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UK's First Gay Museum Planned for London
In late 2011, Jack Gilbert executive director of Proud Heritage, hopes to open Proud Nation, the UK's first museum devoted to gay history. Located in London's King's Cross area, it will include longterm loans of artifacts ranging from 3,000 year old papyri to the door of Oscar Wilde's jail cell to the Gay Love jumpsuit Alan Wakeman wore in the gay pride march of 1972. A cross section map of Apethorpe Hall will show visitors the secret passage James I [pictured] used to get to the Duke of Buckingham's bedroom and a secret, multi-layered map from the 1950s identifies gay hookup sites when homosexuality was illegal. Gay activist superstar Peter Tatchell has promised to donate material that will illuminate William III's sexual orientation. Other items will tell the story of the Ladies of Llangollen, the lesbian icons of the 1770's. Gilbert is quoted in an article in this morning's Independent:
UK's First Gay Museum Planned for London
In late 2011, Jack Gilbert executive director of Proud Heritage, hopes to open Proud Nation, the UK's first museum devoted to gay history. Located in London's King's Cross area, it will include longterm loans of artifacts ranging from 3,000 year old papyri to the door of Oscar Wilde's jail cell to the Gay Love jumpsuit Alan Wakeman wore in the gay pride march of 1972. A cross section map of Apethorpe Hall will show visitors the secret passage James I [pictured] used to get to the Duke of Buckingham's bedroom and a secret, multi-layered map from the 1950s identifies gay hookup sites when homosexuality was illegal. Gay activist superstar Peter Tatchell has promised to donate material that will illuminate William III's sexual orientation. Other items will tell the story of the Ladies of Llangollen, the lesbian icons of the 1770's. Gilbert is quoted in an article in this morning's Independent:
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"It's an invisible history which couldn't be told because it couldn't be researched, but that has changed now," he says. "It will be serious on one level, because we believe that, to have full equality our history, our culture and the full diversity of our lived experience has to be to be recorded and represented. But it will be fun, too."
"It's an invisible history which couldn't be told because it couldn't be researched, but that has changed now," he says. "It will be serious on one level, because we believe that, to have full equality our history, our culture and the full diversity of our lived experience has to be to be recorded and represented. But it will be fun, too."
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The idea arose during the 2004 mayoral elections, when Darren Johnson, the Green Party candidate, suggested a gay museum. The Lottery Fund is supporting the plan, but not everyone in the UK's Museum Association approves of the idea. One questionnaire to the curating community was returned anonymously with the comment: "This isn't what I pay my MA subscription for – the association is to support the museum profession, not to promote filthy perversions among the young and impressionable."
Band of Thebes
The idea arose during the 2004 mayoral elections, when Darren Johnson, the Green Party candidate, suggested a gay museum. The Lottery Fund is supporting the plan, but not everyone in the UK's Museum Association approves of the idea. One questionnaire to the curating community was returned anonymously with the comment: "This isn't what I pay my MA subscription for – the association is to support the museum profession, not to promote filthy perversions among the young and impressionable."
Band of Thebes
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A matter of gay pride: Britain is to have its first museum on the history of homosexuality
By Simon Tait
The Independent, 9 October 2008
There is hardly a minority interest that isn't celebrated in a museum; everything from teapots to Elvis Presley gets the curatorial treatment. There are galleries devoted to immigrants, to slavery, to prison life, to suffragists. In Southport there is the British Lawnmower Museum.
But there is one section of the British community that has never been represented in a museum, even though it accounts for as much as 10 per cent of the population. Jack Gilbert, the executive director of Proud Heritage, hopes to change that in three years' time when the country's first gay museum, opens in London's King's Cross.
"It's an invisible history which couldn't be told because it couldn't be researched, but that has changed now," he says. "It will be serious on one level, because we believe that, to have full equality our history, our culture and the full diversity of our lived experience has to be to be recorded and represented. But it will be fun, too."
It will cost around £10m and while he negotiates a lease and funding. Gilbert is also gathering the collection. "The objects will be there to help us tell the story rather than be silent witnesses, like a vase in a glass case," he says.
