Below is a list of my forthcoming public events – it would be lovely to see you at any of them!
If you’d like to receive infrequent emails to update you on my books and public events (or you’d like a more reliable and ethical alternative to following me on social media), you can sign up to my mailing list.
And if you can’t make any of these events, why not book your own? Take a look at the talks or heritage activities I can offer.
August 2026
Thursday 6 August, 18.00: Leeds’s Hidden Queer History walking tour – City Centre
Starting point: The Bookish Type, 77a Great George Street, Leeds LS1 3BR
Tickets: https://thebookishtype.co.uk/products/leeds-queer-history-tour-city-centre-copy
Queer history is all around us. The building we walk past on the way to work might have witnessed the first meeting of a campaign group; the bus stop we use every day might be remembered fondly as the site of someone’s first kiss. But like many marginalised experiences, too often this history remains invisible.
On this walking tour, historian Kit Heyam will take you on a tour of Leeds’ queer history highlights. From Pride to squats, from 1840s court cases to 1990s raves, you’ll see the city and its past in a new light.
Sunday 16 August, 14.00: Leeds’s Hidden Queer History walking tour – Music & Nightlife
Starting point: The Bookish Type, 77a Great George Street, Leeds LS1 3BR
Tickets: https://thebookishtype.co.uk/products/leeds-queer-history-tour-music-nightlife-2
Where did Soft Cell’s Marc Almond hear his first disco tune? Why did people stick money to the floor in The New Penny? And what happened when a bunch of lesbians wanted to start a pool tournament?
Find out, and discover the history of Leeds’s queer music and nightlife scenes, on this new walking tour of Leeds City Centre.
Wednesday 26 August, 18.00: Leeds’s Hidden Queer History walking tour – LS6
Starting point: The Bookish Type, 77a Great George Street, Leeds LS1 3BR
Tickets: https://thebookishtype.co.uk/products/leeds-queer-history-tour-ls6-1
Queer history is all around us. The building we walk past on the way to work might have witnessed the first meeting of a campaign group; the bus stop we use every day might be remembered fondly as the site of someone’s first kiss. But like many marginalised experiences, too often this history remains invisible.
On this walking tour Kit Heyam will take you on a tour of Woodhouse and Hyde Park’s queer history highlights. From early Pride to squats, from wartime genderqueers to gay hotlines, you’ll see the city and its past in a new light.
September 2026
Friday 4 September, 10.30-12.00: Talk on ‘Leeds’s Hidden Queer History’ for Sociable History Club
Location: Leeds City Museum, Millennium Square, Leeds LS2 8BH
Tickets: Give what you can on the door
Join historian Kit Heyam for a virtual tour of Leeds’s hidden LGBTQ+ history, inspired by their walking tours for The Bookish Type (Leeds’s queer indie bookshop). From Pride to squats, from pubs to circuses, you’ll see the city and its past in a whole new light.
Free light refreshments provided.
October 2026
Tuesday 6 October, 19.00: Queer History Club: People Without History Are Dust – Queer Desire and the Holocaust
Location: The Bookish Type, 77a Great George Street, Leeds LS1 3BR
Where are the stories of great queer love in the Shoah? There are almost none. Anna Hájková explains why the history of same-sex desire in the Shoah, that is, queerness among Jews persecuted by the Nazis for their race, has been excluded and marginalized, and how its return to our understanding of the Holocaust can offer an inclusive and feminist history of this genocide. Based on original and extensive archival research, her book offers a concise insight into the queer history of the Holocaust for beginners and advanced alike. Anna Hájková will introduce her book in conversation with Helen Finch and Kit Heyam.
Content: the talk will include discussion of sexualized violence
About the author: Dr Anna Hájková is Reader of modern European continental history at the University of Warwick, UK. She is the author of, among others, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (2020) and People without History are Dust: Queer Desire in the Holocaust (2025). Hájková is the pioneer of queer Holocaust history.
About the facilitator: Helen Finch is Professor of German Literature at the University of Leeds. She has recently co-edited a special edition of Holocaust Studies, ‘Queer Experiences in the Holocaust’, with Dr. Rosie Ramsden.
Friday 16 October, morning: ‘Assigned monster at birth: gendering children and colonial anxiety in and beyond The Tempest‘
Location: Shakespeare’s Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, Bankside, London SE1 9DT
Tickets: https://www.shakespearesglobe.com/whats-on/symposium-contested-futures/
A talk for the ‘Contested Futures’ symposium, part of the Shakespeare and Race Festival 2026.
‘Differentiation [between male and female],’ wrote the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall in 1908, ‘ought to be pushed to the very uttermost and everything should be welcomed that makes men more manly and women more womanly; while, on the other hand, all that makes for identity is degenerative’. His words are one of the clearest articulations of the connection between White colonial anxiety and the practice of assigning children a gender from the moment of birth, rather than – as the practice had been for centuries before – understanding children’s genders as malleable and protean, gradually increasing in differentiation as they aged. For Hall and his contemporaries, the failure to sufficiently differentiate between boys and girls risked the downfall of White supremacy: an insufficiently differentiated White race would be both insufficiently civilised and insufficiently fecund.
In this paper, I interrogate the relationship between the gendering of children and the fear of Black and Brown fecundity in one of Shakespeare’s most colonially anxious plays, The Tempest. Prospero must both neutralise the threat posed by Caliban’s potential fertility, and create the conditions for Miranda’s; and a key part of both processes involves his role in assigning the genders of these two characters, both of whom the play positions as his children. But how successfully and coherently are Miranda and Caliban assigned genders, and how does this shift over the course of the play? Drawing on the methodologies of trans studies, which prompt us not to take these children’s assigned genders for granted, I suggest that The Tempest shows us the earliest stages of the imbrication of childhood gender essentialism and White colonial anxiety, which continues to pervade contemporary anti-trans thought.
Friday 16 October, 18.30 for 19.00: Gayberystwyth Books Queer Lit Quarterly
Location: Stiwdio Perfformio / Performance Studio, Aberystwyth Arts Centre, Aberystwyth University, Penglais Campus, Aberystwyth SY23 3DE
Tickets: https://aberystwythartscentre-tickets.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/1173691042
Queer Lit Quarterly is an evening of book talks and book signing hosted by Gayberystwyth Books with the support of Aberration Cymru. This is an opportunity to meet queer authors and researchers and publishers, who will read from their books, speak about their motivation and the writing process and take questions from the audience, finishing the evening with a panel discussion. You will have the option to meet the authors, purchase their books and have them signed by the authors.
Kit Heyam 