: LGBTQ+

To celebrate Pride Month this year, some of our amazing ACPs will be hosting Pride themed workshops across some of our museums this June. As part of that celebration, we asked them to reflect on the themes and inspiration behind their workshop and what Pride means to them. 

Symbolism plays a large role in queer history; a big part of this symbolism has been through the use of flowers. Whether it be a derogatory or reclaimed term or a way of signaling to other members of the community, flowers are intertwined with our history.

Violets have historically been associated with lesbianism and femininity; green carnations have been used as a way for gay men to flag each other, ‘pansy’ has been used as an insult for effeminate men, and lavender, both the colour and flower, has been used for decades as an icon of queer resistance and liberation.

Throughout the museum’s archives there are examples of this floral symbolism in protest badges and artworks, which embody the link between our history and flowers.

Violets

In the 6th century, Sappho, a poet from the island Lesbos, described her female lover as wearing a ’violet tiara’. Sappho, well-renowned for her poems, sapphic eroticism and love (indeed, she is where the word sapphic originates), influenced the language and iconography associated with lesbianism and female sexuality extraordinarily. Her use of florals in her poetry no doubt shaped queer symbolism and kinship with flowers across the following centuries.

In early 20th-century Paris, violets were a common adornment for those a part of ‘Paris Lesbos’, homosexual women who built a community with one another represented by the violets they carried, gifted each other, and were buried with.

The symbol was reborn in America when a French play being performed on Broadway, The Captive, used violets to symbolise sapphic love. In the play, a woman gifts her romantic interest a bouquet of violets; this led to outrage and scandal across New York, the play being shut down, the sale of violets plummeting and a state law dealing with ‘obscenity’ being introduced. Despite the pushback, Parisian supporters of the play wore violets on their lapels and belts.

The colour violet has also had significant presence in LGBTQ+ history, with it being present on the first pride flag– created in 1978 by artist Gilbert Baker in California, USA- and it still being present on the traditional 6-stripe rainbow pride flag and progress pride flags and many other iterations. Violet typically symbolises the spirit of the LGBTQ+ community, a fitting meaning for a symbol that has lasted and spread for over a millennium.

Pansies

In the early 20th century, there were many floral terms used to describe an effeminate (and therefore ‘gay’) man. ‘Daisy’, ‘buttercup’ but, perhaps most notably, ‘pansy’. The term ‘pansy craze’ was used to describe the underground queer nightlife and drag scene in places like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, with similar scenes being seen across European cities like London, Berlin and Paris before the rise of authoritarian politics and Nazism. The onset of the depression, the beginnings of World War II and the end of American prohibition saw an end to the short period of visibility for the LBGT community, but the icon that is the pansy has prevailed. Still occasionally used as an insult by the some, ‘pansy’ has taken on a life of its own being used as a term of endearment.

Lavender

The colour lavender has been distinctly used to represent the LGBTQ+ community in many different eras and places, especially in the 20th century, but the flower was also used as a lesser-known symbol for homosexual love. Lesbians gifted lavender as a covert way of expressing their romantic interest in one another, and the flower became increasingly entwined with queer identity throughout the mid-1900s.

The ‘lavender scare’ was a time that parallelled the ‘red scare’ in 1940s and 50s America when those perceived to be a part of the community were fired from their jobs, often when working for the American government, due to their supposed ‘communist sympathies’ because of their sexuality.

The colour lavender was used to symbolise queer identity once again a month after the pivotal Stonewall Riots, in July 1969, as lavender sashes and armbands were handed out by the Gay Liberation Front in a ‘gay power’ march across New York City.

The Gay Liberation Front was the first recorded gay organisation to use ‘gay’ in its name, and its existence and work marked a turning point for the LGBTQ+ community across the globe. One of their first badges used a purple flower with the male/female symbols detailing its petals, whilst resting on a raised fist, a historic symbol of protest. The badge, which can currently be seen at St Fagans’ Wales is: Proud gallery.

