Art

A Day Out In Bath With Added Beryl Cook

~ Cheryl

My friend Lee Harris, formerly of Angry Robot and now starting a line of novellas for Tor, was in Bath on business yesterday. As he had some free time I offered to show him around. Naturally we ended up at a few bookshops, and a beer shop, but I had been told that the Victoria Art Gallery had a big Beryl Cook exhibition on, and I guessed (correctly) that this would appeal to Lee.

I heard about the exhibition from by friend Robert Howes, who has (literally) written the book on LGBT history in Bath. He’d been to see it and noticed something of interest. Cook was catapulted to fame in 1976 when Hunter Davies did a major feature on her in the Sunday Times Magazine (which he then edited). The picture that Davies chose to feature on the cover of the magazine showed a scene in a pub. All fairly normal, most people would have thought. However, the painting was actually of the Lockyer in Plymouth, which at the time was gay-friendly (and may still be for all I know). There were women in the foreground, but that’s because Beryl and her friends enjoyed the company of the gay boys, especially the drag queens.

Anyway, it is a great exhibition, with over 50 Beryl Cook originals. We also ended up having a fun evening out with Emma & Pete Newman, and Joe Abercrombie, amongst others. Emma is due for more surgery any time now. I do hope she’s OK. Sending hugs, love.

Happy Solstice

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Hare Solstice card - by Dru Marland

Here we go with another year’s Solstice card, which is avoiding wasting too many trees, not to mention time and money, on the greetings card business. Best wishes for today, and for any other seasonal festivals that you may have coming up.

This card is a picture called “The Uffington Hare” by local artist, Dru Marland. It is not, as yet, available as a card, but you can buy a print, and several other fine cards, from Dru’s Etsy shop. I am rather hoping that Dru will make a card of it, because I want to buy a few packs for sending to people who still do the paper card thing.

Hares are, of course, rather more symbolic of the spring equinox than of the winter solstice, but it is a lovely picture so you are getting it anyway.

The constellation of Lepus the Hare can be found between Rigel and Sirius, and therefore next to Canis Major and just below Orion.

The other major feature in the picture is the Uffington White Horse which is a genuine Bronze Age monument (as opposed to some chalk cuts which are much more modern). It is in Oxfordshire, but has a Swindon postcode so it isn’t far from here.

Museum of Inuit Art, Toronto

~ Cheryl

I had a little time to myself over last weekend in Toronto, so I took the opportunity to catch up with some culture. For this trip I visited the Museum of Inuit Art, which is in the Queen’s Quay building down by the lake shore. I was very impressed. There are some magnificent sculptures there. Several of them looked very much like they had come straight out of Mythago Wood, which was a strange experience, and I guess shows that Rob got the shamanistic element of the book very right.

One of the favorite subjects for sculptures is Sedna the Sea Goddess, who is a mermaid.

My two favorite artists from the museum are Bart Hanna Kappianaq, who has some beautiful pieces in arctic marble, and Abraham Anghik Ruben, who has a strong Nordic influence to his work.

Visitors were allowed to take photos as long as they did not use flash, so here are some things to whet your appetite.

[shashin type=”album” id=”64″ size=”medium”]

Available Now – Roz’s Resurrections

~ Cheryl

Resurrections - Roz Kaveney


It is a fairly depressing day online: people’s parents dying, cats dying and so on. To cheer myself up I thought I’d post some nice book covers. This is one for a book you can get now, because it was launched on Wednesday. It is Resurrections, the third volume in Roz Kaveney’s Rhapsody of Blood series. I’m reading the book at the moment. Roz is a very, very naughty National Treasure. Then again, us Trans girls are all going to burn in Hell for All Eternity anyway, so we might as well have a bit of fun before we go.

Oh, and Roz, I think the world needs more details on centaur sex…

Historical Fantasy at Foyles

~ Cheryl

La Belle Dame San Merci - Sir Frank Dicksee

After the radio show I managed to find Juliet in time for us to have lunch and see a bit of Bristol before the event. Juliet asked to see an art gallery, so I took her up Park Street to the City Museum and introduced her to the work of the Bristol School, in particular Rolinda Sharples. That gallery is something that Mary Robinette Kowal needs to visit, and it is full of contemporary paintings of people in 18th Century clothing.

