There’s a depressing irony that as the UK celebrates 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, Donald Trump is currently stripping away the rights of LGBT people in the US with yesterday’s announcement that transgender people will be banned from serving in the US military. It’s a potent reminder of what was, and still could be – exposing the tenuous freedoms that LGBT people hold around the world. A reminder that, for all the ecstasies of being young, and gay, those who came before lived very different lives.
The Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool is celebrating the milestone with an exhibition of gay and queer art made since 1967- entitled Coming Out: Sexuality, Gender & Identity, it will be the most comprehensive of its type to ever be held in the UK. It explores decades of change as that suppression was slowly chipped away at – from human desire being policed by the state to the demonisation of AIDS, and all the way the the legalisation of gay marriage. Over 100 artworks will track that journey, the way that British gay life – to utilise a cliche – came out of the closet.
“We are doing something a bit different,” Charlotte Keenan, the exhibition’s curator, told the Guardian. “We are putting ourselves out there. [The ambition is] “to make queer British art and its importance to art history permanently visible within our galleries.”
Those artworks include works by Andy Warhol, Steve McQueen and Derek Jarman, as well as contributions from lesser known artists, like Zanele Muholi, the South African who photographs herself as a “Miss Lesbian” beauty queen, and Sunil Gupta, who’s series ‘Exiles’ documents the lives of gay men in India, where homosexuality remains illegal.
The exhibition ends with the poignant footage of 170 empty gay bars in 13 cities, bars which have closed. The footage, filmed by Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings, as the pair told the Guardian, “transcends sexuality. Anyone can watch the work and identify with it and have a sense of how important a bar, club or network is and what happens if that’s taken away.”
