To help get the blog off to a good start we’ll be posting up a series of entries taken from ‘Out in the Museum’, a paper guide we produced to coincide with this year’s Pride in London Parade (Saturday 28th June 2014). We’ve already used the first entry from the guide, which introduces Hadrian and Antinous, to provide our debut entry into the world of Museum blogging and will put up the rest over the coming weeks.
The guide features 14 objects currently on display in the Museum which possess a variety of LGBTQ connections and narratives. This small selection aims to highlight how objects can help us to recognise and explore the presence of LGBTQ individuals and communities within different time periods and cultures; encouraging discussion of both gender and sexual identities. I’m hoping that it also encourages visitors to approach all different kinds of objects they encounter in the Museum with an LGBTQ-eye!
The guide is a work-in-progress and so we produced just 100 hard-copies for ‘Pride weekend’, in order to gauge visitors’ responses and get some feedback on its content. I’m pleased to say that all 100 copies were quickly snapped up by curious visitors before the end of the day (I’d love to hear from you if one of these was you!). We will be developing the guide further in the future, so are eager to hear your thoughts and comments on it so far.