OutStories Bristol

Queer loss, queer Classics: A. E. Housman’s ‘lost country’
Talk by Jennifer Ingleheart

A E Housman in 1910.
Photo: E O Hoppé.

Queer people have often experienced losses, such as missing the opportunity for marriage and children, the pain of unrequited love, and the potential loss of reputation and liberty. A. E. Housman (1859-1936) writes movingly in his poetry about various losses, including his unhappy love for Moses Jackson, who could not return his feelings. Many of his poems approach the theme of loss and attempt to find consolation for his loss through the framework of the Classics.

Moses Jackson c.1880

This talk looks at how Classics enabled Housman, a classical scholar and professor of Latin at Cambridge, to come to terms with loss. Housman has the reputation of being a divided man, who wrote very impersonal works of scholarship, and reserved his emotions for his poetry. This talk argues that Housman’s different personas and life were far more similar than this stereotype allows, and that he takes similar approaches to queer loss in his verse and his academic work. We will also explore the presentation of Housman’s attempts to deal with loss through the Classics in the fictionalised account of his life found in Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play The Invention of Love. Finally, the talk considers what Housman’s approach to loss as a queer classicist means for queer classicists and for queer people today.

Jennifer Ingleheart

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Jennifer Ingleheart is Professor of Latin at Durham University, where she has taught since 2004. She has published widely on Latin love poetry and on the ways in which Roman sexuality has influenced the modern world. Her recent projects have focused on Latin as a queer private language and on receptions of Rome in erotica and pornographic works.

OutStories will be at Bristol Pride on Saturday. We have a stall in the Community Area near the main entrance to the site.  Come and say hello!

After welcoming an incredible 36,000 people last year, Pride Day is relocating to Durdham Down, doubling its capacity and introducing new festival areas.

Not only is Bristol Pride one of the largest UK Pride events, it’s one of Bristol’s largest festivals, and named in the Top50 World Pride events in 2018 & 2019.

Pride needs your support – so buy a Pride Supporter wristband and beat the queue at the gate. See you there!

Saturday 13th July 2019,  12pm on
Durdham Down, Westbury Park, Bristol

Map

Amber Regis:  “John Addington Symonds: from Bristol via Davos to the archive and library”

J A Symonds in his study at Am Hof. Copyright: University of Bristol Special Collections Library.

This lecture will explore the fascinating afterlife of John Addington Symonds’s Memoirs (c.1899-91) — his account of life as a homosexual man in Victorian Britain and Europe, where experience and action were subject to legal repression and the constraints of social custom and prejudice.

In writing his autobiography, Symonds forged a language through which to articulate his desires and sense of self, drawing upon ancient Greek history and literature, the European Renaissance, and the poetry of Walt Whitman. The finished manuscript could not be published in his lifetime; even if Symonds had found a printer willing to set the type, booksellers would have risked prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. So his manuscript was saved for posterity, passing through the hands of successive custodians and libraries.

The extraordinary story of the Memoirs — their composition and survival — takes us from the streets of Bristol to the mountain tops of Davos, and into the locked safes and strong rooms of the London Library and Bristol University Special Collections.

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Amber Regis is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield. She is the editor of The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016) and her work upon Symonds’s final essay collection, In the Key of Blue (1893), was recently the subject of a collaboration with OutAloud, Sheffield’s LGBT community choir, performed at the 2018 Festival of the Mind.

In April 2016, a team from the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, was awarded funding by the Arts Council England via the Oxford University Museums Partnership’s Innovation Fund for the creation of the University’s first cross-collections trail, Out in Oxford: An LGBTQ+ Trail of the University of Oxford’s Collections.

The project was a response to a lecture by Professor Richard Parkinson of the Oriental Institute (previously of the British Museum and author of A Little Gay History) which he gave during LGBT History Month that year. The lecture called for more explicit, not implicit, LGBTQ+ representation in museums and can be watched here: https://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/great-unrecorded-history-lgbt-heritage-and-world-cultures.