The Bristol School stuff is OK, and does have a couple of over-the-top apocalyptic pieces reminiscent of John Martin (and which may pre-date him, I need to check). However, the stand-out piece in the collection is one of my favorite bits of Pre-Raphaelite art, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, by Sir Frank Dicksee. As this post is mainly about historical fantasy, I have chosen that to illustrate it. (Doesn’t look a bit like Nyx, though.)

We were spared further traffic chaos, and both Helen Hollick and Jack Wolf turned up at the store on time. Helen was resplendent in a pirate costume to advertise her current series of books. We had an excellent discussion. It hardly needed me there to moderate it. There was a decent crowd too. You never quite know with these things, but I think Foyles will have been pleased. We were delighted to see a bunch of the local steampunk group turn up in costume.

Juliet has written a blog post about the discussion here, and there’s no point in my re-hashing that. I did record it, but I haven’t listened to the recording yet and even if it is OK I have no idea when I’ll get the time to edit it. The other thing I took away from the event is that I really need to read Lucienne’s book, To The Fair Land, if only to see what she has made of that strange Terra Australis. I wonder if her characters find that large island where all of the inhabitants have two heads? (That’s an Australian joke, for which Tansy will probably kill me.)

I wish I had been able to hang around and talk to people, but I had an hour to get to an event in Bath, so I headed out immediately the panel was over. Thanks again to all for a great evening.

More From Simeon Solomon

~ Cheryl

The Sleepers, and the One that Watcheth - Simeon Solomon
Yesterday I blogged briefly about Simeon Solomon, the gay Jewish Pre-Raphaelite painter whose life was the subject of a talk I attended on Saturday. I promised you a bit more, so here it is.

As I noted, Solomon was one of the best, if not the best, of the Pre-Raphaelite artists. Had he not been convicted of “attempted buggery”, he would have gone on to bigger and better things, despite the enormous handicap in Victorian society of being Jewish. As it was, he had more exhibitions than any of his colleagues before his social ostracism.

Amazingly, Solomon carried on paining afterwards. He spent the rest of his life (32 years of it) living as a vagrant in London, and keeping going by selling fabulous work at knock-down prices to hypocrites who were happy to buy his art but not to welcome him into their homes.

One of Solomon’s favorite themes was the love triangle with two men and a woman, in which one of the men is newly married to the woman, and his boyfriend stands sadly to the side. The painting at the top, titled “The Sleepers, and the One that Watcheth”, is pretty clearly of Sam, Rosie and Frodo, though Solomon can’t have known that at the time. He would have adored slash.

Frank Vigon, who gave the talk, has spent years raising money to restore Solomon’s grave to a state befitting a great artist. That’s now done. Frank writes about Solomon and the project at The Advocate. His latest project is to raise money to fund PhDs in art history to be given to people interested in going out and researching other unjustly forgotten artists.

Below the cut I’m going to paste some more of Solomon’s work so that you can see the astonishing range of styles that he mastered.

Continue reading →

On My Art Want List

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Heliogabalus, High Priest of the Sun - Simeon Solomon
Yesterday my colleagues at Out Stories Bristol hosted a superb talk by Frank Vigon on the subject of the unjustly forgotten Pre-Raphaelite artist, Simeon Solomon. Solomon was Jewish, and therefore at a huge disadvantage to start with in Victorian society. However, he was also a genius, and therefore despite his Jewishness he was welcomed into the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Or at least he was until 1873, when he was convicted of “attempted buggery”, after which Victorian society, and his artist colleagues in particular, dropped him like a stone.

The fact that Solomon was gay could easily have been discerned years before thanks to his penchant for painting pretty boys, lesbian scenes, and love triangles involving two men and a woman. Given his subject matter, I wondered if he had ever painted a portrait of someone like Stella Boulton. I asked Frank, and he said he didn’t know of one, but that didn’t mean it did not exist. When I got home I stared searching online. I had no luck with Stella, but I discovered that Solomon had done a magnificent watercolor of the transsexual Roman emperor, Elagabalus. The painting’s title says it shows Elagabalus as High Priest of the Sun (she was also known as Heliogabalus), but I am sure that most people looking at the picture would assume it shows a woman. The whims of emperors are, of course, notoriously difficult to predict, but I suspect she would have liked it.

At any rate, other people liked it. According to Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones described it as one of Solomon’s finest works. If I have understood the Christies website correctly, the painting last sold to a private collector for £26k. However, there are many online stores offering fine art prints, so I guess I will have to get myself one. Anyone out there got experience of using such companies and would like to recommend one?

