Welcome to The Old Times. Nick is a Second Year Digital Media Production Student at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge.
He is a retired HR Practitioner (DEI and Communication Specialist), Funeral Director and NHS Administrator.
Coming late to university, Nick’s prefered proverb is: “Be not afraid of going slowly, be afraid of standing still.”
To pick up from Part 2, I thought I had a brilliant idea. It was called Complemental. It was an audio piece for the Sedgwick Museum, built around Charles Darwin’s eight-year obsession with barnacles. Darwin discovered tiny males living on larger hermaphrodite barnacles and called them “complemental males”. In print he described them carefully, as “singular sexual relations”. In a letter to a friend he was delighted by a female who kept “a little husband” in each of two pockets in her shell. The plan was one voice in your left ear and the other in your right. The listener would hear the gap between what a Victorian gentleman could publish and what he could say in private. I was very pleased with myself.
Then I went to the Sedgwick.
The wrong museum
The Sedgwick, it turns out, is interested in Darwin the geologist. Rocks, fossils, the Beagle. The barnacles live across the road at the Museum of Zoology. And the museum for our module is fixed by ARU in, appropriately enough, tablets of stone.
Darwin’s little husbands would have to stay at home.
I’ll be honest: I was gutted. When you’ve fallen for an idea, you build the whole thing in your head before you’ve checked whether the building is the right one. It’s a lesson I to need to relearn every few years.
The bus home
So I sat on the bus feeling sorry for myself, with the museum’s LGBTQ+ trail leaflet on my knee. Somewhere between Cambridge and home, it began to dawn on me that the better story had been in my hand all afternoon.
The museum’s Bridging Binaries trail already does what Complemental was trying to do. It reads letters, choice words and omissions. It asks whether a “secretary” was only a secretary. And its cast is extraordinary:
SUE, a 67-million-year-old T. rex, now known as they/them.
Anna Gurney, a disabled lesbian scholar who did fieldwork from her wheelchair and chose the words “partners and chosen Sisters” for her gravestone.
Franz Nopcsa, a flagrant dandy who very nearly became King of Albania.
Mary Anning, about whom everyone writes love stories, on no evidence at all.
Jonathan Cutbill, who put the Sedgwick’s collections on one of the first museum computers in the world, then co-founded Gay’s the Word, Britain’s first gay and lesbian bookshop.
A dinosaur at one end and a bookshop at the other. Sixty-seven million years, and the queers were there all along.
What survived
By the time I got off the bus, the barnacles had become a single stop on a much bigger journey. The two-ear idea survived too. The public record plays in one ear and the private truth in the other, until at last, at Cutbill, both ears say the same thing.
There was still a question nagging at me, and it’s the one that matters – in fact it was one that Dr Liz posed to us as students working on an Immersive Storytelling Module, “Once upon a time, people visited museums to learn, today we don’t have to do that, so what will encourage people to visit the Sedgwick Museum today?”. Why would a queer person choose a Victorian geology museum for a day out, rather than anything else? Part of the answer is in the stories. The rest, I suspect, will need a good deal of glitter.
Sometimes the idea you love is a stepping stone to the one you need. Darwin would understand. He spent eight years on barnacles before he got round to the big book.
Image: My Journey from Complemental to Crystals (created with Gemini)
1. In the Beginning Was the Word
Dusting off a Victorian museum, one sequin at a time.
In Part 2 of this post, I left you on the bus home, with a museum leaflet on my knee and a question nagging at me. Why would a queer person choose a Victorian geology museum for a day out, rather than anything else?
This week I think I found the answer. You don’t make the Sedgwick less of a museum. You make it a show.
The idea
In the Beginning Was the Word is an audio play you hear on your own phone and headphones as you walk the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. It runs for about twenty minutes, from a T. rex to Gay’s the Word, the Bloomsbury bookshop that changed queer life in Britain. Its argument is simple: over millions of years, queer was always here.
The title is a joke with a halo. St John’s Gospel begins “In the beginning was the Word”. The play ends at a shop called Gay’s the Word. Somewhere in between, a Victorian institution gets the makeover of its life.
It starts with a porter
You walk in and meet Mr Norman Flint, museum porter. Mustard overall, hair like Einstein’s on a windy day, and a voice that could make a volcano sound like a parish notice. He leads you, slowly, to the minerals.
And there, among the amethyst and quartz, something cracks. Out steps Crystal Formation, a drag queen made of minerals and four and a half billion years old, who has “never once had work done”. From here on, she’s your guide.
I wanted the visitor to feel the change, not be told about it. The Porter is the museum everyone expects. Crystal is the one hiding in the cabinets.