A radical feminist group, ‘the Lavender Menace’, was an informal group that protested the exclusion of lesbians and sapphic women in feminist movements in the early 1970s. The term was first used by feminist writer and activist Betty Friedan, who described lesbians as a ‘lavender menace’ that would undermine the entire women’s liberation movement. The name was adopted by the group as a way of reclaiming the negative language used about them, and they are widely associated as being integral to the founding of lesbian feminism.

Carnations

Oscar Wilde, the Victorian author, famously popularised the green carnation in the late 19th century. The flower was dyed by watering it with water laced with arsenic. He pinned one to his left lapel, a style that keeps cropping up as we analyse the use of these flowers as a way to subtly signal to others that he was a rebellious individual, a man who loved other men, in a society that condemned and criminalised male homosexuality– Victorian London.

Eventually, after the publication of a book written anonymously, ‘The Green Carnation’, Wilde was arrested and jailed for gross indecency. Wilde outright denied writing the book, but his work popularising the carnation years prior was enough for authorities to pin the work on him.

Despite this, the carnation prevailed, and it is still a recognised symbol today, albeit a less popular one.

Roses

The rose is a well-known symbol of love, and of course this extends to queer love. In 1960s Japan the rose became an iconic symbol for gay men, even influencing the language they use to describe gay men today. Bara, meaning rose, is a commonly used term for the community.

Roses are also special to the transgender community, especially on Trans Day of Visibility (March 31st), when the phrase ‘give us our roses while we are still here’ is echoed. It means that we should celebrate the lives of trans people, of trans WOC, rather than simply mourning them when they are killed. It is about decentring grief in the trans community and celebrating life whilst amplifying transgender voices. The rose is an important symbol of this, showing appreciation and joy for transgender people.

In this painting, a self-portrait by gay artist Cedric Morris while he lived with his partner in Cornwall, Morris is depicted with a rose pinned to his lapel. Whether this is symbolic of his love or homosexuality is unclear, but it is an obvious example of the tie between the LGBTQ+ community and flowers throughout the ages. Morris was relatively open about his relationship with fellow artist Arthur Lett-Haines, despite homosexuality being illegal at the time.

Flowers are still an integral part of our community and a beautiful way to honour our history. A piece from the museum's archives I find particularly valuable is the flowers worn during the marriage of two gay men, Federico Podeschi and Darren Warren, on the day same-sex marriage was legalised in England and Wales. These flowers symbolise so much that the queer community has fought for: the right to be legally recognised. But they remind us that there is so much further to go, especially in these uncertain times and how recently it was that we gained some basic rights.

My workshop, run both this year and last for Pride, encourages you to connect with our history through the medium of printmaking. Last year we created a banner to be marched at Pride Cymru, and now I will invite participants to create a piece of art to take home or gift to another.

Elizabeth Bartlett @liz_did_stuff on Instagram

Amgueddfa Cymru Producers [ACPs] are a group of young people aged 16 – 25 living in or from Wales who collaborate with the Museum through participatory and paid opportunities.

This is a space to deepen knowledge and to ensure that cultural and heritage spaces are more representational of the young people and their many cultures that make up Wales today. We are here to make heritage relevant!

We explore art, heritage and identity, environmentalism, natural science, social history and archaeology through our collections and by co-producing events, workshops, exhibitions, digital media, publications, development groups and more! Our ACPs work closely with departments across the Museum to help us deepen representation within our collections and programming, that reflects all communities in Wales. This includes expanding our LGBTQ+ collection, decolonising our collections and gathering working-class history through oral histories. ACPs can also bring their own ideas or topics they wish to explore through our collections!

You can sign up to our mailing list here to keep up to date with news and new opportunities.

If you have any queries you can email us on bloedd.ac@museumwales.ac.uk. Follow us on Instagram to keep updated on all things Bloedd! 

To celebrate Pride Month this year, some of our amazing ACPs will be hosting Pride themed workshops across some of our museums this June. As part of that celebration, we asked them to reflect on the themes and inspiration behind their workshop and what Pride means to them. 

The Workshop: Breaking, Repairing, Becoming 

Pride Month is more than celebration — it’s also about restoration. About finding stillness. About reclaiming space — not only in the world around us but within ourselves. My workshop Broken Yet Beautiful lives in that in-between space. It’s where creative expression meets personal healing, where fragments are not failures, but materials for something new. 

