About this event
Session 1: Friday September 2nd - A Very Queer History of Southwark
Session 2: Friday September 16th - Archives and Counter-Archives: Navigating Pleasure and Pain Across Collections in the West
Session 3: Friday October 14th - Toward a Queer Labour History
Session 4: Friday October 28th - Halloween Special! Channelling the Witch as Queer Archetype
Session 5: Friday November 11th - Fragments of a Good Time in the Historical Record
Session 6: Friday November 25th - Growing Our Own Queer Family Trees: DIY Genealogy
LGBTQIA+ people deserve to feel grounded in a sense of their own history, and the best way to do that is to take the process of research, revision, and storytelling into our own hands!
This course will focus on queer–and queering–history, working from very local examples and rare artefacts, to wider themes across time.
Each of the six classes will focus around one theme and will end with an exercise encouraging participants to consider their place within their own queer family trees.
The history of gender non-conformity, same-sex desire, and pleasure beyond the conceptualisation of sex and gender is a complex sprawl, and the role this history has to play in nourishing our lives, our relationships, and our activisms is for us to decide collectively.
Come if you’ve never studied history, come if you’re a tenured professor, come if you want to incorporate historical knowledge into your drag act or spiritual practice or style of flirtation–part of the joy of learning together is that we will be naming our desires for the past and bringing those desires into fruition.
So much remains to be rediscovered, so that queer pasts might nourish queer futures.
Please note: These classes will have occasional mention of homophobia, transphobia, racism, violence and sexual assault against LGBTQIA+ across time, but will foreground/warn in advance of any mention of these topics.
It is impossible to study a history of the oppressed, the marginalised, the subcultural without some engagement with brutality, but this reality isn’t the focus or emphasis of the course.
Accessibility:
The Centre's accessibility statement is here.
Covid and monkeypox safety at the London LGBTQ+ Community Centre:
To keep our community safe, we ask that all visitors do not visit the centre if they are feeling any Covid-19 and/or monkeypox symptoms including headache, fever, sore throat, consistent cough, chills and unusual spots, scabs or ulcers.
You can wear a mask if you feel more comfortable. We also have masks and hand sanitiser available at the Centre.
For current information on Covid and monkeypox please visit the NHS website.
Facilitator for this course:
Brooke Palmieri is a writer, artist, and historian specialising in the long history of gender nonconformity and its intersection with other liberation movements.
In 2017 they completed a history PhD on the radical, collaborative, deeply anti-hierarchical reading and publishing habits of 17th-century Quakers. That year they also developed and taught “The Queer Book,” at the Institute for English Studies, an intensive, week-long class covering 500 years of queer publishing history that is still offered each summer.
In 2018 they founded CAMP BOOKS (http://campbooks.biz) as a platform to promote greater access to anti-assimilationist queer and trans history in three major ways: cheap printing and installations; workshops and lectures; and amassing/salvaging rare and ephemeral artefacts for use in education and exhibition.
This course will make use of rare materials from CAMP BOOKS’ teaching collection and archive.