OutStories Bristol

OutStories Bristol’s highly successful ‘Revealing Stories’ exhibition is on display at the Aerospace Bristol museum from 8th to 24th February.

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.

Saturday 8th to Monday 24th February 2020

Aerospace Bristol, Hayes Way, Patchway, Bristol, BS34 5BZ
Maps and how to get there       Opening times

Please note: the exhibition is located in the hanger housing Concorde ‘Alpha Foxtrot’, the last ever Concorde to fly. You will require a ticket to the museum to see Revealing Stories.

This display comprises vertical text panels only; it doesn’t include the objects that were in the original exhibition at Bristol’s M Shed in 2013.

Join us for an afternoon celebrating LGBT History in Bristol and South Gloucestershire.

This free event is brought to you by The Diversity Trust and Aerospace Bristol and includes exciting speakers, OutStories Bristol’s Revealing Stories Exhibition, and Drag Queen Story Time.

See full information and book your free tickets on Eventbrite.

Saturday 8th February 2020,   12pm to 4pm
Aerospace Bristol,  Hayes Way,  Patchway,  BS34 5BZ
Map

A Bristol LGBT History Month event
Voices and Visibility logo courtesy of LGBThistorymonth.org.uk.

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

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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.