80 More Gays Around the World: Part 27) Guiding the Way

Last time on “80 More Gays”: 74) Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) lived in the same house (though not at the same time) as 75) Margaret Mead (1901-1978), a leading influence on queer anthropology and its related subject of queer archaeology, continued by 76) Chelsea Blackmore).

76) Chelsea Blackmore was appointed Senior Archaeologist at Albion Environmental Inc. in July last year. Albion is a California company that advises and participates in construction and environmental projects, anything from highways, hydroelectric plants and nature reserves, to ensure that the local ecological and cultural properties of each site are handled appropriately. Prior to joining Albion Environmental Chelsea was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California Santa Cruz.

Chelsea’s doctoral thesis was “Challenging ‘Commoner’: An Examination of the Status and Identity at the Ancient Maya Village of Chan, Belize”, which was one of the first studies into social identity in the Mayan civilisation. She has specialised in Mesoamerican culture and aspects of identity relating to gender, social status and sexuality.

Chelsea Blackmore has been open about her sexuality all her professional career. The lack of visible lgbt archaeologists in her undergraduate years and lack of a queer network inspired her to use gender and sexuality as possible factors in her choice of studies. Shortly afterwards she founded “Queer Archaeology”, a blog aimed at lgbt archaeologists and the study of queer archaeology. Chelsea went on to co-found the Queer Archaeology Interest Group of the Society of American Archaeologists in 2014, though attempts to create such a group had been tried before.

Two publications can be said to have pioneered queer archaeology. The first is “Out in the Field: Reflections of Lesbian and Gay Anthropologists” by Ellen Lewin and William Heap (1996), and the queer-themed issue of “World Archaeology” (2000) edited by 77) Thomas Dowson.

In February 2017 I wrote this article about Thomas Dowson and his contribution to the growth of queer archaeology. Not only is he a pioneer in the subject but he is also a leading authority in rock art.

Another aspect of Thomas’s work harks back to the “old days” of the Grand Tour of Europe undertaken by the wealthy in the 17th to 19th centuries. Among these “archaeological tourists” were Amelia Edwards (more of her on Sunday) and Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the gay librarian who made Pompeii a popular place to visit. Both of these people saw the importance of careful scientific study of archaeological sites and their preservation.

For many years archaeologists discouraged tourism of digs and sites. Then the heritage industry took off and governments saw a need to protect many ancient sites. In my childhood archaeology was seen as a very dull subject and you rarely saw the subject covered on television. Only the Egyptian pyramids seem to be of interest. Then came the Viking excavations in Yorvik (York) and the raising of King Henry VIII’s flagship the Mary Rose and the public began to show more interest. Next came unexpectedly popular programmes like “Time Team”, a surprise hit archaeology series that ran for twenty years. The public were now aware of how an archaeological site should be treated and what facts about our past can be uncovered. Today, archaeological programmes are everywhere on almost every channel.

The public’s interest in archaeology has led to tourist companies offering tours of monument and ancient sites like never before. The public are more aware of their responsibilities of visiting these sites. Thomas Dowson was one of the early leaders in modern archaeological tourism. When he moved to France he was naturally interested in the archaeology of the area. There was very little information which was reliable or up-to-date. He thought other people might be interested in the local archaeology so he set up the website “Archaeology Travel” in 2010.

Archaeological tourism among tour companies and institutions has blossomed, and with the help of guidelines produced by the Archaeological Institute of America ancient sites will be better protected and understood. National Geographic organised tours and expeditions for students, including tours took of the San cave paintings which Thomas Dowson studied. One of the tour leaders was 78) Thomas Egli.

Thomas is an experienced tour guide having worked for a variety of companies, including Bali Hai Diving Adventures in Indonesia and Discover Tours Canada. Thomas has Swiss and Canadian citizenship and is currently working in Zurich as a marine ecologist (yes, a marine ecologist in land-locked Switzerland). His claim to fame, though, is that he was voted Mr. Gay Canada in 2012. However, that’s not the connection I’m going to take towards our final steps on this chain of “80 More Gays”.

In 2010 Thomas was a volunteer with VANOC, the Vancouver Organising Committee of the 2010 Winter Olympic Games. He was a supervisor at the Rogers Arena where the ice hockey tournament was held. Ice hockey is the most hotly contested sport at the Winter Olympics with Canada and the USA always vying for the gold medal. The men’s ice hockey final between them was the last medal event of the games. The women’s ice hockey final, also between Canada and the USA, was held three days earlier. Canada won both finals.

