Gay Amnesia

If cultural amnesia – the ability of human societies to forget collective misdeeds – is an evolutionarily advantageous trait, then gay amnesia – defined by the Urban Dictionary as the failure to recognise one’s lovers on encountering them in public – is the most perverse form of this adaptation. Gay men have become the perfect amnesiacs, lacking not only biological progeny on whom to bestow their tales but, often, the desire to have their business witnessed by anyone other than its miscreant participants. 

Far from illuminating the historical homosexual hinterland, the recent vogue for queering narratives proposes a celebratory, revisionist outlook that evades the profound, difficult questions pertinent to today’s gay culture. In an age of sexual forgetting, Gay Amnesia at Verdurin is at once the walk of shame at the end of the club night and a mournful parade for a fantasy of better past times.

Over the Rainbow

Those who thought that the legalisation of same-sex marriage in Britain in 2014 marked an end to decades of social, cultural, and political struggle, however, were soon proven wrong. Today, a new fight for another vision of LGBTQ+ freedom rages on, consuming the political and intellectual legacies of the earlier movements. The activism of identity has been the fodder for a culture war which, by some accounts, is wholly detached from the project of sexual liberation.

Over the Rainbow will ask Simon Fanshawe and Mark Simpson – activists and critics whose work marked some of the most significant points in the journey to freedom –  how today’s emancipated subject should understand the entanglement of civic equality, sexual freedom, and identity. Was sexual liberation the first step of a slippery slope or part of a radical plan whose details were forgotten in history’s twists and turns?

Tuesday, 11 February 2025, 7pm

Return to Sodom

Until not long ago, the canon of gay art and literature was inextricably linked with transgression and tragedy. Generations of queers grew up on Jean Genet’s prison prose which aesthetically linked homosexual love with criminality. Bruce LaBruce mixed blood with taboo politics in his films in the 1990s. Dennis Cooper’s celebration of violent erotic excess and suffering won the novelist a cult following.

These artefacts are uneasy records of homosexual dystopias. Today, by contrast, queer art is full of saccharine ideals that show gay love as free and easy. The symposium Return to Sodom traces the progressive aesthetic turn in search of today’s visionary Jean Genet.

Saturday, 22 February 2025, 2-6pm

Dorian’s Attic

The Rainbow Museum of Queer Life is a popular Sunday attraction for the whole family. Its displays promote pride and inclusion and offer insights into the entwined nature of love and progress. Each visit is a morally corrective experience. But one room is forever closed to the public: The Dorian Gray Attic, a repository for all artefacts that are too hideous or politically dangerous to unleash on the unwitting punter.

Dorian’s Attic is a tour through this idiosyncratic collection of art from gay history that has been banned, cast out, or simply conveniently forgotten. The afternoon will respond to the previous day’s inquiries and play host to screenings of fringe video art, poetry and fiction readings, and reconstruction performances of archival artefacts and plays. 

Sunday, 23 February, 2-6pm

Gay Amnesia is organised with Amir Naaman.