The outcome of the project is a free booklet featuring items from each of the University’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums group (GLAM): the Ashmolean Museum, Bodleian Libraries, Botanic Garden, Museum of the History of Science, Museum of Natural History and Pitt Rivers Museum, and the Bate Collection in the Faculty of Music. The items featured have been identified by the collections’ staff, but the interpretations have all been written by volunteers who identify as LGBTQ+ or allies. Forewords were kindly provided by Richard Parkinson and Stephen Fry. The trail was launched with a series of spectacular and well-attended events co-curated by the project’s volunteers during LGBT History Month 2017. The project was shortlisted for a Museums + Heritage Award and can be accessed here: www.glam.ox.ac.uk/outinoxford.

Beth Asbury is a graduate of Ancient History and Archaeology, and Egyptology from the University of Birmingham. She has worked for the Chartered Institute for Archaeologists, Ministry of State for Antiquities in Cairo, and the Pitt Rivers Museum where she worked on several different projects, including Out in Oxford. In January this year, Beth became the Administrative Assistant for the Public Engagement team in the Ashmolean Museum.

Come and hear Beth speak at the LGBT History Day at Bristol’s M Shed Museum. Free entry.

3:00pm to 3:30pm, Saturday 10th February 2018

Studio Rooms, M Shed, Wapping Road, Bristol, BS1 4RN
Map                   Getting to M Shed

The Studio Rooms are on the first floor, upstairs from the main entrance. M Shed has wheelchair accessible lifts and accessible toilets.

Last September Bristol24/7 launched Talking LGBT+ Bristol – a groundbreaking project set to unearth, document and share LGBT+ life and history in Bristol with a wider audience.

The team at Bristol24/7 want to help others access and learn about Bristol’s LGBT+ heritage.

Over the last few months we have been unearthing stories and finding contributors from the Bristol LGBT+ community and beyond. We completed the first phase of filming in December 2017, with the second and third phases of filming to take place in spring this year. The final film will be shown on the big screen in Millennium Square as part of Bristol Pride. Bristol24/7 will make our Talking LGBT+ documentary available for schools to use as an educational tool and the whole project will also be added as a resource to Bristol Archives.

Bristol24/7 will be showing an exclusive short preview of the project so far. We are still looking for contributors and volunteers to be involved in this amazing project and will be on hand at M Shed to answer any questions.

Drop in on Bristol24/7 at the LGBT History Day at Bristol’s M Shed Museum. Free entry.

12:00pm to 4:30pm, Saturday 10th February 2018

Studio Rooms, M Shed, Wapping Road, Bristol, BS1 4RN
Map                   Getting to M Shed

The Studio Rooms are on the first floor, upstairs from the main entrance. M Shed has wheelchair accessible lifts and accessible toilets.

Bristol24/7 is a Community Interest Company that provides high-quality, independent news and features by experienced and talented journalists and bloggers. Find out what’s happening across Bristol with news, features and what’s on listings on our website and also in our free monthly print magazine.

OutStories Bristol’s highly successful ‘Revealing Stories’ exhibition is on display at Bishopston Library from 1st to 28th February to coincide with LGBT History Month.

The exhibition is based on archival records and oral history interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people associated with Bristol and the surrounding area. Focusing on living memory (c. 1940s to the present) it tells how people fought to shape and control their own lives. It is the story of those who witnessed these changes and helped to make history.

Thursday 1st to Wednesday 28th February 2018

Bristol North Baths,  Gloucester Road,  Bishopston,  Bristol,  BS7 8BN

Map       Opening hours and getting there

Please note: this display comprises vertical text panels only; it doesn’t include any of the objects that were in the original exhibition at Bristol’s M Shed during February/March 2013.

