Out and Proud
Feb. 10th, 2006 01:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shewhomustOn Tuesday we went to the opening of the Private Lives, Public Battles exhibition at Newcastle's Discovery Museum. The museum has been transformed since I was last there, but that's a whole other story. In a small gallery off the massive and brightly-lit hall (previously an open courtyard) that houses the Turbinia, panels of text quote the reminiscences of gay people who have contributed to the Our Place in History project, and glass cases house T-shirts and badges, books and leaflets. While the press walked round the exhibition with the organisers and the local dignitaries in their chains of office, we hung around by the bar, and then eventually it was time for the speeches: a welcome from the Museums service, and Tim saying how astonished he was to find himself here, at the opening of an exhibition in a municipal museum, one of whose exhibits was a tape and slide show he had been forbidden by the municipality to use in teaching. We are indeed living in the future.
This sudden jolt of awareness that, despite all that is still wrong, there is now a level of acceptance of diversity, chimed with something that has been in my mind recently, and I realised that the experience of being at the Angoulême comics festival was, in its own small way, like being gay in a society where this was not a problem. A trivial comparison? Perhaps. But if you know that comics are a slightly embarrassing interest for an adult, not a genuine cultural phenomenon, certainly not an interest you can expect other people to share, then it is extraordinarly liberating to find yourself in a town where the influx of a huge number of comics fans is something to be welcomed and encouraged. Angoulême does not simply tolerate the presence of the festival, with its marquees and its official exhibitions: galleries and churches put on their own smaller exhibitions, shops put comics albums and models in their windows, restaurants lay on special menus, there is even a festival beer with a decorative label. You realise that you are not alone, and that not only are there others like you, there are others completely unlike you - that comics fans are as various as any other group. It is an intensely agreeable sensation.
A bit like coming out, in fact.
This sudden jolt of awareness that, despite all that is still wrong, there is now a level of acceptance of diversity, chimed with something that has been in my mind recently, and I realised that the experience of being at the Angoulême comics festival was, in its own small way, like being gay in a society where this was not a problem. A trivial comparison? Perhaps. But if you know that comics are a slightly embarrassing interest for an adult, not a genuine cultural phenomenon, certainly not an interest you can expect other people to share, then it is extraordinarly liberating to find yourself in a town where the influx of a huge number of comics fans is something to be welcomed and encouraged. Angoulême does not simply tolerate the presence of the festival, with its marquees and its official exhibitions: galleries and churches put on their own smaller exhibitions, shops put comics albums and models in their windows, restaurants lay on special menus, there is even a festival beer with a decorative label. You realise that you are not alone, and that not only are there others like you, there are others completely unlike you - that comics fans are as various as any other group. It is an intensely agreeable sensation.
A bit like coming out, in fact.
