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Proud Nation in London
Jack Gilbert, executive producer of gay museum Proud Heritage
The UK's first gay museum to open in London
"to have full equality our history, our culture and the full diversity of our lived experience has to be to be recorded and represented"
Over 10% of the UK population is gay, and to honour this the country's first gay museum is to open in London's King's Cross.
The museum will be called Proud Nation, and will be run by Proud Heritage, which already has an online museum "reflecting British lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans history and cultural ancestry in all its rich diversity."
Jack Gilbert, executive producer of Proud Heritage, said:
"It's an invisible history which couldn't be told because it couldn't be researched, but that has changed now. It will be serious on one level, because we believe that, to have full equality our history, our culture and the full diversity of our lived experience has to be to be recorded and represented. But it will be fun, too."
Exhibits will include the door to Oscar Wilde's cell at Reading Gaol, where he served two years for "gross indecency" with other men. The door will create the entrance to a section dedicated to the events which lead up to the decriminalisation of homosexual acts in the late sixties.
The museum will also focus on medieval versions of civil same-sex partnerships, and will tell the story of Lady Eleanor Butler and the Honorable Sarah Ponsonby, who lived together in the 1770s, and scandalised society,
According to Gilbert it will be the museum of the LGBT "because this is the community, inclusive and each element with its contribution to British society."
An appeal to the LGBT community has unearthed relevant literature, films, records and a hand-embroidered Gay Love jumpsuit worn in the first Pride march in 1972, amongst other memorabilia.
The Aids Tapestry, telling the story of AIDs victims across hundreds of multi-coloured panels, will be central to the collection.
There has, however, been some resistance from The Museums Association, with one subscriber giving this response:
"This isn't what I pay my MA subscription for – the association is to support the museum profession, not to promote filthy perversions among the young and impressionable."
Gilbert remains optimistic, though. "Ours has been a silent history," he says, "but it isn't one you dare not speak of any more."
