The Museum of Transology’s collection of signs from the Black Trans Lives Matter rally
(Picture: Suzanne Zhang)Queer history is not just about political activism. That is loud and clear as the Bishopsgate Institute takes over the Curve Gallery in the Barbican Centre to celebrate their 40th birthday. The Institute has foraged through their LGTBQ+ archives to find the camp, the unexpected and the poignant. It’s not just any archive exhibition, it’s very queer.
The banners and the feather boa at the very beginning give it away. Politics, but make it sexy. And it’s not as though the monumental struggles of the last few decades have been sidelined; they’re still very much present. But the lack of grand narrative works because it admits that multiple things are true at once. In fact, that’s the point.
