Queer History Night

Join the Queer History Club for an evening cruising the National Maritime Museum and celebrating LGBTQ+ history.

Hear from members of the Queer History Club to learn about their creative research methods, queering and being-queer-in the museum collections and archives.

Queer History Club is an informal, community-centred research group meeting monthly in Greenwich. 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!

Designed and created by members of the Queer History Club 

Learn more about the Queer History Club

My Summer as a Mermaid-Hunter: Looking for Merfolk in the RMG Collections 

An exploration of the process in the research and development of the ‘The Mermaid’s Tail’, first delivered as a part of the ‘Being Human Festival’ in November 2025. Showcasing items of particular relevance to the investigation around depictions of Mermaids within the collection of Royal Museums Greenwich, and knotting them together with the histories of mermaids explored elsewhere. 

What I got Up to This Year 

This presentation will discuss two projects with Queer History Club Members;  a four-week reading group of the Peglar papers, a handwritten 19th century document kept at the Caird library in Greenwich, and a banner-making workshop.

Mary Read: Lost years and transgender possibilities

According to The General History, Mary Read fought in the Nine Years War, however other historians have been reluctant to subscribe to this. Pulling together research from archives in the Netherlands, this presentation argues that a case can be made to nail down the timeline for Mary Read, centering around details of Read's time in the Netherlands.

Victorian Gender Presentation, its Influence on Character Design in Animated Media and How We See Ourselves

The presentation of gender in animated media has been a contentious issue since the introduction of the medium and its popularisation by studios such as Disney and Don Bluth Entertainment. My research explores how the Victorian views on sex and gender influenced character design in animated media, looking at how this links to the relationship between maritime uniform and drag.

Hidden Queer Icons 

This presentation will discuss two hidden queer figures from two museums, Ken Nelson from Museo Na Bolom in Mexico, and Jonathan Cutbill from the National Maritime Museum. I’ll explore their lives and lasting legacies, as well as how I uncovered their stories

"The Dutch East India Company's 'sodomites'"

Today we often hear that our contemporary ideas around sex, gender and race were 'constructed in the colonial encounter.' But what do we mean by that, and how precisely did that happen? This project examines the Dutch East India Company's 17th Century records of persecutions for sodomy on its ships, at trading posts and in the settler colonies. What motivations lay behind these prosecutions, and what was their effect? It's perhaps surprising to learn how many men were prosecuted for sodomy in the Dutch colonial sphere, long before the Dutch 'gay panics' in the 18C Dutch Republic. In the RMG archives I look for the maritime link between the Dutch and English attitudes to sodomy, and how they returned to Europe aboard East India Company vessels. What can we learn about our ideas around race, gender and sexuality today from the colonial records? 

Investigation through Insertion, Interference, Additions and Anagrams

Developing out of practice-based collage research presented last year, this presentation will show what adding, cutting out, altering and reordering material from the collection has revealed, from historic maps to text documents, also looking at contemporary art from the collection.

How the Queer Choir Rocked the Boat

Why we wanted to queer sea shanties and sing them with queers and how we did it: the rationale, the rub, the rehearsals and the result – singing in front of a huge crowd on and under the Cutty Sark. And the future of the project…