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At the start of LGBT history month in February, the government announced it would pardon 49,000 men of sexual offences for homosexuality. While this is an important nod to justice, it is also a reminder of everyday injustices suffered by LGBT people in Britain when it was still a crime to be gay.

Nearly 50 years ago, in July 1967, the government voted to partly decriminalise homosexuality for men over 21-years-old. The illegality of homosexuality had ruined countless lives and careers – even of those who were not actually convicted of a crime.

One of those who fell foul of the law two decades earlier was the distinguished art historian and curator of Leicester Art Gallery, Trevor Thomas. His story is indicative of how others were treated and cautionary of how current injustices inflict harm.

Thomas was a great supporter of German expressionist art, which ultimately resulted in Leicester possessing the best collection in the UK – around 500 pieces. In 1944, he organised a renowned exhibition at the Leicester Gallery. He had helped Tekla Hess, who was persecuted in Nazi Germany and her son Hans, who became Thomas’s assistant, to settle in Leicester. The Hess art collection formed the core of the exhibition. Patrick Boylan, director of Leicester Museums between 1972 to 1990, recalled that the exhibition was highly unusual and one of the first in the UK to show the work of German Expressionist artists, some of whom were in exile, during World War II.

Falling foul of anti-gay laws

But Thomas’s quiet homosexuality soon got him into severe trouble. By 1946 there was a significant, very discrete, gay community in Leicester, including prominent people in public life and the arts. Most of the time, gay men were ignored by the police, but at times “cottaging” – anonymous sex between two men – could be severely punished. In an interview with the LGBT Oral History Project, Boylan recalled that Thomas and another man were arrested for allegedly looking at each other in a local public lavatory.

Thomas was ill-advised by his lawyers to plead guilty to “corrupting a young man”. But he was given a glowing character reference by Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, who had expected Thomas to succeed him. But it was to no avail. Thomas was subjected to a tirade from the bench and thrown into a cell for four days. He was not actually convicted of any offence, though he was “bound over” – a punishment similar to an antisocial behaviour order today – to keep the peace for 12 months. But he lost his job.

Simon Lake, the gallery’s current curator, has explained how quickly Thomas was ostracised, receiving his dismissal notice from the assistant town clerk on the steps of the town hall.

Following his brush with the law, Thomas, like many gay men at that time, visited a psychiatrist, who advised him to marry – or, like the mathematician Alan Turing undergo “cure” treatment. Thomas did get married, and had two sons, though he later divorced.

Thomas lived abroad from 1949 to 1960, holding a number of prestigious posts, including with UNESCO in Paris and professor at what is now University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York. Returning to England in 1960, he became art director for Gordon Fraser greetings cards and from the early 1970s an active and respected figure in the Campaign for Homosexual Equality.

Plath’s neighbour

Thomas lived for a time in the flat below the American poet Sylvia Plath and her two children in north London. Their relationship was uneasy to begin with – partly, at least, because Plath had secured the larger flat that Thomas had hoped to rent.

Later, though, they developed a friendship of sorts. One afternoon, Thomas recalls in a short, privately published memoir, that they were reading the Observer, when Thomas chanced upon a review of The Bell Jar, by a certain Victoria Lucas. When Thomas said he thought it looked interesting, and that he intended to get a copy, Plath owned up to the authorship.

Thomas was the last to see Plath alive. She borrowed some airmail stamps from him on the eve of her death, but he was not aware of the tragedy until the arrival of the emergency services the following day, as he had himself been overcome by gas fumes. He died in 1993. His life reminds us of the invisible persecution suffered by LGBT people in the UK.

ISLAMABAD — 

A suicide gun-and-bomb attack on a courthouse in northwestern Pakistan Tuesday killed at least seven people and wounded 30 others.

Police and witnesses said three gunmen wearing suicide vests stormed the courthouse in the town of Charsadda and lobbed hand grenades to try to enter the main building.

District police chief Sohail Khalid told reporters security guards swiftly challenged the assailants, prompting two of them to detonate their vests during the gunfight while the third attacker was gunned down.

“They tried to enter the courts. At first they attacked with hand grenades and pistols. The police retaliated for about 15 or 20 minutes, and all the suicide bombers exploded after they were hit by the police,” said Khalid

A lawyer, policemen and civilians were among the dead, police and hospital officials said.

A spokesman for Jamaat-ul Ahrar, a breakaway faction of the Pakistani Taliban militant group, claimed responsibility for the attack.

