Introduction to the research

This website is the outcome of a body of research undertaken for Redcar Palace as part of their Redcar Peeps Project. We were asked to consider our LGBT+, Northern and Working-Class identities. The research relates to each of these identities but actually tries to draw from and highlight the intersectional narratives on the coast and in Redcar which is full of queer potential. In the brief it said “Redcar has a seemingly empty LGBTQIA archive and record”, and the word that stuck out was seemingly. I want this research to give you a strong foundation and context to help you unlock some of these queer stories within surrounding coastal towns..and hopefully to start making some of their own! 

The research has breadth, it is split into 5 sub sections that aim to (re)contextualise the landscape and historical narratives through a queer lens. These sections are;

The first two provide some context for how the seaside landscape developed and attitudes in the North while, sections 4 and 5 speak to the forms of seaside entertainment in the early 20th Century and the final sections looks at the later half of the 20th Century when sexuality became more explicitly linked to ones identity. Each section contains overviews on the subject, visual examples and links to Redcars.  

Below I want to cover how I am using the terms Queer, Queering and Intersectionality. 

What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Queer’ and ‘Queering’

In this research I will be using the term ‘Queer’ and will be ‘queering’ history, it is important for me to explain the definitions of these terms that I have adopted. 

Queer

From the mid-nineteenth century, ‘queer’ was already associated with difference, strangeness and eccentricity. The Oxford English Dictionary linked it to homosexuality by 1922, even if that use of queer only became clearer to most people a few decades later.¹

It is important to note that the word can be triggering for some but for others it has been used by individuals who feel other definitions of gender and sexuality do not reflect their experiences. 

Through history members of the LGBT+ community have been defined and define themselves using different language and Queer tries to accommodate many of these and other words, and it can be useful too where none of them adequately captures the expression of identity or desire that we might see or find recorded in the past.²

Queering 

: to consider or interpret (something) from a perspective that rejects traditional categories of gender and sexuality : to apply ideas from queer theory to (something)³

What ‘queering’ means is to embrace figures and histories in their entirety, including narratives that are not so clear-cut or easy to interpret from a modern standpoint.‘Queering’ as a tool of historical analysis does not mean an attempt to ascribe a specific label to a historical figure or to make queer that which is not.⁴

An intersection approach to queering

One of the most exciting opportunities of queer history is not only to find examples of similarity and difference in the past but also to think about how history can be done differently? How do histories of labour, class, capitalism, colonialism and more change when we think about them queerly?⁵

Our identities do not act independently on one another; I am not northern one day, working class the next and queer the day after. These identities combine, overlap, or intersect and cannot be separated from one another. 

What this work aims to do is move the narratives discussed, those of working class histories on the north east seaside coast, into a realm of queer possibility.  As I mentioned earlier my role is to unlock some of those stories of queer histories but the most exciting part is that through this art you’re starting to make some of your own. 

Endnotes