The door to Oscar Wilde's cell at Reading Gaol (where Wilde served two years' hard labour for "gross indecency" with other men), for instance, will introduce the legal battles which eventually brought the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the late sixties and the 2003 repeal of Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act which forbade the publication of material promoting homosexuality, or teaching about it in schools.
Wilde's door currently resides in the collections of the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham and is one of a number of objects Gilbert is negotiating to have on long loan from institutions. Others include documentary evidence of the gay preferences of James I, including a cross-section map of Apethorpe Hall showing the secret passage between the bedrooms of the king and the Duke of Buckingham. Other material provided by Peter Tatchell will show the homosexual preferences of William III.
There are 3,000-year-old papyri in the Petrie Museum, Greek and Roman vase decorations from the British Museum and documents showing medieval versions of civil same-sex partnerships. There will be the story of the Ladies of Llangollen, Lady Eleanor Butler and the Hon Sarah Ponsonby, who scandalised society by setting up home together and living as a lesbian couple in the 1770s, only to become a magnet for the literary elite. The pair counted Southey, Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron among their visitors.
The nomenclature will come in for discussion, too. The community is no longer confined to the word "homosexual", the term is eschewed now as a medical construct rather than a social life choice. This will be the museum of the LGBT – Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transsexual – "because this is the community, inclusive and each element with its contribution to British society" Gilberts says. Euphemisms are difficult, and some younger lesbians prefer to be called "gay women" because "lesbian" evokes aggressive haircuts and tweed skirts. But "queer", Noel Coward's preferred adjective, is acceptable.
An appeal to the community for objects has brought to light films, records, literature, the hand-embroidered Gay Love jumpsuit worn by artist Alan Wakeman in the 1972 Pride March, and the photographs of Gay Pride events by Scott Nunn of the Pink Paper. Some of the gay dolls collected by the artist Nigel Grimmer will be there – including a Liberace in full glitter, the lesbian characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer ("together for ever") and – a real collectors' item from the Seventies – Gay Bob, complete with closet out of which to step.
One poignant offering is a map that was used by homosexual men in the 1950s to help them locate rendezvous, which has tones of wartime secret agents. To fool the authorities, it was drawn on several separate layers of tissue paper and could only be read when all the layers were brought together.
Pride of place, as it might be, will go to what Gilbert calls the Bayeux Tapestry of LGBT Britons, the Aids Tapestry, if his negotiations with the owners are successful. Made in the late Eighties and early Nineties, it is hundreds of multi-coloured panels each one telling the story of an Aids victim using fabric belonging to the subject. It is currently in storage in Manchester.
The idea for a gay museum came during the 2004 mayoral elections, when the Green candidate Darren Johnson suggested one; the other candidates also saw the benefits. After the elections in which Ken Livingstone was re-elected, though, the support proved itself to be notional rather than financial, though, and the reality dawned that there would have to be a campaign to raise public support and fundraising soon began.
There was, however, space given to an exhibition at City Hall this summer to allow Proud to make its case. "It was a good opportunity, and we hope to be able to do it every year until we open the museum," Gilbert says. "What was particularly heartening was to see a group of Roman Catholic primary school children whose teacher was explaining the subject matter. Five years ago she would have been breaking the law."
This year Proud Heritage launched its own website with the beginnings of a virtual museum, but Gilbert's ambition is to establish not only a central museum, but information centres in archives around the country that detail where material can be found.
It has been difficult, Gilbert admits, and there has been resistance in the museum community. The Museums Association circulated a questionnaire among its members to see what support there would be for the initiative, and among the support were some alarming responses: "This isn't what I pay my MA subscription for – the association is to support the museum profession, not to promote filthy perversions among the young and impressionable," one unsigned return said.
But times have changed quickly, Gilbert says. He is currently negotiating for funding with the Heritage Lottery Fund, who are being open-mindedly helpful, he says, with the London Development Agency and with private sources. "Ours has been a silent history," Jack Gilbert says, "but it isn't one you dare not speak of any more."
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