Creative Scotland Crowdmatch has provided £712 of match funding
"Dueer," - why do queer people not come out?
Glasgow, Glasgow City, United Kingdom
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Aim
"Dueer," aims to explore the many reasons queer people do not feel comfortable coming out and whether art can help them.
Dueer reader,
We have recently received a conditional £5000 grant from Glasgow Life to produce a series of lectures, screenings and workshops looking at the myriad reasons queer people do not yet feel comfortable coming out. The money is going toward paying our invited guests and artists involved in the project who, together with attendants, will investigate the place of art in helping queer people to feel comfortable in their own skin. But in order to receive the grant we are required to raise £1470 ourselves and for this sum to be match-funded by Creative Scotland. This is why we are asking for your help. This is our first fully funded project, which makes “Dueer," a big step for us at The House. We hope that you will join us on this journey!
About The House Arts Collective
We are a small trans-led group of artists working out of a converted garage in Glasgow's Maryhill, a historically community-driven and politically active part of the city. Since we opened our doors in 2024, we have hosted a wide range of community events ranging from exhibitions, screenings, meals, performances and talks. We have also been home to a number of political and community groups who have organised their activities at our premises. Our operation is funded by the artists who work in our studios and workshops.
Since our conception, we have been committed to offering free space to organisers and artists who do not have access to the funds to rent a typical gallery or event space. While our small team has massively enjoyed facilitating the many proposals we have received, we are at a point in our life where we are interested in programming with more intention and purpose. Through hosting externally proposed projects we have become intimately familiar with the advantages of our space and the interests of artists in Glasgow today. It is this research and our desire to make something special for our communities and audiences which led to the development of "Dueer,".
Introduction
Amielle, project leader and one of the directors of The House, spent a lot of time as a teenager on gay male online forums and dating sites, spaces synonymous with anonymity and a hotspot for closeted queer men of all ages. A number of years ago she conducted a series of unofficial and anonymous interviews with men about their personal reasons for not feeling comfortable coming out. It became obvious that while the reasons were many, the fear was singular. These interviews never left Amielle and the question has remained close to her heart since.
The project in its current form began as a bid for The House as part of Glasgow International 2026, the city’s bi-annual visual arts festival. When our team was researching international projects with the intent to collaborate we happened upon the awe-inspiring Canadian initiative 75SHOTS. We swiftly got in contact with Karin Hazé, their founder, to ask whether she wanted to bring the project to Glasgow as part of the festival. While we did not receive the funding necessary to produce the project at the time, we remained in contact with Hazé. Slowly we began to tease out the first strands of the now much larger project through exploring what a global collaboration between The House and 75SHOTS might look like.
Glasgow is uniquely positioned as a city to address these questions. Heralded by queer people as open and inviting, it has a complicated religious history tied in with the football rivalry of the city's two major teams. There is a deep rift between its vibrant arts communities and communities still deeply impacted by repression, poverty and violence. While tides are slowly shifting for queer people in sports, it appears many remain in the closet despite Glasgow's relative openness. We hope that these conversations will highlight some of these disparities and open up the floor for the still closeted to share their unheard stories.
It is important to note that the structure of the project also functions as an attempt by our team at interrupting the typical life-cycle of art shows in Glasgow. We have recognised a complete focus on the opening night with little-to-no interaction with the art itself. Sadly, art in Glasgow appears to primarily be an opportunity to see friends and grab a free beverage rather than engaging critically with the work that the artists around us are making. As a counter-measure to this, “Dueer,” is meant to be experienced as a series with the hope that attendants will return for all sessions or at least more than one of the planned monthly events. We have also scheduled feedback sessions two weeks after each primary event where audience members will be invited to reflect on its content and informally discuss the merits and advantages of certain artistic mediums in addressing the central question. We believe this structure will foster intimacy and trust between participants and facilitators, which we hope will open up for attendants to share their own private and personal experiences for the final part of the project.
Project Outline
"Dueer," has been conceived as a series of performances, workshops and lectures held at our Napiershall street location. Throughout the series attendants, facilitators and experts will together explore the many and diverse reasons why all queer people do not yet feel comfortable coming out. While the project is meant to be experienced as a cohesive series of activities, the series has been produced to allow for the possibility to experience an event by itself.
The project will first explore global, then national and lastly local narratives. Each event will be facilitated by a relevant artist guest from a particular artistic medium or academic approach. These include but are not limited to film, dance, writing, activism, queer theory, and social studies. Each session will explore the relevance of the given approach to queer people who are struggling with coming out. Our hope is that participants, with the help of our workshops and lectures, will feel able to share their own experiences and histories as part of the final outcome of the project.
We will begin our exploration through a global perspective with a screening of films by queer artists living under threat of state-sanctioned violence because of their sexuality and/or gender. Karin Hazé, founder of 75SHOTS, a Canadian initiative that puts filmmaking tools in the hands of queer people who live in countries where homosexuality is still criminalised, will lecture on the project and its impact. 75SHOTS is not only an educational initiative but also a living archive of films by independent and amateur queer filmmakers from around the globe. The films document the everyday and the fantastical experiences of people who are persecuted because of their sexualities and gender. After the screening, our facilitators will take questions from the audience for Hazé and the filmmakers who will be joining us virtually.
