A Queer Walk of York Andy Egerton, Rachel Cowgill and Laura C Forster
Event details
Between recent political strife regarding the Equality Act, local venues ending contracts with drag queens, and the sustained anti-trans campaigns funded by J.K. Rowling – whose themed shops dot the Shambles - York’s queer landscape faces significant pressure. Given this climate, it’s more important than ever to think about flagging practices, outward visibility of queer solidarity, space making and space co-opting.
A Queer Walk of York takes you on a journey through the city, commemorating spaces where queer folk used to meet, chat, dance and organise. Complete with personal reflections on venues long since defunct, it invites you to reflect on experiencing and living in York as a queer person. Echoing this year’s Festival theme, the guided walk focuses on how we take, make, fight for and commemorate the queer spaces in our city.
The Queer Walk of York is a trail of queer heritage sites building on work done during the StreetLife project, inspired by York Alternative History’s Guerilla Blue Plaque project, and later the collaboration between York LGBT Forum and the Rainbow Plaque Project headed by Kit Heyam, Helen Graham and Jan Atlus. We are also grateful for support from Queer Arts. The guided tour features spaces that would not necessarily ‘count’ as ‘official’ enough to be of historical interest at first glance.
Meet outside City Screen for this walk.
About the speakers
Andy Egerton is a PhD Researcher in the School of Arts and Creative Technologies (ACT) at the University of York, currently working on a Collaborative Doctoral Award (CDA) funded by WRoCAH. Andy's PhD is looking at staff perspectives on barriers to creating more accessible, inclusive and multisensory museum exhibits, particularly in heritage sites and listed buildings in a post-lockdown landscape. In 2023, Andy was Research Assistant for the music strand of the StreetLife Project, and produced the ‘Love it or Hate it: The Willow Legacy’ exhibition, in addition to the Queer Walk.
Rachel Cowgill MBE is a Professor in Music in University of York's School of ACT, Associate Dean for Research (Arts & Humanities) and Director of the Humanities Research Centre. She initiated the StreetLife project and led the music strand and was also Principal Investigator for the AHRC-funded projects InterMusE and OurPlace. Rachel is a cultural-historical musicologist working on histories of live performance and community archiving.
Laura C Forster is a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of York. She is a historian of radical and socialist ideas, cultures and communities in modern Europe. Laura also has practical and research interests in public history and in queer histories and methodologies. She is an editor at History Workshop and her recent book with Joel White, Friends in Common: Radical Friendship and Everyday Solidarities (Pluto Press), considers the radical potential of friendship and queer intimacies as part of political struggle.
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