This project began during my final year, born out of a personal journey exploring identity, repair, and resilience. It wasn’t just a project — it became a way of understanding the world and our place within it. Over time, it has grown into something deeply collective: a workshop where people are invited to break a ceramic object and rebuild it using fast-drying clay. There’s a strange beauty in that process — a catharsis, a stillness, a soft power. 

At the end of my internship, I wrote a detailed blog for Cynfas reflecting on how Broken Yet Beautiful grew out of my final project and personal journey. 

So, when I brought Broken Yet Beautiful to the National Waterfront Museum this Pride Month, I wasn’t introducing something new. I was holding space for others to experience what I had: the quiet liberation of breaking and rebuilding, of letting go, and of forming something new with care.

During the workshop, participants chose objects, gently broke them, and spent time thoughtfully reassembling each piece — no longer what it was, but still full of meaning. The soundscape of breaking ceramics echoed in the background, not as destruction, but as release.

Fragments of History: Artworks That Spoke to Me 

While reflecting on this work, I spent time looking through the LGBTQ+ collection at Amgueddfa Cymru. A few pieces in particular resonated with me - Cup, Theatre Container and Extended Teapot by Suttie,Angus (1946-1993). When I came across Ladies of Llangollen – Dillwyn and Cow Creamers by Paul Scott, I stopped. Just for a moment — I froze. It felt like I’d stumbled into a story that didn’t need to shout to be heard. 

This work — a wooden tray filled with ceramic fragments — reads like a memory map. A cabinet of echoes. Each shard of blue-and-white domestic ware holds something: a glimpse into time, place, love, rupture. It’s not just ceramic — it’s a landscape of emotion. A kind of quiet archive. And as both an artist and a curator working with themes of identity and repair, I felt an immediate kinship with what Scott was doing. 

We do not mend to hide the scar, but 

trace its curve and let it sing. The 

past may splinter — still, we hold 

each shard like it remembers spring. 

The reference to the Ladies of Llangollen — Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby — adds a tender depth. Two women who defied 18th-century expectations and lived together in a self-declared romantic friendship, they turned their home into a sanctuary for intellectuals, artists, and thinkers. Their story is often romanticised — but here, in Scott’s work, it is made material. Grounded. The fragments of everyday domestic life — plates, cups, cow creamers — become vessels of queer memory, intimacy, and resistance. 

What moved me most was the way the piece doesn’t try to “fix” anything. The broken pieces aren’t disguised or forced back into their original form. They’re framed. Held. Given new meaning. There’s a quiet dignity in that. A soft resilience that speaks more truthfully than restoration ever could. 

To me, Ladies of Llangollen mirrors what we try to do in Broken Yet Beautiful: not to erase cracks, but to honour them. Not to return something to what it was, but to allow it to become something else — something that tells the truth of what it’s been through. 

It’s in this act of holding — not hiding — that the work finds its power. 

Belonging in the Making 

Through my work with Amgueddfa Cymru, I’ve connected with Bloedd — a youth-led programme uplifting LGBTQ+ voices across Wales. If you're a young person, Bloedd is a space for you. To create, to speak, to belong. 

This Pride Month, I’m celebrating more than identity — I’m honouring the quiet strength it takes to rebuild, and the power of coming together. 

Workshops like this offer more than creativity. They offer space — to reflect, to exist, and to heal. Even in fragments, we are still whole. 

Amgueddfa Cymru Producers [ACPs] are a group of young people aged 16 – 25 living in or from Wales who collaborate with the Museum through participatory and paid opportunities.

This is a space to deepen knowledge and to ensure that cultural and heritage spaces are more representational of the young people and their many cultures that make up Wales today. We are here to make heritage relevant!

We explore art, heritage and identity, environmentalism, natural science, social history and archaeology through our collections and by co-producing events, workshops, exhibitions, digital media, publications, development groups and more! Our ACPs work closely with departments across the Museum to help us deepen representation within our collections and programming, that reflects all communities in Wales. This includes expanding our LGBTQ+ collection, decolonising our collections and gathering working-class history through oral histories. ACPs can also bring their own ideas or topics they wish to explore through our collections!

