Queer History Club is an informal, community-centred research group meeting monthly at the National Maritime Museum.
If you’re interested in joining, come along and find out more. No historical expertise required. Queer passions, special interests and historical crushes very much encouraged.
Whether you have used collections and archives for research before or are new to this area, we are looking for new members to join us as we seek out the existing and perceived queerness in the archives and look at providing alternative perspectives on the Museum's collections.
This may appeal to anyone interested in exploring creative practice in conversation with historical research and queer archival practice. No specialist knowledge or existing practice will be needed to participate. The club acts as a social space to share your passion for queer maritime history, to develop your research skills, share ideas with peers and generally have a good time!
The club is run by the founding members of the Queer History Club (a one-year project exploring LGBTQ+ histories in the collection) as well as Royal Museums Greenwich staff.
We will be advertising dates of upcoming sessions shortly.
To register your interest, please email learning@rmg.co.uk with the subject title 'Queer History Club'.
Queer History Club sea shanty choir
In September 2025 the Queer History Club choir was formed, primarily to sing sea shanties. While many of us are familiar with shanties, we don't all know where they came from, or how and why they were sung. With the assistance of Sonny Brazil, folk musician and member of Goblin Band, we've explored the context in which they became popular and reworked some of the words for our purposes. We re-imagine the already colourful characters in these songs, muse about their lives and rewrite the songs to create bigger, brighter, and freer stories. Besides, shanties are also fun to sing.
The choir is performing at the Cutty Sark Sea Shanty festival on 22nd Nov.
A member of the choir, Billie Duch Giménez, has created a zine which gives an insight into the choirs process, and presents some of our reworked songs, complete with commentary. The introductory pieces to sea shanties and to the rewriting process were written by Steph Morris and Billie Duch Giménez respectively, while the song lyrics, and the commentaries, were written collaboratively by the choir.