A fresh wave of terrorist attacks is gripping Pakistan and Jammat-ul Ahrar, or JuA, as well as the mainstream Pakistani Taliban have taken credit for being behind most of the violence.

The surge in militant attacks has left more than 120 people dead and hundreds of others wounded within the last two weeks.

Local affiliates of Islamic State, however, have claimed Thursday’s suicide bombing of a famous Sufi shrine in southern Sindh province. The blast killed at least 90 devotees and wounded more than 300 others.

Pakistani security forces have since responded to the spike in violence by unleashing a nationwide crackdown on suspected militants across the country, killing more than 100 and detaining 1300 others.

Pakistan has also closed border crossings with Afghanistan and enhanced troop presence there, saying Jamaat-ul Ahrar and other anti-state groups have masterminded the violence from their bases in the neighboring country.

The Afghan government has denied the charges.

CANNON BALL, NORTH DAKOTA — 

As dawn breaks over an encampment that was once home to thousands of people protesting the Dakota Access oil pipeline, a few hundred holdouts rise for another day of resistance.

They aren’t deterred by the threat of flooding, nor by declarations from state and federal authorities that they must leave by Wednesday or face possible arrest. They’re determined to remain and fight a pipeline they maintain threatens the very sanctity of the land.

“If we don’t stand now, when will we?” said Tiffanie Pieper of San Diego, who has been in the camp most of the winter.

Protest started in August

Protesters have been at the campsite since August to fight the $3.8 billion pipeline that will carry oil from North Dakota through South Dakota and Iowa to a shipping point in Illinois. Dallas-based Energy Transfer Partners began work on the last big section of the pipeline this month after the Army gave it permission to lay pipe under a reservoir on the Missouri River. The protest camp is on Army Corp of Engineers land nearby.

FILE – Protesters block highway 1806 in Mandan, North Dakota, during a protest against plans to pass the Dakota Access pipeline near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, Nov. 23, 2016.

The protests have been led by Native American tribes, particularly the Standing Rock Sioux and Cheyenne River Sioux, whose reservation is downstream. They say the pipeline threatens drinking water and cultural sites. ETP disputes that.

Faced with the prospect of spring flooding, some protesters are considering moving to higher ground, though not necessarily off the federal land. Some may move to the Standing Rock Reservation, where the Cheyenne River Sioux is leasing land to provide camping space even though Standing Rock Sioux Chairman Dave Archambault has urged protesters to leave.

“We have the same goals,” Cheyenne River Chairman Harold Frazier said of himself and Archambault. “We don’t agree on whether or not the water protectors should be on the ground.”

No camp re-entry after Wednesday

On Monday, North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum talked with Archambault on the telephone about efforts to clean up and vacate the protest camp, Burgum’s office said. Burgum and Archambault both stressed the importance of keeping lines of communication open, including a one-page flyer that the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs will distribute in the camp, reminding protesters that the main camp will be evacuated at 2 p.m. Wednesday and re-entry will not be allowed, Burgum’s office said.

More than 230 truckloads of debris have been hauled out as of Monday, according to the governor’s office.

Those urging the protesters to leave say they’re concerned about possible flooding in the area as snow melts.

“The purpose of this is to close the land to ensure no one gets harmed,” said Corps Capt. Ryan Hignight.

Trash waits to be hauled away at the Dakota Access oil pipeline protest camp as a National Guard Humvee monitors the camp from a nearby hilltop, Feb. 16, 2017.

Debris from camp a concern

One concern is that floodwaters could wash tons of trash and debris at the encampment into the nearby rivers.

“One of the biggest environmental threats to the Missouri is the camp itself,” Burgum said.

Many in camp think authorities are exaggerating the flood threat and trying to turn public sentiment against them.

“They’re talking like it will be a flood that will wipe out all of existence,” said Luke Black Elk, a Cheyenne River Sioux from South Dakota. Some flooding is likely, he said, but “most of it won’t be that bad.”

The camp has been the site of numerous and sometimes violent clashes between police and protesters who call themselves “water protectors,” with more than 700 arrests. The camp’s population has dwindled as the pipeline battle has largely moved into the courts.

Bryce Peppard, from Oregon, is one of few remaining at the Dakota Access oil pipeline protest camp.

Protesters won’t make it easy

Protesters who remain say they’re prepared to be arrested, but will remain peaceful.

“We’ll make it difficult for them to handcuff us, but there will be no forceful opposition,” said Bryce Peppard of Oregon.

