Brighton Ourstory - Lesbian and Gay History Group

Men dressed as women! Women with their boobs out! Men with their bits out! Drunkenness!! Hairy bumholes! Yes - hurray - Brighton Festival has been and gone again. But this year fingers have been pointed and tongues have wagged over the poverty of queer programming. Brighton and Hove council provides the Festival with £150,000 in funding. £30,000 of that grant must be pink tax pounds. So just what are we getting for our money? Is it too much to expect some Festival eventswhich speak clearly to our experience? A lot of people are feeling shortchanged again.

In previous years there has regularly been a handful of queer events but it's been a matter of working through the brochure with a microscope to pick them out. Since 1995 they've largely been found in the small print of the Umbrella section while the main illustrated pages are dedicated to the big national and international names which seem to be calculated to appeal to a middle-class heterosexual audience.

Assimilated mainstream?

This year there were events of queer interest - Behjamin Britten, John Adams, Michael Petry, Peter Ackroyd, Simon Callow, Bill T Jones, Jin Xing, David Starkey, Saki and (the only item of lesbian interest) a performance of Virginia Woolf's Orlando. But you wouldn't have known it from reading the programme where as usual the queer element was played down or desexed. The Festival claim they operate an enlightened policy of assimilated mainstreaming but it seems to work in exactly the same way as the old policy of closeted silence.

The Carnivalesque exhibition was particularly disappointing. Carnival and queers - well connected, as even a drunken child will know. The works selected were excellent in lots of ways. Plenty of bottom jokes. Performance by bisexual Jewess Tattooess, Marisa Carnesky. A caricature directed at the sodomitic Georgian actor Samuel Foote. Two men cruising in the crowd at an Italian Carnival in an aquatint by Paul Sandby (who spent time as the drawing master at the Woolwich Military Academy and evidently knew a thing or two about ogling queens). Punch and Judy puppets from our own Sergeant Stone. Lesbian prostitues on horseback in the Paris Carnival by Toulouse-Lautrec. But the wall captions and the catalogue by the show's curator offered no comment but a tight-lipped mumble about 'transvestism'.

A potentially important part of the exhibition was a display of Leigh Bowery's costumes at Fabrica. More oddness, hurray! hurray! But no. Uncatalogued, poorly displayed and utterly unadvertised, it came across as a guilty afterthought. Nicola Bowery, the generous lender of the costumes, was apparently obliged to mount the display herself with no help from the venue.

In fact the best queer events took place during May but outside the Festival: Bloody Dykes and Hovesexuals Walk This Way! in the Fringe; Musafir, featuring a stunning whirling Indian drag queen ayt the Gardner; Julie Burchill's double bill of lesbian films at the Duke of York's and at Crawley a poorly-attended performance of Michael Clark's latest twisted take on life and the poignant ludicrouness of love.

City bid

As we are all too tediously aware, the Queen is being asked to declare Brighton and Hove a city. Do we have any reason to think this will happen while we so evidently live in a second-rate provincial town which cannot bring itself to acknowledge the queer communities who built the cosmopolitan culture on which the city bid rests?

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