I’ll write some more about Simeon Solomon tomorrow.

Black Sci-Fi & Wangechi Mutu at The Watershed

~ Cheryl

Family Tree - Wangechi Mutu

We had another fine evening of Afrofuturism at The Watershed last night. The event was introduced by Ytasha Womack, inevitably, and by a new voice to me, Ingrid LaFleur. Ingrid is an Afrofuturist art critic, and for me the most interesting things she said were about using Afrofuturism to help with the revitalization of Detroit. Was she at DetCon 1? She should have been.

We began with a short film by the Kenyan artist, Wangechi Mutu. Again I had not heard of her before (except doubtless in passing while reading the art section of Ytasha’s book too quickly). Edson had brought in some books of her work, and I was totally blown away. If you are in London, she has an exhibition on at the moment at Victoria Miro. And if you are not some of the pieces in the exhibition are available on the Guardian website. I note that people often seem to use the word “cyborg” in connection with Mutu’s work. Donna Haraway should be proud.

The film by Mutu was The End of Eating Everything. It is around 8 minutes long. Part of it is available on YouTube. The part of the monster is played by the musician, Santigold.

The main film of the night was Black Sci-Fi, a BBC documentary from 1992 which features Samuel Delany, Octavia Butler, Steve Barnes, Mike Sargent and Nichelle Nichols. Chip and Octavia were on fire. I wanted to tweet just about everything they said. Sadly I wasn’t anywhere near fast enough. You can see some clips from the film at this Tor.com post. Unfortunately for you it doesn’t include the best bits in which Chip reads from Dhalgren against a background of deserted and derelict parts of New York. (Of course that does mean that you don’t see how the BBC managed to mis-spell Chip’s name in the titling, but so it goes.)

The Tor.com post says that the film has been lost, but it hasn’t. It is just unobtainable unless you have the sort of access to the BFI archives that The Watershed has. We had a unique opportunity to see an incredibly rare documentary featuring two of science fiction’s greatest writers. And the cinema was almost empty. Well, that’s your fault, Bristol. I saw it, and you didn’t.

Black Superheroes at The Watershed

~ Cheryl

My Saturday evening was spent at the Watershed’s Afrofuturism season. The event in question was a screening of Will Smith’s movie version of I Am Legend, followed by a discussion of black superheroes.

The film was rather better than I expected. Will Smith is so much better on his own than when being the comedy black guy in someone else’s movie.

I wasn’t really there for the film, however. I was there to hear Edson Burton, Adam Murray and Jon Daniel talk about black superheroes. I mean, Black Panther, Storm — what’s not to like?

Adam is one of my colleagues from Ujima, and he knows a lot about the relationship between superhero comics and hip-hop. That’s certainly an area I can be educated in.

Jon is a fabulous graphic designer and, amongst other things, was responsible for the Afro Supa Hero exhibition at the Museum of Childhood in London last year. I was delighted to get to meet him.

Just in case anyone has missed me enthusing about this before, I am firmly of the opinion that Minister Faust’s From the Notebooks of Dr. Brain is the best superhero novel ever written. I am also a big fan of Samit Basu’s Turbulence. Both books use the superhero genre for hilarious and accurate satire of the author’s societies — black North American and Indian respectively.

I also note that Tobias Buckell’s Arctic Rising and Hurricane Fever feature a Bond-like character, and Bond is most definitely a superhero.

One thing I learned at the talk is that John Jennings, who created the fabulous cover for the Mothership anthology, is also one of the two people responsible for the Black Kirby exhibition. That gives me an excuse to post this:

Mothership - John Jennings

Karen Joy Fowler & Cats

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

This past weekend the Cheltenham Festival of Literature had a panel featuring the finalists for the Booker Prize. As you should know, Karen Joy Fowler is one of those writers, and on her way to Cheltenham she stopped off to do a reading for Toppings in Bath. She has, after all, written The Jane Austen Book Club, and had not visited Bath before. A visit was clearly overdue. Obviously I had to go along and show support.

I’m not going to say much more about We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. There’s a review here if you are interested. What I want to talk about (and those of you who have read the book will know why this is relevant) is animal behavior.

