Literature & Spoken Word Community | Southbank Centre

Posted by Rosie Goldsmith on behalf of Rupert Smith of HOHC.
Look out for more HOHC events this weekend at SBC Literature Festival!

Paul Burston and I have been programming events at Southbank Centre, as The House of Homosexual Culture, for just over a year now. When we were first invited to put together a series of events for the 2008 London Literature Festival, we were speechless with amazement. Amazed because, despite having written something in the region of 20 books between us, we had never been invited to speak or read at a single mainstream literary festival. The inevitable conclusion was that this was because we were labelled as ‘gay writers’. Thus, when the Southbank invitation came, we felt that something really significant had changed in the literary establishment and the way it deals with ‘minority’ work.
The House of Homosexual Culture has been open for business for about five years now. When it began, it was little more than a group of friends who, frustrated at the lack of engagement with queer culture and history on the commercial gay scene, started meeting in each other’s houses to discuss interesting subjects. This quickly turned into venue-based events, and the thing snowballed from there. Within a few months, we had a residency at the Drill Hall in central London, where we started getting regular audiences of up to 200. We did a season at the Vauxhall club Duckie, playing to packed houses. Our Autumn and Christmas Fayres at St John’s Church in Waterloo attracted crowds of up to 1000 to buy jam and cakes and learn how to knit. We had tapped into something big, and we didn’t really know what to do with it.
Paul and I have known each other for a long time, first as journalists, then as fellow authors. We’ve been invited to read at the same (gay) festivals, and we’ve shared many a typical writers’ conversation about the lack of opportunities to promote our work. Paul took the bull by the horns in 2007 when he started Polari, a monthly lesbian and gay club night where writers and readers come together through words, music and lashings of alcohol. In February 2007, Polari and HoHC joined forces for a big, packed event at a club in Soho celebrating queer books – and then, the next day, we were wondering if anyone out there in the literary world was taking a blind bit of notice of what we were doing.
And then came the call from Southbank, who invited us not only to produce three events exploring lesbian and gay literature at the 2008 festival, but also to keep producing all year round. Since those first three shows in July 2008, we’ve done eight events covering everything from transsexualism to strippers, punk rock to LGBT immigration. Now we’re back at our second festival with four events that combine reading and performance in a way, I hope, we’ve made our trademark. Ever since our first Southbank event, a celebration of literary erotica that featured male and female strippers, and quickly became notorious as the show that ‘put cock in the Festival Hall’, we’ve tried to expand the notion of what a literature event can and should be by mixing readers and performers from a wide variety of backgrounds and disciplines.
We’re able to do this because Southbank has offered us the support, both technically and artistically, to do pretty much as we please. Paul and I are both authors, so our core business is writing, promoting and selling books – but we’re also students of gay culture and history, and want to celebrate every aspect of it. We like to get singers, comedians, dancers and, of course, strippers on stage whenever possible. The programmers and technical staff at Southbank have never batted an eyelid – or, if they have, we’ve never seen it.
Most importantly, working at Southbank gives The House of Homosexual Culture and the subjects we celebrate a status that they’ve all too often lacked in mainstream culture. To be here in the programme alongside all other types of literature, music, performance and visual art is to know that we’re taken seriously and judged on our own merits. For too long, we’ve had our noses pressed against the window of the arts establishment, all too aware that they wouldn’t let us in because they didn’t know what to do with us. Now, at Southbank, we’ve been let in – and they’re letting us show that lesbian and gay literature, culture and history is every bit as exciting and important as anything else you care to name. Having the Southbank on board has made us up our game – we’re constantly striving to show that we deserve our place in the UK’s most prestigious arts centre. And we like to think, when we look around the lobby and see heavily tattoo-ed queer punks, or transgender people, or gay muscle boys more at home on the dance floor, mixing with the audiences for orchestral concerts, or hip hop gigs, or heavyweight Granta-style literary debates, that we’ve added something to the cultural mix that might not have been there before. It’s a friendship that we hope will prosper for years to come.

Filed under: London Literature Festival 2009 | Tagged: House of Homosexual Culture, Paul Burston, Rupert Smith | 1 Comment »