Writing the lesbian body has become more common of late, making reading it all the more difficult. I don’t know the statistics about queer people, but there’s fewer women in tech, as an example, and so it can be harder for women just by virtue of the fact that there are fewer of them.What signs mark the presence of a lesbian body? “It’s its own echo chamber because it’s a skewed demographic. “And I’m like, well, one kind of disproves the other, right?” The tech industry itself isn’t totally inclusive, either. “The two pieces of criticism I tend to get when I do queer activism are either ‘we don’t need this because queer people are treated equally’ or ‘go die of AIDS’,” Forster says. The reaction so far has been everything you’d expect from the internet. Then again, as the metaverse expands, “elsewhere” may become an increasingly nebulous concept.

While the fight for queer rights continues IRL, more and more projects are springing up (including Minecraft’s groundbreaking Uncensored Library) that provide an opportunity to imagine what the future might look like elsewhere. This could be where virtual reality steps in to carve out new spaces beyond this stuffy, heteronormative dimension. As ever, the problems are intersectional: For a Bristol-based project launched in the same year the Colston statue-topplers were cleared, the question of who owns public spaces and how they decide what gets displayed in them is more relevant than ever. Speaking to Cronin 20 years on, now happily married to Deborah, she still sees a frustrating lack of visibility for lesbians and the wider LGBTQ+ community. “What I couldn’t have in life, I would have forever in death.” “The challenge of this work was to strike a balance between a high level of formal execution and pointed political protest,” she can be heard explaining in the museum.

It remains the world’s first and only marriage equality monument. New York-based artist Patricia Cronin contributed a virtual rendition of the marble statue she created in 2002 titled Memorial to a Marriage, it depicts Cronin and her partner Deborah locked in an embrace to mark their love after death, at a time when they couldn’t marry. Some people have waited longer than others for these moments.

As it transpired, there was no dedicated LGBTQ+ museum in the UK at the time ( Queer Britain has since opened its doors as a physical museum, where Forster’s project will be making an appearance in July). “I kept thinking: ‘Surely someone’s done this?’” she tells me from a café in Brislington, Bristol. It’s here that a set of nail polish becomes an act of defiance, a karaoke microphone an avatar for proxy community and a carefully mislaid copy of James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room a bid to be discovered and seen.įorster’s museum began life, like so many moments of cultural watershed, when she simply couldn’t find one anywhere else. Each exhibit is made up of a 3D scan of a particular object and an accompanying voice message telling the story of its significance. Devised by Antonia Forster – activist, speaker, self-taught coder and once declared one of the most influential queer people in Bristol – the LGBTQ+ VR Museum offers a cultural exhibition based on contributions across the queer community, from the southwest of England to Denmark and Ghana.

Lesbian virtual reality