32 GSCENE
ICONIC QUEERS History is littered with personalities. It’s through them that we learn about our past. We praise individuals in our communities for their pioneering work, often doing well in their field of expertise and in some cases while living their authentic selves. Two such persons who lived in Brighton and Sussex were Gluck and Edward Carpenter. Both are celebrated for their personal achievements as well as for living out lives during a time when to do so was in some cases illegal, and certainly not in keeping with contemporary opinion. Rory Finn looks back on their lives
) It’s easy to think that some ideas and identities are new, dreamt up by the latest generation of queer people to grace our scene. Non-binary is a term that has grown in usage in the past few years and increasing numbers of people are identifying as such. Notable examples include Sam Smith and Jack Munroe. But as a concept it’s nothing new and genders that don’t fit into the traditional notions of male and female have been around for as long as we have.
Gluck was a gender non-conforming British painter (1895-1978). Named Hannah Gluckstein at birth, and born into a wealthy family, Gluck was privileged to have the resources to pursue a life of their own. They received money in trust at the age of 21 and put themselves through art school in London from 1913 for three years. After that, Gluck moved to Cornwall to join an artists’ colony in Lamorna. However, Gluck didn’t want to be
As a lesbian icon to us all decades later, Gluck was known for having relationships with women. Their relationship with American socialite Nesta Obermer is depicted in the 1937 painting Medallion, named such because of a single object with two faces. Gluck referred to this as the YouWe portrait. This painting is perhaps one of the most recognisable and famous depictions of a queer lesbian relationship, having most notably featured as the cover image for Radclyffe Hall’s 1928
part of any particular art movement, and would prefer to feature their art in solo exhibitions. During their time at Lamorna, Gluck began curating themselves in a way that defied contemporary gender norms and fashion. They are presented in paintings by their contemporaries and in photos as smoking a pipe, wearing masculine style and clothing and pursuing relationships with women. The world of art scholarship will often use the feminine pronoun ‘she’ in reference to Gluck. In this piece we refer to Gluck as ‘they’. We do not know for sure how Gluck would have identified themselves, had they been living now, with the explosion in people coming out as non-binary and using the singular gender neutral pronoun, they/them, it’s quite possible that Gluck would have done the same. Gluck insisted on “no prefix, suffix, or quotes” and didn’t want to be titled, choosing to use only a shortening of their surname as their name. A famous example of the strength
MEDALLION, 1937, GLUCK RIGHT, NESTA LEFT
Gluck
of feeling Gluck had on this issue is when an art society, of which Gluck was vice president no less, referred to them on a letterhead as “Miss Gluck”. Gluck resigned.
lesbian novel, The Well Of Loneliness, which follows the life of an upper-class woman called Stephen Gordon. The novel portrays queerness as natural, that we are born this way and pleads: “Give us also the right to our existence.” Gluck’s work is often exhibited as celebrations of queer love. Radical at the time, and perhaps still radical for some people to this day, that our genitalia should not define us. Gluck died in Steyning, Sussex, aged 82.
GLUCK, 1932, BY HOWARD COSTER, THE FINE ARTS SOCIETY
Edward Carpenter ) Edward Carpenter perhaps wouldn’t look out of place in modern Brighton. He was a gay rights activist, vegetarian, and pro animal rights. However, he was born a hundred years too early for the city we inhabit now, coming into the world in 1844. Carpenter’s family home was 45 Brunswick Square, Hove. He was educated at Brighton College, enjoyed playing piano and horse riding on the Downs and as a young man he discovered he "felt a friendly attraction towards my own sex, and this developed after the age of puberty into a passionate sense of love”.
Carpenter’s exploration of gay sexuality led him into a close friendship, which had a “touch of romance,” with Edward Anthony Beck, whom he met at Cambridge. But this didn’t stop him from joining the Church of England as a curate after university. He experienced an increasing sense of dissatisfaction in the years that followed, with both the Church and university, and what he saw as Victorian hypocrisy. He found comfort
