ABSTRACT
IN A N E W S PA P E R A RT I C L E in 2004, the activist Peter Tatchell posed the ques-tion, ‘What would be in a queer museum?’ and responded with absolute conviction: it would contain ‘the same kinds of thing as in any other museum. Noteworthy letters, diaries, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and personal possessions of famous homosexuals and bisexuals’. Among the roll call of fi gures that Tatchell subsequently announced under the heading of ‘famous homosexuals’ are Lord Mountbatten, Florence Nightingale, Lawrence of Arabia, Catherine Cookson, Winston Churchill, and William Shakespeare. Churchill, whom Tatchell includes on the basis that he had a ‘fl ing’ with Ivor Novello, stands for those who ‘had only one-off gay encounters’. Others are there because they are ‘gay by orientation’: Edward II, Richard the Lionheart, and James I, for instance, fi nd themselves appropriated as key personalities in a proposed exhibition on The Queer Kings of England and Scotland. 1
Right now, in the UK, a signifi cant discourse is emerging on the staging of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) history for the British public. Scholars engaged in queer historical work would do well to sit up and take note. For the second year running, a series of events was organized in February under the heading LGBT History Month. Particularly designed to address issues of homophobic bullying and negative discrimination in institutions such as schools, and building on the success of Black History Month (which has been celebrated in the UK since 1987), the series set out ‘to mark and celebrate the lives and achievements of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered people’ through a range of activities such as exhibitions, study days, living-memory workshops, walking tours, readings, performances, and fi lm screenings. 2 Coinciding with LGBT History Month (as well as returning for a brief stint during this summer’s Europride celebrations) was a small display in the foyer of the Museum of London called Queer is Here, which focused on the shifting fortunes of London’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered communities since the decriminalization of homosexuality in 1967. The Museum has also now posted information on its website about queer-themed objects in its collections, in an effort to begin charting histories of Londoners that have been previously hidden or ignored. 3 Every Sunday afternoon, courtesy of the health-promotion agency Kairos, it is currently possible to go on historical walking tours of lesbian and gay Soho in London, taking in the haunts of queer icons such as Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, and Derek Jarman, as well as lesser-known fi gures like Geoffrey, a receptionist
Queer is here? LGBT histories and public culture
at a club in Rupert Court who kept members amused in the 1960s and 1970s with his outlandish collection of hats. 4 Finally, at the end of 2005, a national survey of museums, libraries, and archives in Britain – the Proud Nation Survey – was launched by the group Proud Heritage, with the aim of constructing a single national database of Britain’s LGBT-related holdings. This project, which is endorsed by the MDA (Museum Documentation Association), has already apparently turned up some important ‘discoveries’: the director of Proud Heritage, Jack Gilbert, reports that one of the organization’s Board Members recently came across the door to Oscar Wilde’s cell in Reading Gaol in the archive of HM Prisons. 5
There are a number of reasons why a public discourse on queer history is becoming more prominent in the UK at the present time. Perhaps most signifi cant has been the repeal in 2003 of Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, a law which banned the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities and which had the effect of causing a number of public institutions, museums included, to shy away from endorsing or actively fostering LGBT-related activities. Although no successful prosecution was ever brought under the provision, there are signs that the arguments used to justify Section 28’s retention continue to linger in segments of the British media. This climate of nostalgia especially manifests itself in the guise of tirades against the pervasion of queer sex, affect, and experience, commonly marked by tabloid pundits as the ‘private’ activities of ‘consenting adults’, into what might be termed public culture – the convergence of organizations, institutions, and identities in the public sphere. To this end, in January 2005, the Sun ran a series of articles on the fi rst LGBT History Month in February of that year. These included a news item on how the enterprise, ‘funded with taxpayers’ cash’, will encourage school pupils to study ‘famous gay Brits’; an opinion piece by the right-wing columnist Richard Littlejohn railing against what he calls ‘the history of poovery through the ages’; and a leader column declaring the project ‘not wanted’. LGBT History Month ‘is a blatant exercise in social and sexual engineering’, the editorial splutters, ‘people’s sexual preferences . . . are a private matter, not a badge to be worn nor a propaganda weapon with which to infl uence young minds’. 6
Although rearguard actions of this sort are perfectly unsurprising – the Sun has a long and disreputable record of peddling homophobic responses to the question of what counts as legitimate public culture – the frameworks within which queer histories are being constructed and reconstructed by projects such as LGBT History Month should nonetheless give scholars pause for thought. After all, it is only by entering into a critical dialogue with these frameworks that academic historians will be able to have a role in shaping and transforming them. In what follows, I review some of the activities associated with this year’s History Month, with a particular focus on the Museum of London exhibition and on some of the project’s web-based initiatives. In the course of this discussion, I will also confront the implications of the entry of queer history into public culture for the styles of presentation adopted by archives and museums.
