LGBTQ+ History Month: Heather Savage on preserving histories of queer protest and nightlife

This LGBTQ+ History Month, we spoke to Camberwell graduate Heather Savage, who recently graduated from MA Illustration. We caught up with Heather to discuss her graduation project Misfits Pageant and her experience at UAL.

Hi Heather! How would you describe your creative practice?

As an Illustrator, Director, Educator and Curator, I see illustration as event-making, critical education and filmmaking. Alongside this, I make DIY, overly camp drawings, prints and murals filled with saturated, surreal characters. My work is humorous, weird, playful and rooted in joy as a form of resistance.

I work with queer archives at the Bishopsgate Institute and MayDay Rooms, which inform my practice and have helped develop my critical position as an Activist Illustrator. My work is heavily fuelled by collaboration and includes directing music videos, co-curating exhibitions and facilitating participatory workshops with communities. I use illustration as a way of responding to modern fascism, not by illustrating archives literally, but by activating them through events, workshops, moving image and collective archiving.

What were the highlights of your experience studying at Camberwell?

Studying MA Illustration at Camberwell radically reshaped how I make work and how I situate myself within illustration. Learning to monoprint directly onto a screen through the printmaking facilities completely transformed my visual language and methods. Being taught this process by technicians such as Ines Fernandez de Cordova opened up new ways of thinking about instinctive, DIY printmaking, repetition and making through playing.

Tutorials with Sinead Evans and Fred Andersson were particularly formative. Their knowledge of queer culture pushed me towards working with queer archives at the Bishopsgate Institute and helped me understand how my interest in nightlife, community and protest could be articulated through events and socially engaged practice. I was also deeply supported in developing moving image work. Experimenting with editing while making, with guidance from technician John Inch, allowed me to treat film as another illustration tool rather than a separate discipline. Overall, the MA gave me critical grounding and confidence to bring together archives, collaboration and community-led practice.

You’ve described yourself as being interested in "queer archives, protest aesthetics and the politics of partying." Why is preserving histories of queer protest and nightlife important to you?

Preserving histories of queer protest and nightlife feels increasingly urgent in the current political climate, with the global rise of fascism and the violent resurgence of transphobic legislation. As a queer woman educated in the shadow of Section 28, I am very aware of how legislation shapes lives, silences histories and attempts to erase communities. The echoes of that era are still being felt and are now repeating themselves in new forms across the UK and beyond.

Queer heritage is deeply rooted in party culture, drag and DIY ballrooms. These spaces have historically offered refuge, experimentation and joy during times of extreme precarity. Nightlife is not escapism alone: It is where community is forged, identities are played with and collective strength is built. Preserving these histories matters because joy, silliness and celebration have always been radical tools. Pride has always been a protest. Party and protest have always been linked in queer culture.

Tell us about Misfits Pageant and how the idea came to be realised? How did you find the venue for the event, The Island?

Misfits Pageant emerged from a combination of archival research and wanting to respond to queer history through action. After visiting Tate Modern’s Leigh Bowery exhibition in 2025, I was excited by the documentation of Andrew Logan’s ‘Alternative Miss World, Earth 1986’ looking at how extravagance, silliness and play functioned as resistance during the AIDS crisis. At the same time, I was researching queer party archives at the Bishopsgate Institute, specifically ‘Pubs + Clubs’ (Rainsford, 1988), which showed queer people during Section 28 finding joy in drag costumes and building community through nightlife.

I decided to realise this research as a live event: a queer drag beauty pageant staged as both protest and celebration, fundraising for the Queer Youth Art Collective. The Island in Bristol was an essential part of the work. Before moving to London, I had a studio there and had collaborated with them on a queer club mural and exhibition titled ‘New Traditions: Modern Folklore in the UK & Ireland’ (2024). The former police cells, once used to incarcerate queer people under homophobic laws, became a powerful site for queering and reclamation. The event centred cryptids as a costume theme and was collaboratively produced with queer DJs, performers and artists, creating a multi-perspectival, non-hierarchical archive of collective joy, protest and remembrance.

How did you get involved with Queer Youth Art Collective and what is it about their mission that resonates with you?

I became involved with Queer Youth Art Collective through Fred Andersson, one of the co-founders and also my MA tutor. When deciding where the Misfits Pageant fundraiser should be directed, supporting queer and trans youth felt vital, particularly at such a volatile political moment.

Their mission resonates deeply with me because they provide free creative workshops and sustained support for queer people aged 18 to 28: something that did not exist for me growing up. Their work fosters resilience and creates community through art-making, functioning as a form of graphic medicine and collective care. Supporting them felt politically necessary but also extremely meaningful on a personal level.

Are there any figures in LGBTQ+ history, or perhaps someone making history now, that stand out for you as an inspiration?

I am inspired by people who build queer culture through pedagogy, writing, performance and collective worlding, rather than through individual visibility alone. In education, Fred Andersson has been a significant influence on my practice. Their approach centres confidence and clarity, supporting students to trust their own ideas while learning how to communicate them visually in socially engaged ways. Their work, alongside founding the Queer Youth Art Collective, is always so exciting to see, not compromising on their politics and instead centring it, in a playful and accessible way.

My thinking is also shaped by queer writers such as Shon Faye and Sacha Coward, whose work opens up ways of understanding trans life, British queer history and queerness through folklore and storytelling. I am deeply inspired by figures who created queer subcultures as forms of resistance and care, from Pepper LaBeija and ballroom culture to Paul Reubens’ Pee-wee Herman, whose commitment to worlding, craft and playful surrealism showed how silliness can be radical. In film, John Waters and Tourmaline influence how I think about documenting queer life through humour, excess, sensitivity and archival storytelling. For contemporary protest, Lambrini Girls stand out as queer anti-fascist activists, using anger, humour and DIY performance as tools of resistance.