'Shout queer!' The museums bringing LGBT artefacts out of the closet

From Michelangelo's suggestive David to a gender-fluid Hindu deity, cultural institutions are digging into their vaults to display once-hidden objects of same-sex desire and gender nonconformity

'Let's let them know we're all here," says Dan Voh, addressing a crowd of at least 100 in a space just off the domed entrance hall of London's Victoria and Albert Museum. It's the hottest day of the year so far, and the people fanning themselves with gallery maps have come to join the monthly LGBTQ tour, which Voh, a volunteer, helped set up four years ago. "On the count of three," he bellows, "we're just going to shout 'queer' - celebrating Stonewall, remembering how hard we fought to be here. One, two, three"" The word echoes off the barrel vaults of the sculpture hall and subsides as we head off in different directions - the tour is so popular that the group has to be split into at least six parties. Visitors are shown 10 or so objects throughout the museum, from a dress designed by Jean Cocteau to a sandstone sculpture of half-female, half-male deity Ardhanarishvara. The guides, who select the objects, are also volunteers, although the tours have been endorsed from on high: "Tristram [Hunt, the museum's director] does write us very supportive letters," Voh says. At the end, everyone goes for a drink.

The tour's burgeoning popularity is part of a more general "queering" of British museums that is gathering pace. Institutions across the UK are teasing out stories of same-sex desire and gender nonconformity in artefacts that have, until now, been left untold, or actively suppressed. In 2015, National Museums Liverpool launched a research project to identify objects with an LGBTQ connection, resulting in a trail that takes in four separate venues. Last year, the University of Cambridge began piloting a tour programme that takes in its classical archaeology, zoology and polar museums (gay penguins make an appearance). Building on an audio trail devised in 2017 to mark the 50th anniversary of the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, the British Museum recently announced it will offer volunteer-led tours around its permanent collection. And the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford has been awarded 91,200 in lottery funding to develop a series of exhibitions and permanent changes to its collection under the banner Beyond the Binary: Queering and Questioning Collections and Displays.