Welcome to Litsy!

Fascinating book. I will be thinking about her ideas and interpretations of freedom and campaigning for some time, I think.

Picture of the coast near Edinburgh. The sea was what came to mind this morning as I thought about freedom.

By insisting that there could be no positive discussion of homosexuality in schools, it [Section 28] ensured the opposite. Homophobia spilled up unchecked. Poof, lezzer, I hope you die of Aids: the torrent of playground language to which any gay or gender non-conforming kid was subjected. I can still feel my school years in my body, every muscle clamped and clenched, defended against discovery of the so-called family situation...

Having a few days away.
Fancy hotel room, generally lovely, but hopeless absence of reading light leaves me unimpressed.

Would it be weird to phone hotel in advance next time and ask for a room with a reading light?

These interviews revealed such a diversity of sexualities...that Hirschfeld's belief in the existence of anything so simplistic as two genders was eroded. No, the line between male and female, straight and gay was decidedly blurred. In 1910, he calculated that there were forty-three million possible combinations of gender and sexuality, a near-infinite spectrum of human possibility.... Imagine telling J. K. Rowling.