You can sign up to our mailing list here to keep up to date with news and new opportunities.

If you have any queries you can email us on bloedd.ac@museumwales.ac.uk. Follow us on Instagram to keep updated on all things Bloedd! 

1 Corinthians 12 introduces its readers to the lasting image of the fledging church as a physical body – each part with different but important roles to fulfil. This metaphor has endured for centuries, and is a challenging one for many Christians today, who struggle with things like hard denominational boundaries and tribal us/them attitudes. For Fr. Ruth, a queer priest in the Church in Wales (CiW), it has a similarly challenging but uplifting message. 

Ruth is a curate (trainee vicar) in the Islwyn Ministry Area in the Diocese of Monmouth, and she’s part of a team that looks after twelve different churches up and down the Gwent Valleys. She’s also bisexual, gender-non-conforming, and in a civil partnership with her spouse, Hannah. In addition to her ministry in the CiW, Ruth is one of four Pastoral Leaders of an ecumenical LGBTQ+ church in Cardiff called The Gathering. 

If that surprises you, that’s okay. But, despite what you may have been taught, queer people have always been a part of the life of the church. We have always been vicars, ministers, deacons, worship leaders, caretakers, congregants, youth group leaders. We are a part of the heritage and life of the church in a way that has, for too long, been overlooked and brushed aside.

The Anglican Church, in particular the Church of England, is undergoing a real reckoning at the moment over the issue of blessing same-sex marriages. The CiW has already had this conversation, and voted in 2021 to bless the marriages of same-sex couples. Whilst, for many, this does not go far enough, it is generally seen as a good first step, and it sets a precedent for other Anglican churches also having this discussion. It also puts those campaigning for marriage equality in a really good position for the Church in Wales to formally allow the sacramental celebration of marriage (hopefully) soon. The current position is bittersweet for many, though. As Fr. Ruth explained to me: “When the current legislation passed, that was a huge change for the Church in Wales. But I felt quite conflicted about it. In part, I am delighted that we can offer something to people for whom the church have been offering nothing. But, in part, it feels like a half-hearted step, where, what you're saying is ‘we're going to recognise that these relationships are good and holy and that God can bless them, but we're not willing to offer you the sacrament of marriage’. It feels theologically incomplete. And it's hurtful, as a queer person in a relationship, to know that the sacrament of marriage is withheld from us.”

It is still a huge deal, though, especially when you consider the length of Christian history that we were completely excluded from the public life of the church. We were still there, though, in closets and in the background, and I like to find queerness reflected in artwork throughout Christian history. It’s forever fascinating to me the ways in which artists, for hundreds of years, have been interpreting biblical stories in ways that we, as audience members and critics, can see the homoerotic. In this artwork, we can see ourselves reflected; here, in the shadow of gender transgression, there, in the hint towards homoeroticism. Indeed, for many artists throughout history, the only acceptable outlet for them to express their homoerotic desires was to displace them through artistic interpretations of ‘safe’ stories and figures – biblical scenes and characters. For example, artwork depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian is almost always homoerotic – after all, an attractive young man, mostly naked, is often depicted as being penetrated by arrows.

For Ruth, the ways in which she honours her place in the Church, and where she sees herself in the heritage of the church, is through the practise of the Eucharist. A useful image for her in thinking about the Eucharist is that of a human heart. “During the Eucharist, the church is like the chambers of the heart. It draws in that which needs nourishment. In the movement of the Eucharist, the nourishment is received, like blood going out to the lungs and coming back again, and then it's sent back out into the rest of its community.” So, when Jesus says, at the Last Supper, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19, NRSV), and we partake in this remembrance, we become a part of something bigger than us – an invisible string that stretches back centuries, connecting everyone across the world that’s ever remembered Jesus’ life in this way, like branches of a nervous system spanning time and space and holding us together. In this act of remembrance, “in becoming the body of Christ, all of the boundaries get blurry. So we become parts of a whole. That requires all of our differences.” It requires our differences in sexuality and gender identity, and how we interact with the world around us as embodied creatures. “As someone who the church historically would have said ‘we have no need of you’, I find it really, really heartening that those who still wish queer folks weren’t in ministry can't say ‘we have no need of you’. Because here we stand within the sacramental honours of the life of the church. You cannot say to me: I have no need of you. The challenging side is, I can't say to them I have no need of them either. We are brought together in that wholeness. And that wholeness is of God and so it's not up to us to say we have no need of one another.”