The cast
Crystal takes you to meet the people from the museum’s own Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ trail. There’s SUE, a they/them T. rex. Anna Gurney, a disabled lesbian fossil hunter who chose the words “partners and chosen Sisters” for her gravestone. A young Charles Darwin, far queerer than the textbooks ever let on. Baron Nopcsa, who nearly became King of Albania. Mary Anning, who, among many other things, worked out that some fossils were poo. And Jonathan Cutbill, who catalogued this museum on one of the first computers in the world, then co-founded Gay’s the Word.
Why it works as immersive storytelling
The trick is borrowed from the best television. When Russell T Davies brought Doctor Who back, he didn’t make it more educational. He made it funnier, faster and braver, and people learned more because they cared. That’s the ambition here: queer joy and laughter first, with the facts carried along on the current.
A few devices do the heavy lifting. In one ear you hear the official record. In the other, the private life. A geologist’s hammer taps every time the record falls silent. And a tune by Ivor Novello rises slowly as you walk, until at the very end you find out why.
Because it’s audio, nobody has to out themselves to take part. And because there’s a little dress code, a green carnation, a single earring, a carabiner, everyone in the know can spot each other. The in crowd, among the fossils.
What’s next
Next comes the script, then a recording session and a test walk with some queer volunteers. If you’d like to be one of them, wear a green carnation and come and find me.
Whoever said geology was dull has never met Crystal.
2. The characters
Two guides, one official voice, and the people of the Bridging Binaries trail. Historical figures speak only words they actually wrote. Anything invented is marked in the script.
The guides
Mr Norman Flint, Museum Porter. Sixty-something, mustard-brown overall, wild white hair like Einstein in a gale, a bunch of keys he jangles for emphasis. He has worked here forty years and has a fact for every case, delivered at the speed of continental drift. He is the museum everyone fears they’ll get. He is also, it turns out, a man with a story the catalogue never recorded. Voice: slow, Fenland, monotone, oddly lovable. Think a parish notice read by a sleepy owl.
Crystal Formation, your host. A drag queen made of minerals, who emerges from the gem cases at Stop 1. Four and a half billion years old and still forming. Quick, warm, outrageous, generous. She loves this museum more than anyone, which is exactly why she won’t let it be boring. She knows when to stop talking, and those silences are the most powerful moments in the piece. Voice: a Heartstopper best friend crossed with a Saturday night headliner. Played by a drag artist.
The official voice
The Catalogue. The museum’s labels and records, given a voice. Received Pronunciation, faintly appalled by everything, and always in the left ear. It reads the public version of every life: “secretary”, “cousin”, “resided with”.
The Clerk. Reads court, police and government records. No performance at all. Centre channel. Used only when the law speaks.
The cast of history
SUE the T. rex (67 million years ago). They/them, silent, magnificent. Crystal speaks for them, and they don’t need it.
Anna Gurney (1795 to 1857). Scholar, fossil hunter, wheelchair user, lesbian, woman of faith. She speaks only the words she chose for her own grave. Right ear.
Charles Darwin (1809 to 1882). The young naturalist, before the beard, writing to friends and to his own notebook. Amused, curious, delighted. Right ear.
Hensleigh Wedgwood (1803 to 1891). Darwin’s cousin and a police magistrate, writing late at night to the Home Secretary. Troubled and decent. Centre.
Baron Franz Nopcsa (1877 to 1933). Transylvanian dandy, palaeontologist, nearly King of Albania. Grand, Central European, enjoying himself enormously. His lines are marked as invented.
Mary Anning (1799 to 1847). Never heard directly. She is surrounded instead by two breathless Romance Novelists, one Victorian and one modern, who cannot stop writing her love life.
The Twentieth Century. A chorus of whispers, wireless, studio audiences and protest, heard on the long walk.
Ivor Novello (1893 to 1951). Never voiced. Heard only through his music, which rises under the long walk.
Jonathan Cutbill (1937 to 2019). Geologist, cataloguer, co-founder of Gay’s the Word. No actor plays him. His story is told, and both ears finally agree about him.
You. The visitor. Crystal’s companion for the afternoon, and the last person the play is about.
3. Synopsis
A dusty porter leads you into a dull museum, a drag queen bursts out of the gem cases, and together you walk sixty-seven million years to a bookshop in Bloomsbury. On the way, you discover that queer was always here, in the rocks, the records and the gaps between the words. About 25 minutes, seven stops and a long walk.
Prologue: The door. Mr Norman Flint, museum porter, meets you on the steps. He jangles his keys, recites the opening hours and the founding of the Woodwardian Professorship, and leads you slowly through the galleries. It is every school trip you ever endured.
