The Annual John Addington Symonds Lecture
The Symonds lecture is co-produced between the IGRCT and OutStories Bristol, and is held every year around the time of the birthday of John Addington Symonds on October 5th. The lecture concerns topics in LGBTQ+ history.
John Addington Symonds (1840-1893) was a poet, translator, and literary critic who lived in Bristol for much of his life. He is known as an early pioneer in the study of LGBTQ+ history in antiquity.
OutStories Bristol are an organisation devoted to collecting and preserving the social history and recollections of LGBTQ+ people living in or associated with Bristol.
2025: The Twelfth John Addington Symonds Lecture
Speakers: Alexander Taylor and Nicky Sugar, ‘“No man can see himself as others see” Bringing the personal papers of John Addington Symonds to new audiences.’
Date: October 4th, 2025.
Alexander Taylor and Nicky Sugar from the University of Bristol Special Collections will unveil the results of the current project to recatalogue the Symonds archive and increase engagement with his work. They will bring to life new information about Symonds’s life and work, but will also use the Symonds collection as a vehicle for discussing some of the current issues archivists have to balance when working on collections. How do we deal with sensitive or contentious topics within the records we look after? Who gets to decide which aspects of the collection are highlighted in catalogues, and on what basis? How do we ensure that engagement with collections is equitable and authentic?
2024: The Eleventh John Addington Symonds Lecture
Speaker: Dr Sam Rutherford, ‘How to Bring Your Canon Up Gay: John Addington Symonds, Eve Sedgwick, and the Intellectual History of Male Homosexuality’
Date: October 5th, 2024.
2023: The Tenth John Addington Symonds Lecture
Speaker: Museum Bums (Jack Shoulder & Mark Small)
Date: October 7th, 2023.
Museum Bums explore the inspirations for John Addington Symonds, taking a closer look at some of the characters in Symonds‘ works in their own trademarked cheeky way. Jack and Mark are the duo behind the eponymous viral Twitter (‘X’) account @museumbums.
A transcript of the talk can be found on the Museum Bums blog.
2022: The Ninth John Addington Symonds Lecture
Speaker: Dan Vo, ‘Queer Britain: In the Key of Blue’
Date: October 15th, 2022.
In The Key of Blue is a daring collection of writing by John Addington Symonds which flirts with being an out and loud declaration of sexual identity and pride.
As one of the team members who helped open Queer Britain, the first LGBTQ+ museum in the UK, guest speaker Dan Vo explored the title poem and compared the way Symonds struggled to define the colour blue, a clever metaphor for same sex love and desire, with the impossibility of trying to encapsulate what ‘queer’ means to a modern audience.
2021: The Eighth John Addington Symonds Lecture
Speaker: Tom Sapsford, ‘The Song of the Cinaedus: Deviant Performers in Ancient Rome’
Date: October 4th, 2021.
The cinaedus is a man noted in classical literature for his effeminacy and voracious (homo)sexual appetites. Often used as a slur in invective Latin poetry and graffiti to lambast the masculinity of named individuals, Dr Sapsford (Assistant Professor in the Department of Classical Studies, Boston College) explored how an array of ancient Mediterranean sources present the cinaedus as a specific type of performer, whose signature song and dance appear to be as racy and challenging as the social behaviours so often ascribed to him.
2020: the Seventh John Addington Symonds Lecture
Speaker: Dr. Alan Greaves
Date: October 20th, 2020.
Dr Greaves (University of Liverpool) discussed the ‘restoration’ of a statue of Hermaphroditus, which was altered in the 18th century and presented as a conventional statue of Venus. The lecture explored the history of the statue, as well as the status of intersex people in the ancient world.
A full report on the event can be found on the OutStories Bristol website.
2019: The Sixth John Addington Symonds Celebration:
Speaker: Prof. Jennifer Ingleheart, ‘Queer loss, queer Classics: A. E. Housman’s ‘lost country’’
Date: October 5th, 2019.
Professor Ingleheart (Professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History, Durham University) looked at how Classics enabled A. E. Housman (1859-1936), classical scholar and professor of Latin at Cambridge, to come to terms with loss in his poetry. Queer people have often experienced losses, such as missing the opportunity for marriage and children, the pain of unrequited love and the potential loss of reputation and liberty. Housman has the reputation of being a divided man, who wrote very impersonal works of scholarship and reserved his emotions for his poetry. The talk argued that Housman’s different personas and life were far more similar than this stereotype allows and that he takes similar approaches to queer loss in his verse and his academic work. It also explored the presentation of Housman’s attempts to deal with loss through the Classics in the fictionalised account of his life in Tom Stoppard’s 1997 play The Invention of Love. Finally, the talk considered what Housman’s approach to loss as a queer classicist means for queer classicists and for queer people today.