After this exploration of the global queer experience, we will focus in national stories alongside dancer John Darvell who has been exploring choreography as a response to the closet. Darvell will speak on his ongoing project Good Enough which is working to amplify voices of queer men over 50 in Scotland by compiling their stories into an interactive story box. We will explore the merits of sculptural and performative approaches in a panel discussion with Darvell and questions from our audience.
We will then move onto local stories, which is where the series takes an interactive turn. These last sessions will be facilitated in collaboration with LGBT-activism organisations. Representatives from the organisations will speak briefly on their work after which Leo Bussi of Waterwings Press will lead a letter writing session where we will be writing letters to our formerly closeted selves. These letters, with the permission of the attendants, will then be workshopped by Bussi and our facilitators into a text to be performed as part of the final session.
Our final session will be a performance dressed as a mock-funeral with a service conducted by ordained ministers Susan and Gerrie Douglas-Scott. Participants will be invited back to the now-transformed event space via funeral invitations. The facilitators will style our event space as a graveyard complete with soil, gravestones, and casket from which Bussi will be performing the workshopped text. The reading will be followed by a wake where refreshments will be served, giving attendants the opportunity to reflect on the project as a whole.
Contributors
The House facilitators
The project will be facilitated by our two directors at The House, Amielle Bogarve and Rhiannon Clucas. They both have experience delivering a range of different projects at wide-ranging scales as part of the organisation. Outside their work for The House they have worked as community organisers for cultural organisations like the Centre for Contemporary Arts, the Citizens Theatre, the Unitarian House and the Glasgow Community Sauna.
Amielle and Rhiannon will be working alongside experts who will provide insight into different mediums and approaches to primary question guiding the project.
Invited Guests (more to be confirmed)
(picture from quebec-elan.org)
Karin Hazé of 75SHOTS
https://www.75shots.com/founder
Karin is the founder of 75 SHOTS Pocket Cinema, which offers a platform for radical LGBTQ+ perspectives that are often suppressed by capitalist and Western frameworks. Her artistic vision merges poetic and raw expression, reflecting her unwavering commitment to uplifting disenfranchised communities. In recognition of her dedication to making a difference, Karin was recently awarded the Iris Unger Recognition Award, which celebrates artists whose projects embody passion, commitment, and the drive to create social change. Her impactful work and advocacy have been officially presented at the United Nations. Recently, she attended WorldPride Amsterdam for a workshop with queer refugees and held a panel as part of the Human Rights Conference.
(picture from immersivearts.uk)
John Darvell of NOCTURN
https://nocturncreative.co.uk/about
John started dancing at 30, on his own time. At 38 he retrained professionally at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. By then he had a different vocabulary to most of the room — having already had a career as a civil servant — and a deep instinct for who gets left out of cultural spaces. Both of those things still run through everything NOCTURN does. He founded NOCTURN in 2007. The company has spent the years since making participatory and digital dance outside major cultural hubs — in rural communities, museums, festivals, online, and now from Scotland. He is currently working on an interactive story-project cataloguing coming out stories of gay men over 50.
(picture from ok.co.uk)
Susan and Gerrie Douglas-Scott of Celebrate People
https://www.celebratepeople.co.uk/about-us/
Susan and Gerrie founded Celebrate People, an LGBTQIA+-inclusive organisation of celebrants who have been conducting ceremonies since 2003. They both campaigned tirelessly for marriage equality for over 20 years and in 2014 were the first women to be legally married in Scotland under new law. They have conducted thousands of ceremonies.
For the past 11 years, Susan has followed a career as a freelance consultant in equalities, health, disability and social care, as a non-executive director and a charity trustee. This followed her 18-year career in local authorities and non-Government Organisations in the field of disability and health, including the CEO of PHACE Scotland, Epilepsy Scotland and the Health and Social Care Alliance.
Gerrie was a government adviser on involving people in their health care and in 2022-3 was the Co-Chair of the Scottish Government’s Expert Working Group on Spiritual Care Education (Health and Social Care). She is currently a Trustee of Pushing up the Daisies charity and on the Board of Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons PodMed Board.
(picture from frieze.com)
Leo Bussi of Waterwings Press
Leo is a dear friend of The House, a poet and art critic based in Glasgow. He runs a reading series called Waterwings. His debut pamphlet, Life-Sized, came out in 2025 with SPAM Press. His poetry and writing have appeared in numerous outlets including Frieze, Gutter Magazine, Discount Guillotine, Plinth, Des Pair Books, Soapbox Journal, Tentacular Magazine, and more. He has been commissioned by Sid Motion Gallery, Glasgow Zine Fest, and Jupiter Artland to perform and curate readings.
It has been absolutely fabulous to plan this project alongside our House team and the guests. We hope that you find the project interesting enough to donate and most of all we hope to see you all there!
Love,
The House
Funding method
All or nothing – this project will only receive pledges if it reaches its target of £2,940 by 4th October 2026 at 4:51pm