Queer History: a tour of gender and identity through time and culture

It is a Friday lunchtime and a group of people are huddled together in front of a glass display cabinet in the Middle-Eastern gallery of the Cambridge Fitzwilliam museum. They are all peering in at two small coins, one inscribed with Arabic script, the other with Sanskrit.

The coins themselves are inconspicuous: less polished than others in the collection and only an inch in diameter. They were minted, the exhibition labels says, in the reign of Mahmud of Ghazni, ruler of the extensive Ghaznavid Empire from 999-1030. Aside from their age and distant geographic origins, they seem unremarkable. You’d certainly be forgiven from passing them over on a visit.

These people, however, are on a Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ tour. They are listening intently as their tour guide Jasmine describes how these unassuming coins are part of a wider story of same-sex relationships and their place in medieval Islamic culture.

At the time of the coins’ minting, Mahmud of Ghazni was in a passionate romantic relationship with his male slave Malik Ayaz, and had exalted him to various positions of power across the Ghazanid Empire. While the story of their love affair had been censored until recently — the result of Western colonialism and changing attitudes towards homosexuality in the Middle East — Jasmine explains how Ghazni’s subjects saw their relationship as a higher form of love.

As the tour goes on, the group discovers that the Fitzwilliam museum is brimming with fascinating queer stories just like that of Mahmud and Ayaz. They are led through the galleries as Jasmine talks about a diverse range of objects, from classical sculpture to twentieth century ceramics.

Many of the artefacts are impressive by themselves. The Roman bust of Antinous, lover of Emperor Hadrian, for example, is a visitor favourite. But others are more like Ghazni’s coins: unassuming and at risk of being overlooked completely by less-thorough museum-goers.

Many of the stories Jasmine shares have either been forgotten, obscured or actively suppressed. She tells anecdotes about ceramicists who were instrumental to gay rights activism and queer artists who were expelled from the Royal Academy for the perceived licentiousness of their painting: these are stories that you won't find on the exhibit labels. Even the more well-known queer histories, such as Queen Anne’s lesbian love affairs that inspired the Oscar-winning ‘The Favourite’, are told in a way that reveals new information about how queer identities were understood by society. It is a revelatory 40 minutes.

The Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ tours have been running across the University’s museums since December 2018.  The project was first piloted at the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Museum of Classical Archaeology, the Polar Museum and the Museum of Zoology but the popularity of the tours has led to them being rolled out across all seven of the University’s museums, including the Whipple Museum of the History of Science and the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology.

The project was established in collaboration with Daniel Vo, the person behind the V&A’s award-winning monthly LGBTQ+ tours. Vo visited the Fitzwilliam in 2017 and posted images and stories of the museum’s queer-related objects on social media (a process he refers to as “queering” the collection). The Fitzwilliam team were impressed and hired him to help develop their own series of tours.

The tours are all volunteer-led and the guides have the freedom to curate their own itineraries. Most have conducted their own research into various objects across the collections, and it isn’t unusual for guides to draw up their own personal experiences.

“Some of the volunteers weren’t museum people at all, and came to us from completely different backgrounds and interests.” says Niki Hughes, Opening Doors Project Coordinator at University of Cambridge Musuems (UCM). “It’s been brilliant, because it has opened up whole new communities – not just the LGBTQ+ community, but also non-visitors – to the UCM, and vice versa. One of volunteers, who didn’t have much interest in museums before the project, has even gone on to take a job at the Fitzwilliam” she says.

Jasmine, our tour guide, works in visitor services at the Fitzwilliam and was more aware than most that there were a wealth of stories in the museum that remained untold. She signed up as a tour volunteer while the scheme was still in its pilot phase. “It seemed like an exciting opportunity to talk more about the stories we don’t necessarily tell in our exhibit labels and to give people a new framework for understanding our collections” she says.

The Fitzwilliam museum itself has an interesting queer history. Former director Carl Winter was one of only three gay men who gave evidence to the Wolfenden Committee, the group that recommended the legalisation of homosexuality in Great Britain.

The museum was also the beneficiary, along with the British Museum, of the bequest of Charles Shannon and Charles Ricketts’s extensive art collection. Shannon and Ricketts were a close couple who lived and collected together from the 1880s to 1930s, and many of the objects in their collections have stories behind them that relate to queer identities. When Shannon fell ill following an accident, Ricketts gifted the collection to the two museums, lowering the insurance premiums on their house and freeing up cash to pay for Shannon’s care.

While she was working on a transcription project for the Founder's library of the Fitzwilliam, Jasmine came across a 1937 letter from Thomas Sturge Moore, a close friend of the couple. The letter was addressed to then-director of the Fitzwilliam Louis Colville Gray Clarke and expressed regret that the museum had excluded Ricketts's name from the exhibit labels, crediting the collection to Charles Shannon alone. ‘Shannon would have been very distressed if he could have forseen that Ricketts name would not appear equally with his own' the letter stated. ‘Their friendship like their collection was unique and they regarded its designation by their joint names as their monument.’

Jasmine explains that she began to kick up some fuss when she noticed, some 80 years later, that several of the exhibit labels still bore only Shannon’s name. “It is changing now but still a hundred years later we’re not telling the full story’ she says. ‘It is important to challenge these things.”

UCM was an early adopter in the push to ‘queer’ museum collections and the Bridging Binaries tours have proven extremely popular. The project has received considerable media coverage, with articles appearing in The New York Times, The Guardian and The Times. The scheme’s success has also encouraged other museums to consider LGBTQ+ stories in their programmes.

One of the visitors on Jasmine’s tour was visiting the UK from New Jersey, USA and had arranged his visit to Cambridge specifically around the LGBTQ+ tour. "I’d been to a similar tour at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City and it was fascinating, seeing a side to the museum you don’t normally see." he says. "I saw the LGBTQ+ tour listed on the Fitzwilliam website and decided to come to Cambridge."

As well as avowed art history enthusiasts, the tours have also attracted those who have previously shied away from the museums for various reasons. The initial pilot phase saw that up to 58% of tour attendees were first time visitors. "There isn’t a typical person who comes to the tours" Jasmine says. "We recently had a group of science PhD students attend the Fitzwilliam tour. This was great because they had no background in art or history but were really fascinated by the stories."

But perhaps the most positive feedback has been from members of the LGBTQ+ community itself. “A common response we got at the beginning of the project were people saying that they’d never been to a museum before and that our LGBTQ+ tours made them feel like they could come” Jasmine says. “We wanted to make people feel like they’re welcome and that their stories are being told.”

Find out more information about University of Cambridge Museum's Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ Tours or to book on to a tour visit the website.