Gives two groups traditionally overlooked and stigmatized by history and society—people with disabilities and queer people as well—and lets them have center stage. Who knows what great stories we’ve missed out on, due to history’s longstanding obsession with dead statesmen to the exclusion of everyone else?

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of Queer Disability through History: The Queer and Disabled Movements through their Personalities by Daisy Holder.

Holder’s work is a fascinating dive into the intersection of queer and disability identities throughout history. However, the book’s structure and writing style could benefit from tighter editing. Some tangents, while interesting, occasionally disrupt the flow. Additionally, the anthology format, while effective in highlighting diverse experiences, sometimes feels disjointed. Would have also loved to see more BIPOC - was really expecting to see Audre Lorde and/ or Gloria Anzaldúa.

Despite these shortcomings, Queer Disability through History is a valuable contribution to the field of disability studies and queer theory. It offers a nuanced perspective on the complex experiences of individuals who have been marginalized due to both their sexual orientation and physical or mental impairments.

This was an interesting read. I enjoyed the information. Some of it was refresher to me (the biography of Frida Kahlo, for example); others were new (Kitty Cone). The writing, however, was choppy and needed more organization. For example, in the chapter about Kahlo, Holder takes a side track into disability history as a whole, something that would have been better suited for an introduction. In the chapter about Michelangelo, there's a long tangent that includes both the al-Andalus empire and Ancient Greek poetry. Why? I understand that the constraints were narrow, given that all the figures needed to be at least convincingly Queer and Disabled, but an editor should have caught that.

This opened my eyes.

Of course I know disabled people existed. I obviously know queer people existed. And yeah then logically queer disabled people existed too. But this book giving me many examples of wonderful people made it so much more real. It gives examples of people further back into history, and others who lived not that long ago. It gave me a big idea of us being there in all ages of time, and that was really nice.

I felt connected with history through this book in a way I only once had before with Queer as Folklore which I reviewed a few weeks ago. Both books take a look at historical queer things and it really gave me space to exist. Queer Disability Through History gave me even more a connected feeling though because disability is such an essential part of me and that intersection gives life a very different outlook. I loved that the book talked about this intersection too, how queerness can sometimes act as a disability, or how queerness and disability together give someone a significantly higher chance of discrimination. The look at both of these marginalizations together and how they interact through history gave me a lot more insight how this can be for others.

The book stayed down to earth but professional throughout. It felt respectful to the deceased and handed it with care. It was interesting to learn about so many individuals, some of whom I'd heard from before and others who I didn't. It highlighted a few big moments in both queer and disabled history and showed someone disabled and queer who had a big hand in that. These highlights were really awesome and gave me a lot of insight.

I would recommend this book to anyone wanting queer and disability history in a fun way.

DNF at 37,9%

I would like to thank NetGalley and Pen & Sword for the access to this e-ARC and apologize for my inability to finish it.

As a queer, disabled person I was really excited for this book and I worked through it until the near end when I started to run out of time and could not reissue the book. I would have liked to finish it but I really struggled with how unorganized everything was and I would often have to jump back to other pages to figure out if I had missed something (I had not), but the author would bring up subjects and run with them and then bounce back to what they were originally talking about. It's like ADHD brain in writing format. As someone with ADHD I would often start stories and get distracted with my points and end up on big tangents. This feels like that.

I really enjoyed learning about queer, disabled people as I hadn't been introduced to the subject other than in my own life. I had never focused on my disabilities and it somehow never occurred to me to find out about other people like myself.

If I had more time, I would put it into this book so that I could fully understand the authors points and passion about these queer individuals.

I think the whole book needs re-collating and a good edit before putting it on the shelves. Someone mentioned a better cover, but I found it clever.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for an ARC in exchange for an honest review of Queer Disability through History. Unfortunately I was unable to download this book before the archive date. I look forward to finding it at my local bookstore or library!

I really enjoyed learning more about queer disabled activists, especially some that I hadn’t ever heard of before. However, I really didn’t like that it wasn’t chronological and the language used was strange at times; it didn’t fit the tone quite right. There were grammatical errors as well. The fluidity of the narration was also off, there could’ve been way better flow and connection of topics within each chapter as well as continuance throughout the book.

