Rainbow Plaques: Making Queer History Visible

In the next of our pieces on queer heritage, Kit Heyam reflects on the Rainbow Plaques project, which commemorates the queer history of places by making the diversity and longevity of the queer experience in York clearly visible, and the impact of the plaques in the city and beyond.

Permanent rainbow plaque for Anne Lister, Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate

What does it mean for a city or a building to have a queer history? We now have many opportunities to learn about the queer history of particular spaces – from books like Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London, to site-specific initiatives like those of Powderham Castle, Devon, or the National Trust, to self-guided tours like the West Yorkshire Queer Stories app (which I was proud to have the opportunity to work on last year). But there remains a palpable difference between the experience of moving through a space with knowledge of its queer history, and the experience of seeing that history made visible. Commemorative markers of history can have a powerful impact on the way we feel about a space: on whether we feel a sense of belonging there, or a connection to its past. But who decides who gets to feel that belonging and connection – and how should we address the fact that marginalised groups tend to have much less access to it?

The Rainbow Plaques project, which I have coordinated along with Helen Graham from the University of Leeds since 2015, began as a response to these questions of commemoration – as well as a way to challenge ideas of what constituted historical importance, incorporating the fact that buildings often hold great personal significance for queer individuals. Based on a ‘Guerrilla Blue Plaques’ event held by York’s Alternative History (as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘How should decisions about heritage be made?’), Helen and I designed a cardboard plaque which combined the legitimising connotations of blue plaques with a visibly queer rainbow. At our first workshop in February 2015 (part of the York LGBT History Month programme), participants shared community knowledge of a specific flat as the site of wild queer parties, experiences of homophobic violence, and personal victories; my own plaque marked the first place I tried on men’s clothes in a shop changing room. Since then, I’ve led plaque-making workshops with groups including West Yorkshire Queer Stories, the V&A LGBTQ working group, and the Queerology art collective. 

‘Anne Lister – Britain’s first modern lesbian’, King’s Manor, University of York

The cardboard plaques are deliberately ephemeral: they last 24 hours or less, creating crucial freedom to experiment with wording and with what counts as ‘history’. But the effect of them all being displayed at once is powerful: for a short time, the city and its buildings become visibly queer. Queer people are able to feel a direct connection to the history of the space we inhabit – something particularly valuable for a group of people who are more likely to experience social isolation in the present. Importantly, too, all those who move through the space are given access to greater awareness of the diversity and longevity of queer experience. This is an essential part of combating anti-queer discrimination, which is so often articulated in terms of ‘tradition’ – framing queer people (and particularly trans people) both as a newfangled ‘trend’ whose validity can be easily dismissed, and, paradoxically, as a new and powerful threat. 

The chance emerged in 2018 to create a permanent rainbow plaque for York. Community consultation indicated that the first choice of location was Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate: where Anne Lister, the Yorkshire businesswoman known for her coded diaries in which she detailed her lesbian relationships, shared Holy Communion with her partner Ann Walker as a way to solemnise their union. With a new design by a member of the local LGBTQ+ community, four organisations – York Civic Trust, which administers York’s blue plaques; the Churches Conservation Trust, which owns Holy Trinity; and two activist groups, York LGBT Forum and York LGBT History Month – came together to make the plaque a reality.

‘In the 1930s (on) LGBT people were known to occupy the first floor flat…’, Micklegate, York

Here, the newfound permanence of the plaque created challenges as well as opportunity: tight character limits, the competing priorities and timescales of all the parties involved, and the heightened level of scrutiny that a plaque’s wording attracts when cast in aluminium rather than scribbled on cardboard. Failure to reach enough members of the local and national lesbian community with our consultations, to realise the impact of tight deadlines, and to robustly test the potential for ambiguity in our chosen wording (most damagingly, the possibility that the phrase ‘gender-nonconforming’ might be interpreted as referring to Anne Lister’s identity, rather than describing her activities) led to an outcry at the plaque’s original text. Many objections to the plaque were in good faith, coming from lesbians who saw Anne as an important historical point of identification and felt justifiably hurt that this wasn’t explicitly marked; but others drew on a transphobic discourse that inaccurately presents the fight for trans rights and the fight for lesbian rights as a zero-sum game, meaning that trans members of the plaque team (including myself) experienced sustained online abuse in the aftermath of the plaque’s unveiling. 

The remade plaque – which commemorates Anne as a ‘lesbian and diarist’, and refers to Holy Trinity as the place where she ‘took sacrament … to seal her union with Ann Walker’ – stands as an important reminder of the issues at stake in commemorating the queer history of buildings. But as the first permanent rainbow plaque in the UK – a commemorative marker that, unlike the many other plaques relating to LGBTQ+ history, makes its site’s queer past indelibly visible – it is also clearly cause for celebration. More than that, it is cause for inspiration.

In July 2019, activists from Wandsworth LGBTQ+ Forum and arts organisation Studio Voltaire – none of them affiliated with the York groups – unveiled a plaque with the same design dedicated to Oscar Wilde at Clapham Junction railway station. Separate projects, such as Leeds Civic Trust’s temporary trail in 2018, have produced rainbow plaques of different kinds. I’m excited to see where they travel next, and to have played a small part in making our queer past ever more visible – or to put it another way, in making the visible evidence of our past ever more queer.

‘Dedicated to the long-suffering staff of WH Smiths…’, Coney Street, York

Further reading

• The template for the cardboard plaques is freely downloadable here.

• Martin Bashforth et al., ‘Socialising heritage/socialising legacy’, in Valuing Interdisciplinary Collaborative Research: Beyond Impact, ed. Keri Facer and Kate Pahl (Bristol: Policy Press, 2017).

• Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

Dr Kit Heyam is a Lecturer in English at Northumbria University and a queer history activist. Their book on the development of Edward II's queer reputation is forthcoming with Amsterdam University Press.

‘York’s First LGBT Archive’, York Library, Library Square, York

‘York Castle Museum: Here men were imprisoned for committing the act of sodomy...’, Tower Street, York

Temporary rainbow plaques at Holy Trinity Church, Goodramgate, York

‘2015 York #Rainbow Plaques First Year’, Friargate, York

‘Stuart Feather met John Chesterman…’, Church Lane, York

‘Willow Disco: The end point of many university of York LGBTQ socials…’, at the site of the late Willow Disco, Coney Street, York