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A Gay Outing at Charleston:
Chapter Two
To tie in with the Gay Pride weekend in Brighton Charleston
have arranged an evening of talks and discussions about Bloomsbury’s
gay culture. Many of the characters that moved around the
Charleston scene, of course, were gay or bisexual. Duncan
Grant was openly gay and had several affairs with men. Ditto
Lytton Strachey. Virginia Woolf was married to Leonard Woolf
but had a long relationship with the poet Vita Sackville West:
her novel Orlando is, in effect, a lesbian love story in disguise.
For men homosexuality was still illegal in that period (witness
the hounding of Oscar Wilde) but the Bloomsbury group escaped
persecution.
The use of the word ‘outing’ in the title of the
talk is cleverly intentional. The idea is to bring Bloomsbury’s
sexuality into the open. The evening will be opened by Terry
Henson, who will give a background to the characters involved
in the Bloomsbury set and their sexuality. Simon Watney will
then introduce the two speakers for the evening, Neil Bartlett
and Maureen Duffy. Bloomsbury expert Bartlett is a director,
performer, artist and writer who was in charge of the Lyric
Theatre for ten years until 2004. Duffy, said to be the first
lesbian to publicly come out, is an acclaimed poet and novelist,
the author of an openly lesbian novel, The Microcosm, as early
as 1966. This is the second year such an event has been held
at Charleston: the audience are welcome to contribute what
promises to be a lively debate. A free tour of the house is
also offered at 6.30pm.
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