Exploring LGBT+ history and the British Empire through art

26 February 2024

In 1768, Captain James Cook set sail for the Pacific on the Endeavour. For more than 250 years, Europeans had explored the Pacific, but much of it remained unknown to them. Cook’s voyage was supported by both the British Admiralty and the Royal Society with the initial aim of recording the transit of the planet Venus.

The expansion of the British Empire which followed his explorations would severely impact how people would be able to love. From the 1860s onwards, the British Empire spread a specific set of legal codes and common law throughout its colonies which specifically criminalized male-to-male sexual relations, a legacy that lives on today. Of the 72 countries with anti-gay laws in 2018, at least 38 of them were once subject to some sort of British colonial rule.

This was particular to Britain. Of the major colonial powers of Western Europe — Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain — only Britain left this legacy to its colonies.

The prints are based on photographs from the collection at the Pitt Rivers Museum. Each photograph was taken in a country where Britain either imposed or maintained homophobic legislation. It has been argued that this legislation was mostly a response to colonial panic about Western behaviour overseas, but the impact on the local population was to change how many societies viewed same-sex love and gender diversity.

While it may be difficult to say whether homosexuality was accepted in precolonial societies — and we need to look at regionally or culturally based practice rather than national borders — there are many examples from around the world which challenge the Victorian desire for enforced heteronormativity.

In pre-colonial Africa there were a number of patterns of homosexual relationship which were often institutionalized and not uncommon for both males and females before marriage. The Spanish were ‘shocked’ by the homosexual acts they witnessed in South America and in pre-modern China, relationships between men were often treated as an intellectual refinement and the general public were indifferent to them. Meanwhile in pre-colonial India, same sex love and romantic friendships existed without any extended history of overt persecution.

The idea of a hetero/homosexual binary is often redundant when looking at precolonial societies where for people who performed homosexual acts their sexual orientations were not necessarily their identification — it was something you did, not who you were. Stuart Hall argues that you are only aware of your identity when it is unaligned with those of the people around you — or in this case unaligned with the legislation imposed upon you.

Many British photographers visiting these countries tried to ‘scientifically’ document knowledge: recording physical appearance without gathering information about the lives, loves and emotions of the subjects. When searching for photographs to work with from the many thousands in the Pitt Rivers Museum archive, I subconsciously tried to unpick this — looking for images which would not only work compositionally, but which also sparked an emotional response.

By juxtaposing these portraits with the legal codes used to criminalise love, relationships, and sex in their countries, the prints invite viewers to consider links between the contemporary discrimination of LGBTQ lives and the British Empire, responsible for disseminating these laws from the 1860s onwards.

Image credits:

1. Left: Matt Smith, Bhutan: Article 213 (2019). Right: Matt Smith, Pakistan: Section 377 (2019). Image: Imperial Health Charity.
2. Matt Smith, Tanzania: Section 377 (2019). Image: Imperial Health Charity.
3. Matt Smith,  Bahrain: Article 171 (2019). Image: Imperial Health Charity.