Frances Williams of QUEERCIRCLE makes the case for ‘queering’ the ongoing UK public policy agenda of ‘creative health’ in the first of a seven-part takeover.
Over the next week or so, we’re going to explore different understandings and interpretations of ‘queer space’ in relation to the UK public policy agenda of creative health. The health potentials of queer space can be seen as an iteration of the idea of ‘safe spaces’: namely, spaces of solidarity, refuge and care that have been fabricated amid hostile environments (often temporary, contingent, adjacent or marginal in nature).
These articles arise out of a series of research commissions instigated by LGBTQ+ organisation QUEERCIRCLE, which opened in 2022 and where I work as Research And Health Lead. We were keen to find out how the policy and practices of creative health would land in our particular LGBTQ+ community context, just as the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions was taking place.
‘Creative health’ is an ongoing public policy agenda that is currently being implemented by way of a number of linking initiatives across the cultural and health sectors, building on the recommendations of an All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) report published seven years ago (APPG 2017) and recently reviewed (APPG 2023).
In response – and partly in riposte – to these documents, QUEERCIRCLE published Queering Creative Health, an academic report by Yasmin Jiang, with accompanying drawn zine by MJ Barker (Jiang 2023; Barker 2023). Both publications, in their different ways, aimed to ‘queer’ creative health in the sense of “querying normative assumptions that underpin the field”, simultaneously “blurring the divide between community and academic knowledge” (Jiang 2023, 2). Both Jiang and Barker urge us to (re)imagine health not as cure or closure, but as a relational negotiation of care across bodies, resources, and relationships.
As Phoebe Eustance’s article will observe: “Such a frame is instructive for institutions too. If health is a process rather than an end state, institutions oriented toward creative health must also treat their forms as provisional, and therefore be attuned to feedback, open to re-composition, and accountable to those they hold.”
Holding spaces
LGBTQ+ social and community spaces sit outside of the clinic, yet hold health potentials that go well beyond it, promoting health in the widest sense: less as a response to illness so much as supporting activities that keep us well (social connection, social movement building, and fostering creative agency being prime amongst these).
Representing work undertaken between 2024-25, the six authors who feature in this takeover bring diverse approaches to the topic of queer creative health as artists, zine-makers and singers, as well as straight-up academics and PhD researchers (sometimes one and both).
In our Research Group, we held regular gatherings to cultivate collaborative ways of working that took place outside of the university setting (a precarious one for many, sometimes ‘in recovery’ from these pressurised zones of knowledge production, bringing varied experiences of marginality and rejection). Often, our challenge lay in identifying and expressing forms of community knowledge that were latent, or subject to omission or suppression.
QUEERCIRCLE itself represents something of a response to disappearance. The charity takes up three rooms in North Greenwich on a five-year lease from the Design District. Set up just after COVID-19 restrictions were lifted, we aimed to work at the “intersection of arts, health and social action”.
Place-based cartographies
The pandemic saw the closure of many LGBTQ+ spaces across London, an acceleration of a trend that had already seen nearly half close over the previous 10 years due to rising property prices and rents (Campkin and Marshall 2017). Responding to these multiple impacts, QUEERCIRCLE’s initial research findings suggested that there was a pressing need to ‘queer creative health’ since many of its underpinning assumptions don’t always serve LGBTQ+ people well (Jiang 2023).
The APPG Creative Health report suggested that ‘marginalised’ communities can especially benefit from creative health approaches and activities, mitigating against the ill effects of health inequalities (APPG 2017, 30). The need to ‘queer’ creative health, we propose, arises out of the unspecified contexts in which this work is imagined to take place. The organisation of services by way of Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) is held to rest on the benefits of a ‘place-based’, approach, one operating within local geographies, unfolding at ‘neighborhood’ level (Charles and Naylor 2022).
