Depictions of homosexuality in art and culture reach back into antiquity, but even a few years ago an exhibition with the word queer in its title would have been inconceivable.
This year, however, sees a step change – 2017 marks 50 years since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, a legal milestone that decriminalised consensual sex between two men over the age of 21 and in private. The anniversary has prompted museums and galleries to put queer culture at the heart of their programming, including in titles and text.
Even though they may be temporary, these exhibitions, displays and events form part of the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ equality in law and social attitudes. Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain (until 1 October) is a major part of the London gallery’s LGBTQ programme of displays, events and talks that focus on a century bookended by the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy and the 1967 act.
London’s National Portrait Gallery is running a year-long I am Me season, a series of exhibitions looking at different aspects of gender and sexuality, including David Gwinnutt: Before We Were Men, comprising photographs of the London gay scene in the 1980s.
On a smaller scale, the exhibition Queer Talk: Homosexuality in Britten’s Britain (until 28 October), at the Red House, the Suffolk home that composer Benjamin Britten shared with Peter Pears, provides a picture of a time when homosexuality was illegal.
In a nod to the rainbow flag, Refracted: Collected Highlights (until 8 September) is a colour-themed LGBTQ art exhibition at the Russell-Cotes gallery in Bournemouth.
Some of the exhibitions are the culmination of a process that has seen core collections reappraised, new LGBTQ-related acquisitions, artworks and objects reinterpreted, and text panels rewritten to reveal LGBTQ connections.
But museums and galleries have to tread carefully, warns Jude Woods, a community development worker and LGBTQ rights activist in Leeds. “It’s great to see so many exhibitions with LGBTQ connections, but it can easily backfire,” he says.
“Museums and galleries can risk being one step away from a freak show unless the ‘queering’ becomes part of the fabric of the museum. We have to work harder to understand LGBTQ culture to avoid misrepresenting people’s lives, which could be hurtful, especially when they have trusted the institutions to tell their stories.”
Woods cites the example of the BBC documentary Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?, which was criticised by transgender people for being manipulative, poorly researched and presented.
Woods runs a project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), Queer Stories, which focuses on intergenerational LGBTQ history and heritage, and Sage, a lottery-funded project supporting older LGBTQ people with Age UK Leeds and other partners.
Woods has a close working relationship with Leeds Museums & Galleries, and together they have modelled an integrated approach such as the Dying Matters display in the community space at Leeds City Museum. “The subject is death and dying, which is something that affects everybody,” Woods says.
“So among the exhibits, films and photographs, is the story of John and Ray who are facing terminal illness as a gay couple.”
Oral histories
It is important that museums and galleries fully embrace their LGBTQ work and include activities such as awareness and terminology training for staff.
“If a mainstream cultural organisation doesn’t try to promote marginalised voices it will inevitably add to the oppression, unwittingly or otherwise,” Woods says. “Absence or silence adds to the further marginalisation of LGBTQ people, despite the gains we have made over the past half century.”
Previously untold stories can be revealed easily but there are significant gaps, partly because before 1967 LGBTQ people were cautious about recording their lives.
Museums and galleries have reached out to organisations and activists, in some cases for the first time, to collect oral histories and material culture for their core collections.
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) has been building relationships with LGBTQ communities for years and running conferences since 2003, as well as an LGBTQ history club for the past five years.
“If you are classed as illegal you are less likely to keep records,” says Tom Furber, a development officer at LMA. “And the records that do end up in archives tend to be from institutions and establishments. It’s one-sided – about people, not by people – and we wanted to counter that.
“People have told us that they never kept a diary because it could have incriminated not just themselves, but also their family and friends. So oral histories are a great way of making a deliberate intervention to challenge the official record. They concern people’s memories, especially where documents are missing, and it’s more democratic.”
Furber adds that in many ways it’s been made easier by having engaged people keen to tell their stories. “It’s long overdue. We are pushing at an open door.”
Rather than a temporary exhibition to mark the 1967 act, LMA is building on the partnerships that have evolved from its HLF-funded project Speak Out, which ran between 2014 and 2016.
“Speak Out had many positive outcomes,” says Furber. “We now have more than 50 oral histories on a dedicated website, which we’ve tried our hardest to be representative of LGBTQ people and also of London.”
