Admiral Nelson included in National Maritime Museum’s ‘Queer History Night’
by Charlotte Gill, Telegraph:
Cross-dressing Arctic explorers, 19th-century trans sailors and ‘Penguin Pride’ feature in LBGTQ+ History Month at the museum.
Nelson’s final words of “Kiss me, Hardy” might have given rise to generations of schoolboy sniggers, but his love triangle involving Lady Hamilton and her husband has perhaps made him into an unlikely gay icon.
That has not, however, stopped the National Maritime Museum including him in a “Queer History Night”, for which it has been accused of “bad history”.
As part of the plans to mark LBGTQ+ History Month, Nelson’s legacy will be examined “through a queer lens” in a presentation titled #NELSONFEST.
The talk organised by The Queer History Club will consider the “men who loved him”, according to promotional material which has been seen by The Telegraph but has since been removed from the museum’s website.
The club is run by an “LGBTQ+ community-led research group”, whose members say they are “crushing on the ghosts of the Nelson-Hamilton thruple”, which references the love triangle of Nelson, Sir William Hamilton and his wife Lady Emma Hamilton.
The latter is the subject of another talk at Queer History Night.
Curators at the museum also describe “cross-dressing Arctic explorers” and “people assigned female who sailed as men in the nineteenth century” and their “lived experience of masculinity to reassess them as an important part of trans history.”
It is unclear which historical figures they are referring to, though they cite James Clark Ross and Francis Crozier in information about “the allure of polar explorers”.
Lord Roberts, a historian whose book Leadership in War documents Nelson’s life, said: “This smacks of sheer desperation by the National Maritime Museum.
Read here (£)
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