This place-based approach does not align with how LGBTQ+ communities form and thrive: as communities of interest, not those of place. Rather, the ‘counter mapping’ tools invented by digital creatives such as Lucas La Rochelle more usefully visualise and represent the fluid, community-generated LGBTQ+ experience in relation to physical space: ‘unfolding realities’, as they call these pinned moments on their ever-expanding website, forms of queer experience that are likely to ‘continue to be invalidated, contested, and erased’ elsewhere (Rochelle 2017).
Broken, harmful systems
Queer (creative) health initiatives in the UK unfold against various shrinkages and deprivations: the current backdrop of reduced NHS resources, with community health creation promoted at a time of ongoing austerity plus moral panic around trans lives (and the withdrawal of healthcare services for those in the trans community, specifically).
In tomorrow’s post, PJ Annand and Lucy Wood explore the balances at play between risk and comfort that come together when we try to deliberate ‘safe spaces’ through practice as well as policy. On Wednesday, LGBTQ+ mental health worker Lu Wilson looks at safe spaces specifically for trans young people, considering how time also relates to space and the lived experience of trans and gender non-conforming young people.
On Thursday, Anni Raw explores the role of making in the formation of any space designated ‘queer’ as we ‘craft connection’ with strangers who may (or may not be) ‘like us’. And on Friday Phoebe Eustance’s post moves the emphasis to more formal, containing social structures, speculating on the limits and potentials afforded by a queer institution.
Finishing the takeover off next week, on Monday singer Cas Olowoyo (stage name ‘Ellc’) describes a more embodied understanding of relational space, as expressed through the bodily instrument of the (gendered) voice. And a final summation is given by MJ Barker, who reflects on the synergies between these perspectives. They ask: what kinds of research cultures are needed to encompass and bring together different kinds of knowledge – held in the body and between people, as well as by wider political and economic infrastructures?
The full QUEERCIRCLE takeover will appear at this link as articles are published.
About the author
Dr Frances Williams is Health and Research Lead at QUEERCIRCLE and the author of the book When Was Arts in Health? A history of the present (Palgrave Macmillan 2023). She completed a PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2020, which looked at spatial understandings of the field of Arts in Health, especially around devolved territories and local government.
References
All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing. 2017. Creative Health: The Arts for Health and Wellbeing. Second Edition. House of Commons. https://ncch.org.uk/uploads/Creative_Health_Inquiry_Report_2017_-_Second_Edition.pdf.
All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing and the National Centre for Creative Health. 2023. Creative Health Review: How Policy can Embrace Creative Health. House of Commons. https://ncch.org.uk/creative-health-review. Accessed 19 August 2025.
Barker, MJ. 2023. Queer Creative Health Zine. QUEERCIRCLE. https://website-artlogicwebsite0206.artlogic.net/usr/library/documents/main/queer-creative-health-print-zine_web.pdf
Campkin, B. and L. Marshall. 2017. LGBTQ+ Cultural Infrastructure in London: Night Venues, 2006–present. UCL Urban Laboratory. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/sites/bartlett/files/LGBTQ_cultural_infrastructure_in_London_nightlife_venues_2006_to_the_present.pdf
Charles, A. and C. Naylor. 2022. Place-based partnerships explained. The Kings Fund. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/insight-and-analysis/long-reads/place-based-partnerships-explained#:~:text=Place%2Dbased%20partnerships%20exist%20to,services%20(see%20Figure%202). Accessed 19 August 2025.
Jiang, Y. 2023. Queering Creative Health: a community-informed exploration of queer health and well-being and its implications for creative health practice. Report. University College London and QUEERCIRCLE. https://website-artlogicwebsite0206.artlogic.net/usr/library/documents/main/queering-creative-health-report_web.pdf
Rochelle, Lucas L. 2017-ongoing. Queering the Map: a community-generated counter-mapping project for digitally archiving LGBTQ2IA+ experience in relation to physical space. https://lucaslarochelle.com/queering-the-map/. Accessed 19 August 2025.