The women’s ice hockey team final at Rogers Arena contained the team with the most lgbt players at the Vancouver Olympics, and I want to group them all together for the penultimate “80 Gay”. That team was the winning 79) Canadian Women’s Ice Hockey team.

Next time in our last “80 More Gays Around the World”: We discover how we link back to 1) k d lang.

Champions of Justice

“Champions of Justice” is the title of my newest guided tour of lgbt Nottingham. I did the full tour for a paying client for the first time a week ago and it went very well. I usually try out parts of new tours on my established tours to see what works. I tried out the last part of the new tour in summer when I did my Robin Hood tour for a group of teenagers.

So, who are the Champions of Justice, and how do they fit in with Nottingham’s lgbt heritage? Here are the basics.

ROBIN HOOD – CHAMPION OF THE POOR AND OPPRESSED.
There’s no way you can talk about Champions of Justice in Nottingham and not mention Robin Hood. The first lgbt connection is my theory that the ballad which forms the basis of the legend and stories familiar to us today was written by Sir John Clanvowe who was married to Sir William Neville, Constable of Nottingham Castle. There’s no room to go into the details here, but if you put “Sir John Clanvowe” into the search box you can find out more.

Robin Hood was used by the lgbt community in Nottingham as the subject of a play by a gay street theatre group in the 1970s. Of course they put their own distinctive slant on the legend. Robin was transformed into Robina, Maid Marian was a man in drag, and someone else dressed up as the Major Oak. They put on their play outside the city Council House where a reception was being held for a Soviet trade delegation. When the delegates left the reception and saw the performance outside they were impressed that the council had arranged a special performance for them by the Robin Hood Society. A passing dog was also fooled, at least by the actor dressed as the Major Oak because it peed up her leg! The council wasn’t impressed and got the security guards to chase the actors away. Just how they explained that to the Soviets isn’t known!

LORD BYRON – CHAMPION OF THE UNEMPLOYED AND INDEPENDENCE FIGHTERS
203 years ago this week the British government sent hundreds of troops into Nottingham to quash the rioters known as the Luddites. These were hand-weavers who had been put out of work by newly invented weaving machines. They lost their jobs, their only income, and became destitute. Hundreds of them went around smashing the new machines and attacking their ex-employers’ homes. Parliament then passed an act which meant that anyone found guilty of rioting would be hanged. It didn’t stop the rioting.

A few weeks later the 24-year-old Lord Byron stood up in the House of Lords to make his maiden speech. He had spend that Christmas in the Nottingham area and undoubtedly knew about the riots. He said that it was wrong to hang the Luddites because they had no other choice but to smash the machines and reclaim their livelihoods. His words made him a hero in Nottingham.

By 1823 Byron was known throughout Europe because of his poetry (and his pansexual antics!). He was persuaded to join the Greek fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire. He was treated like a war-hero when he arrived in Greece, even though he hadn’t seen any military action. They were so in awe of him that he they virtually offered him the throne.

Unfortunately Byron died of a fever before he saw any action. But he was – and still is – treated as a national hero in Greece. His body arrived back in Nottingham for burial. Hundreds, if not thousands, of people came to see and pass by his coffin as it rested in a city centre inn overnight. Many were there to remember him as a great poet, but many more were there to remember him as a champion of the unemployed Luddites.

RAY GOSLING AND IKE COWEN – CHAMPIONS OF GAY RIGHTS
These two men were among the first members of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) founded in Manchester in 1969. Nottingham was one of the first branches formed and Ray and Ike were members. Ray was also one of the city’s youngest – and first openly gay - councillors in the 1960’s and was Vice-President of the CHE. He later became a very popular radio and tv broadcaster. Ike was a former RAF officer and a university law lecturer who wrote the CHE’s constitution.

In 1977 they persuaded the CHE to hold their annual conference in Nottingham. Several city hotels hosted discussions, workshops and events, but one event created the biggest stir in the CHE’s existence thus far. One discussion was on the subject of the psychological origins of paedophilia led by a Dutch doctor and MP who had been imprisoned in Holland for having sex with underage boys. The public and the media in 1977 were outraged. Several protest meetings were held outside the hotel, and the hotel (quite understandably regarding the violent anti-gay climate at the time) cancelled the events for fear of attacks on the hotel and its staff. The event was moved to another venue (from which the media was banned). In spite of this controversy the conference was deemed a huge success.

