Hey, welcome to Everything Else, the cultural podcast from The Financial Times.

My name's John.

And my name is Griselda.

And in this week's episode, we're going to be talking about why this is the year of queer art.

It's been 50 years this summer since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK.

And this anniversary is being celebrated in lots of different events

from film festivals to exhibitions. We'll also hear from Patricia Lockwood. She has been nicknamed

the poet for the Twitter generation, and she has just released a memoir called Priest Daddy

about growing up in the Midwest of America with a crazy sounding Catholic priest for a father.

So why are we talking about this now?

Next month marks 50 years since the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, which decriminalise private sexual acts between two consenting men above the age of 21.

So it's a kind of partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, basically.

And so this is kind of a landmark year, I guess,

because people are looking back at those 50 years,

at how things have changed, what hasn't changed as well.

Yeah, everyone's jumping on board.

There's this multi-part BBC documentary about queer Britain. There's the huge queer British art show at Tate Britain, which is great. Lots of other exhibitions. The British Museum has a display, the British Library. There's a British library. There's one opening at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, a big show. Okay, let's stop there. So, I mean, I could go on, there's a long list. So what did you think about the Tate Show? I was kind of reading at less as an art shows and more of a kind of social history. It's being built as the first major exhibition dedicated to British queer art. And to encounter kind of gender fluidity long before it became a term or even, you know, a 21st

century thing was quite interesting. Yeah, gender fluid entered the OED, the Oxford English

Dictionary last year, in fact. So this is a very contemporary word. But yeah, as you said, I think all

of these, the kind of cross-dressing and the codes and things that are displayed in the exhibition show that this is not new. Yeah, and a lot of the artworks on show are kind of nuanced and complex and show that people were thinking about this long, long, long, long before we had these times. Before they were even allowed to. Yeah, exactly. So there's a kind of suppression, which is really interesting going. Yeah, let alone language. There's also, of course, the massive deal in the theatre world at the moment is Angels in America,

Tony Kushner's play from 1993, which is being revived at the National Theatre,

with Andrew Garfield in the lead role.

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