In August, the landmark exhibition Queer Lives of Waltham Forest depicted the past and present lives of LGBTQ+ people in the borough – Alastair Ball spoke with the organisers to find out more
Local exhibition Queer Lives of Waltham Forest brought contemporary photography into conversation with the borough’s rich LGBTQ+ history.
Through images of friendship, family, identity and belonging, alongside artefacts, the exhibition created a vivid collective portrait of queer life, past and present.
I spoke with exhibition organisers Waltham Forest Pride about the show and their intentions behind it.
What inspired Queer Lives of Waltham Forest, and why did you want to create this exhibition?
Queer Lives of Waltham Forest came from a desire to showcase, celebrate and document the queer lives that make up our borough. We didn’t want to focus only on major events, but on the everyday queer experiences that go undocumented. The friendships, relationships, chosen families, places, memories and moments of joy that make up queer life are just as important to our history.
The aim was to create something that reflects the diversity of LGBTQ+ life in Waltham Forest and give local people the opportunity to see themselves represented.
The exhibition also sits at the heart of what Waltham Forest Pride Collective is trying to build: spaces where our community can come together, share our stories, celebrate one another and reflect on where we have come from and where we are going.
Why was it important to include historical objects alongside contemporary photography?
Our aim was to create an exhibition that connects queer life in Waltham Forest today with the history that came before it. It can be easy to assume that queer visibility is something relatively recent, but LGBTQ+ people have always been part of this borough. More than that, local queer people have played an important role in shaping LGBTQ+ life and liberation across Britain.
Alongside contemporary photography, the exhibition brought together archival material from the UK Gay Sports Festival (2000), the first major national gay multi-sport event of its kind to be held in the UK.
The exhibition also featured original “Pits and Perverts” T-shirts, generously loaned to Waltham Forest Pride Collective by local resident Jane Connor, an original member of Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. These objects offered a tangible connection to a pivotal moment in British LGBTQ+ history.
What do you hope visitors, both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+, take away from the exhibition?
We hope LGBTQ+ visitors leave with a sense of recognition, pride and belonging, that they see something of themselves, their experiences or their community reflected in the photographs exhibited.
For non-queer visitors, we hope the exhibition offers a more complete picture of queer life and challenges the narrow ways in which queer people are so often represented.
Queer life can be joyful, complex, ordinary, liberating, creative and revolutionary – and it is all of these things at once. We want visitors to see something to celebrate and be proud of, but also something to be inspired by.
What do you hope visitors, both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+, take away from the exhibition?
We hope LGBTQ+ visitors leave with a sense of recognition, pride and belonging, that they see something of themselves, their experiences or their community reflected in the photographs exhibited.
For non-queer visitors, we hope the exhibition offers a more complete picture of queer life and challenges the narrow ways in which queer people are so often represented.
Queer life can be joyful, complex, ordinary, liberating, creative and revolutionary – and it is all of these things at once. We want visitors to see something to celebrate and be proud of, but also something to be inspired by.
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