LGBTQ+ History Lecturer Samuel Rutherford ’12 Recommends Books for Pride Month

Sam Rutherford ’12 and her new book, "Teaching Gender."

Photo courtesy of Sam Rutherford ’12

By Elisabeth H. Daugherty

Published June 23, 2025

2 min read

Sam Rutherford ’12 began his studies in queer history at Princeton, where he wrote a senior thesis about the early British theorist of homosexuality John Addington Symonds. After pursuing a master’s at Oxford and a Ph.D. at Columbia, he is now a lecturer in LGBTQ+ history at the University of Glasgow in Scotland.

Rutherford’s research focuses on the history of ideas about gender and sexuality, and on what happens when the state and other institutions come into contact with individuals’ intimate lives. His new book, Teaching Gender: The British University and the Rise of Heterosexuality, 1860-1939, explains how U.K. universities became gender-integrated in the early 20^th century, how the rituals of heterosexuality became the primary way that women and men in universities interacted with one another, and what happened to alternatives for gender and sexuality that couldn’t be made to fit within these norms. His next book project is about what queer and trans history tell us about the history of the U.K. state from 1820 to the present.

PAW asked Rutherford to draw on his background in queer history to recommend three books for Pride Month. He suggested these.

The cover of "Before We Were Trans," featuring a black and white photo of five women.

Before We Were Trans (2022)

By Kit Heyam

In all times and all places, people have lived lives in genders different to those they were assigned at birth. Heyam’s capacious, elegantly written book is an introduction to the stories of some such people from around the world, as well as to the theoretical concepts and modes of analysis used by specialists in the field of trans history. I teach this book every year, and it’s my go-to recommendation for anyone who wants to learn more about what trans history can do for our broader understanding of gender as a category of historical analysis.

The cover of "The Well of Loneliness," featuring an illustration of people perhaps at a party.

The Well of Loneliness (1928)

By Radclyffe Hall (New Oxford World’s Classics edition ed. Jana Funke and Hannah Roche, 2024)

Hall’s 1928 novel gets a bad reputation as turgid and depressing. But behind the tragic narrative arc of the novel’s protagonist, Stephen Gordon, is a much wider, emotionally rich and resonant picture of different possibilities for living a queer or trans life in early-20^th-century Britain and France. Funke and Roche’s edition — the first critical edition of the novel — allows a new generation of readers to access what Hall has to say about gender, sexuality, and the search for a meaningful life in the face of ostracization and oppression.

The cover of "Modern Nature," featuring a photo of a garden.

Modern Nature (1991)

By Derek Jarman

In the repressive climate of 1980s and ’90s Britain, the artist Derek Jarman was a rare public figure who was open about his HIV status, a sharp critic of the homophobic state, and someone whose writing, films, paintings, and garden mounted a beautiful and urgent response to the political moment in which he lived. Modern Nature, his diaries from 1989-90, juxtapose the quotidian details of attending hospital appointments, planting flowers, and cruising for sex on Hampstead Heath with news headlines of war and genocide abroad and the state’s neglect of its most vulnerable citizens at home. I’ve been turning to Jarman a lot this year as I think increasingly about the resources that the queer past can offer queer and trans people in the present for building livable lives in the face of state repression.