“Seeing two men being intimate was something I never saw growing up in small town UK. I was 18 before I saw two men kissing, that was on TV and was just the briefest of pecks” writes a participant in a Queer interpretation project at the Whitworth.

“I was a teenager in the 1980s and early 1990s, pre-internet. Like most gay kids in those days, I grew up feeling abnormal and that there was something wrong with me that I didn’t really understand. Being gay wasn’t something people spoke about then, unless in an abusive tone, and there was a lot of that. Even talking about it in schools then was illegal.

“We had a lot of books at home including some large illustrated volumes on the history of art, which are mine now. I only saw images like this in those books, I thought at the time that it was ok for men to love men in centuries past, just not in the 20th century. This early 16th century etching of Jupiter embracing Cupid by Marcantonio Raimondi, reminds me of those self-affirming images I loved to see in those books.” 

Queering the Whitworth was a project that looked again at the collections of the art gallery, challenging the idea that curators are the only ones who get to give meaning to artwork. Instead, this project invited responses from the Queer community, selecting artworks and describing them in their own ways, thereby queering the museum and gallery space.

Jupiter embracing Cupid – From the Chigi Palace
Marcantonio Raimondi (1480 (c)-1534 (c))
1517-1520 (c), Line Engraving. Gifted by George Thomas Clough, 1921.