The thing that struck me most about Karen’s talk was when she got onto the subject of animal communities. Some animals, for example most cats (lions being the obvious exception) are fairly solitary. Other animals like to gather in groups. Humans are an example of the latter. We like forming tribes, and we are very protective of fellow tribe members. But there is a corollary, in that we are also very hostile to anyone we see as not part of the tribe.

Politicians understand this; right wing populists such as Nigel Farage build their careers on it. The more they can make people think that life is a constant battle of “us” against “them”, the better they do in the polls. For Farage, and Rupert Murdoch, life is a constant effort to shrink and homogenize the group of people that is regarded as “us”.

What Karen said in her talk is that it is the duty of Art to constantly try to grow the group of people that is regarded as “us”, until it encompasses the whole species, and even beyond. She thinks that it is the duty of Art to encourage empathy for our fellow beings. That’s a project I am happy to get behind.

With this sort of thing in mind, once the signing was over I had a chat with Karen about the recent BBC Horizon series on cat behavior, because some of it is also very relevant. In particular, in the second program, they noted how cat personality is very plastic. The period between around 2 and 8 weeks old is crucial for kittens. If, during that time, you give them constant contact with humans, then they will grow up to behave like domestic cats. If, on the other hand, they are kept away from people, they will grow up to behave like ferals. Where they were born, and the lives of their parents, is not relevant.

That’s a classic example of nurture over nature. But of course it isn’t the only aspect of cat personality. Hunting, it appears, is instinctive. Cats will display hunting behavior, regardless of how domesticated they are. They won’t necessarily kill if they are not hungry, but they will hunt. Some are better at it than others. Here’s the scary bit.

The program put cameras on a couple of the best hunters to see how they did it. One of the cats was caught imitating bird calls. Not song, obviously, as cats don’t have the vocal skills, but they can apparently mimic cawing and clucking noises. Cats are smart. I guess it is just as well that they don’t mimic human speech.

Julian Quaye Catalog

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

The AviatorThe artist Guest of Honor at BristolCon this year is Julian Quaye, who describes his work as “steampunk meets Beatrix Potter”, and which I have been known to describe as “steampunk furries”. I first encountered him when he had an exhibition at Harvey’s Cellars, and I’m delighted that the BristolCon folks chose him as a guest.

Hopefully many of you will be coming to BristolCon and will be able to see Julian’s work in person. However, for those of you in far flung places (and I’m thinking in particular of you, Otto & Paula), there is a way to see more of his work, and buy prints.

If you go here you will find a magazine on Issuu that contains many of Julian’s latest works, and a price list for prints (or originals if you can afford such things) at the back. This is all part of a story Julian is working on, featuring the many characters he has created. Hopefully he will tell us more about it at the con.

Today on Ujima – Ann Leckie, Art, Massage & Trauma

~ Cheryl

Well, that was… not up to my usual standard.

I’ve been getting very little sleep of late, and you need to have your wits about you to host a radio show. Even with the Ann Leckie interview being a pre-record, I managed to stuff up somewhat. I couldn’t even do basic arithmetic. Thankfully I have a bunch of great songs on hand for when I do mess up and need something to get me out of a jam. Also Valentin, my engineer, was heroic. Paulette and Frances provided valuable support, and our studio guests were wonderful.

Anyway, first up was my interview with Ann Leckie, recorded at Worldcon the day after she won the Hugo. Sadly it does not contain the conversation we had later about how to film Ancillary Justice and keep that sense of unease that the use of “she” creates in the reader. I do want to see that happen.

After Ann I talked to Suzie Rajah about Art on the Hill, one of the many fine local arts trails that happens each year in Bristol. Thankfully Suzie needed very little prompting from me.

You can listen to the first hour of the show here.

For the second hour Paulette joined me to interview two ladies: Nealey Conquest of Community Conscious, and Judy Ryde of Trauma Foundation South West. Nealey is a holistic massage practitioner, while Judy runs a charity that helps people who have suffered extreme trauma, such as refugees fleeing war zones.

You can listen to hour two here.

The playlist for today’s show was:

  • Just Like a Woman – Bob Dylan
  • Another Girl, Another Planet – The Only Ones
  • Electric Avenue – Eddy Grant
  • Running up That Hill – Kate Bush
  • Vincent – Don McLean
  • If I Can Help Somebody – Mahalia Jackson *
  • I Can make You Feel Good – Shalamar
  • Midas Touch – Midnight Star
  • Everybody Hurts – REM

* This is one of the songs that my mum asked to be played at her funeral. It was also a favorite of Dr. Martin Luther King. Mahalia Jackson is probably the finest gospel singer ever.

