It's Always More Complicated

Interview with Kit Heyam, author of Before We Were Trans: A New History of Gender:

a new and different story of gender, that seeks not to be comprehensive or definitive, but – by blending culture, feminism and politics – to widen the scope of what we think of as trans history by telling the stories of people across the globe whose experience of gender has been transgressive, or not characterised by stability or binary categories.... the stories this book tells leave questions and resist conclusions. They are fraught with ambiguity, and defy modern Western terminology and categories.

Telling Scotland about AIDS:

From the first reports of AIDS in Scotland, individual activists and organisations have sought to educate and protect their local communities. Historian Colin Moore shows how their campaigns evolved from simple pamphlets to fun and innovative messages incorporating sex, comics, football, and even a bright pink bus.

This book looks fascinating: Bo Ruberg: Sex Dolls at Sea: Imagined Histories of Sexual Technologies:

Ruberg examines the generally accepted story that the first sex dolls were dames de voyage, rudimentary figures made of cloth and leather scraps by European sailors on long, lonely ocean voyages in centuries past. In search of supporting evidence for the lonesome sailor sex doll theory, Ruberg uncovers the real history of the sex doll.

A rather different slant on love over distance and separation: Aimee Fox, '“I Have Never Felt More Utterly Yours”: Presence, Intimacy, and Long-Distance Marriages in the First World War':

Wartime separation gave couples space to develop new forms of intimacy and affection. Through creative, often abstract, alternatives developed to affect a sense of presence, spouses were able to know, embody, and imagine one another. While separated couples frequently desired and imagined physical reunion, its fleeting nature was emotionally wearing and often undermined intimacy and togetherness in immediate and long-lasting ways.

Pioneering the sexy horror of the vampire before the Transylvanian Count: Meet 'Varney,' The Vampire Who Popped Up 50 Years Before 'Dracula':

Varney is about the (very) long quest of Sir Francis Varney to acquire blood to live on, in the form of a beautiful young virgin who he can marry and then suck dry. Lacking this wife due to Plot Reasons, he resorts to the women near him to feed on. He wants to “obtain the voluntary consent of one that is young, beautiful, and a virgin” .... Varney is emo, haunted by guilt, full of self-criticism, and a drifter in a world that hates and fears vampires. Who better, then, to become the icon of the undead? Varney’s tall, gaunt, so pale as to have pure white skin, with “eyes like polished tin” and a head full of long black hair.