David Minto on His Article “Perversion by Penumbras”

In this episode of AHR Interview, David Minto discusses his article “Perversion by Penumbras: Wolfenden, Griswold, and the Transatlantic Trajectory of Sexual Privacy,” which appears in the journal’s October 2018 issue. The article examines the role of the 1957 British Wolfenden Report on homosexual offenses and prostitution in the creation of the legal atmosphere in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in its 1965 decision in Griswold v. Connecticut, recognized a constitutional right to marital privacy. Minto is Assistant Professor of History at Durham University. His research deals with twentieth-century British and U.S. history in domestic and transnational perspective, with a particular focus on gender and sexuality. He is currently working on his first book project, which is titled “An Intimate Atlantic: The Special Relationships of Transnational Homophile Activism.” Interviewing Minto is historian Julio Capó Jr. Capó is Associate Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and researches transnational and queer history with an emphasis on the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America. His book Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 was published in 2017 by the University of North Carolina Press.