Stop 1: The Whewell Mineral Gallery. Among 40,000 minerals, the Porter mentions that William Whewell coined the word “scientist”. In the beginning was the word, he mumbles. And the gems answer back. A crack, a shimmer, and Crystal Formation steps out of the rock. She sends the Porter off for a cup of tea and takes over. There are meteorites older than the Earth, a duchess and her very dear friend, and a promise: by the end of the tour, we’ll have found another word.
Stop 2: SUE the T. rex. The Catalogue says “female”. A record scratch. Nobody can tell from a skeleton, so SUE is they/them. Nature never kept to tidy categories, and the rocks have the receipts.
Stop 3: Anna Gurney. The tone softens. A disabled lesbian fossil hunter dug an elephant jaw from the Norfolk cliffs and chose the words “partners and chosen Sisters, knit together in the Love of God” for the grave she shared. Chosen family. We didn’t invent it. We inherited it.
Stop 4: Darwin the Geologist. This one is a party. Young Darwin learns to break rocks from Adam Sedgwick, then turns to the strangest sex lives in nature: barnacle wives with pocket husbands, butterflies half male and half female, Hector the hen-feathered cockerel, and his own private note that every man and woman is hermaphrodite. Then a thirty-second sting. In 1835, while Darwin was at sea, his cousin sent two men to trial, and they were hanged. Crystal falls silent and says their names.
Stop 5: Baron Nopcsa. Maximum glamour. Bandits, the throne of Albania and thirty years with his “secretary”. Then the age of Oscar Wilde closes in. The love that dare not speak its name, the 1895 trials and a sad end in Vienna in 1933, told once and gently, with a content note.
Stop 6: Mary Anning and the poo. Two romance novelists fight over her love life on no evidence at all. Crystal takes back the story. What Mary actually discovered was that certain stones were fossil dung. Victorian Cambridgeshire then had a gold rush for it, and diggers looking for poo found the hippos of Barrington.
The long walk. The twentieth century in three minutes, down the long gallery. Polari whispered in back rooms. E. M. Forster in King’s College, with a gay novel locked in a drawer. Young actors at Cambridge who would one day change the world by coming out. Turing, Wolfenden, 1967, Scotland in 1980. And under it all a tune growing clearer.
Stop 7: Jonathan Cutbill. The cataloguer of this museum, who went on to open Gay’s the Word in 1979. The shop’s name came from Ivor Novello’s last musical, the tune we’ve been hearing all along. There’s the Customs raid of 1984, and the miners’ support group that met among the shelves. Fossilisation runs in reverse: people who’d been turned to stone, breathing again. For the first time, both ears agree. In the beginning was the Word. Here’s the word: Gay’s.
Epilogue: The Porter. Mr Flint comes back with his tea and, for the first time, says something the catalogue never recorded. Forty years at this museum, and twenty of them married to Clive. Nobody ever asked. The fusty old museum was queer all along, and so, in the end, is the man who showed you in.
Where week 2 leaves me
Image: Gay’s the Word (created with Gemini)
Week 2 started with a 3D scan of my coffee cup and ended with a drag queen climbing out of a mineral cabinet. Somewhere in between, I tried on four hats I’ll never own, lost a project to the wrong museum, and found a better one on the bus home. Complemental, my Darwin barnacle piece, turned out to belong across the road. But it taught me the device at the heart of everything that followed: the public record in one ear and the private life in the other. In the Beginning Was the Word takes that idea and gives it a cast, a journey and a lot more sequins. It runs from a they/them T. rex to Gay’s the Word, by way of a disabled lesbian fossil hunter, a would-be King of Albania, Darwin’s very queer science, Mary Anning’s poo and a fusty porter with a secret. Next comes the hard part. I’ll walk the route at the Sedgwick to fix every stop, check every fact against its source, finish the script, and then record it and test it on some willing queer volunteers. The prototype is presented on 12 November. Between now and then, the aim is simple: to prove that a Victorian geology museum can be the best queer day out in Cambridge. Wish me luck, and keep your green carnation handy.
References used in the Week 2 posts
The Sedgwick Museum and Bridging Binaries
Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. LGBTQ+ Trail leaflet. Text and illustrations by Layo Danbury, 2025. University of Cambridge Museums / Bridging Binaries.
Darwin Correspondence Project, University of Cambridge: letters to J. D. Hooker (10 May 1848) and Charles Lyell ([2 September 1849]). https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/
Brooks, R. (2026). Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life: A History of Sex and Science. Yale University Press.
Brooks, R. (2022). “Bounds of diversity: queer zoology in Europe from Aristotle to John Hunter.” Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, 195(1), 1–32.
History Today, August 2026, Volume 76, Issue 8 (Ross Brooks article).
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