A Gay Outing at Charleston

One of my favourite quotes about the infamous Bloomsbury set, (apart from the story about Lytton Strachey pointing at a stain on Vanessa’s white dress and uttering, ‘semen?’)  is the pithy phrase, ‘they lived in squares and loved in triangles’ . Of course the first part is not strictly relevant to the period of their occupation of rural residence Charleston House. The latter is though - borne out by the complex networks of relationships that went on there: Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and David Garnet for one, Angelica Bell, David Garnet and Duncan Grant for another, and not least Ralph Partridge, Lytton Strachey, and Dora Carrington. To coincide with Brighton’s Gay Pride, Charleston are putting on a series of events aptly named ‘a gay outing’. The evening begins with art historian Simon Watney who will be giving a talk on these triangular relationships, and examining the significance of recently reacquired painting Iceland Poppies by Vanessa Bell as a symbol of them. The second half of the evening will be a talk and slideshow delivered by producer and screenwriter Derek Granger on the subject of filming EM Forster. Forster was himself an important member of the Bloomsbury group and frequent visitor to the farmhouse, who battled to repress public recognition of his own homosexuality in his lifetime (before the posthumous publication of the explicitly gay love story Maurice). On the day there will also be the opportunity to have a tour of the house and a picnic in the grounds. With sandwiches cut into triangles obviously. ER