Multiple identities
The work of around 50 artists can be seen in the large-scale exhibition Coming Out:
Sexuality, Gender and Identity, which opens at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool on 28 July. It explores sexuality and gender identity in art since 1967 and draws on the Arts Council Collection and National Museums Liverpool’s (NML) own holdings, including new acquisitions funded by the Art Fund through its New Collecting Award scheme.
“The exhibition has grown out of several years of broad research we’ve done into LGBTQ history through NML’s Pride and Prejudice research project, which now has 300 LGBTQ-related items on the website,” says Charlotte Keenan, the curator of the Walker.
“This in turn has informed our recent collecting activity – it’s important that we are getting away from the temporary exhibition and events mindset, and bringing LGBTQ issues into the heart of the gallery.
“Ideas about gender and sexuality have changed – people now see gender as a spectrum with multiple identities within it. The institutional art world still has blind spots, however, and we want to acknowledge how much of this history is not known by our sector and society.
"There are artists in the exhibition who assert their identities and put this at the front of their practice. But we are also flagging other works where the LGBTQ associations have been hidden, or where people have been marginalised.”
Works such as the bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by the 19th-century black American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and the Walker’s portrait of Henry VIII, who introduced the 1533 Buggery Act, will both be flagged with a “P” logo for Pride and Prejudice.
Some text labels have also been rewritten to acknowledge LGBTQ associations. The Walker’s show reflects the prevailing visual culture as expressive of queer identity, not just through paintings but also with zines, performances and videos, including UK Gay Bar Directory, a film by artist duo Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan that records the gay clubs that are being lost to gentrification.
Heritage organisations such as the National Trust and Historic England, which have historically been coy about any LGBTQ associations with their properties, are also coming out, as it were.
Historic England has relisted several of its properties and sites to foreground LGBTQ owners and inhabitants, including the homes of Oscar Wilde, Anne Lister and Benjamin Britten in London, Halifax and Aldeburgh, Suffolk, respectively, and the grave of Egyptologist Amelia Edwards in Bristol. At least 25 National Trust properties have strong LGBTQ histories, says Tom Freshwater, the national public programmes manager.
“We are looking at our collections with a fresh perspective, and 11 of those properties have opted for visitor-facing programmes,” Freshwater says. “In the past we have ignored the debates around the sexuality of certain figures, but there are exciting possibilities to draw out stories that speak directly to the 2017 anniversary.”
The visitor’s book at Anglesey Abbey near Cambridge, owned by Lord Fairhaven, reveals connections through friends and visitors such as Carl Winter, who was the director of the nearby Fitzwilliam Museum from 1946 to 1966 and gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee under the pseudonym “Mr White” to help build the case for bringing in the Sexual Offences Act.
Another example is Wightwick Manor in the Midlands, which has a collection of paintings by Simeon Solomon, a pre-Raphaelite painter who was openly gay but who fell into penury and obscurity after being arrested in a public urinal with another man in 1873. Videos with leading scholars on Solomon have been created for Wightwick as part of the LGBTQ events.
Building collections
This year, the National Trust launched its Challenging Histories programme and is working closely with the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries.
“An LGBTQ staff group has been set up and training has revealed that euphemisms such as ‘confirmed bachelor’ don’t cut it any more,” says Freshwater. “We also have a fantastic legacy in new collections records and guidebooks, podcasts and material for the website.”
The title of the Never Going Underground exhibition (until 3 September) at the People’s History Museum in Manchester comes from the slogan of the biggest UK march against Section 28, held in the city in 1988. From May that year, local authorities were banned from promoting homosexuality, an amendment of the Local Government Act 1986 that was not repealed until the end of 2003.
“We had the busiest opening in the museum’s history,” says Catherine O’Donnell, the events and engagement officer at the People’s History Museum.
“We are particularly pleased because it was a community-curated exhibition where all departments of the museum were involved. We’ve been increasing our collections over three or four years and it looks at LGBTQ people’s struggle for rights going back to 1625 with the first record of a conviction for female sodomy – it’s not just about gay men.”
The exhibition was created with four project partners – Proud 2B Parents, Proud Trust, LGBT Foundation, and Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus – and co-curated with nine community curators.