D. H. LAWRENCE – CHAMPION OF FREEDOM FROM CENSORSHIP (POSTHUMOUSLY)
Freedom from state censorship in the UK owes a lot to the trial in 1960 in which Penguin Books was prosecuted for obscenity for publishing local novelist Lawrence’s “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.

SIR WILLIAM NEVILLE AND SIR JOHN CLANVOWE – CHAMPIONS OF THE FREEDOM TO WORSHIP

This couple have appeared on this blog many times (again, enter their names in the search box). Both men were members of the Lollard Knights, a group of knights who supported the right to worship without interference or persecution from the Vatican (long before Henry VIII created the Church of England).

The Archbishop of Canterbury was very anti-Lollard and excommunicated all Lollard preachers. One carried on preaching and came to Nottingham in 1387, whereupon he was arrested. Sir William Neville, as Constable of Nottingham Castle at the time, suggested the preacher be held in the castle cells as they were more secure. The authorities agreed.

What no-one noticed after a few months was that the preacher had disappeared from the castle and was found in hiding under the protection of another Lollard Knight over a hundred miles away. It’s obvious that Sir William Neville’s Lollard sympathies had something to do with the escape. Fortunately, being one of the king’s closest courtiers, he wasn’t punished. Eventually, the Archbishop declared all Lollards heretics and had them burnt at the stake. Sir William and Sir John escaped this punishment also, both having died some years previously.

And those are just a few of Nottingham’s lgbt Champions of Justice.

City Pride : Pink Lace

Yesterday Nottingham hosted Nottinghamshire Pride. After many years of being held in the Arboretum or Goose Fair site it has moved into the historic Lace Market and Hockley area of the city. It feels like a home-coming, because the first ever Pride-like event in Nottingham took place there in 1997. It was called Pink Lace. 

It also gave me an idea for a new mini-series of articles. Inspired also by my recent article on Toronto I thought I’d do a series on individual cities and towns when they held their Pride celebration and look at their lgbt heritage. I’ve called the series City Pride (which includes towns and other areas). 

As the Pink Lace Tour is the newest of my lgbt tours of Nottingham I thought I’d start there. Rather than give a review of the whole city I’ll restrict myself to the Lace market and Hockley area and the street leading up to it from the Market Square. These are just snapshots of Nottingham’s great wealth of lgbt heritage and I hope I’ve chosen a varied selection for your enjoyment. There are too many lgbt pubs, clubs and venues to mention them all. The map below shows you where things happened. 

1a) Zara – This fashion store is on the site a popular old pub that was here for several centuries until 1903. Here Lord Byron’s coffin was brought to rest overnight before being taken for burial in Hucknall several miles away. Thousands of people filed past the coffin to pay their respects to one of the very few parliamentarians to defend working people’s rights. Byron lived in the city centre as a child, for part of that time at 1b). 

2) J. M. Barrie – A large decorated wall plaque marks the location of the offices of a local newspaper on which Barrie worked. It is said that he got the idea for Peter Pan after watching children at play in a local park. 

3) Thurland Hall – A pub named after a huge stately home that once stood here (I’ve outlined the extent of the original Hall on the map). This old palace was the only building big enough to house the court when “Queen” James I came to Nottingham, which he did 6 times, each time without his wife but with his “toy-boys”. 

4) The Bodega Club – This was where the Scissor Sisters gave their first Nottingham performance to a crown of less than 100 in 2003. Their subsequent 3 appearances in the city attracted thousands. 

5) Outhouse Project – In 1998 the National Lottery gave £228,000 to help establish an lgbt centre in Nottingham. Although the plane never came to fruition, with several sites being considered, the office of the Outhouse Project was here. Nottingham still has no lgbt centre.

6) The Queen of Clubs – Formerly known as Omega, before that Rain, before that Ice, and before that Jacey’s. Jacey’s hit the headlines in 2001 when the council banned its weekly male stripper show. Jacey’s pointed out that the council-run Theatre Royal had hosted the Chippendales and was about to produce “The Full Monty”. The council cancelled Full Monty and banned ALL male strippers (the ban has not been officially lifted). My friend and former barista at Jacey’s, Rich Cowell, made front page of the tabloids in 2005 when he was a Royal Navy lieutenant. He had been voted Mr Gay Plymouth and the Navy considered disciplinary action. Rich came 2^nd in the Mr Gay UK finals. 