Historic England is the public body that looks after England’s historic environment. We champion and protect historic places, helping people understand, value and care for them. In our South West office in Bristol we are responsible for giving advice on planning decisions, listing and grant applications for Heritage at Risk for the heritage in the entire south west.

As part of our national championing of heritage we launched our Pride of Place campaign which aims to uncover and highlight places of LGBTQ heritage across England, ranging from the frontiers of Roman Britain to the gay pubs and clubs that remain important in our lives today.

It also included the creation of an interactive crowd-sourced map that identifies places that are relevant to LGBTQ heritage and history. Members of the public can contribute to this map. In the Bristol office we want to use this campaign to engage more with our local LGBT community.

Historic England will be showcasing Pride of Place at the LGBT History Day at Bristol’s M Shed Museum, and explaining how you can help contribute to this national resource.

12pm to 4:30pm,     Saturday 10th February 2018

Studio Rooms,    M Shed,    Wapping Road,    Bristol,    BS1 4RN
Map                  Getting to M Shed

The Studio Rooms are on the first floor, upstairs from the main entrance. M Shed has wheelchair accessible lifts and accessible toilets.

Historic England’s Bristol Office

Tom Marshman is launching his new audio tours of M Shed; they will be Mp3 players encased in vintage matchboxes he has collected. Tom has spent many years recording the stories of Bristol’s Older LGBT people, developing verbatim theatre, and wanted to do something more with them, finding a place where they can be permanently. They are tales of jeopardy, injustice and celebration and indulgence! The sound tours are a collaboration with sound artist Rowan Evans.

The idea to put the audio devices in a match box came from one of the stories about a man who met his life partner when he ran out of matches and asked a stranger for a light!

Tom says “It is really exciting for me to have a piece of work that will be a permanent part of the exhibition, so people can request the Mp3 players at the front desk whenever they like and hear the rich everyday stories of Older LGBTQ people living in Bristol.”

It will add a new queer reading on many of the objects that are part of the collection that visitors have become familiar with.

Audiences will be able to walk around the museum and hear the stories that relate to objects in the collection. For example you can listen to how one man fell in love with a bus driver as you sit on the double decker bus that is in M-shed.

Alongside that, Tom will be talking about his new show he is developing and that will premiere in September 2018 in Bristol and that is focused around life in Britain in the 1950’s before decriminalisation of homosexuality.

Come and hear Tom at the LGBT History Day at Bristol’s M Shed Museum. Free entry.

12:00pm to 12:30pm, Saturday 10th February 2018

Studio Rooms, M Shed, Wapping Road, Bristol, BS1 4RN
Map                   Getting to M Shed

The Studio Rooms are on the first floor, upstairs from the main entrance. M Shed has wheelchair accessible lifts and accessible toilets.

Thanks to the Wonder Woman movie, Amazons are all over popular culture right now. Even the British Museum is getting in on the act, with their Scythians exhibition.

The historical people on whom the Amazon myth is based were almost certainly Scythians or some related tribe of horse warriors. But were they lesbians, living in an all-female society? Was their home a Paradise Island somewhere in the Mediterranean? Were there trans women among the Amazons?

As always, the past is far more queer than most people think.

Cheryl Morgan is a science fiction critic and publisher. She is the owner of Wizard’s Tower Press and the Wizard’s Tower Books ebook store. Previously she edited the Hugo Award winning magazine, Emerald City (Best Fanzine, 2004). She also won a Hugo for Best Fan Writer in 2009.

She is a Co-Chair of OutStories Bristol and lectures regularly on both trans history and science fiction and fantasy literature.

Come and hear Cheryl speak at the LGBT History Day at Bristol’s M Shed Museum. Free entry.

2:00pm to 2:30pm, Saturday 10th February 2018

Studio Rooms, M Shed, Wapping Road, Bristol, BS1 4RN
Map               Getting to M Shed

The Studio Rooms are on the first floor, upstairs from the main entrance. M Shed has wheelchair accessible lifts and accessible toilets.