Oscar Wilde Tours

08/18/2026

08/18/2026

Despite being a Jew in a city still grappling with religious freedoms, Simeon Solomon rose to become one of London’s notable painters only to come tumbling down from prominence after arrests under homophobic laws. He died in poverty, outcast from his social and professional circles, but his works survive as stunning examples of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Today, it’s clear how Solomon’s identity informed his art. He used Old Testament biblical stories to carve out space in the Christian art world and injected classical scenes with q***r longing.

📘: https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/simeon-solomon/

08/17/2026

In 1866, Frances Thompson sat before a congressional investigating committee in Memphis and described what seven white men had done inside her home.

She had been born into slavery. Now free, Thompson supported herself by sewing, washing and ironing. She lived as a woman in Memphis and walked with crutches because of a disability.

Then came the Memphis Massacre.

Beginning May 1, 1866, white mobs, including policemen, attacked the city's newly freed Black population. Homes, churches and schools were burned. Black residents were beaten, robbed, murdered and s*xually assaulted.

Thompson told investigators that seven white men entered the home she shared with 16-year-old Lucy Smith. Two wore police badges. The men demanded food, robbed the women of money and clothing, and s*xually assaulted them.

Thompson became one of five Black women whose testimony about s*xual violence was included in the congressional investigation. She is also recognized today as the first known transgender person to testify before a congressional committee.

But her story took another turn ten years later.

In 1876, Thompson was arrested after authorities classified her as male and charged her for wearing women's clothing. Newspapers seized upon the revelation. Her gender was weaponized to attack her credibility and, more broadly, to cast doubt on testimony about white violence during Reconstruction.

The strategy was cruelly effective: turn the survivor into the scandal.

Thompson died later that year, around the age of 36.

For more than a century, her name remained largely outside popular LGBTQ+ history. Yet her testimony survives in the official record of the 39th Congress, preserving the voice of a formerly enslaved Black trans woman who spoke publicly about racial and s*xual violence at a moment when doing so carried extraordinary risk.

Frances Thompson did not use our modern vocabulary for transgender identity. But the historical record shows that she lived as a woman for many years, and historians today recognize her as an extraordinary early figure in American trans history.

08/15/2026

📸😂Members of the Christian Universal Ministry basketball team before a game in 1980. Apparently nobody checked the initials before ordering the uniforms. 😂

08/15/2026

Interesting take

As more people turn to GLP-1 weight-loss medications, a subculture rooted in rejecting narrow beauty standards faces its latest evolution.

08/15/2026

Great moments from our Gay England tour.

08/15/2026

08/13/2026

For generations, q***r African lives were often discussed as though they were somehow foreign to Africa, a Western import, an intrusion, something without roots in the continent’s history.

An extraordinary exhibition at the Smithsonian is quietly dismantling that idea, one artwork at a time.

Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art, now entering its final weeks at Washington’s National Museum of African Art, brings together nearly 60 works by LGBTQ+ artists from Africa and its diaspora. It is the largest exhibition on the subject the museum has ever mounted.

And the title is no accident.

“We are here,” is the declaration running through it: q***r Africans are not suddenly appearing in history. They were already part of it.

The artists come from across the continent and diaspora, places where being openly LGBTQ+ can mean radically different things. Through photography, painting, sculpture, video and installation, they explore desire, family, spirituality, intimacy, gender, exile and something q***r African stories are too often denied: joy.

There are major names here. South African photographer Zanele Muholi has spent years creating an extraordinary visual archive of Black LGBTQ+ life. Nigerian-born Rotimi Fani-Kayode, who died in 1989 at only 34, made haunting photographs mixing homos*xuality, Yoruba spirituality and the Black male body. Ugandan artist Leilah Babirye transforms discarded materials into regal sculptural portraits of q***r and trans people.

But perhaps the exhibition’s most provocative argument is also its simplest.

Q***r African people do not require history to grant them permission to exist.

They already existed, in families, communities, photographs, bedrooms, art and memory. What has changed is who is finally being allowed onto the museum wall.

Here: Pride and Belonging in African Art runs through August 30 at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. Admission is free.

***rArt

08/10/2026

In Petrograd in 1921, a group of men and women arrived for what appeared to be an extraordinary celebration: a same-s*x “wedding,” with guests dressed in elaborate costumes, some men in women’s clothing and some women in men’s. In the aftermath of revolution and civil war, it was a remarkably visible gathering of people whose lives were usually lived far more discreetly.

But there was a catch.

The celebration was being watched from within.

The event became known as the “gay wedding” of Petrograd, and one of the men involved in organizing it, sailor Afanasii Shaur, was working with the authorities. According to surviving accounts, the gathering provided an opportunity for the secret police to identify and arrest dozens of people suspected of belonging to Petrograd’s homos*xual and gender-nonconforming underground.

By the end of the night, the party had effectively become a police trap.

What happened afterward, however, complicates the story.

The authorities investigated the guests, but the case ultimately collapsed. Revolutionary Russia was in the middle of dismantling the old tsarist legal system, and the Soviet criminal codes that followed did not initially criminalize consensual s*x between men. The accusations against the wedding guests went nowhere, and they were eventually released.

That tolerance would not last. Under Stalin, s*x between men was criminalized again in 1934, beginning another brutal chapter of secrecy, imprisonment and persecution.

Yet the photograph associated with that strange 1921 night survives: elegantly dressed figures staring back from a Russia few people imagine existed.

A party became a trap. A trap became a historical record. And a century later, the people the police hoped to expose are still defiantly visible.

***rHistory