Lemons, Laws & Secret Doors is open until the end of August at Hastings Museum & Art Gallery, and it’s one of the most inventive queer history shows you’ll find outside the capital. The exhibition is the work of the Hastings Queer History Collective, a self-described geek gang who have spent the last six years unearthing local queer stories and staging events at the museum. In 2023 their queer map of the museum introduced the world to the Pheasant Who
Broke the Internet, a gender-shifting icon who managed to upset the right-wing press and gender-critical commentators on both sides of the Atlantic. That pheasant along with some of its most famous critics makes a triumphant return in this show, and more importantly in the gift shop.

What gives the exhibition its charm is how personal it is. Each collective member has curated
their own section around the stories that matter to them, and it shows. The result is less a conventional museum display than a patchwork of obsessions, and it’s their creativity that really stands out, making films, sound pieces, tea cosies, dice towers and caves to bring stories to life.

The show is the culmination of six years of smaller events, all quietly building toward this moment. It was at Queer Lives, Queer Objects in 2025 an evening where members of the public brought in objects with queer histories attached that we first met our poster boy Uncle Vic, when his wedding ring was brought in by his nephew Joel. His and Auntie Joan’s love story, told through photographs and memorabilia from their life together is the sweetest of
tales, we advise you to bring a hankie.

Love runs through every corner of the exhibition, a mothers love and acceptance in Spill the Tea, the extraordinary real-life love story of Dawn Langley Hall and John Paul-Simmons and
decades of devotion wrapped around a painting in Hockney Connections.

Queers have always and will always love each other, and if you read the archive of newsletters from the local CHE (Campaign for Homosexual Equality) group, we will also always dance, fuck and eat potato salad. Those newsletters saved for decades by the group’s own potato salad chef, Roger, form the script for Meet Me at the Village Hall, a short film remembering our long gone queer spaces.

The show does a remarkable job of holding onto lost moments by rebuilding entire worlds
around them. Interactive pieces let you step into a 1960s disco in the smugglers’ caves of St Clements, wander through Amelia and Rosa’s 1890s parlour, or sit in on a long Friday night at the Hastings Befrienders helpline in the 1980s.

Elsewhere, the exhibition celebrates the interwar drag kings and queens who performed on the pier, looks at how local people coped with the AIDS crisis and takes us into the secret backroom bars you could only enter with your own key.

There’s so much queer history that could easily disappear if we don’t make the effort to hold onto it. We need to sit down with our elders, dig through the archives, or just witness it to keep these stories alive. Lemons, Laws & Secret Doors is on until 30th August, so get yourself to Hastings and go and see it before the doors close for good.

Lemons, Laws & Secret Doors is created by Hastings Queer History Collective and produced by Home.