A collection of biographies of queer Disabled people in history. My favorite part of this collection was the intro, which embodied Disabled Rage in a beautiful way by standing firm against othering terms such as “handicapable” or “disabled” and the way their patronizing use is harmful to Disabled communities. Unfortunately, I did not enjoy the rest of the collection as much.
While I mostly enjoyed reading the biographies and I definitely learned something new about new queer Disabled people that I hadn’t known before, I was a bit disappointed at seeing who was missing (where are Eli Clare? Leslie Feinberg? Audre Lorde?) or at least a mention of acknowledgement of who is left out of this anthology. Furthermore, I found myself quite confused by the structure of this anthology. How (if at all) where the chapters sorted? As far as I could tell it was not structured in a temporal order or the place of origin or anything else and I feel like a clearer structure there could have made the story more interesting. Instead, it kind of felt like the author picked some queer Disabled people from history she liked and simply started writing, sorting it by whenever the research was done. Then most chapters include tangents to various ideas, either in Disability Studies or Queer Studies or an exploration of history and how things have changed. I feel like reading the chapters would have been more interesting if these ideas had been weaved into the chapters better, maybe by placing them at the front of each chapter and linking back to them in the actual biographies. Like this it would often throw me out of the stories of the people I was reading and unfortunately was not something I enjoyed. Finally, I also feel that the writing could have been edited better, leaving out personal comments by the author, as that really threw me outside of the biographies. I do think non-fiction writing can include an author voice, but here it felt too much to me.
My personal favorite chapters were the ones about Kitty Cone, as I knew parts about the ADA and how it came to be, but didn’t know about her involvement, Connie Panzariono, whose work I definitely want to check out now and Sharon Kowalski and Karen Thompson, a lesbian couple whose life changed after Sharon was disabled through a car accident and had her parents declared as her legal ward. Of the people featured in this anthology some are quite famous in queer circles (Frida Kahlo, Marsha P. Johnson, Lord Byron, Alan Turing and Michelangelo) and so I didn’t really get that much from their chapters as I knew most of what was presented here before, but if you are more interested in their lives you might get more out of there stories than I did.
All in all, I do think this book could be interesting to the right audience, which will be more you than me if you are a) not interested in academic historical writing and can handle snarky remarks by an author & b) are new to Disability studies and Queer Studies.

Three stars for effort, and because this book so desperately needs to exist. But I’m being generous.

Although I read a review copy, there is a sore need for editing such that chapters don’t seem like a mish-mash of barely-related topics. Such as it is, a chapter will often take a sharp and unexpected detour into the life of a completely different historic character.

I do love a bit of snark in my history books, but this author just doesn’t quite get the balance right, and I found myself irritated with the lack of respect for historians. He even, when referring to “so-called experts”, adds in parentheses, “not that I’ve studied their credentials”. I’m sorry, what?? How do you write a historic book without fine combing the credentials of any work you reference?

Unfortunately, this is not the golden book I was hoping for, but you will learn some new things about new people.

An enjoyable and informative book. There were a range of individuals discussed - both ones I had heard of and ones that I hadn't. Out of those that I had heard of before, there was a ton of information about them that I was unaware of. The book does a solid job of putting the individuals and their experiences into a greater context as well. Even as someone who has read about/engaged with disability advocacy for some years now, there were sections that helped me grasp areas of theory better than previously.
It jumps around quite a bit and is definitely more focused on historical individuals. I didn't fact-check everything in the book, but going off of the reading experience... I recommend this.

I enjoyed a lot of this while also learning a lot. Some of the people featured I had never come across before and am glad I now have.
However, specially at the beginning, it didn't feel focused on the person it was featuring. Additionally, I'm not a fan of the cover. It's a bit confusing and I feel it should focus on the people it features rather than the author.

I wanted to like this book, I really did. I'm a queer and disabled person with training as a historian, so this looked like an absolutely ideal read for me. Instead, I would honestly say that this author has been failed in being told this book is publishable as a work of history.

The writing, in the version I received, needed serious editing, from structure to line edits. Much of the content was tenuously linked together, such that this was not a queer disability history but was mostly a history of several individuals who were queer and disabled, with frequent tangents into general queer or disabled history. The tone was entirely unacademic to the point of disparaging the work of historians that the book should have (and only occasionally was) built upon, and was otherwise sarcastic to the point of confusion. Some of the historical facts were wrong, and the historical analysis was next to nonexistent. The sources referenced were of low quality (and often formatted inconsistently), ranging from BBC news articles to podcast episodes, with barely any use of original or academic sources.

