You don’t need to ‘Queer’ the Mary Rose

I have an idea for the Mary Rose museum in Portsmouth. My idea is for a Mary Rose Ultimate Experience – a funfair ride which replicates the experience of those 500 young boys and men as they sank with the great Tudor warship. There’ll be no need for expensive visuals because it would have been dark down there below deck and I’m hoping the passengers on my ride will be flung violently from side to side because first aboard will be the director and trustees of the museum and there they will have to stay until they promise never again to publish anything remotely like the piece that has just appeared on the museum website.

The blog is prominently displayed on the site and its title is: ‘How can we understand the Mary Rose’s collection of personal objects through a queer lens?’

The answer to the question is that we can’t, of course, because you don’t ‘understand’ anything through a lens, queer or otherwise.