Positive Leicester

In the below conversation, Catherine Hallsworth and Jonathan Raynor reflect on the process of creating the exhibition and its impact on the museum’s relationship to LGBTQ audiences. 

Catherine Hallsworth and Jonathan Raynor

Collection: Leicester Museum And Art Gallery 

Keywords: HIV/AIDS, Trade Sexual Health, Warren Wiesner, Leicester AIDS Support Service

How did you end up collaborating with Trade Sexual Health?

Catherine Hallsworth (CH): In my previous role as Outreach Officer for Leicester Museums and Galleries, we had Arts Council funding to really focus on underrepresented groups within the service. One of the things that we noticed is that we didn't really have any kind of real understanding of our offer for LGBTQ+ audiences, so we started putting together some activities – at this point, the Leicester Pride March went past the museum and we had a museum take-over day. We decorated the front of the museum with flags and held face-painting on our butterfly pavement. Within the museum, we had arts and crafts, creating flags and streamer batons. At the same time, Trade Sexual Health contacted the museum service about what we might do with the anniversaries relating to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It came to me because it was a community group, and I was looking for partners for stories.

We’re really lucky because we have our Leicester Stories Gallery which has an entire section devoted to stories from communities where they can lead on an exhibition. It was a kind of serendipitous meeting as a lot of these things are; it's just about being open to it and trying to make sure that people know that you are always looking to work with community groups, so that they feel they can approach you, which just works so much better than cold approaches. But it's rare too – you want people to already be excited about you and what you do, which was great for us because Trade absolutely were.

Could you tell me a bit about the idea for Positive Leicester and how the exhibition came about?

CH: We started talking to Trade about what they felt were the important stories that came from their organization, from the community groups they work with. Their focus was very, very much on the HIV/AIDS epidemic. We discussed what their aims and objectives were, who they wanted to speak to, and why they wanted to be speaking to people in a museum context. At the beginning of the outreach work we created an internal staff group comprised of those who were interested generally in the project and LGBT staff who wished to participate.

We went down to Trade and had a chat to them; they started telling us stories, and what was really nice is that by having a variety of people listening you got a real idea of what they valued and the kinds of stories they were choosing to tell you. But also you could tell what was surprising to people who were within the LGBTQ+ community, who were finding interesting and surprising stories that they weren't aware of, never mind those who are completely removed from any sort of community work or from that community itself. This process helped us to really focus on the story of Warren Wiesner, a local HIV activist who had a really unique story as he was the first local authority employed officer specifically to work with HIV/AIDS organisations. We also focused on the founding, in the late 1980s, of what was Leicester AIDS Support Service (LASS) and also Trade as well.

So it was quite organic and it often is when you’re working with these community groups, because they don’t know which of their stories are going to work for audiences outside of their community. They know they have stories but they don’t know that they’re worth telling. So it's really lovely to be able to show that enthusiasm and almost use the enthusiasms from each side to drive the narrative. People could say, “Oh, no, no, I really want to know more about this” and we could start to unearth those elements around it.

This process also helped us really focus on the aims of Trade as an organization, which were to highlight the narrative of eradicating AIDS transmission by 2030; their origins as an organisation; and the origins of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. These aims – from origins to eradication – gave us a clear, linear structure to an exhibition, which you could then populate with stories as you work through this timeline of past, present and future. We were really, really lucky to be able to pull that together. And because we had people working on the project who were completely outside of the community, outside of any community work, or much younger, we could get a really good grip on what people didn't know – which was a great way of telling us what we needed to include and understanding what the audiences need to know to be able to engage with that exhibition.

What did the process of collaborating with Trade involve?

Jonathan Raynor (JR): Trade have a large amount of HIV and AIDS related material that they've amassed over the years, which they allowed us to view and photograph. Members of our internal staff group went down from the museum to have a look at it all and work through what they had. Once we knew what we had to work with, we had a discussion with Trade about what objects and material we thought would complement the exhibition and which things we wanted to loan.

Trade also put us in touch with local people who had lived through the AIDS epidemic and were able to give us more information on their experiences, which gave us some great insight into the community. Once we'd finished writing the interpretation, we then sent this over to them to check, particularly to make sure we were getting all of our sexual health advice correct, which thankfully we were!

