Quick Details
Duration: 90 minutes
Departure times: 9:00 then every hour, on the hour, until 17:00
Meeting Point: The entrance of King’s College on King’s Parade, Cambridge
Important Information:
Learn about the history of Cambridge’s LGBTQIA+ community, from the lives of famous queer alumni who accomplished major political milestones, to the stories of residents who experienced the vibrant nightlife of the ’70s. Learn about the Lesbian line, the creation of Stonewall, Cambridge’s major gay pub the Turk’s Head, and see a plethora of other sites in the city’s beautiful historic centre.
The tour will take you from King’s College (home of many highly influential Gay alumni such as Alan Turing), past St Catharine’s College (where Ian McKellen started his acting career and LGBTQIA+ activism), Queens’ college (where renowned Gay comedian Stephen Fry studied), onto the Backs of the medieval colleges, and into the city centre where you’ll search for the secret entrances to some of the city’s old Queer pubs and hostels, and visit other crucial landmarks for the advancement of LGBTQIA+ rights.
All the while, a resident student who has experienced Cambridge themselves will not only provide a deep insight into the history of Queer life and activism at the University, but they will also bring the streets’ past to life with readings from books set in Cambridge written by Queer alumni, supplementing this with their own experiences of Queer life in the city nowadays.
This is the first tour in Cambridge dedicated to Queer history, and it has been curated with the aim of paying tribute to those who have come before us – suffering the effects of homophobia but also making major contributions to science, art, and the humanities. We wish to continue to assert Queer voices at the University, and paint the city in a new light that focuses on the history and experiences of those society tends to forget.