20 C O N T E X T 1 7 3 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 ALISON ORAM Pride of Place: queer heritage Equalities legislation, courageous curators and changing social attitudes have led to more openness around LGBTQ+ histories in heritage since the mid-2010s. Ten years ago, in the early 2010s, only a handful of historic sites acknowledged their LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer) histories. These included Sissinghurst in Kent, whose famous garden was made between the 1930s and 1960 by Vita Sackville-West and her husband Harold Nicolson. Both were widely known – on the basis of letters, diaries and biographies – to have had numerous same-sex relationships alongside their successful marriage. Another well-known site, Charleston in East Sussex, the country home of some of the Bloomsbury Group, including painters Duncan Grant andVanessa Bell, acknowledged its queer bohemian histories in its guidebook and guided tours. These historic houses had courageous curators who were committed to telling the full history of their earlier inhabitants. Many more places, even where there was a large amount of published material about their queer past, continued to ignore such histories in their interpretation. Horace Walpole’s amazing gothic fantasy home, Strawberry Hill House in Twickenham, for example, obscured its queer roots until very recently. The silence around LGBTQ+ heritage had many causes: the anxieties of curators, local homophobia, the idea that heritage sites (especially country houses) should provide a ‘nice day out’ with nothing to trouble their middle-class visitors, and the deep-rooted connection of heritage to ideas of national identity. Heritage is often seen as the last bastion of an imagined British nation, where social hierarchies of class and race, patriarchal family structures and heterosexuality are assumed to be natural and enduring features that should not be disturbed or questioned – especially in the recurrent conservative ‘culture wars’ around imperial histories and heterosexual norms. As soon as historians begin to interrogate these places and Charleston, East Sussex, the country home of some of the Bloomsbury Group, has acknowledged its queer bohemian histories in its guidebook and guided tours. (Photo: Antiquary, Wikimedia)
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