New LGBTQ trail at Brighton Museum

Robert White and Kelly Boddington have been developing a higher profile for LGBTQ people in the Royal Pavilion and Brighton Museum. Robert explains what the pair have been up to.

I’ve worked for the Royal Pavilion & Museums for over seven years now in a number of roles, mostly customer service related, which although I have enjoyed they have not really allowed me to be creative or work with our collections. I studied Fine Art at the University of Brighton and so have always been keen to look for opportunities to get more involved with that side of working in Brighton Museum.

At the start of 2013 a temporary position came up to work with one of the curators on new interpretation and a public trail for the Museum based on the theme of ‘Colour’, I jumped at the chance along with my colleague and friend Kelly Boddington.

At this early stage we took the theme very literally and began looking at our displays and researching into the history of colours and pigments, I think it’s fair to say that at this stage both Kelly and I found the project rather dry!

During a meeting a few weeks into the project it was decided that we needed to look at the theme of colour more broadly to develop something more engaging. We discussed the museum’s lack of LGBTQ representation and how it doesn’t reflect Brighton as one of the biggest LGBTQ cities in the country.

This is a fact that has been brought up in visitor feedback for a considerable amount of time and is something the Museum is keen to develop. A decision was then made that having an LGBTQ trail would fit with the colour theme perfectly (rainbow flag!) and that this project provided a great opportunity to begin increasing that presence in Brighton Museum.

Over the next few months Kelly and I delved into the permanent collections in the Museum and looked for objects with LGBTQ links. We researched creators, artists, royalty and the history of Brighton and eventually ended up with far too much information for the trail.

The research stage was fantastic and we both found particular subjects that we connected with. Personally, Alexander McQueen was probably the most fascinating person to research. I have always admired his work but hadn’t ever explored much further than that.

Looking into the history of Brighton as a gay city was also interesting and very often quite amusing. Some of the personal stories that were revealed certainly gave an insight into gay life in the city two hundred years ago and also during the two world wars.

The leaflet, along with some YouTube videos we recorded to accompany each stop on the trail, went public in May 2013. At the time the Object Stories Trail (as it was then known) was only meant to be temporary as our leaflet print run was limited and a number of the objects on the trail were due to be moved for the next major exhibition, Subversive Design.

After five months and a public evening event in the museum called Out Late, the trail was taken down and it wasn’t until March 2014 that Kelly and I were asked to continue the work that the trail started.

We now had the funding to have the leaflet redesigned completely and printed with a view to it becoming a permanent feature of the Museum and also to put an event on linked with the trail over summer.

As part of this new set of work Kelly and I had the opportunity to attend the fantastic Un-straight Museum conference organised by Homotopia at the Museum of Liverpool – I recommend looking this up online if you’re interested in the LGBTQ side of museum collections. We were able to take ideas from this and start feeding them into our work at the Museum – for example, we have spoken at an Art teacher conference on the subject of LGBTQ issues in secondary schools and have started working closely with our Senior Learning Officer to improve some of our educational sessions.

The great, vibrant new leaflet design, created by Brighton-based EighthDay, has been out in Brighton Museum since the end of July. To celebrate the re-launch of the trail Kelly and I ran Hello Sailor! – a free public event also tied into our Keith Vaughan display (on until November 9th 2014) where visitors could participate in activities exploring the male form, including life drawing. We were really pleased with the turn out and have since received some positive feedback from visitors who have taken the new trail.

We are both really keen to carry on working to increase the LGBTQ presence in the Museum and will continue to work on other projects in the future. I think the trail is just the start of so much more that we could do and although it has taken a long time to happen, is starting to meet a public demand for the kind of content we display.

For any further information on the trail or other potential LGBTQ projects or events in the future email: visitor.services@brighton-hove.gov.uk