In this series of filmed interviews, Professor Matt Cook, who has the Jonathan Cooper Chair of the History of Sexuality, Mansfield College, University of Oxford, addresses some of the key questions currently on the agenda around LGBTQ+ rights, language and politics.

In many of the sections he explores his own route as a historian through the changes that have occurred in the study of LGBTQ+ history. He talks us through a biographical journey of trying to access Gay history and how literature provided a key cross over for exploring LGBTQ+ stories during the 1980’s when the media and political landscape was full of anti-gay rhetoric.

This interview is an important way for historians and students of history to understand how LGBTQ+ history has developed and how its scholarship is developing.