How was the format of the display shaped – what inspired it, and how did you balance subject matter, material, and audiences?

JR: In 2018, I had the opportunity to visit an exhibition at the Museum of Memory and Tolerance in Mexico City called Identity, Love and Sexuality, which had as its centrepiece a timeline of LGBT history presented on a very long rainbow ribbon which ran across multiple rooms and corridors. From this, we decided to use a timeline ourselves as the centrepiece of ours, but in this case to demonstrate just how interwoven the history of the virus was with the LGBT community and how devastating it was for LGBT people in particular. Around the timeline, we then had panels which went into more depth about Leicester's response to the virus, about sexual health in general, and how you as an audience member could go about getting tested. One of the primary goals of the exhibition was to encourage more people to get tested for HIV.

CH: We had examples of testing kits on the walls, as a way of dispelling fears about this; it was the idea of really showing people how simple and easy it was, to show it's fine, don't worry.

JR: We had a mix where we got some modern stuff from Trade, as well as the Leicester Sexual Health Clinic, and then we also had some historic condoms and other paraphernalia from Trade’s collection.

In terms of balancing subject matter, we wanted to tell a more uplifting story about how times have changed, and that a positive diagnosis for HIV is not the death sentence that it would have been treated as by many in the past. In order to do this, our graphic designer created a backdrop of sky blue with clouds for the panels along with a graphic at the base showing the evolution of the designs of the rainbow flag. This counterbalanced some of the harder hitting material, and gave it a general air of being friendly and inviting to engage with.

Similarly, when choosing materials from Trade’s archives to use in the exhibition, we tried to steer away from some of the more graphic material to ensure that as few individuals as possible would be deterred from reading more. In some ways, I wonder whether we self-censored more than we needed to. Our main summer exhibition that year, Punk: Rage and Revolution, contained some lightly graphic material which we expected parents to object to and so we put up signs warning that parental discretion was advised, yet we barely saw anyone deterred by this. And we were genuinely surprised by how both parents and children engaged with the material. So perhaps if we ran the exhibition again in future, we could be slightly more bold with our choices. But I think we got the balance right in the end to maximize audience engagement.

The exhibition aimed to tell two stories – one about the virus, and one about the responses of the LGTBQ community in Leicester and elsewhere. How did you come to this format? What made the response to HIV/AIDS in Leicester distinct?

JR: Really, the decision to tell the two stories was driven by the disparity in understanding across our audiences, and even within our teams, regarding knowledge of the epidemic on both local and international levels. We found that young people had very little knowledge of the scale of the epidemic and those who had grown up outside the UK also had limited access to much of this background information.

Much of the initial story of the virus was characterized by this abhorrent lack of action from authorities who committed a sort of genocide of inaction by simply letting people they considered undesirable in some way die off. And this is what made Leicester's response distinct because you had a much more concerted level of effort to do something about it, driven by local campaigners such as Warren Wiesner and LASS. The City Council even produced a video, called Not Another AIDS Video, dispelling many of the myths surrounding the virus in an effort to increase public awareness, which we featured in the exhibition. This work also meant that the two stories really complemented each other since Leicester had many local examples of what became the biggest iconography from the era – such as photographs of Princess Diana visiting LASS, which we included in the display.

And one particularly poignant item which we were able to feature in the exhibition were the LASS panels. They were a version of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, which is made up of many individual panels, each commemorating someone who died of HIV/AIDS; it originated in San Francisco in the United States in 1987. LASS produced a version of this where, instead of having a panel, each person memorialized in it had a drawstring bag containing trinkets, personal items, and even locks of hair from the deceased sewn onto it. This was very touching and many people, including myself, found it difficult not to be moved to tears by it.

Could you tell me about your aims for reaching LGBTQ audiences and how these are distinct to the museum and Leicester?

CH: This is a really interesting one because the LGBTQ+ audiences are one of the more invisible audiences. It's not something that people overtly declare on arrival at a site. And so we were trying to make an active statement, to say “Yes, we know that a number of our audiences already are LGBTQ+ people, but it doesn't necessarily mean they know they are welcome”. And actually, you need to be making that explicit. If you want to develop your audiences, if you want to make sure everybody feels included, you can't just make these assumptions that people will think, “Oh, well, of course, museums are safe spaces”. You have to display and say that they are and you have to do this in a way that really celebrates the communities that you're looking to engage with and especially with Leicester.

