Exploring LGBTQIA+ Heritage in Scotland

In the fourth of our pieces on queer heritage, Jennifer Novotny and Nicky Imrie reflect on community heritage initiatives in Scotland. 

Queering Edinburgh. © Scottish Civic Trust, 2019.

How and which stories are told in the built environment in the UK have been thrown into the spotlight in recent weeks by the Black Lives Matter movement. Buildings, monuments and streetscapes are now subject to more scrutiny than ever before as members of the public and professionals grapple with meaning, significance and value. 

Making stories and histories visible by identifying and understanding significance in the built environment is at the heart of community heritage. In 2019, two programmes supporting community groups across Scotland, the Diverse Heritage project at the Scottish Civic Trust, led by Jennifer, and Scotland’s Urban Past (SUP) at Historic Environment Scotland, led by team members Nicky and Mark Scott, teamed up to co-design a project with LGBTQIA+ groups to do just that. The project sought to identify and record the country’s queer heritage and explore how individuals think about complex and competing identities.

Our work was delivered in partnership with nine third-sector and volunteer-led organisations and groups in Edinburgh and Ayrshire, who were crucial to its development. We were inspired by similar projects of the last 15 years endeavouring to shine a spotlight on LGBTQIA+ stories and identities, including: the Rainbow City research and exhibition project in Edinburgh; OurStory Scotland’s ‘OurSpace’ exhibition in Glasgow; academic research by Jeff Meek at the University of Glasgow; OurStory Scotland’s walking tour of Glasgow and Glasgow Women’s Library Stride with Pride heritage trail. From outwith Scotland we found inspiration in Historic England’s crowdsourced Pride of Place map accompanying their research on LGBTQIA+ places; the National Trust’ Prejudice and Pride revealing queer stories in traditional heritage properties; and the Canada-based Queering the Map website recording personal, stories and memories of queer people linked to place.

We were encouraged by the form of community-mapping embraced by many of these projects – that their practice allows for the capture of memories and emotional responses, and attaching significance and value to places and spaces where traditional mapping processes do not.

The foundations of our community-mapping project were shaped collaboratively with members of Edinburgh’s LGBT Health and Wellbeing QTIPOC (Queer Transgender Intersex People of Colour) group. When asked if there were historic places or heritage spaces in the city where they felt that they belonged, one person said, ‘I don’t know where to place myself’ –she felt pulled between her identity as a queer woman and as a woman of colour. 

Map-making in action. © Scottish Civic Trust, 2019

This fundamental experience became a guiding principle as we built our Edinburgh community mapping event. This workshop was to be a space and activity where participants could connect actively to the past and the present, embrace different parts of their identities, and locate places where they could be their whole selves.

‘Queering the Map of our City’ was specifically marketed to would-be participants with intersectional identities via the QTIPOC group. The mapping exercise was designed to incorporate multiple identities, using different flags and to encourage free-form annotation and drawing. The workshops sought to bring together the LGBTQIA+ community to strengthen ties within it and allow reflection, thus ‘build[ing] capacity for community mobilization, enhancing knowledge, and raising political consciousness’ (Parker, 2006: 478). The community map was transparent in its goals to record the diverse spaces, places, stories and experiences of LGBTQIA+ voices in Edinburgh, including those of minority-ethnic and disabled people.

The map sought to record queer spaces – those occupied by queer people – as well as intentionally queering parts of Edinburgh: subverting the status quo by populating it with queer people, events and memories. Place was particularly important to some of the participants as a way of expressing often invisible sexual orientation, for example, recording (generally temporary) spaces that affirmed bisexual identity. 

In following weeks, the maps created by the 35 workshop participants were translated into colourful, attractive and – importantly – useable, layered digital and printed maps by artist Holly Summerson.

A thought-provoking discussion concluded the Queering the Map workshop in Edinburgh where conversation turned to challenges in discovering past LGBTQIA+ places and experiences as well as to future aspirations and accessible places and spaces. There was a desire to ‘recreat[e] what community can be for us’ and ‘where you can just be LGBT’.