2018: The Fifth John Addington Symonds Celebration
Speaker: Dr Amber Regis, ‘From Bristol, via Davos, to the Archive and Library’
Date: October 18th, 2018.
In her lecture, Dr Regis (Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield) explored the fascinating afterlife of John Addington Symonds’s Memoirs (c.1889–1891) – his account of life as a homosexual man in Victorian Britain and Europe, where experience and action were subject to legal repression and the constraints of social custom and prejudice. In particular, Dr Regis illustrated the ways in which, in writing his autobiography, Symonds forged a language through which to articulate his desires and sense of self, drawing upon ancient Greek history and literature, the European Renaissance, and the poetry of Walt Whitman. However, the finished manuscript could not be published in his lifetime: even if Symonds had found a printer willing to set the type, booksellers would have risked prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. His manuscript was thus saved for posterity, passing through the hands of successive custodians and libraries, including Symonds’ friend and Scottish historian Horatio Brown and the London Library.
The extraordinary story of the Memoirs, as illuminated by Dr Regis, took the audience on a thrilling trip through time and space, from the streets of Bristol to the mountain tops of Davos, and into the locked safes and strong rooms of the London Library and Bristol University Special Collections.
2017: The Fourth John Addington Symonds Celebration
Speaker: Dr Jen Grove, ‘EP Warren’s Classical Erotica: LGBT+ Activism and Objects from the Past’
Date: October 7th, 2017.
For the IGRCT’s annual event co-sponsored by OutStories Bristol, Dr Jen Grove (Research Fellow in the Centre for Medical History at the University of Exeter) delivered an absorbing lecture on ‘EP Warren’s Classical Erotica: LGBT+ Activism and Objects from the Past’.
Edward Perry Warren (1860-1928) is best known for giving his name to the “Warren Cup”, an ancient Roman goblet with explicit scenes of men having sex together (now in the British Museum). The Classical antiquities which Warren collected at the beginning of the twentieth century include many of those we now turn to for visual evidence of homosexual acts in the ancient world. Drawing on original archive work, Dr Grove’s talk explored how Warren used such artefacts from ancient Greece and Rome to campaign for the acceptance of same-sex relationships in the modern world. Warren was particularly influenced by John Addington Symonds and his Greek-inspired idea of a comradely type of love between highly virile men. This talk explored some of the problems of looking to Warren, the objects he collected, and the type of ancient relationship by which he was inspired — between older and younger partners — for LGBT+ activism and education today
2016: The Third Annual John Addington Symonds Celebration
Speaker: Dr Jana Funke, ‘Beyond The Well of Loneliness: Reassessing Radclyffe Hall’s Place in LGBTQ History’
Date: October 8th, 2016.
Dr Jana Funke (Lecturer in Medical Humanities in the Department of English at the University of Exeter) delivered a splendid lecture on ‘Beyond The Well of Loneliness: Reassessing Radclyffe Hall’s Place in LGBTQ History’. Her talk drew on fascinating, original archival research, opening up a new understanding of Radclyffe Hall’s views and writings on gender and sexuality. In particular, Dr Funke discussed Hall’s engagement with sexologic understandings of sexuality and gender identity, including those articulated by John Addington Symonds and Havelock Ellis, and reconsidered Hall’s often misunderstood engagement with feminist politics and female sexuality. The event was co-sponsored with OutStories Bristol.
2015: The Second Annual John Addington Symonds Celebration
On October 5th, 2015, the well-attended birthday celebration was held in Symonds’ own childhood home, Clifton Hill House (CHH), which has served as a Bristol University Hall of Residence for over a century. It was co-hosted by Thomas Richardson, Warden of CHH, and co-sponsored by OutStories Bristol. Richard Cole (PhD student, Classics and Ancient History) read one of Symonds’ poems and Gemma Tiley (OutStories) spoke about her project on mapping Symonds’ Bristol. This was followed by a Formal Dinner hosted by the Warden of CHH, attended by well over a hundred students and various guests, including the IGRCT Director, who spoke about Symonds and proposed a toast to his legacy.
2014: Happy 174th Birthday, John Addington Symonds!
The birthday celebration, which has become an annual event, was held on October 5th in the spectacular Orangery and Gardens of Goldney Hall, across from Symonds’ childhood residence of Clifton Hill House, and was co-sponsored with OutStories Bristol, who presented an exhibit on the city’s LGBT history.