7) Broadway Cinema – Nottingham’s leading independent cinema whose café-bar is my home from home. It has hosted several exhibitions and screening for LGBT History Month and Nottingham Pride and for many years hosted the British Film Institute’s touring LGBT Film Festival. For Pink Lace in 1997 it provided the entertainment and facilities. 

8) The Health Shop – A health clinic, the base of the Gay AIDS Initiative project (GAi) which was launched on 11 July 1994 with Sir Ian McKellen doing the official opening. The Health Shop also provided facilities for volunteers to put together thousands of free condom packs to be distributed around city venues. Several lgbt support groups held meetings here. In 1999 Channel 4 television followed Health Shop director Tim Franks for several weeks for their fly-on-the-wall series. 

9) The Masquerader – In 1913 an eccentric local character was arrested for begging. It turned out that this cross-dressing astrologer was a Serbian war refugee. His home was on the site of this car park.

10) Pierrepont Hall – another huge stately home long since demolished (the extent of the property is marked on the map). It was the childhood home of Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu, who married her lover’s brother to avoid becoming Mrs. Clotworthy Skeffington. She introduced smallpox inoculation into England and popularised the Language of Flowers.

11) Short Hill – One of the surviving lace worker’s tenement buildings still stands. It was the home of Karl Wood before World War I. He became an art teacher and painter of windmills. In 1957 he was imprisoned for his homosexuality.

12) The Galleries of Justice – The old city court house and jail, now the National Museum of Law. In 2008 an exhibition commemorating Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment in Reading Jail came here. Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, recreated Oscar’s trial in the old court itself. Part of the exhibition included the door from Oscar’s cell, and visitors reported hearing voices from behind it! During it’s working life as a court this building saw one of the biggest mass prosecutions of gay men before homosexuality was legalised – 23 men were put on trial in 1961.

If you’d like to see your own city featured in City Pride why not let me know. Or you could write your own article and be a guest blogger for the day. Just give me plenty of advance notice so I can schedule it in (I usually plan one month in advance of publication).

Dragging It Out With Music

On Tuesday night I joined my colleagues on the Nottinghamshire Rainbow Heritage project at the council house in Nottingham for our annual celebration of LGBT History Month. Part of the celebration featured a performance by two members of a local energy company who entertained the capacity audience with their drag double act. It’s highly appropriate that drag cabaret formed part of the celebration because, as I’ve mentioned before, Nottingham was the home city of one of the UK’s most famous drag performers and cabaret artists of the 20^th century – Douglas Byng (1893-1987).

Douglas Byng features a lot in my lgbt tours of Nottingham. There are plenty of stories about him that I can use, not all of them on the same tour. For today I want to pull some of these together into one article.

We’ll start with his birth – where else? Douglas wasn’t born in the city centre but in a suburb called Carrington about a mile away, too far away to actually take the tour on foot. His father Joseph Byng was the manager of the Nottingham Joint and Stock Bank which was in the city centre just behind the council house. The bank is now a branch of the French Connection fashion store. I explain on my tours a little about Douglas’s family background in front of this store, of how appropriate it is that Douglas became interested in fashion, and how Joseph and his first wife and 10 children lived in an apartment on the top floor. After the death of his wife the family moved out to a new house in Carrington, where Joseph lived with children and his 2^nd wife, and where Douglas was born.

The road out of the city centre to Carrington is called Mansfield Road. At the end of the Victorian period and into the start of the 20^th century this road was the place to be seen on a Sunday afternoon. After church and Sunday lunch people would dress up in their finest and walk up and down Mansfield Road (its quite a long road) during what was called the Sunday Parade.

While he was still a youngster Douglas decided he’d take part in this Sunday Parade. Wearing a wig made from hemp matting, a purple overcoat and a tall cane he strolled up Mansfield Road and back down again. He waved to passers-by and greeted imaginary friends, and then encountered a very real neighbour who recognised him. Douglas was deeply embarrassed at being discovered and never took part in the Sunday Parade again. Considering this is now the route of the annual Nottingham Pride march from the city centre to the Pride site it seems that Douglas wasn’t the last gay man to dress up and be noticed on Mansfield Road.

This interest in dressing up didn’t impress Douglas’s parents, however. They sent him off to live with his eldest brother in Germany in an effort to curb his enthusiasm for theatrics. There Douglas studied music which would become a vital part of his later career in cabaret. Also putting the kibosh on his parents’ intentions Douglas grew more interested in costume as his brother owned a lace factory (Nottingham was a leading lace-making centre at the time and it’s lace-makers were in demand around the world).