Queering the Map of Edinburgh final map

Creating welcoming and safe places and spaces where young LGBTQIA+ people can be themselves and feel accepted is precisely what pupils in many high schools in Scotland are actively engaged in doing. In East Ayrshire, working with the local-authority education department’s wellbeing team, two schools and a local film-maker, pupils were interviewed on camera about the places that mattered to them. The final film shows confident and articulate young people expressing their experiences of setting up transformational LGBTQIA+ clubs in their schools. 

A second community-mapping event was held in Ayr. As in Edinburgh, it began with OurStory Scotland sharing extracts from memories and experiences to encourage participation. The event was less formally structured than in Edinburgh: it involved simultaneous activities all focused on the process of mapping, recording and sharing local LGBTQIA+ stories and places and also afforded participants the opportunity of making new connections. The importance of the social aspect of such events, ‘surrounded by queer people’, and the act of telling and respecting LGBTQIA+ stories and histories were highlighted in the feedback gathered at the end of the event.

Our collaborative project work during LGBT History Month 2019 has produced a legacy of lasting partnerships and a continuing strand of work for the Diverse Heritage project, with community events in Glasgow and Dundee and as a theme for the annual Doors Opens Days festival. The Edinburgh map, displayed in A0 format, proved a popular object in SUP’s concluding exhibition in summer 2019. The show toured to Edinburgh, Inverness and Glasgow and included an accompanying storytelling workshop for Non-binary people.

The project’s activities and outcomes emphasised the importance of making LGBTQIA+ stories and histories visible, understanding the significance and value attached to certain places and of making accessible what came before, perhaps, as one Edinburgh participant, an architect, suggested, in a resource ‘almost like a listed-building entry for LGBT culture’.

Sharing stories in Ayr. © Scottish Civic Trust, 2019

At the same time, however, there is very much more work to do to ensure that all LGBTQIA+ histories, places, stories and experiences are made visible and voices amplified, not limited to community elders, disabled people, working-class people and people of colour. Feedback from the Edinburgh event drew attention to the fact that, despite trying to attract a weekly successes audience, it was still predominantly white; it therefore was ‘only telling one history’ and that ‘a map without them [people of colour] replicates whiteness and power’.

If, as historians, archaeologists and community-engagement practitioners, we are to do justice to working with community groups who are currently underrepresented or invisible in Scotland’s built and cultural heritage and whose interests we claim to serve, we need to work harder to make our activities inclusive. We need to continue to develop partnerships to co-create engagement opportunities that are relevant and meaningful. We must challenge ourselves and our sector to creatively rethink what we do. It is not good enough to simply offer a single, themed activity for an awareness month, make an event free, or rely on traditional outreach offerings. We have to look deeper at the structures of our cultural heritage institutions. We need to work together to rewrite our practices and envision new ways of connecting people with the past. We need to collaborate with an ever-more diverse range of our neighbours, colleagues and friends, because when we all participate in Scotland's rich cultural heritage, we all benefit.

Dr Jennifer Novotny is an historian and archaeologist. Her heritage projects include the University of Glasgow’s First World War centenary commemorations; the Erskine Hospital Centenary Community Project; and ‘Justice Not Charity Was Their Cry’ in partnership with Disability History Scotland. She cares deeply about public history and heritage and making the past accessible to all.

Dr Nicky Imrie is a historian, community-engagement practitioner and translator. Her research and heritage work include Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900; ‘Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making and Meaning’; collections engagement officer at University of Glasgow Archives and Special Collections; and training officer at Scotland’s Urban Past. She is passionate about the built environment and supporting communities to share their histories and stories, and is currently covering Jennifer’s maternity leave from the Diverse Heritage project officer role at the Scottish Civic Trust.

Further reading and watching

Chelsea Blackmore, ‘How to Queer the Past Without Sex: Queer Theory, Feminisms and the Archaeology of Identity’, Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress, 7.1, 2011, pp. 75–96.

Sarah De Nardi, ‘Senses of Place, Senses of the Past: Making Experiential Maps as Part of Community Heritage Fieldwork’, Journal of Community Archaeology and Heritage, 1.1, 2004, pp. 5–22.

Brenda Parker, ‘Constructing Community Through Maps? Power and Praxis in Community Mapping’, The Professional Geographer, 58:4, 2006, pp. 470–84.

Scotland’s Urban Past, Past Forward: Stories of Urban Scotland, Historic Environment Scotland, 2019.

Video: How To: Community Mapping with Scotland's Urban Past.