Jon Brown’s Account
During my research into the Museum’s Collection I discovered an LGBT+ themed exhibition, ‘Celebrate’ from 2001 that was put on by ‘Lifetimes’ (now Museum of Croydon). I tracked down the people involved with the creation of the exhibition and discovered Jon Brown. The following written account details the methods employed by the research team and Jon’s personal experience working on the project.
I worked for Croydon’s Museum Service for 11 years before leaving in September 2002. My role was as a researcher, discovering Croydon related stories and objects and interpreting this material for exhibition at the newly founded Croydon Museum, then called Lifetimes, which opened at the Croydon Clocktower in 1995.
The primary method for researching material was using oral history interviewing. This meant finding relevant people to interview on a particular topic that the museum wanted to include in its displays and exhibitions, for example using an air raid shelter during the Second World War. The interviews would usually take place in people’s own homes, and related photographs and objects were borrowed. These would then all be interwoven, contextualized and put on display in the museum. The defining way of displaying this material was using audio; the interviewees would be heard telling their own stories, in their own words and in their own voices. During my tenure at Croydon I carried out hundreds of such interviews.
The main minority ethnic populations of the borough were Black African Caribbean, South Asian and Irish, and researchers from those ethnicities were recruited to gather material for the museum from those groups. Specific pamphlets highlighting this material were available in the museum so that, say, if the history of Black African Caribbean people in Croydon was your particular interest you could easily identify those stories and objects within the displays.
So in the late 1990s when the Museum Service decided to begin proactively collecting Croydon lesbian and gay material to include in its displays there was already an ethos of trying for an inclusive historical interpretation. A lesbian researcher was employed to gather lesbian material, and I, as a gay man already employed in the museum as a researcher, I took on the role of conducting the gay men’s project.
“ I had felt a personal affinity with these men and their life experiences, I could relate closely to much of what they described...”
The material we were gathering was initially displayed in a temporary exhibition within the museum called Celebrate (held between June and November 2001), before being incorporated into the permanent displays when they were updated in the following years. The Celebrate exhibition included the lesbian and gay men’s stories, integrated together on text panels with photographs, with objects displayed alongside in cases.
My intention was to try and gather stories from a wide age range of men and hopefully of a diverse ethnicity, with a connection to Croydon being the binding theme. To find volunteer interviewees willing to tell their stories in a pre-internet age I had letters asking for help printed in the gay press, went to a gay youth group and the Croydon Area Gay Society (CAGS) meetings, and managed to track down some 1970’s Croydon members of CHE (Campaign for Homosexual Equality). As I recall I interviewed seven men, five of whom ended up being included in the museum displays. They aged from late teens through to John Wickenden who was in his eighties. All were white.
I would conduct a whole life story interview with each man, but many aspects of the stories they told weren’t necessarily about their sexuality, for example Matthew Whale talked about working as an acupuncturist and Gary Thomas, about having a facial deformity. Others stories featured sexuality as the core part of their accounts, like Ray Harvey Amer recalling his time in the navy, John X coming out and John Wickenden being bullied as a child.
I was proud of my work in gathering and exhibiting this material and it felt like a rare triumph for the representation of marginalised people’s history and stories. At the end of the project, when taking an overview of the lives of all of the men I interviewed, I felt to varying degrees that their sexuality had made their lives more difficult and complicated than those of their heterosexual contemporaries. This matched my own personal experiences of life and shouldn’t really have come as a surprise.
I connected with the sheer amount of homophobia that the group as a whole experienced, it left me exhausted and depressed, which was not what I had expected. I had felt a personal affinity with these men and their life experiences, I could relate closely to much of what they described in a way that, perhaps, wouldn’t have been the case with a heterosexual interviewee. It all gave me a broader perspective on the different ways homophobia influences the everyday lives of gay people and this new awareness felt burdensome.
It is now nearly twenty years since this project was concluded and looking back, I feel a sense of achievement at having been part of something that was groundbreaking, progressive and bold. I was part of a team of museum staff who helped initiate the recording for posterity the voices of some Croydon gay men, whose stories would otherwise never have been documented. The men who were interviewed willingly gave their time and support to the project, each realising the importance of visibility and the significance of having gay lives documented and displayed in a museum.
by Jon Brown
Researcher for ‘Celebrate’ exhibition, Lifetimes
