How can historic houses and heritage sites better reflect and interpret LGBTQ+ histories? Join us for the launch of How to Queer Your Historic House, a free downloadable resource designed to help heritage professionals uncover and integrate queer narratives into historic spaces.
Created by researcher and heritage practitioner Indigo Dunphy-Smith, this practical, budget-friendly guide 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. The guide 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.
Speakers (in order of appeareance): Indigo Dunphy-Smith, Judith O’Flynn, Alice Strickland, Matthew Butler
About Indigo Dunphy-Smith
Indigo (she/her) is a researcher and writer based in Edinburgh, focusing on queer storytelling through museum and gallery collections. From castles to convict barracks, she has worked in the heritage sector for over ten years across Australia and Scotland. She specialises in research and public programmes that make space for marginalised stories in traditional places. Indigo has delivered conference papers and workshops about how to uncover queer links in historic houses and appeared on the podcast Bad Gays. She is currently the co-chair of the National Trust for Scotland’s LGBTQ network and supports organisations in queering heritage spaces.
Indigo’s website: https://a-queer-was-here.com/
queerhcn.org 