The Corps and the governor say they would rather there were no arrests.

“The ideal situation is zero arrests are made because everybody figures out that it’s not a place where you want to be when the flood starts to happen,” Burgum said.

During the last 13 years of his life, Andy Warhol made 610 time capsules. The artist stuffed these parcels with found objects and everyday ephemera, before consigning them to storage.

When the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh started to carefully exhume and catalogue their contents, they discovered that the boxes contained everything from newspaper articles, junk mail, and toenail clippings, through to source photographs for projects, letters for commissions, and even the occasional unsold artwork. The last intact time capsule was opened in 2014 by an anonymous bidder who paid US$30,000 for the privilege. It seems safe to say that, 30 years on from his unexpected death at the age of 58 in 1987, Warhol’s work still has secrets to reveal.

This is despite the fact that Warhol has become one of the most well known artists in the world, with endless books and essays devoted to him. His early paintings of the ubiquitous Campbell’s soup cans and iconic silkscreen images of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe are now instantly recognisable. Warhol currently enjoys an enviable combination of popular appeal, market success and critical recognition. His work is widely agreed to hold an important – and, if anything, growing – place in histories of post-1945 artistic production.

The Factory

The latter status stems in particular from Warhol’s experimentation in avant-garde film, with works like Sleep (1963), Blow Job (1963) and Empire (1964). Sleep, famously, has a running time of 521 minutes, and consists of long take footage that shows Warhol’s friend and sometime lover John Giorno sleeping. To make the film, Warhol combined 22 shots, during each of which he homed in on different parts of Giorno’s supine form, from his face to his buttocks. The result is an obsessively voyeuristic film, the overtly boring quality of which paradoxically underlines the intense fascination that the object of desire can hold for an observer.

The cast lists for Warhol’s films, many of which were made at The Factory – the name Warhol gave his New York studio – read like a who’s who of the city’s alternative art scene in the 1960s and 1970s. They feature figures from the worlds of avant-garde film, performance and literature such as Jack Smith, Jill Johnston, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Gerard Malanga and Taylor Mead. The Factory itself performed an important networking function, becoming a place for people to be seen as much as for work to be made.

It was also an artwork in its own right. Warhol covered the walls of its first incarnation, which became known as the Silver Factory, in aluminium foil and silver paint, while the overarching concept of The Factory as a creative crucible enabled Warhol to manufacture the “superstars” that appeared in his productions, such as Edie Sedgwick and Ondine, by bringing individuals together and then featuring them in his productions. The Factory provided the stage on which Warhol developed a complex artistic persona that played with the celebrity status of the artist, and with the notion of the artist as impresario, models that practitioners from Tracy Emin to Jeff Koons continue to mine productively.

Experimentation

Warhol’s experimentation also expanded into performance. Between 1966 and 1967 he organised a series of multimedia events in collaboration with the Velvet Underground and Nico under the name Exploding Plastic Inevitable (EPI). The EPI immersed its audiences in frenetic environments of slide projections, sound, and strobe lighting. These sensory assaults were disorientating and destabilising, and have come to be understood as radical uses of technology and media.

In a very different instance of artistic collaboration, Warhol let the groundbreaking choreographer Merce Cunningham use his work Silver Clouds (1966) as the scenography for Cunningham’s 1968 dance RainForest. Silver Clouds consists of pillow-shaped Mylar balloons filled with helium that gently float around any given space. In RainForest, the dancers have to negotiate their unpredictable trajectories. The Silver Clouds were themselves developed in conjunction with the engineer Billy Klüver, who headed up the organisation Experiments in Art and Technology during the 1960s.

It is partly this openness to experimentation and collaboration that continues to ensure critical interest in Warhol, but his engagement with sexuality and gender is equally significant. The essays in the 1996 book Pop Out: Queer Warhol exemplify the ways in which Warhol’s work itself, together with his performance of his artistic identity, have had significant ramifications for understandings of the body, queer art histories and sexual politics.

Warhol’s reputation has not been unassailable. A dip in the art market in the 1990s led to prices for his works falling, while accusations of misattribution have been levelled at the Andy Warhol Foundation. Yet three decades on from his death, it often seems as if there are as many versions of Warhol as there are audiences.

While it might be the success of his works at auction that make headlines, it is the ideas, creative provocations, and the artist’s own studied resistance to interpretation throughout his interviews and writings which ensure that audiences remain intrigued.