by Jamie (he/they), JCR Equalities Rep, Winkworth House, West Village
This year’s LGBT History Month theme was ‘politics in art’. I wanted to write this short piece to focus on my own queer experience in Bristol, and how queer artistry has shaped that.
I came to Bristol knowing I wanted to get more involved in the queer scene here. I knew there was a lot to explore, and I started that exploration from the comforts of my new room. At my accommodation, we have a fairly big corkboard, which I spent a couple weeks intricately filling with iconic queer artistry, whether that be a painting of St Sebastian, a photo from a Gay Liberation Front march, or the more sombre ‘Perfect Lovers’ (1991) by Felix Gonzalez-Torres: two clocks that started in synchronization, but slowly drift apart due to batteries running out, representative of two lovers falling out of sync as one passes from AIDS.