Hello and welcome to Queer as Fact. The podcast bringing you queer history from around the world and throughout time. I'm Alice. I'm Eli. Today we're going to be talking about periodical homophobia.

But otherwise, our mini episodes are probably going to be a lot lighter on content warnings than our long episodes, which can be pretty heavy.

So there are two halves to this story about Queen Victoria.

The first half, which I'm going to talk about first, is that Queen Victoria

refused to sign a bill making lesbianism illegal in Britain, saying either women do not do

such things or I've never heard of such a thing. Okay, so you're saying that phrased as a fact.

I'm assuming this is what people say happens. Yes. You just very much

sounded like you had quotes from her though. Is that meant to be people direct quoting her,

whether or not it's made up, you can tell me in a minute. Yeah, that's meant to be people

direct quoting her. And she is directly quoted saying these two phrases in a wide variety of

sources. I see. So like professional academic sources or just people on the internet?

I've seen it in academic sources, but only as a kind of side note, like never in an actual

academic text that's talking about Queen Victoria and lesbians, just as a kind of side note being

like, by the way, Queen Victoria said this in an academic thing on another topic.

I mean, I doubt there's really much that is focused specifically on Queen Victoria

and lesbians, or even on Queen Victoria and, like, homosexuality.

Yeah, no, that's not.

I was researching this.

Fun time. People just don't talk about lesbians.

No, they don't.

Yeah, which is both like the source of this myth and our current problem we continue to

be experienced.

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