This week's Queerstory tells the story of Claude Cahun — born Lucy Schwob in France in 1894 into a Jewish literary family, and a surrealist photographer, writer and, as it turned out, resistance fighter. Decades before words like non-binary or gender-fluid were in common use, she was already writing about gender as something changeable, something that could be put on and taken off like a costume, and she took the name Claude precisely because in French it works equally as a man's or a woman's — refusing to let language decide who she was. In 1930s Paris she worked, and lived, with her partner Suzanne Malherbe, who took the name Marcel Moore; the two had been step-sisters before they were lovers, and out of that unlikely arrangement came one of the great creative partnerships of the twentieth century, so close that it is hard to say where one artist ended and the other began. In 1937 they left Paris for Jersey to escape the rising far right, and when the Nazis occupied the island in 1940 they stayed and ran one of the strangest resistance campaigns of the war — Claude writing messages in fluent German, signed by an invented disillusioned soldier, which the two of them slipped into coat pockets, left in vehicles and dropped at military funerals. They called their weapon the paper bullets, and for four years nobody suspected two ageing, eccentric French women of running a resistance operation from a stone house by the sea. In 1944 they were caught and sentenced to death; they were still awaiting execution when Jersey was liberated in May 1945. Claude never fully recovered, and died in 1954. Her photographs were largely forgotten until the 1990s, and today she is recognised as one of the earliest openly gender-fluid artists in modern history.

And with autumn approaching, the team brings their reading list for the season — a top five chosen with the help of queer and independent bookshops in London, Manchester and Bristol, and spanning new fiction, a journey through queer cinema, and a trans-feminist essay on homelessness that lands at a painfully timely moment.