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 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 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. 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 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.

Edward Carpenter

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”.

Edward Carpenter and George Merrill

From:www.friendsofedwardcarpenter.co.uk

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 in the works of American poet Walt Whitman, which caused him to feel “a profound change”.

After he left the Church, Carpenter moved to northern England to be part of the University Extension Movement, which introduced higher education to deprived areas of the country. He became increasingly interested in socialism and his political ideas have formed the basis of the British Labour movement. He particularly wanted to expand education to the working classes. It was during this time he found he had particular attraction to manual workers; "the grimy and oil-besmeared figure of a stoker" or "the thick-thighed hot coarsefleshed young bricklayer with a strap around his waist".

In 1891 he met George Merrill, a workingclass man from Sheffield who was 22 years his junior. They began co-habiting a few years later and this relationship endured until Merrill died suddenly in 1928. What is perhaps extraordinary is that this was of the era of Oscar Wilde’s trial, which saw him imprisoned in 1895 for homosexuality. Carpenter was a solid socialist and believer in social justice. He saw his homosexuality as not merely a state of being but a way to change society for the better. In his 1908 work, The Intermediate Sex, he remarked:

“Eros is a great leveller. Perhaps the true Democracy rests, more firmly than anywhere else, on a sentiment which easily passes the bounds of class and caste, and unites in the closest affection the most estranged ranks of society. It is noticeable how often Uranians of good position and breeding are drawn to rougher types, as of manual workers, and frequently very permanent alliances grow up in this way, which although not publicly acknowledged have a decided influence on social institutions, customs and political tendencies.” writing inspired the likes of DH Lawrence to write Lady Chatterley’s Lover as well as inspiring countless other peers of his time, by celebrating the homosexual condition as “a force in human evolution”. He is remembered by some as the "gay godfather of the British left".

Unsung iconic queers

But what about the rest of us? It’s frustrating that any cursory glance at the past reveals mainly privileged, white, upper and middle-class individuals. There’s nothing wrong with being that in and of itself, but it has the effect of rendering everyone else invisible. History is written by the victors and those with authority have the power to shape the interpretation of it through their own lens. I would like to dedicate the rest of this feature to thinking about the unsung iconic queers. They say it takes a village to raise a child (who will later become a queer icon), so who is in this village of ours? Reading through the archives of Brighton Ourstory has been fascinating. The project started in 1989 and ran for over 20 years, chronicling what it could of LGB history in the city, with biographies like Carpenter’s to titbits that illustrate what life was like for lesbian and gay people in the city. This tradition has been continued in other projects, such as Queer In Brighton, an oral history project which collated a broad range of voices and contributions from individuals, many of whom have made Brighton & Hove the city people continue to see as having ‘streets paved in gay gold’. Just by existing here in the way we do makes this city iconic. 2014 saw the publication of another oral history project Brighton Trans*formed (Queenspark Books), which explored the lives of trans people in the city. Groundbreaking in itself for portraying trans people as happy, part of a vibrant and diverse community, just as the western world was experiencing its ‘trans tipping point’ and Caitlyn Jenner burst out of the trans closet on to the cover of Vanity Fair.

QTIPOC Narratives Zine

We must record our lives for future generations or else they can easily get lost in the mists of time or the dominant culture. One method is for communities to come together and create zines, webpages, and now Instagram feeds. QTIPOC Narratives produced a zine and you can follow them on Instagram (details below). At time of writing, Brighton Museum should be reopening in September, but you can revisit some of the exhibitions online until then, including zines produced by the Queer On The Pier project, the stories behind the outfits in Queer Looks.

MORE INFO

www.brightonourstory.co.uk www.queensparkbooks.org.uk www.brightontransformed.com/ www.instagram.com/qtipocnarratives www.brightonmuseums.org.uk/discover/focus-on/lgbtq-history-practice

cus-on/lgbtq-history-practice/

Queer On The Pier