In a world full of divisive individualism, rituals like a Eucharist serve as an important reminder that we are a part of a much, much larger whole. The human body is an ecosystem of multitudinous grace, apathy, compassion and anger – never just one thing, always many interlinking feelings and experiences and beliefs. And, if a single human body is an ecosystem, how vast must the ecosystems of our societies be? Another word for Eucharist is Communion. This is the term that I grew up with in my faith tradition, and it holds both a special and fraught place in my heart because of it. The obvious reason behind it being called Communion is that it is through this ritual that we commune with God – we honour Jesus’ life and death, and are in communion with something greater than ourselves. But, through the connections and interconnections of this action, are we not also in communion with one another? Are we not then, in spite of all the things that separate us, one body? 

 ‘Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. […] If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” […] If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honoured, all rejoice together with it.’ (1 Cor. 12:12-26, NRSV). 

On the 1 December 1994 a tree was planted in the Gorsedd Gardens in front of National Museum Cardiff.

The tree was planted on World AIDS Day 1994 as a memorial to those who have died of AIDS in Wales. Since its planting it has been known by a few different names including the Tree of Life and the Red Ribbon Tree, and has become the focus for yearly World AIDS Day commemorations on 1 December each year, with people attaching red ribbons to the tree.

The tree was planted by Mike Phillips and Martin Nowaczek (co-founders of Cardiff Body Positive), along with the Lord Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Cardiff. At the planting a balloon was released for all those who have died of AIDS in Wales. By the end of 1994 (the year the tree was planted) there had been 10,304 reported AIDS cases and 7,019 known deaths in the UK (with 141 cases and 118 of these deaths in Wales).

Speaking about the planting of the tree Mike recalls that “I was around 25 when we planted the Red Ribbon Tree. We’d opened the Cardiff Body Positive drop-in-centre the previous day and Martin, already ill, was feeling tired. He died less than 6 months later”.

The plaque next to the tree was rededicated in 2021 and the original plaque donated to St Fagans National Museum of History. It was displayed at St Fagans in 2022/23 as part of the exhibition Wales is… remembering Terrence Higgins.

The Cardiff Body Positive collection recently donated to Amgueddfa Cymru is closely associated with the tree as its co-founders Mike and Martin planted the tree in 1994.

Cardiff Body Positive was founded in 1993 and were based at 57 St Mary Street, Cardiff. It supported people living with HIV and AIDS from across Cardiff and south Wales, and was one of a number of Body Positive groups around the UK. Their drop-in centre opened the day before the Tree of Life was planted, and they later organised what they called a ‘Celebration of Life’ at the tree – celebrating the lives lost to AIDS and showing solidarity and support to those living and affected with HIV/AIDS. The Cardiff Body Positive newsletters in the collection contain some obituaries for those who died of AIDS in Wales including its co-founder, Martin.

Cardiff AIDS Helpline was also operating about this time as well as the South Glamorgan AIDS Network. It was Cardiff AIDS Helpline that organised the first Candlelight Memorial to be held in Wales, which was held on 1 December 1993 on the steps of National Museum Cardiff, with almost 600 people attending. They held another World AIDS Day Candlelight Memorial in 1994 on the evening following the planting of the tree.

Today there is still no cure for HIV, but effective treatment now means that people with HIV can’t pass the virus on and can live long and healthy lives. The Welsh Government HIV Action Plan as well as organisations and networks such as the Terrence Higgins Trust, and Fast Track Cymru are working towards preventing new infections and eliminating stigma by 2030.