Douglas returned to England before the First World War and began his career as a theatrical costume designer. In 1914 he took to the stage himself in a seaside concert party. He first appeared in pantomime in 1921, and in 1924 played his first Dame role in “Dick Whittington”. For those unfamiliar or confused by British panto the Dame is a comedy role played by a man in drag, usually quite grotesque or eccentric in character. It was in the Dame role that Douglas was to make his name in the 1930s and it enabled him to use his design skills to create ever increasingly outlandish costumes, something that has now become essential in British panto.

Dames had previously been played “straight” as men dressed as little old ladies (think of Old Mother Riley, or a comedy version of Norman Bates from “Psycho”). Douglas brought more fun, imagination, and indeed glamour, to his costumes, often parodying the fashion of the time. In the 1930s there was a fashion for short fox-fur capes complete with rows of fox tails. My grandmother had one, it was creepy!

Douglas parodied these capes by designing one made out of bathroom loofahs instead of fox tails. It presented problems a couple of years later when World War II broke out because loofahs were imported, and they became difficult to obtain. Douglas realised that his loofah cape was in danger of being stolen. There were plenty of Black Marketeers who’d think nothing of stealing it and selling the loofahs at a profit. So Douglas decided to lock the cape away in a safe when it wasn’t needed for performances. Needless to say, this made the cape more valuable than the real fox-fur capes, and a valuable asset.

Douglas performed in Nottingham several times in pantomime at the Theatre Royal, another stop on my tours. After retiring to Brighton on the south coast he still visited Nottingham to see his siblings, several of whom lived well into their 90s, and a brother who died in 1983 at the age of 103. Douglas himself died at the age of 94.

To end this article I’ll show you this video of Douglas Byng in action doing one of his cabaret acts. It’s not very crisp in either sound or vision I’m afraid. Rather than appear in full drag as he did in his usual cabaret act, Douglas gives the suggestion of drag with a few simple items of clothing in this old film from 1932.

My Silver Anniversary

As I said last week in my introduction to the Ology of the Month I’m a keen geologist and rock collector. Its exactly 35 years ago this week when I went on my last geology field trip to the Peak District in Derbyshire.

Ten years later, having lost direction in my life, I drifted into tour guiding. And on 5^th March 1988 I conducted my first guided tour at Epworth Old Rectory, the childhood home of the Wesley brothers who founded Methodism. So tomorrow I celebrate my silver anniversary as a tour guide! Yaaaay!

Epworth was a deliberate choice to begin my guiding career as I was Methodist lay preacher at the time, and 1988 was the bicentenary of the founding of Methodism. In May 1988 I was one of 3 guides who met 200 delegates of the World Methodist Council at Doncaster train station and took them around the rectory (filmed by the BBC’s “Songs of Praise” programme).

After Epworth I got a job at Gainsborough Old Hall, a medieval manor house. It’s appropriate that there’s been all that fuss over the discovery of Richard III’s skeleton recently because the Old Hall was built by one of his supporters and he visited it (and I’m descended from his aunt Philippa). At the Old Hall I conducted many tours for visitors, but I was also involved with the school education programme (which won the Sandford Education Award during my time there) and living history weekends (oh, how I miss those weekends!).

For the school and living history I had to dress in authentic period costume. This (very bad) photo shows me in one of my costumes. Dressed like this I also publicised the Old Hall at county shows.

Then, in 1998, I moved to Nottingham. There I got a job at Nottingham Castle. Underneath the castle are man-made passages which are grouped together under the name of Mortimer’s Hole, named after the tyrant who deposed and probably murdered King Edward II. Some time back I wrote about an amazing fact I discovered after I left the castle. One of my colleagues and fellow guides was young Mark. After we both had left the castle (and had a bit of an on-and-off fling over 2 years) I discovered he was descended from Edward II’s partner Piers Gaveston. The implications of this are given in an earlier post.

I had, perhaps, something of an advantage over my colleagues in that I could use my knowledge of geology to describe the rock formations within the walls. I was able to point out the shape of the sand dunes from which the rock was made all those millions of years ago. And even pin-pointed out one very short event from those millions of years ago by following a line of pebbles in the rock wall which signified a flash flood. Those pebbles, of course, came from mountains that were formed many millions of years before that.