“We were handing over control in a way,” says O’Donnell, “and the process has been as important as the final product.” The family-friendly exhibition explores identity, equality and diverse families through art activities, music and drama.
“We co-produced interactives with Proud 2B Parents,” says O’Donnell. “We took inspiration from objects such as Molly Spoons [spoons that used to be given to someone coming out], which can be dressed up like peg dolls. The idea was to make a direct reference to LGBTQ objects that families could play with in our puppet theatre.
“All this adds layers and substance, not only to our collections and programmes, but to the wider sector. We are keen to be involved in ongoing discussions about proposals for a queer museum. This would be the perfect legacy of the year’s work.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer. Speakers from Tate, Walker Art Gallery and the People’s History Museum will be speaking about how museums represent diverse identities at the Museums Association Conference & Exhibition in Manchester (16-18 November).
Lu Tolu was one of nine community curators who worked on Never Going Underground, an exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. The role demanded many months of unpaid time.
“Luckily my employers were supportive and recognised it as a development opportunity,” says Tolu, an economic researcher from Malta who works at the Health & Safety Executive in Bootle near Liverpool. “They allowed me to compress my working week into four days and I also used my three days’ paid volunteering leave.”
The community co-curators researched and selected objects for the exhibition.
“Everyone worked in a different way,” Tolu says. “For example, I had never been in an archive, but I quickly got a feel for the research. Others talked to activists and from this we managed to collate all manner of material from pictures and videos to physical objects.
“We had to learn how to structure a story around the objects and when the designers started to suggest ways of displaying them, it was exciting to see the stories forming before our eyes,” Tolu adds.
“Learning the process of putting together an exhibition has been incredibly fulfilling. What the exhibition celebrates is how the work of LGBTQ activists accumulates and reaches out to people. Even if the impact of protest and demonstration is not immediate, it shows how groups can come together to make change. Section 28, for example, is an inspiring story to tell even though it took more than a decade to revoke.”
This year, however, sees a step change – 2017 marks 50 years since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, a legal milestone that decriminalised consensual sex between two men over the age of 21 and in private. The anniversary has prompted museums and galleries to put queer culture at the heart of their programming, including in titles and text.
Even though they may be temporary, these exhibitions, displays and events form part of the ongoing struggle for LGBTQ equality in law and social attitudes. Queer British Art 1861-1967 at Tate Britain (until 1 October) is a major part of the London gallery’s LGBTQ programme of displays, events and talks that focus on a century bookended by the abolition of the death penalty for sodomy and the 1967 act.
London’s National Portrait Gallery is running a year-long I am Me season, a series of exhibitions looking at different aspects of gender and sexuality, including David Gwinnutt: Before We Were Men, comprising photographs of the London gay scene in the 1980s.
On a smaller scale, the exhibition Queer Talk: Homosexuality in Britten’s Britain (until 28 October), at the Red House, the Suffolk home that composer Benjamin Britten shared with Peter Pears, provides a picture of a time when homosexuality was illegal.
In a nod to the rainbow flag, Refracted: Collected Highlights (until 8 September) is a colour-themed LGBTQ art exhibition at the Russell-Cotes gallery in Bournemouth.
Some of the exhibitions are the culmination of a process that has seen core collections reappraised, new LGBTQ-related acquisitions, artworks and objects reinterpreted, and text panels rewritten to reveal LGBTQ connections.
But museums and galleries have to tread carefully, warns Jude Woods, a community development worker and LGBTQ rights activist in Leeds. “It’s great to see so many exhibitions with LGBTQ connections, but it can easily backfire,” he says.
“Museums and galleries can risk being one step away from a freak show unless the ‘queering’ becomes part of the fabric of the museum. We have to work harder to understand LGBTQ culture to avoid misrepresenting people’s lives, which could be hurtful, especially when they have trusted the institutions to tell their stories.”
Woods cites the example of the BBC documentary Transgender Kids: Who Knows Best?, which was criticised by transgender people for being manipulative, poorly researched and presented.
Woods runs a project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), Queer Stories, which focuses on intergenerational LGBTQ history and heritage, and Sage, a lottery-funded project supporting older LGBTQ people with Age UK Leeds and other partners.
