LGBTQIA+ lives that matter
- Room to Be
- 1 day ago
- 4 min read
Celebrating LGBTQIA+ History Month: members of Room to Be share a little bit about LGBTQIA+ lives and histories that matter to them.
Claude Cahun (1894-1954)
Claude Cahun was an artist who explored gender, beauty, surrealism in their work with Marcel Moore. Cahun said ‘Masculine? Feminine? It depends on the situation. Neuter is the only gender that always suits me.’ Claude and Marcel had a lifelong creative and romantic partnership, including photography, sculpture and writing. They also ran an art campaign to sabotage the Nazi occupation of Jersey.
If you want to find out more I recommend Kaz Rowe’s ‘Liberated’: https://www.kazrowe.com/comics/cahun
V Roberts
For The Living
Transgender Day of Remembrance has taken place on 20th November every year since 1999. Trans advocate Gwendolyn Ann Smith launched this day not only to pay tribute to the life of Rita Hester, a transwoman whose life was taken just the previous year, but also to mourn and commemorate all those who are murdered for their transgender identity. Ten years later in 2009, TDOR became an inspiration in the mind of Rachel Crandall Crocker. She
recognised the importance of such day, but was frustrated that it was the only day for her community. Rachel wanted something for trans people that would acknowledge and celebrate those still with us, not just those who lost their lives to violence. International Transgender Day of Visibility was born. On March 30th every year, Trans Day of Visibility plants a hopeful seed for a kinder and more inclusive society, not only encouraging the
individual but raising awareness about the diversity of the human experience. Whether thriving or struggling, or simply just existing, trans people exist all over the world. Rachel Crandall Crocker carved a way for them to feel seen and to find confidence to share their authenticity, and be met with open-heartedness and acceptance. This, alone, could save a life.
Tom Bird
Walter Sholto Douglas (1790 - 1830)
Walter Sholto Douglas was born Mary Diana Dods. Known as 'Doddy' to his friends, one of whom was Mary Shelley, the forever-famous author of the gothic novel, Frankenstein. Shelley herself lived a life fraught with scandal and rebellion for the early 1800s; it seems fitting that she would not shy away from a friendship with Doddy, a Scottish gender non-conforming writer and literary critic who first published under the name David Lyndsay and then later Walter Sholto Douglas.
Mary Shelley was a key player in the plot to obtain Doddy and their mutual friend Isabella Robinson fake passports and documents in a bid to live as man and wife raising Robinson's illegitimate child. The plot somehow succeeded. They travelled to France as Mr and Mrs Douglas, and their forged marriage disguised the child's illegitimacy.
No images of Walter Sholto Douglas are known, but a scathing description exists from another of Shelley's friends, Eliza Rennie, who wrote about Douglas in her Traits and Private Recollections.
. . . certainly Nature, in any of its wildest vagaries, never fashioned anything more grotesque-looking than this Miss Dods. She was a woman apparently between thirty and forty years of age, with a cropped curly head of short, thick hair, more resembling that of a man than of a woman. She wore no cap, and you almost fancied, on first looking at her, that some one of the masculine gender had indulged in the freak of feminine habiliments, and that "Miss Dods" was an alias for Mr. —.
Constant financial struggle eventually saw Douglas separating from Robinson and incarcerated in a debtor's prison. It was while he was in prison, Douglas contacted a friend requesting a fake moustache and whiskers, it is assumed to keep the guards unsuspecting of his hairless chin.
Douglas had always struggled with health complications. He died of his ailments somewhere between November 1829 and November 1830 after months in prison.
There is anguish in my Breast
A sorrow all undreamed, unguessed –
A war that I must ever feel –
A secret I must still conceal –
I stand upon the Earth alone
To none my secret spirit known.
(Walter Sholto Douglas)
Emile
Derek Jarman (1942 - 1994)
'Understand that sexuality is as wide as the sea. Understand that your morality is not law. Understand that we are you. Understand that if we decide to have sex whether safe, safer, or unsafe, it is our decision and you have no rights in our lovemaking.' - Derek Jarman
English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist and author, Jarman was one of the brave who unflinchingly spoke out for gay rights at a time when homosexuality was demonised. A figure in the public eye, his voice was sorely needed.
'I'm not afraid of death but I am afraid of dying. Pain can be alleviated by morphine but the pain of social ostracism cannot be taken away.' - Derek Jarman
In 1986, aged 44, Jarman received an HIV diagnosis which, at that time, came with a short life expectancy of little more than a year. This was what motivated Jarman to purchase Prospect Cottage, a small fisherman’s cabin on the shoreline of Dungeness; an area many might consider ‘barren’ with its vast strip of shingle wedged between the sea and Romney Marsh. Jarman was inspired to form a sculpture garden, coupling art and the drive to create with whatever might grow in this harsh coastal landscape. He went on to describe in his diaries how crafting this garden, both in the creation of its artwork and watching what grew, was a healing process for him, ‘a therapy and pharmacopoeia’. Jarman tended this garden for eight years before HIV health complications eventually took his life.
That drive to create and the desire to connect with what grows is the same ethos behind Room to Be.
Emile