A Well Desereved Award

~ Cheryl

In today’s email was the happy news that this year’s Burbank International Film Festival has given the prize for Best Feature Documentary to Better Things: The Choices of Jeffrey Catherine Jones. I blogged about the film here and here. Thanks to the crowdfunding campaign, I have a DVD of the film, and I am not in the least bit surprised that it is winning prizes. Maria Paz Cabardo has made a brilliant film about a great artist, and a brilliant film about a trans person. You can buy the DVD here.

Last Week on Ujima – Amy Morse, Glenda Larke, Bicycles, Art

~ Cheryl

I did manage to get a radio show done last week. Despite everything, I think I did OK. Here’s what went down.

In the first half hour I welcomed local author, Amy Morse. We had a lovely chat about starting to build a writing career, social media, crowdfunding and all that stuff that many of you will be familiar with.

That was followed by the second of the interviews I recorded at Worldcon. This was with Glenda Larke. We talked quite a lot about living in Malaysia and Tunisia, and how this has influenced Glenda’s writing.

You can listen to the first hour here.

The second hour began with a discussion of cycling in Bristol. It featured Celia Davis from the city council, and our front of house manager, Frances, who does actually cycle. You know me: if I have a bike I want it to have a motor.

Finally we had a lovely bunch of people in from the Bristol Biennial arts festival, which was running all over the city last week. I wish I had been able to go to see some of the installations and performances.

You can listen to the second hour here.

Today on Ujima – Australians!

~ Cheryl

It was my great pleasure to welcome four Australian writers into the Women’s Outlook studio today. Cat Sparks, Donna Hanson, Rob Hood and Matt Ferrer are on vacation together after Worldcon and kindly agreed to come and talk to me for an hour. We chatted away about what they thought of the UK, and eventually got onto talking about their books as well. Special thanks are due to Thoraiya Dyer for listening in all the way from Australia. I love broadcasting to the world.

You can listen to the first half of the show here.

In the second hour I was joined by Gary Thompson of 121 Creatives, a local design company. We had a chat about the design industry and the sort of work Gary does. It is hard to give an impression of his work without images, but if you check out his website you can see some of the things we were talking about.

Finally Paulette and Judeline joined me in the studio for a chat about the various things we had been up to in the past couple of weeks. There is a small amount of Worldcon reporting in there, though obviously nothing in depth because the audience is very general.

You can listen to the second half of the show here.

The playlist for today’s show was as follows:

  • 1999 – Prince
  • Fantasy – Earth, Wind & Fire
  • Thriller – Michael Jackson
  • We Were Rock ‘n’ Roll – Janelle Monáe
  • Dark Moon, High Tide – Afro Celt Sound System
  • Winter Fields – Bat For Lashes
  • Ali Baba – Dreadzone
  • Night Boat to Cairo – Madness

VanderMeers in Bristol

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Last night I got to interview two of my favorite people: Ann & Jeff VanderMeer. This was at an event at The Lansdown co-sponsored by BristolCon, Bristol Festival of Literature, Small Stories and Wizard’s Tower. I don’t think I was at my best, thanks to a case of con crud, but people seemed to enjoy the interview. They also had some other great things to see and hear.

This was mainly down to the Small Stories folks. Nat and Sian worked very hard, producing goodies bags for the attendees, and even posters. They also arranged for two additional forms of entertainment. Firstly there was a live reading of part of one of the stories from The Time Traveler’s Almanac. The reader was a professional actor, who did a great job. Hopefully someone can supply me with his name. (Update: Aaron Anthony, I’m told.)

The other piece of entertainment the live creation of a painting by local artist, Luke Sleven. This was inspired by a variety of VanderMeer productions, including The Time Traveler’s Almanac and Last Drink Bird Head. Here is a slightly askew photo of it taken on my cell phone. Hopefully someone has a better picture.

Time traveling bird head

In addition we had some fabulous squid cake, provided by Pat Hawkes-Reed.

Squid cake

Huge thanks to Nat, Sian, Pete Sutton and everyone else involved.

Tonight Jeff will be reading at Mr. B’s Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath. I’d encourage you to go, but it is sold out.

