Mark Small and Jack Shoulder
Each year OutStories Bristol in collaboration with the University of Bristol Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition (IGRCT) present a lecture celebrating the life of John Addington Symonds (1840-1893), Bristol-based writer, art historian and pioneer of homosexual rights.
The 2023 lecture was given by Jack Shoulder and Mark Small, the duo behind the eponymous viral Twitter (‘X’) account @museumbums. Your can read a transcription of the lecture here.
Andrew Foyle tells the story of a remarkable gay couple and the museum they founded – the American Museum & Gardens at Claverton Manor, near Bath.
Dallas Pratt was the grandson of a US oil magnate with a thirst for learning and access to a vast fortune. John Judkyn was a middle-class Midlander, furniture restorer and antique dealer with impeccable taste. From their chance meeting in 1937 until John’s tragic early death their love and lives embodied a passion for collecting which inspired them to create the museum.
Andrew Foyle is a historian specialising in Bristol’s history, and a member of OutStories Bristol. Andrew co-curated Revealing Stories, Bristol’s first exhibition of LGBTQ history at Bristol’s M Shed Museum in 2013.
This talk was a collaboration between M Shed, the American Museum and Gardens, and OutStories Bristol.
Our thanks to the American Museum & Gardens for access to their archives and photographs, and to M Shed who hosted this online talk on 16th February 2022.
The lecture at our AGM this year was given by Dr. Alan Greaves of the University of Liverpool. His talk was quite interactive, and also included some material that we don’t have permission to share on this website, but Dr. Greaves has given us permission to share the substance of his talk here.
The focus of the lecture was statues, something that is very topical in Bristol right now. In particular, Dr. Greaves looked at one particular statue that is now in the World Museum in Liverpool. It is titled “Sleeping Venus”, and if you click through to the Museum’s website you will see a fairly typical Roman statue of a near-naked woman reclining, apparently asleep.
The statue came to the Museum from the estate of Henry Blundell, a wealthy art collector who lived around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Blundell records that this particular piece required extensive restoration before he was able to put it on display at his mansion, Ince Blundell Hall. It is the nature of this “restoration” that is of interest to us.
We know what the statue originally looked like because the statue was sketched by Blundell’s friend, Charles Townley. That sketch is part of a collection of that is now in the British Museum. Here it is.
The “restoration”, it seems, involved more taking away than repairing. The three child figures, one of whom was apparently suckling at the reclining figure’s breast, have been cut away and the statue repaired so that their removal is not obvious. A careful look at the Townley sketch also reveals a set of male genitals nestling between the thighs of the adult figure. These too have been removed. The crotch is now entirely smooth.
The original statue, therefore, was not of Venus, but of her child, Hermaphrodit(us/e), who is both male and female. This god was well known in the Roman world, and many statues of them exist. There is a very famous one in the Louvre in Paris. No one is entirely sure what these statues meant to the Romans. Modern historians, who are often as perturbed by such figures as Blundell, tend to assume that they were some sort of crude joke. However, one of the functions of the god appears to be to watch over (heterosexual) marriage, in which a man and a woman join together as one.
What we can say about the statue is that Blundell’s alterations have erased its original nature and function. It was acceptable in Georgian times to have a statue of a near-naked woman in your house or garden. It was not acceptable to show her breast-feeding, and it was absolutely not acceptable for her (him? them?) to have a penis.
The alterations also erase another facet of ancient life. A small percentage of human babies are born with ambiguous genitalia, or other features which cause them to not fit neatly into our categories of boy and girl. These days we call such people intersex. There are over 100 different known medical variations of the more common body types. For many decades it has been commonplace for such babies to be operated on while very young to make them appear less different. Such operations can lead to life-long medical problems. The fact that this has been done is generally kept highly secret, with only the doctors and parents knowing it has happened. This could not happen in ancient times. They didn’t have maternity hospitals, or sophisticated plastic surgery techniques.
In the more brutal ancient societies such as Sparta, and Rome in its early days, a baby who looked unusual in some way might well be killed. But by the time of the Empire social attitudes in Rome seem to have softened. One intersex person, a man called Favorinus, became a famous philosopher and a favourite of the Emperor Hadrian, despite having apparently never gone through male puberty. That’s an amazing achievement in a society as patriarchal as Rome.
The modern intersex rights movement is fighting to ban all surgery on infants. For more information see https://oiiuk.org/.
We are delighted to present this recording of the lecture from our 2019 AGM. The speaker is Professor Jennifer Ingleheart, Professor of Latin at Durham University. The title of the talk is, “Queer loss, queer Classics: A. E. Housman’s ‘lost country’”. For more information about the talk see the our earlier post advertising the event. A copy of the handout that accompanied the talk can be downloaded here.
In addition to being part of the AGM, the lecture celebrates the birth in 1840 of John Addington Symonds, Bristol-born writer, art historian and pioneer of homosexual rights. Mr. Symonds birthday is celebrated annually by the Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition at the University of Bristol who also provided the venue and refreshments. Our thanks to both Professor Ingleheart for a fascinating lecture, and to the Institute for the arrangements.