BUREAU OF LOST CULTURE – Queer Histories (05/07/2025)

There are many familiar names—Oscar Wilde, Sappho, James Baldwin, Freddie Mercury—but also many we might not expect: Florence Nightingale, Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, J. Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tchaikovsky, Greta Garbo, Richard the Lionheart, even Abraham Lincoln—all in Keith Stern’s extraordinary encyclopaedia ‘Queers in History’ – along with 1000 other stories of artists, generals, politicians, kings, despots and many more figures drawn from 5000 years of hidden histiry.

The book is more than a who’s-who of queer history—it’s a challenge to the official version of the past, a reminder of how history gets made, unmade, and remade depending on who’s telling it and tries to restore a more honest human story inviting us to consider how queerness has always existed, has always contributed.

Keith came to tell us about what drove him to write this book and why it matters.

And we get into the subject of whether Gandalf was Queer – we really do…