Some of the content was interesting, but that's probably the only positive point I can find. I know the author is clearly passionate about the content, but I would instead have encouraged them to do further high-quality research and work on their writing skills without trusting their work to a press that doesn't give their book the editing or cover (seriously, why is the cover a fake tweet by the author?) it deserves. This book would have been much better served by good framing as to what it actually is.

If you think you would like to read a 'popular history' (written for an audience with no academic/historical knowledge or study experience) book which gives the very basics of some queer and disabled history in the US and UK, like books written in a sarcastic tone, and have no trust for any academic historical work, then this book is genuinely for you. I like none of these things and this book was therefore not for me.

Starting off, I loved that the book included a definition for disability at the beginning that was widely inclusive. It is such an interesting premise to dive into history through specific queer Disabled peoples’ lives! Immediately, they touch on how queer Disabled peoples’ identities are often separated into “queer” or “Disabled”, but both aspects are rarely examined together. They also mentioned how their own coverage of the issues may be biased and I appreciated how the author confronted their own biases this way. They did a wonderful job weaving in a lot of basic queer and disabled history to fill out the stories that this book told and it added some interesting context! All together, it made an enthralling read about disabled queer history! #QueerDisabilitythroughHistory #NetGalley

Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with the eARC, but it did not affect my review in any way!

CW: use of historical terms for LGBTQ+ people and Disabled people , ableism, homophobia, medical homophobia, talk of suicidal thoughts, medical abuse, pedophilia,

This is an amazing book that focuses on The intersections between several groups, but predominantly those with disabilities that are also lgbtqia+.
Covering topics from Guardianship, Ethics in care, access issues and more it is a definitive guide to understanding these groups intersecting history and I feel should be a mandated read for all.

From platforming icons both known and previously unknown (at least to me) for their contributions to policy, societal change, pride as we know it and so much more it is a fountain of knowledges.
Additionally it highlights Impacts on those in several minorities ie queer and disabled or BIPOC/and disabled.
One event which particularly stuck out to me was the Capital crawl. This being as it was such a visual and un-ignorable representation of the community and the need for Policy around queerness and disabilities to change to better protect them.

This includes fighting against past DSM psychotherapy definitions on homosexuality and transgenderism and ADA policy failing protecting those who were intersectional.
From Deafness to chronic illness, To those disabled by events we see a broad range of disabilities and identities represented and it has an intersection with art as well as policy.

I got this as an arc on Netgalley and it has since come out! Today in fact so go get this! This is genuinely a must read. It talks about important queercrips in history and their importance but also connects it with other, queer and/or crip, history. As a queercrip who has talked about historical queercrips in the past, this anti-erasure book gave me so much joy.

Queer disability through history, due to the title and tag line I thought this book was about the struggles and comparisons gay and or disabled people go through and those who have risen above to change the laws social opinion in legislation and it is kind of like that but I found out of the four people she focused on two of them really weren’t activist for disable nor queer communities. I enjoyed reading the story of Frida Kahlo and Lord Byron but when I think of social justice warriors for queer and or disabled people they are not the two I think of but I digress. She also put Dr. John friar in the book who was Dr. anonymous he started ed the gay in lesbian psychiatric foundation in went by the anonymous Moniker, before publicly being gay was okay. She also had a focus on kitty Cohen who I’ve never heard of before but found her story very interesting. As for the rest I DK I did enjoy most of it but found a lot of it had nothing to do with the activism and social change that has happened over the past centuries but at least she is trying I guess? I did find the story about the disabled girl who was locked up to keep her from her girlfriend is sad and I am sure she was just one of many. I was also surprised she didn’t mention Elton John who is legally blind and openly gay and has been for decades I think because her criteria was disabled and queer made for a very small scope I don’t think anything would’ve been wrong with talking about the mini heroes from each community that made great strides whether they fell under one or both categories it’s still benefited everyone included if you know what I am saying. #NetGalley, #PenAndSwordPress, #DaisyHolder, #QueerDisabilityThroughHistory,

This was a really poignant and important read. The way the author structured this book lead the reader through the intersection of disability and queerness -which has not previously been really talked about together even though the term intersectionality has been coined for a while. I liked how the author started with more famous queer folks - Frida and Marsha - and then expanded with other figures that might not have been well known in either the disability or queer communities but are now more understood. This is a great book for anyone who wants to learn more about queer or disability history (and will learn about both).