Queer Bloomsbury: Art, Affairs & Arrests — LGBTQ+ History Walking Tour

Queer Bloomsbury: Art, Affairs & Arrests — LGBTQ+ History Walking Tour
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ByNick Collinson

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Great Portland StreetLondon, England
Friday, December 4 • 5:30 PM - 8 PM

Overview
Discover the artists, writers, lovers and rebels who made Bloomsbury a remarkable centre of queer life, art and experimentation.

A story-led LGBTQ+ history walk through London’s Bloomsbury…
Bloomsbury might be known for its elegant squares, great museums and respectable intellectual life – but behind those orderly Georgian façades lies a much queerer history…
For more than two centuries, this corner of London has attracted artists, writers, thinkers and outsiders who questioned the rules around sex, gender and relationships – as well as plenty of people who found inventive ways around them.
On this guided evening walk, we’ll peel back the layers of Bloomsbury’s queer past, from Victorian scandal and clandestine encounters to bohemian parties, police raids, cruising grounds and some spectacularly complicated love lives.
At the heart of the story is the Bloomsbury Group: a circle of writers, artists and intellectuals who transformed British culture – and whose approach to relationships could be every bit as experimental as their work.
Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes are among the familiar names we’ll encounter. Between them and their friends, lovers and rivals, we find marriages that weren't quite marriages, love triangles that became quadrangles, affairs crossing lines of gender and sexuality – and even an economist who approached his secretive sex life with an suitably statistical eye.
As the famous line about the Bloomsbury Group goes, they “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.”
But queer Bloomsbury wasn't confined to a privileged circle of writers and artists…
We'll discover what happened when police turned their attention to a particularly flamboyant basement flat in the 1920s; explore the sexual after-dark life of one of London's grandest garden squares; and encounter Victorians whose refusal to fit neatly into expectations of sex and gender caused a sensational national scandal.
Again and again, we'll find the same contradiction: Bloomsbury could be a place of extraordinary freedom and experimentation – but who got away with it depended enormously on class, money, privacy and power.
Our final stop takes us inside the British Museum during its Friday late opening, where a selection of objects takes our story much further back – exploring sex, desire and relationships across different cultures and thousands of years of human history.
Because queer history isn't a neat march towards the identities we use today. It's stranger, messier and, quite often, considerably more fun than that.
The walk lasts approximately two hours and finishes inside the British Museum. In particularly bad weather, a greater part of the tour may take place inside the Museum.

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Good to know

Highlights
2 hours 30 minutes
ages 16+
In person
Paid parking

Refund Policy
Refunds up to 7 days before event

Highlights
2 hours 30 minutes
ages 16+
In person
Paid parking

Refund Policy
Refunds up to 7 days before event

Location

Great Portland Street
Euston Road
London NW1

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Organized by
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Nick Collinson

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