Get out your rainbow flag and fly it high. June is the month to celebrate the diversity of sexuality and sexualities across society. For historians it is an opportunity to showcase the long history of LGBT+ issues in the UK’s past and to explore the different ways sexuality and LGBT+ people have been presented and have presented themselves.

This year we caught up with Professor Matt Cook who is the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality, Mansfield College, University of Oxford. He discussed some of the ways that language has changed about the LGBT+ community and why researchers have needed to approach their studies in this area from a variety of angles.

The extract here is part of a larger interview that will be made available in our membership area.

As a supporter of allowing people to access broad areas of history we also have a number of other resources and content on the history of LGBT+ communities in the UK – some of which we are sharing with you freely during the month of June.