Into the centre

Pride Legacy Project (PLP) provides a unique perspective on lesbian and gay (including bisexual, trans & queer, or LGBTQ) cultural awareness in the heritage and creative sectors across London. Our mission is to enable creative and heritage venues to develop an awareness of LGBTQ culture within policy and workplace, programming and audiences. The project developed in response to a body of research carried out to explore the London arts sector’s awareness and understanding of LGBTQ culture in policy and practice. The research, supported by Arts Council England, explored the experiences of audiences, practitioners and arts professionals. We discovered that lesbian and gay issues, never mind LGBTQ cultural awareness, are still very much on the periphery of the diversity awareness agenda. Despite recent legislation introducing anti-discrimination rights for lesbians and gays in the workplace and in the provision of goods and services, we observed that the arts are still getting to grips with Black and minority ethnic diversity awareness, let alone age, disability, gender, religion or belief, or sexuality.

Our initial aim was to work with venues to explore and deliver LGBTQ cultural events as part of mainstream programmes. At the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) we developed a series of events with the Education Department coinciding with the David Hockney Portraits exhibition. The events drew not just on his works, but also the other collections in the Gallery, to explore wider themes such as social and sexual liberation in the 1960s and the allure of West Coast America to artists. Guest speakers, discussions and gallery tours accompanied queer readings of portraits. The NPG now has regular ‘Queering the Portrait’ events as part of its education programme, and we will be developing this idea at Tate Modern next year. Since then, we have worked with Dana Centre, Petrie Museum, Half Moon Children’s Theatre, Ambassador Theatre Group and the Young Vic. Currently, at the British Museum, we are exploring audience response to the idea of ‘Sexuality as Cultural Reference’, to coincide with the Hadrian exhibition. The outcome of this research will help us to enable other arts venues to understand and acknowledge mainstream and targeted audience perception to LGBTQ culture as part of general programming.

While our research has been LGBTQ based, our service takes an holistic view of pushing diversity forward in its totality, rather than in single issues. We believe that it is time for the arts to move away from single issue approaches and instead provide a diversity base where all issues are central. The single equality approach sees organisations adopt the principle of working across the equality strands and is a view supported by the antidiscrimination campaign Stonewall. Moreover, the Single Equality Public Duty Bill is expected next year. When this happens, it will be the duty of all public sector bodies to ensure the prevention of discrimination. However, it need not be difficult to achieve this. Once a cohesive diversity policy is adopted and implemented across the ‘community’ of each organisation, programming, audience diversity and subsequently broader diversity awareness take care of themselves.