22 C O N T E X T 1 7 3 : S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 2 Plas Newydd, Llangollen, with Castell Dinas Bran in the background. After Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby set up home as a couple here, they promoted the queer fashion, extending their library to include pointed gothic-style windows. (Photo: Wikimedia) heritage. In our roadshow talks with the public, I talked about how the queer past lies all around us, soaked in the pavements we walk on, the bricks and mortar of the locations we visit, and the buildings that stood on these sites earlier. We didn’t forget the open spaces, either – those gardens laid out with a queer eye, the heaths and parks that were and are cruising grounds, and the places where crowds have congregated to demand legal and social change. One example of the last is Albert Square in central Manchester, where LGBTQ+ people and their allies gathered in 1988 for a huge demonstration against Section 28. Pride of Place – as can be seen in the online exhibition – valued people’s everyday queer heritage, not only the classic sites preserved as elite heritage. We emphasised that the architecture and design of buildings and places could be queer in itself, that a thread of queer sensibility links many sites, for example in the use of camp and artifice or the reworking of historic styles. Strawberry Hill House is one such place, where Horace Walpole deployed the neo-gothic, creating ‘a little plaything house… the prettiest bauble you ever saw’. After Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby eloped from Ireland in 1778 and set up home as a couple at Plas Newydd in Llangollen, they too promoted this queer fashion, extending their library to include three pointed gothic-style windows and a coloured glass lantern embedded in the door. As historians we wanted to use the term ‘queer’ to try to explain that our identity categories today (lesbian, gay, trans etc) are historically specific and it is usually anachronistic to apply them to the past. Queer signals the varying historical meanings around gender and sexuality, some of them named, others ambiguous and unknowable. We included sites marking early modern sworn friendship or sworn brotherhood (discussed by Alan Bray) in which two men (or two women) pledge their affection, creating kinship in a Christian context, and may be buried together, as are the 17th-century men Sir John Finch and Sir Thomas Baines in a joint tomb in the chapel of Christ’s College, Cambridge. It memorialises, in Finch’s words, ‘the beautiful and unbroken marriage of souls, a companionship undivided during 36 complete years’. More prosaically, we also used the term ‘queer’ alongside LGBTQ+ in Pride of Place in order to be widely inclusive of all non-normative sexual and gender identities past and present, as well as for its convenience as an umbrella term. With Pride of Place, Historic England led the way for the heritage sector to positively celebrate LGBTQ+ histories.This was reinforced in 2017, the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of sex between men, when the National Trust launched Prejudice and Pride as its theme for that year. The trust identified a dozen of its Kingston Lacy, Dorset. Its owner, William Bankes, fled the country after being arrested for indecency but continued from his exile to have his house spectacularly renovated. (Photo: Henry Kellner, Wikimedia)
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