IN MEMORIAM: ‘David was of a generation that researched beauty as a pastime, someone who understood the varieties and complexities of beauty, and that beauty could be many things and could arise in many forms.  His projects could easily be seen through a lens of grandeur, but to David they were always exercises in simplicity (“Because simple is never easy”), and why be easy?’

Original collage by Alexander Innes.

LOOKING: ‘“I asked her, ‘did you watch that?’” Tovey recalls. “Yes…I saw your little bum going up and down,” he says, mimicking his mother by transposing his Billericay accent up an octave. “That’s the final frontier,” he adds. “If your Mum’s seen you getting bottomed on TV, there’s nothing to hide.”’

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

KING OF COMEDY: ‘For me, Sandra Bernhard embodies a kind of Queer Art of Failure: one day gracing the Chanel runway, the next a one-episode arc of Highlander: The Series. Bernhard laughs it off, and has done so with insouciance time and again.’

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

THE CATHOLIC: ‘I have a theory that a Catholic can always spot another Catholic. It might be the self-deprecating humour that often strays into the darkly morbid, a fondness for black, references to family in Derry, a profusion of cousins… or perhaps it is the guilt. ‘

Illustration by Jon McCormack

A HOME FOR SCIENCE FICTION QUEERS: ‘Before Torchwood, gays on screen had been largely consigned the common stereotype enjoyed the world over: a mincing, Cabaret figure, largely only present for some light comic relief – a category I gladly fall into.’

Illustration by Jon McCormack

NEW QUEER CINEMA: ‘presented a startling array of troubled young men and I felt their pain acutely… its films told personal stories and gave representation to a vast array queer voices: punks, skinheads, soul boys, hustlers, prisoners, kings of England, gay dads, lesbian hippies, murderous teens, suicidal teens, vogue champions...’

Illustration of The Doom Generation by Fernando Monroy

RIOT UPRISING: 2019’s World Pride Event marked the 50th Anniversary of The Stonewall Uprising… but what was it and who were the major players?

Illustration by Joshua Osborn

THE SEXOLOGIST: Being born into a Pentecostal Christian family as queer was hard, I was taught that identifying outside of the heteronormative binary of their religious beliefs was my one-way ticket to hell. So when I came across the story of Magnus Hirschfeld, a gay man born into a conservative Jewish family, I instantly connected.

Illustration by Jon McCormack

QUEER BROOKLYN: ‘Hugh has authored a diligent and compelling queer history book because for years he’s been paying close attention to the things that many of us overlook. When Brooklyn Was Queer looks at how the geographical and economic conditions of a place can foster a queer community, particularly how Brooklyn’s waterfront drew in many sailors, sex workers and artists with gay tendencies.’

Illustration by Elena Durey.

QUEER INTENTIONS: ‘The book, which might actually make you LOL on public transport (it would be remiss not to mention the drunken boat-top dance routine performed to “Lady Marmalade” with a sex workers’ group), is also thought-provoking, saddening, and ridiculously readable.’

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

AUNTIE: ‘I have never had an elder to turn to for advice about love, life or relationships from a non-heterosexual lens, let alone somebody to speak to about activism and community. Audre Lorde became that person for me, through her work I had questions answered and worries alleviated. I felt comforted.’

Illustration by Amir Khadar

THE DIARIST: ‘Anne Lister is someone I return to, when things get muddled and life requires a courage that I cannot muster from within. Anne was born in 1791, the heiress to a large estate in Yorkshire. She forced herself back into the world in the 1970s, when her diaries were discovered behind a panel at her home, Shibden Hall. They have have been described as “the Dead Sea scrolls of lesbian history”. ‘

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

THE INSPIRATOR: ‘A touch on the buttocks was how I first heard about Edward Carpenter. Not my own, but E.M. Forster’s. Immersed in Forster’s gay classic Maurice, I read at the end how the author had been, miraculously, impregnated with the idea for the novel’s cross-class fantasy by a touch on the buttocks he had… received from one George Merrill, lover of Edward Carpenter.’

Illustration by Jon McCormack

THE NATIVE SON: ‘There I was a 13 year old boy having just moved from Zimbabwe in the cold 1996 weather. Grappling with the biting cold, the school bullies and just being away from the sun and all the things that I knew and loved… I would retreat to the library, if I was not in my bedroom dancing to you know who (’96 was the Spice Girls zenith). So it was I found Harlesden library and James Baldwin’s Just Above My Head. ‘

Illustration by Jannelly

AS ATLAS DID: ‘U.A. Fanthorpe. A particular favourite of my mum’s. I’d borrowed her Selected Poems to pack in my suitcase, the cover complete with a black and white portrait of the smiling writer looking eminently sensible in a striped shirt, knitted waistcoat, and glasses… Her work was by turns eerie, pragmatic and gently funny, steeped in history and myth. I immediately found myself entranced.’

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

THE TALE TELLER:‘‘I have discovered that myths and legends, and in particular mermaids have a deep deep queer soul. The man who really precipitated this eureka moment was Hans Christian Andersen. A man I think most people think they know through his charming stories and fairytales, but they probably don’t know the other side: a biromantic and sexually frustrated artist, tortured by rejection, which he poured into his writing.’

Illustration by Sam Russell Walker

THE LESBIAN POPE: ‘Natalie met her first girlfriend at 17, her last on a park bench when she was 80. In her teens she moved to France – having realised that good girls stay in Ohio, but gay girls go to Paris – where she lived for the rest of her life.’

Illustration by Fernando Monroy