Leicester has a very large non-Britain born population, so lots and lots of new people come into the city. You can't assume that they are aware of some of the things we might know – for instance, the sense that in theatre, in the arts generally, and in culture, LGBTQ+ voices have been very prominent over the past 40-50 years. That's not necessarily the case all over the world, and there are probably an awful lot of places that people will come from where they wouldn't know that we would assume everyone would feel fine and safe where we are. In producing the display then, we wanted to make sure that it addressed a broad and diverse understanding of that community. Even though it is focused on a particular story, it's not just confined to a particular section of the community.

One of Trade's aims in being involved in this, too, was accessing new audiences. They wanted to have a presence somewhere where people aren't going to look for LGBTQ+ or indeed sexual health content, but where they could come across them. It was a really nice way of us both trying to do different things.

What was the audience response to the exhibition?

JR: The exhibition was really well received. We had almost 10,000 visitors to it over the course of the two months that it was open. During this time, we also had digital labels in the gallery which visitors could use to give thoughts, feedback, or experiences that they may have had. And we received a much larger number of these than average with some really touching stories from people giving us more insight into people's experiences. Following popular demand after the exhibition as well, the LASS quilt remained up for a further three months.

Informally, we also heard that there was an increase in people getting tested around the exhibition, but it's difficult to fully gauge this as many people now opt to test themselves at home using kits which can be ordered online, which wouldn't appear in any statistics we could obtain. But regardless, both ourselves and Trade were very happy that the exhibition gained such a large audience and so was able to provide a big number of people with relevant sexual health resources.

Late last year, just after World AIDS Day, we found a big red ribbon with some brief information about the exhibition that had been affixed to the railings outside the front of the museum. We're still not fully aware who did it. But we were incredibly touched that the exhibition was successful enough that they wanted to commemorate it in this way.

Has the exhibition had an impact on how LGTBQ audiences engage with the museum and its work since then? Will it have impacts on collecting or other exhibitions or policies?

CH: Yes, I think it has. It's been a really positive experience. In general, there’s been a very conscious move by all the teams here to try and make sure that we are focusing our efforts on engaging with these audiences whenever a new engagement process starts. We’re currently in the middle of building works here and we are going to be rehanging all of the art across the museum. For this, we’re trying to make sure that the voices across the city are being represented and there was a big concerted push to make sure LGBTQ+ voices were part of that, to make sure we weren't just going back to the usual visible audiences.

We're also extremely proud of the fact that staff felt empowered to use their community representation in this project, because sexuality and gender identity is not always something that's welcome in the workplace or something that's necessarily publicly discussed in a British workplace. But it's something that really had a huge impact on this project and made it really, really successful. And it's something that we definitely would be doing again, as a way of helping people who are already in that space feel as safe as they possibly can.

Our community engagement team now goes to Pride; we are going to it with the Cabinet of Curiosities every year, which is having a fantastic impact. We’re also very open and keen to have LGBTQ+ voices represented in our Contemporary Collecting as well, so it’s been a really, really positive experience across all of the departments

JR: There's a project within the arts and museums service in Leicester called Leicester Heritage Panels, where panels are placed in locations throughout the city and contain information about local history and local culture pertinent to that location. And following the exhibition, there was one put up about the HIV/AIDS work within the community; it's on Wellington Street near most of the most prominent LGBT venues in the city.

CH: And what's really, really important about that is it's putting that story on the same level as all of the other Leicester stories that are being landmarked. We’ve got them on Thomas Cook outside the train station, on Roman Leicester, and on Alice Hawkins, who was a suffragette from the city. It’s great that the team that wrote those panels, once they saw the Positive Leicester exhibition, said, “well, we need one there as well”. That's an amazingly positive experience for everyone within that exhibition that its legacy is a permanent fixture within the city, on the same level as all of the most important stories in the city’s history.

Catherine Hallsworth, Volunteer Coordinator, Leicester Museums & Galleries, Leicester City Council.

Jonathan Raynor, Customer Service Assistant, Leicester Museums & Galleries, Leicester City Council.