after drifting all round, they could not get a cent out of it, while many
of the claims adjacent to theirs proved extremely rich.
Such diggings as these are called “coyote” diggings, receiving their
name from an animal called the coyote, which abounds all over the plain
lands of Mexico and California, and which lives in the cracks and crevices
made in the plains by the extreme heat of summer. He is half dog, half fox,
and, as an Irishman might say, half wolf also. They howl most dismally, just
like a dog, on moonlight nights, and are seen in great numbers skulking
about the plains.
Connected with them is a curious fact in natural history. They are
intensely carnivorous—so are cannibals; but as cannibals object to the
flavor of roasted sailor as being too salt, so coyotes turn up their noses at
dead Mexicans as being too peppery. I have heard the fact mentioned over
and over again, by Americans who had been in the Mexican war, that on
going over the field after their battles, they found their own comrades with
the flesh eaten off their bones by the coyotes, while never a Mexican corpse
had been touched; and the only and most natural way to account for this
phenomenon was in the fact that the Mexicans, by the constant and
inordinate eating of the hot pepperpod, the Chili colorado, had so
impregnated their system with pepper as to render their flesh too savory a
morsel for the natural and unvitiated taste of the coyotes.
These coyote diggings require to be very rich to pay, from the great
amount of labor necessary before any pay-dirt can be obtained. They are
generally worked by only two men. A shaft is sunk, over which is rigged a
rude windlass, tended by one man, who draws up the dirt in a large bucket
while his partner is digging down below. When the bed rock is reached on
which the rich dirt is found, excavations are made all round, leaving only
the necessary supporting pillars of earth, which are also ultimately
removed, and replaced by logs of wood. Accidents frequently occur from
the “caving-in” of these diggings, the result generally of the carelessness of
the men themselves.
The Cornish miners, of whom numbers had come to California from the
mines of Mexico and South America, generally devoted themselves to these
deep diggings, as did also the lead-miners from Wisconsin. Such men were
quite at home a hundred feet or so under ground, picking through hard rock
by candlelight; at the same time, gold mining in any way was to almost
every one a new occupation, and men who had passed their lives hitherto
above ground, took quite as naturally to this subterranean style of digging
as to any other.
We felt no particular fancy for it, however, especially as we could not get
a claim; and having heard favorable accounts of the diggings on Weaver
Creek, we concluded to migrate to that place. It was about fifteen miles off;
and having hired a mule and cart from a man in Hangtown to carry our long
tom, hoses, picks, shovels, blankets, and pot and pans, we started early the
next morning, and arrived at our destination about noon. We passed through
some beautiful scenery on the way. The ground was not yet parched and
scorched by the summer sun, but was still green, and on the hillsides were
patches of wild-flowers growing so thick that they were quite soft and
delightful to lie down upon. For some distance we followed a winding road
between smooth rounded hills, thickly wooded with immense pines and
cedars, gradually ascending till we came upon a comparatively level
country, which had all the beauty of an English park. The ground was quite
smooth, though gently undulating, and the rich verdure was diversified with
numbers of white, yellow, and purple flowers. The oaks of various kinds,
which were here the only tree, were of an immense size, but not so
numerous as to confine the view; and the only underwood was the
mansanita, a very beautiful and graceful shrub, generally growing in single
plants to the height of six or eight feet. There was no appearance of
ruggedness or disorder; we might have imagined ourselves in a well-kept
domain; and the solitude, and the vast unemployed wealth of nature, alone
reminded us that we were among the wild mountains of California.
After traveling some miles over this sort of country, we got among the
pine trees once more, and very soon came to the brink of the high
mountains overhanging Weaver Creek. The descent was so steep that we
had the greatest difficulty in getting the cart down without a capsize, having
to make short tacks down the face of the hill, and generally steering for a
tree to bring up upon in case of accidents. At the point where we reached
the Creek was a store, and scattered along the rocky banks of the Creek
were a few miners’ tents and cabins. We had expected to have to camp out
here, but seeing a small tent unoccupied near the store, we made inquiry of
the storekeeper, and finding that it belonged to him, and that he had no
objection to our using it, we took possession accordingly, and proceeded to
light a fire and cook our dinner.
Not knowing how far we might be from a store, we had brought along
with us a supply of flour, ham, beans, and tea, with which we were quite
independent. After prospecting a little, we soon found a spot on the bank of
the stream which we judged would yield us pretty fair pay for our labor. We
had some difficulty at first in bringing water to the long tom, having to lead
our hose a considerable distance up the stream to obtain sufficient
elevation; but we soon got everything in working order, and pitched in. The
gold which we found here was of the finest kind, and required great care in
washing. It was in exceedingly small thin scales—so thin, that in washing
out in a pan at the end of the day, a scale of gold would occasionally float
for an instant on the surface of the water. This is the most valuable kind of
gold dust, and is worth one or two dollars an ounce more than the coarse
chunky dust.
It was a wild rocky place where we were now located. The steep
mountains, rising abruptly all round us, so confined the view that we
seemed to be shut out from the rest of the world. The nearest village or
settlement was about ten miles distant; and all the miners on the Creek
within four or five miles living in isolated cabins, tents, and brush-houses,
or camping out on the rocks, resorted for provisions to the small store
already mentioned, which was supplied with a general assortment of
provisions and clothing.
There had still been occasional heavy rains, from which our tent was but
poor protection, and we awoke sometimes in the morning, finding small
pools of water in the folds of our blankets, and everything so soaking wet,
inside the tent as well as outside, that it was hopeless to attempt to light a
fire. On such occasions, raw ham, hard bread, and cold water was all the
breakfast we could raise; eking it out however, with an extra pipe, and
relieving our feelings by laying in fiercely with pick and shovel.
The weather very soon, however, became quite settled. The sky was
always bright and cloudless; all verdure was fast disappearing from the
hills, and they began to look brown and scorched. The heat in the mines
during summer is greater than in most tropical countries. I have in some
parts seen the thermometer as high as 120 degrees in the shade during the
greater part of the day for three weeks at a time; but the climate is not by
any means so relaxing and oppressive as in countries where, though the
range of the thermometer is much lower, the damp suffocating atmosphere
makes the heat more severely felt. In the hottest weather in California, it is
always agreeably cool at night—sufficiently so to make a blanket
acceptable, and to enable one to enjoy a sound sleep, in which one recovers
from all the evil effects of the previous day’s baking; and even the extreme
heat of the hottest hours of the day, though it crisps up one’s hair like that of
a nigger, is still light and exhilarating, and by no means disinclines one for
bodily exertion.
We continued to work the claim we had first taken for two or three
weeks with very good success, when the diggings gave out—that is to say,
they ceased to yield sufficiently to suit our ideas: so we took up another
claim about a mile further up the creek; and as this was rather an
inconvenient distance from our tent, we abandoned it, and took possession
of a log cabin near our claim which some men had just vacated. It was a
very badly built cabin perched on a rocky platform overhanging the rugged
pathway which led along the banks of the creek.
A cabin with a good shingle-roof is generally the coolest kind of abode
in summer; but ours was only roofed with cotton cloth, offering scarcely
any resistance to the fierce rays of the sun, which rendered the cabin during
the day so intolerably hot that we cooked and ate our dinner under the shade
of a tree.
A whole bevy of Chinamen had recently made their appearance on the
creek. Their camp, consisting of a dozen or so of small tents and brush
houses, was near our cabin on the side of the hill—too near to be pleasant,
for they kept up a continual chattering all night, which was rather tiresome
till we got used to it.