Image: Indigo Dunphy-Smith, and Ellie Muniandy of MGS, with a copy of the toolkit (Joe Setch)
The ‘How to Queer Your Historic House’ toolkit by Indigo Dunphy-Smith provides practical guidance for curators and heritage staff to incorporate queer histories into historic property interpretations.
A new toolking has been published to help heritage professionals better find and integrate queer narratives into their programming.
The ‘How to Queer Your Historic House’ toolkit, has been created by researcher and heritage practitioner Indigo Dunphy-Smith. It has been backed and launched by the Queer Heritage and Collections Network, a UK-wide network supporting LGBTQ+ collections and programming across cultural institutions.
The network describes it as a “practical, budget-friendly guide”, which is designed for curators, visitor services staff, educators, and volunteers working across heritage sites.
“Drawing on years of hands-on experience in historic houses, Indigo provides a framework for rethinking object interpretation, challenging biases, and linking contextual LGBTQ+ stories into the property’s narrative—even at sites with no direct queer history,” it said.
The guide identifies four challenges for integrating queer histories into historic properties. First, many historic houses lack documented LGBTQ+ residents. Second, evidence of queer histories has often been hidden or destroyed. Third, queer people historically used coded language and symbols that require specialist knowledge to interpret. Fourth, heritage spaces have traditionally used heteronormative assumptions in their interpretations.
It then offers tools to explore broader social and cultural contexts, drawing meaningful links between historic spaces, collections and queer experiences of the past to tell a more complete story of a historic house.
Museums Galleries Scotland (MGS) is among the organisations to back the repot. Ellie Muniandy, senior museum development manager at MGS, said: “How to Queer Your Historic House offers heritage workers a range of approaches which will help them to tell more diverse and representative stories about the past.
“The aims of Indigo’s fantastic guide align with our ambition for Scotland’s museums and galleries to achieve LGBTQ+ equity across their work. Our endorsement of How to Queer Your Historic House follows our recent survey on LGBTQ+ representation in the museum sector, which highlighted that museum organisations are seeking resources which will help them to build their knowledge and confidence in this area.”
The report can be download here.