Liverpool Wrap

~ Cheryl ~ 1 Comment

Last night I met up with Alan Moore’s daughter, Leah. She and her husband, John Reppion, have been at many of the same conventions as me over the years, but we hadn’t seen each other much since they acquired a pile of sprogs. John kindly babysat for the evening so that Leah and I could have a girls’ night out on the town. We avoided the town center, which would have been packed with gloriously painted Liver Birds in their regulation 8″ heels and military grade perfume, plus hordes of soccer fans getting tanked in anticipation of another glorious defeat for the English team. Instead Leah took me on a pub crawl around some of the better watering holes of the city.

There’s not much to report on that, though I did grab a quick interview with Leah about Electricomics which I will podcast in due course. I note that while her dad is the figurehead for the project, Leah is the project manager. Also she and John have written a science fiction series, Sway, for the project which will be illustrated by Nicola Scott.

The only other thing I want to mention is that we did, inevitably, talk about LGBT history. Leah reminisced about when her dad was involved in AARGH (Artists Against Rampant Government Homophobia), the anti-Section 28 campaign. On a London march she and her sister, Amber, got to carry the banner, and met a tall and glamorous lady called Roz Kaveney who made a striking impression on the girls. Small world, comics.

This morning I’m planning to leave my suitcase in Left Luggage at Lime Street (yes, they have one) and take a look around the Walker Gallery, in particular the Grayson Perry exhibition. After that it is off home and back to audio editing.

The Un-Straight Conference – Day 2

~ Cheryl

Day 2 in Liverpool was a bit of an anti-climax because the schedule was constructed around April Ashley’s keynote speech. As she was too ill to attend, there was a big gap in the day. The organizers filled it with what I gather is a very rare film about early trans women, including April. I’d love to see that one day, but I chose not to do so this weekend as I wanted to have a look around the rest of the museum, and grab some vox pops for Shout Out and podcasting.

Before that, however, we had some excellent presentations from museum professionals. The first session featured Zorian Clayton from the V&A and Marcus Dickey Horley from the Tate. Both talked about how staff networks within the London museums had worked to put on special events interpreting museum exhibits through a queer gaze. These have been very successful, and I have some hope that similar things can be done in other museums around the world.

Marcus was responsible for the wonderful Transpose event at which a number of trans artists presented their work at Tate Modern. That included CN Lester, Juliet Jacques and Raphael Fox, all of whom I have the honor to have met. He also came out with the best Twitter fodder of the weekend. The Tate now asks visitors whether they identify as LGBT as part of the demographic survey on their feedback forms. He said that 20% of respondents under the age of 20 tick that box. And that, of course, is only the proportion that are prepared to self-identify for a survey. That’s hugely valuable data when making a case to cater for LGBT visitors to a museum or gallery.

The other session featured international visitors: Hunter O’Hanian from the Leslie Lohman Museum in New York, and Michael Fürst from the Schwules Museum in Berlin. This got me questioning the statement yesterday that there are only 2 LGBT museums in the world. Strictly speaking, the Unstraight Museum is more of a virtual installation, and the Leslie Lohman is an art gallery. However, I see I have a comment on Friday’s blog post listing a whole bunch more. We are still well short of the 312 Elvis museums, but I’m delighted to see that these places are out there.

A common feature of both Hunter and Michael’s talks was how an establishment that was originally set up as exclusively about gay men has shifted its focus to cater to the whole QUILTBAG spectrum. The Leslie Lohman was founded in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, so it inevitably had a male focus. For the Schwules it was more a case of lesbian separatists refusing to have anything to do with it at first.

Which reminds me, one of the more delightful aspects of the weekend has been the complete absence of TERFS.

There were two more breakout sessions to attend. The first was from Kati Mustola, a Finnish academic who talked about how an LGBT presence in Finland came about via an interest in social and community issues. The other was a presentation by the amazing artist, Andrew Logan. His glass portrait of April is one my favorite things in the exhibition.

I have a huge number of photos, and quite a bit of audio, to process. That will take time, and this coming week is ferociously busy. Please bear with me. I would, however, like to thank Sarah Blackstock from Birmingham LGBT and Surat Knan from Rainbow Jews for enabling me to bring some diversity to an otherwise fairly white event. There was a strong feeling amongst the attendees that we wanted to do more events like this, and hopefully future conferences will be larger and more diverse in many ways.