Today’s LGBTQIA+ Pride Marches are an ongoing celebration of the changes that started outside the Stonewall Inn.  We now have specific Black Pride marches, and Trans Pride marches as well, which draw particular attention to sub-groups of the LGBTQIA+ community that are peculiarly vulnerable. Pride is a protest that is in danger of becoming a party, causing many young people, both within and outside of the LGBTQ+ community, to begin to question the point of pride.  The point of Pride is that LGBTQ+ rights are very recently won and it would be only too easy for all the progress towards equality to be rolled back.  

February is Lesbian, Gay, Bi, Trans, Queer, Intersex and Asexual (and all the other strands of sexual and gender diversity) awareness month. I will be posting regularly here on the Library blog about the history of how the understanding of sexual diversity developed since the concept of sexuality was discovered or perhaps invented in the nineteenth century, through the fight to develop greater awareness, tolerance and freedoms for all people throughout the twentieth century and then looking at the state of LGBTQIA+ rights today.

I’d like to start this LGBTQIA+ History Month with a focus on some largely forgotten LGBTQIA+ artists. There are several art exhibitions featuring works by LGBTQIA+ artists that you can visit between February and April 2024, including several in London and one in nearby Chichester you could visit, any of which will make for a pleasant day out.

Earlier this month, a new exhibit opened in the library’s First Floor mezzanine display space. Sounds Beyond Music: Selected Objects from the Museum of Portable Sound will run from 13 November through 31 January.

MOPS is an independent museum based in Portsmouth after first opening in London almost exactly eight years ago as a research project for my PhD in sound studies and museum studies, and I’m its Director and Chief Curator. It’s dedicated to the collection, preservation, and exhibition of (mostly non-musical) sounds as museum objects.