I didn’t have a special costume for the cave tours, except at one special event when I dressed as the Constable of Nottingham Castle – my tribute to 3 “gay” constables of the past. I really enjoyed my tours and got a lot of good feedback. Several times my manager put me forward when a television crew came along. I even took a female wrestler into the caves for an American wrestling programme (can’t remember which one, but there used to be a YouTube video of it). On another occasion I was being interviewed by a professor. While we were waiting for the crew to set up the cameras the professor and I amused ourselves by making hand shadows of dinosaurs and bats against the cave wall!

On my tours I tried to get people involved, especially the children. When I got to the part where I describe how Roger Mortimer was captured at Nottingham and later executed I “demonstrated” on a volunteer child how a traitor was hanged, drawn and quartered. The kids loved it! And so did most of the adults! And this was years before “Horrible Histories” became popular. In 1994 I even helped to get the cave tours awarded the Best UK Guided Tour of the Year. One of the undercover judges told me years later that she still remembered it with a smile (I hope it was for the right reasons!).

After I left Nottingham Castle I wanted to carry on being a tour guide but there weren’t many openings. For several years before I left I was researching lgbt history. From this research I decided I could do gay tours of Nottingham. My first was during Nottingham Pride on 29^th July 2006.

I’m pleased to say my Nottingham tours are very successful. I’m planning 2 fund-raising tours for this year’s Nottinghamshire Pride committee, and have several others planned in the coming months. There are even some “regular” customers – the University of Nottingham LGBT Students group have been on 7 tours so far, and they’re hoping for their 8^th in October.

My tours are always developing. No two tours are the same, and I often alter the route for each group. I also try to create at least one new tour every year with a different theme. So people can decide whether to have the Romantic Valentine tour, the Seven Deadly Gay Sins tour, or the standard tour, for instance.

I don’t know how I’m going to celebrate my Silver Anniversary tomorrow, but I’m sure I can do some sort of celebrating throughout the year. Perhaps you may even join me on a tour yourself one day.

Ready to be horrified?

Preparing for a few Thrills

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was trying to produce a gay Hallowe’en tour. Well, I think I’ve done it. Using my Seven Deadly Gay Sins tour as the basis I’ve put together a bigger tour with lots of new stories. I did it this way because there’s very little I could use for a traditional Hallowe’en tour with a gay theme. But don’t despair – the way it has turned out there is still blood and guts, and tales of vampires, ghosts and murder.

I intend this to be a one-off tour – never to be repeated. Because of that, and because it’ll last longer, I’m going to put up my usual charge and ask people to pre-book. I haven’t finalised a date or time yet, but if you’re interested let me know anyway.

Another reason for the increase in charge is the need to raise funds for an exhibition in LGBT History Month next February. I don’t have the financial resources that Nottinghamshire’s Rainbow Heritage has for their displays so funding it myself is my only option at the moment.

Without giving too much away – the new Hallowe’en tour will take us to old and new locations around Nottingham city centre and look at the origins of the modern vampire, a cross-dressing clairvoyant, and perhaps the ghost of Oscar Wilde. Add a good sprinkling of dismembered body parts and I think it’s a tour to thrill.

More information and full details of the tour will appear in a few days.

Future Shocks!

It’s a little early in the year, I know, I’m thinking ahead.

My tours of Nottingham have always been well received. Several groups have even been on more than one. I’m always looking for new themes and ideas. For several years I’ve been trying to come up with a Hallowe’en tour – complete with references to being “grabbed by the ghoulies” and “putting the willies up you”! There isn’t much information to work on with regards to the lgbt angle, except that Nottinghamshire’s Lord Byron was present at the birth of the story of Frankenstein.

Earlier this year I thought I might adapt my “Seven Deadly Gay Sins” tour and put emphasis on the various gruesome punishments in Hell awaiting the sinful. I might work out a combination of the two and research new information. I could even include my own encounter in Canning Circus cemetery with a dead (human) body that wasn’t supposed to be there (a tale I’ll go into more detail about in November).

As a Christian I also commemorate All Saints Day the day after Hallowe’en, being the dedication of my home parish church in Misterton. So by combining the 2 days I could come up with a “ Gay Demons and Queer Saints” tour.

If people would be interested in a Hallowe’en tour, conducted late at night of course, please let me know and I’ll be spurred on to put one together. If you know of any gruesome gay tales of Nottingham, suitable for a light-hearted tour, also drop me an email.

I’ll leave you with a truly awful joke – Why can’t you ever see the cross-dressing father of a ghost? Because he’s trans-parent!!! Get it? Oh, never mind.