Yes, it is that time of year again. Every October, on or around the time of the birthday of John Addington Symonds, OutStories Bristol has an Annual General Meeting. We hold this in conjunction with the lovely people from the Institute of Greece, Rome, and the Classical Tradition (IGRCT) at the University of Bristol. Every year I do the boring bit of getting through the AGM business as fast as I can, and then we settle back to enjoy a fascinating lecture about queer history.

This year the lecture will be given by my friend, Dr Alan Greaves of the University of Liverpool. He’s going to talk about statue descration, which has been much in the news this year. Of course people have been desecrating statues for a very long time. In Egypt, both Hatshepsut and Ahkenaten, two pharaohs who defied social conventions, had their statues defaced. In Rome Damnatio Memoriae was such a regular fact of life that statues were sometimes made with detachable heads. But politics is not the only reason why statues have been defaced. If you want to know why this is an LGBT history talk, you’ll need to sign up and listen to Alan.

The booking form is here.