John Hays Hammond Jr. died 5 years before Pride Month was first celebrated in 1970. While it is impossible to know how our Museum’s founder would have specifically identified in the modern landscape of diverse Queer identities—ongoing research efforts at the Museum supports a clear acknowledgment that Hammond had intimate romantic relationships with both men and women throughout his life. Moreover, the inventor was but one individual thread in a fascinatingly vibrant tapestry of Queer contemporaries that stretched across the globe.
These people came together within the walls of Hammond Castle Museum and throughout the city of Gloucester. They were artists, movie stars, poets, musicians, playwrights, filmmakers, athletes, scientists, politicians, sailors and cab drivers. They were the wealthy scions of the world’s most prominent families, international celebrities, and the children of blue-collar workers from suburban Queens. More so than their diverse set of individual backgrounds and accomplishments, these remarkable people were part of a vital historical community.
Hammond Castle Museum is proud of our historic and continuing role as a space that celebrates the legacy of that Queer community and believes that exploring those legacies is a natural continuation of our founder’s educational mission to educate the public about history and the fine arts. Throughout June 2024, the Museum will honor Pride Month with a series of programs, beginning with the final entry in our May lecture series, and culminating in a month-long showcase of aspects of LGBT Pride to be found in the history of Hammond Castle Museum.
Special Events During Pride:
- Tuesday, May 28th: Lotta Dames, No Horses-The Life, Death, and Legacy of John Latouche
- Sunday, June 9: Abbadia Mare: A Night of Poetry & Pride
- Saturday, June 15: Hammond Castle Museum on Screen: Celebrating a Historic Legacy of Pride:
- 10 am – 3 pm: Bewitched Family-Friendly Screening
- 5 pm – 9:30 pm: Double Feature: Tell Me That You Love Me Junie Moon & The Rocky Horror Picture Show
Pride Month Mini-Exhibits:
On Fridays throughout June 2024, in honor of the City of Gloucester’s ongoing celebration of Pride Month, Hammond Castle Museum will be debuting a curated series of Pride-focused mini-exhibits. Each of these exhibits will highlight or celebrate the life and accomplishments of a different set of significant Queer figures who either visited the museum or were associated with its founder John Hays Hammond Jr. (b. 1888-d.1965).
5/31 – 6/6: The Innocents at Home: Harry Martin and John Latouche
This mini-exhibit focuses on the life and relationships of Harry Martin, as well as Martin and Hammond’s relationship during the final years of the inventor’s life, and utilizes archival materials including oral histories with Martin recorded at the Museum in the 1970s and a never before publicly displayed Ellsworth Kelly sketch from the Museum’s guest book. For the first time, Museum visitors will get to hear for themselves firsthand accounts of John Hays Hammond Jr. and his remarkable collection, in the words of one of the people who called the Museum home and knew its founder most intimately.
6/7 – 6/13: Maximus to Aquarius: Gerrit Lansing and Set Magazine
This mini-exhibit focuses on the contents of Set magazine, and the circle of remarkable Queer writers and artists that contributed to its production. It also features the first public display of a unique version of Abbadia Mare, a poem written by Lansing in the Museum’s guest book in 1959, illuminated by Martin and personally dedicated to Hammond. Through these materials, visitors will understand the cutting edge of Gloucester’s literary arts scene in the 1960s and get a sense of how Hammond—in the final years of his life—continued to support the next generation of Queer young people who shared his interests.
6/14 – 6/20: From Beauport to Fenway Court: A. Piatt Andrew, Henry Davis Sleeper, Isabella Stewart Gardner and Leslie Buswell
This mini-exhibit focuses on contextualizing Hammond’s relationship with Buswell as a part of a larger local community of Queer figures, including Andrew and Sleeper. Using newly digitized correspondence between Hammond and Buswell, visitors can, for the first time, get an understanding of the nature of these historical Queer relationships in the words of two men who were part of one, as well as a better understanding of an important aspect of local Queer history.
6/21 – 6/27: Anything Goes: Cafe Society and Lady Mendl
When you hear that Lady Mendl standing up
Now does a handspring landing up-
On her toes
Anything goes
Cole Porter
“Anything Goes” from Anything Goes 1934
This mini-exhibit will focus not just on Lady Mendl, but on the diverse international Queer community she represented, one which Hammond and his wife Irene Fenton Hammond interacted with often during their frequent trips abroad, in particular during the period in which the Museum was constructed and Hammond was acquiring the Museum’s collection. Utilizing Hammond’s diaries and correspondence visitors will learn about the history of this vibrant community, and what happened to it, from an insider’s perspective.
6/28 – 7/4: Sewing Circles: Natalie Hays Hammond, Alla Nazimova, and Queer Women of the Stage and Screen
This mini-exhibit will bring together aspects of Queer history and Women’s history with a focus on historical correspondence and surviving artistic work from these remarkable women to illuminate this curious subset of Hammond’s circle of friends, their relationships with one another, and how they fit into the broader tapestry of Queer society at the time.