Woods has a close working relationship with Leeds Museums & Galleries, and together they have modelled an integrated approach such as the Dying Matters display in the community space at Leeds City Museum. “The subject is death and dying, which is something that affects everybody,” Woods says.
“So among the exhibits, films and photographs, is the story of John and Ray who are facing terminal illness as a gay couple.”
Oral histories
It is important that museums and galleries fully embrace their LGBTQ work and include activities such as awareness and terminology training for staff.
“If a mainstream cultural organisation doesn’t try to promote marginalised voices it will inevitably add to the oppression, unwittingly or otherwise,” Woods says. “Absence or silence adds to the further marginalisation of LGBTQ people, despite the gains we have made over the past half century.”
Previously untold stories can be revealed easily but there are significant gaps, partly because before 1967 LGBTQ people were cautious about recording their lives.
Museums and galleries have reached out to organisations and activists, in some cases for the first time, to collect oral histories and material culture for their core collections.
London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) has been building relationships with LGBTQ communities for years and running conferences since 2003, as well as an LGBTQ history club for the past five years.
“If you are classed as illegal you are less likely to keep records,” says Tom Furber, a development officer at LMA. “And the records that do end up in archives tend to be from institutions and establishments. It’s one-sided – about people, not by people – and we wanted to counter that.
“People have told us that they never kept a diary because it could have incriminated not just themselves, but also their family and friends. So oral histories are a great way of making a deliberate intervention to challenge the official record. They concern people’s memories, especially where documents are missing, and it’s more democratic.”
Furber adds that in many ways it’s been made easier by having engaged people keen to tell their stories. “It’s long overdue. We are pushing at an open door.”
Rather than a temporary exhibition to mark the 1967 act, LMA is building on the partnerships that have evolved from its HLF-funded project Speak Out, which ran between 2014 and 2016.
“Speak Out had many positive outcomes,” says Furber. “We now have more than 50 oral histories on a dedicated website, which we’ve tried our hardest to be representative of LGBTQ people and also of London.”
Multiple identities
The work of around 50 artists can be seen in the large-scale exhibition Coming Out:
Sexuality, Gender and Identity, which opens at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool on 28 July. It explores sexuality and gender identity in art since 1967 and draws on the Arts Council Collection and National Museums Liverpool’s (NML) own holdings, including new acquisitions funded by the Art Fund through its New Collecting Award scheme.
“The exhibition has grown out of several years of broad research we’ve done into LGBTQ history through NML’s Pride and Prejudice research project, which now has 300 LGBTQ-related items on the website,” says Charlotte Keenan, the curator of the Walker.
“This in turn has informed our recent collecting activity – it’s important that we are getting away from the temporary exhibition and events mindset, and bringing LGBTQ issues into the heart of the gallery.
“Ideas about gender and sexuality have changed – people now see gender as a spectrum with multiple identities within it. The institutional art world still has blind spots, however, and we want to acknowledge how much of this history is not known by our sector and society.
"There are artists in the exhibition who assert their identities and put this at the front of their practice. But we are also flagging other works where the LGBTQ associations have been hidden, or where people have been marginalised.”
Works such as the bust of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by the 19th-century black American sculptor Edmonia Lewis, and the Walker’s portrait of Henry VIII, who introduced the 1533 Buggery Act, will both be flagged with a “P” logo for Pride and Prejudice.
Some text labels have also been rewritten to acknowledge LGBTQ associations. The Walker’s show reflects the prevailing visual culture as expressive of queer identity, not just through paintings but also with zines, performances and videos, including UK Gay Bar Directory, a film by artist duo Rosie Hastings and Hannah Quinlan that records the gay clubs that are being lost to gentrification.
Heritage organisations such as the National Trust and Historic England, which have historically been coy about any LGBTQ associations with their properties, are also coming out, as it were.
Historic England has relisted several of its properties and sites to foreground LGBTQ owners and inhabitants, including the homes of Oscar Wilde, Anne Lister and Benjamin Britten in London, Halifax and Aldeburgh, Suffolk, respectively, and the grave of Egyptologist Amelia Edwards in Bristol. At least 25 National Trust properties have strong LGBTQ histories, says Tom Freshwater, the national public programmes manager.
