LGBT People and the UK Cultural Sector

Citation

Graham Willett (2015), "LGBT People and the UK Cultural Sector", Library Review, Vol. 64 No. 3, pp. 263-264. https://doi.org/10.1108/LR-12-2014-0146

The long march of lesbians and gay men, more recently joined by bisexuals, transgenders and people with intersex conditions (LGBTI is the usual abbreviation, though there are others) is marked out most commonly by reference to law reforms and public opinion. But, this is only part of the picture. The appearance of LGBTI people in society’s mainstream institutions is an often-overlooked part of the story. In this book, John Vincent sets out to chart the history and present place of LGBTI people and their issues in the UK cultural sector. By “cultural sector” he means libraries, museums, archives and cultural and heritage organisations.

Starting from the 1950s he moves through the subsequent decades up to the present and casts a glance into the future with some lessons and best practice guidelines. It is explicitly a UK history, which might seem unnecessarily limited except for two things. The first is that Vincent places the history of the sector firmly within the broader political context and within the changing fortunes of LGBT people in Britain. And, while the broad outlines of progress in the West since the 1950s are similar, the UK experienced a political backlash against gay men and lesbians in the 1980s that other countries (I am thinking of Australia here, but not only Australia) did not. Thatcher’s assault on “society”, a scandal-obsessed press pushing its right-wing agendas against Labour and local councils, the demonisation of gay men in relation to AIDS – all these brought a virulence to 1980s British life that the cultural sector in that country needed to deal with. The second reason for the British focus is the amount of material that Vincent has unearthed. There was precious little from the 1950s (but not nothing!), but from the 1990s onwards, there is a great deal to talk about.

The author casts his net wide, dealing with the opportunities and obstacles presented to gay people inside mainstream cultural institutions. He sees them as both agitators and employees, dealing with their managers as well as their colleagues (who are as often supportive as hostile). Beyond that, he looks at LGBTI engagement with national, local and community-based institutions via conferences and policy groups, displays and exhibitions. Using detailed accounts and lots of examples keeps the book lively (as these things go) and useful.

If it is true, as one observer is said to have remarked in 2012, that the British cultural sector had been slower to take up LGBT issues than Australia and the USA, it has certainly been catching up. On my visit to various museums in the UK in that same year, I was pleasantly surprised to find queer folk represented in the Imperial War Museum North and the People’s History Museum, as well as in the Alan Turing centenary celebrations. The recent offer by the London Metropolitan Archive to host the biennial international LGBT ALMS (archives, libraries, museums and special collections) conference in 2016 is an indication of Britain’s standing in the field. Britain is indeed catching up, and Vincent’s book helps us to understand how it has been doing so.

The book is intended for wide audiences, mostly those working in the cultural sectors and varied workplaces. It has a glossary of terms at the start (what on earth do all those letters in LGBT stand for, and why do they matter?) and more detailed discussions of the debates around these terms are included as an appendix. The language overall is clear and concise – this is a book to be read with profit by anyone in the field, or interested in this topic.