This exhibition shows some of the first LGBTQIA+ stories ever discovered in the Museum’s archives and collections.

Through research into the queer stories in our collections, the Museum is highlighting historically overlooked and dismissed perspectives and celebrating the diversity of Wiltshire’s community. This display in the Long Room features objects and documents with LGBTQIA+ stories related to Siegfried Sassoon, Queen Anne, Cecil Beaton and Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire. In Finding Queer Stories at Wiltshire Museum, these objects are explored and contextualised through a queer lens.

Highlights include…

• A 1931 illustrated edition of Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. The book features a selection of striking illustrations by Barnett Freedman that bring this autobiographical account of the author’s experiences in the trenches to life.

Sassoon was a celebrated First World War poet and had affairs with several men, including artist Stephen Tennant. In one of his private diaries, Sassoon describes a spontaneous trip to Stonehenge with Tennant, who he says was making “the most passionate avowals and simply intoxicating my senses.” Sassoon’s story brings a whole new context to this book and makes it an object with a queer story.

• Part of a 1932 article in The Queen entitled Ashcombe House: Cecil Beaton’s Romantic Wiltshire Home. The article explores the Georgian manor near Salisbury that artist Cecil Beaton leased until 1945. The article features descriptions and photographs of the artist’s lavish home with “treasures […] collected from all over Europe,” “white-painted wicker cages […] containing live white doves” and a bedroom “devised to represent a circus.”

Throughout his life, Beaton had relationships with women and men including Kinmont Hoitsma, who moved from America to England to live with the artist after the two fell in love. Beaton wrote in his diary “I’ve never been in love with women and I don’t think I ever shall in the way that I have been in love with men.” This article gives readers a glimpse of Beaton’s queer home and lifestyle.

• Several silver coins from Queen Anne’s reign, including a 1703 halfcrown, a 1704 fourpence, a 1705 sixpence and a 1709 shilling. These coins feature a portrait of the queer monarch, who was on the throne between 1702 and 1714.

For years, Queen Anne wrote passionate letters to her lady-in-waiting Sarah Churchill, telling her “Tis impossible for you ever to believe how much I love you except you saw my heart.” The Queen’s many romantic letters to Sarah make her a royal with a queer story, giving these silver coins a queer context.