“We are looking at our collections with a fresh perspective, and 11 of those properties have opted for visitor-facing programmes,” Freshwater says. “In the past we have ignored the debates around the sexuality of certain figures, but there are exciting possibilities to draw out stories that speak directly to the 2017 anniversary.”
The visitor’s book at Anglesey Abbey near Cambridge, owned by Lord Fairhaven, reveals connections through friends and visitors such as Carl Winter, who was the director of the nearby Fitzwilliam Museum from 1946 to 1966 and gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee under the pseudonym “Mr White” to help build the case for bringing in the Sexual Offences Act.
Another example is Wightwick Manor in the Midlands, which has a collection of paintings by Simeon Solomon, a pre-Raphaelite painter who was openly gay but who fell into penury and obscurity after being arrested in a public urinal with another man in 1873. Videos with leading scholars on Solomon have been created for Wightwick as part of the LGBTQ events.
Building collections
This year, the National Trust launched its Challenging Histories programme and is working closely with the University of Leicester’s Research Centre for Museums and Galleries.
“An LGBTQ staff group has been set up and training has revealed that euphemisms such as ‘confirmed bachelor’ don’t cut it any more,” says Freshwater. “We also have a fantastic legacy in new collections records and guidebooks, podcasts and material for the website.”
The title of the Never Going Underground exhibition (until 3 September) at the People’s History Museum in Manchester comes from the slogan of the biggest UK march against Section 28, held in the city in 1988. From May that year, local authorities were banned from promoting homosexuality, an amendment of the Local Government Act 1986 that was not repealed until the end of 2003.
“We had the busiest opening in the museum’s history,” says Catherine O’Donnell, the events and engagement officer at the People’s History Museum.
“We are particularly pleased because it was a community-curated exhibition where all departments of the museum were involved. We’ve been increasing our collections over three or four years and it looks at LGBTQ people’s struggle for rights going back to 1625 with the first record of a conviction for female sodomy – it’s not just about gay men.”
The exhibition was created with four project partners – Proud 2B Parents, Proud Trust, LGBT Foundation, and Manchester Lesbian and Gay Chorus – and co-curated with nine community curators.
“We were handing over control in a way,” says O’Donnell, “and the process has been as important as the final product.” The family-friendly exhibition explores identity, equality and diverse families through art activities, music and drama.
“We co-produced interactives with Proud 2B Parents,” says O’Donnell. “We took inspiration from objects such as Molly Spoons [spoons that used to be given to someone coming out], which can be dressed up like peg dolls. The idea was to make a direct reference to LGBTQ objects that families could play with in our puppet theatre.
“All this adds layers and substance, not only to our collections and programmes, but to the wider sector. We are keen to be involved in ongoing discussions about proposals for a queer museum. This would be the perfect legacy of the year’s work.”
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer. Speakers from Tate, Walker Art Gallery and the People’s History Museum will be speaking about how museums represent diverse identities at the Museums Association Conference & Exhibition in Manchester (16-18 November).
How Never Going Underground was curated
Lu Tolu was one of nine community curators who worked on Never Going Underground, an exhibition at the People’s History Museum in Manchester. The role demanded many months of unpaid time.
“Luckily my employers were supportive and recognised it as a development opportunity,” says Tolu, an economic researcher from Malta who works at the Health & Safety Executive in Bootle near Liverpool. “They allowed me to compress my working week into four days and I also used my three days’ paid volunteering leave.”
The community co-curators researched and selected objects for the exhibition.
“Everyone worked in a different way,” Tolu says. “For example, I had never been in an archive, but I quickly got a feel for the research. Others talked to activists and from this we managed to collate all manner of material from pictures and videos to physical objects.
“We had to learn how to structure a story around the objects and when the designers started to suggest ways of displaying them, it was exciting to see the stories forming before our eyes,” Tolu adds.
“Learning the process of putting together an exhibition has been incredibly fulfilling. What the exhibition celebrates is how the work of LGBTQ activists accumulates and reaches out to people. Even if the impact of protest and demonstration is not immediate, it shows how groups can come together to make change. Section 28, for example, is an inspiring story to tell even though it took more than a decade to revoke.”