introduction

This collection is titled Perversions for a number of reasons. It was begun in London in the late 1970s, an era of Queer Studies avant la lettre, when the work of Richard Dyer, Mary Mcintosh, Simon Watney, Jeffrey Weeks and Elizabeth Wilson, among others, circulated in places like the National Film Theatre (where Richard curated its first gay film season), the feminist journal Red Rag (where Elizabeth memorably addressed the question of bisexuality), the men's collective Gay Left, and even — occasionally — in the classroom. (It's worth remembering that Mary Mcintosh's pioneering analysis of the social construction of the homosexual identity ¹ dates back to 1968, and the radical British school of sociology known as 'Deviancy Studies'.)