The Aberystwyth Queer Assembly

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The Aberystwyth Queer Assembly brings together a collection of LGBTQIA+ authors and local academics to explore the vital intersection of queer literature and professional research. Presented in partnership with Gayberystwyth Books' Queer Literature Quarterly and Project LUNA, this event provides a unique platform for voices of vision to share the stories and studies that are shaping a more inclusive future for Wales. 

Matt Townsend is an academic at Aberystwyth University. An award-winning and published clinical academic, Matt's research spans public health, death and dying, and queer cultural competence. An openly gay academic, Matt is currently LGBTQ+ lead at Aberystwyth where his work on embedding queer inclusivity within nurse education is positioning Aberystwyth University as a centre of excellence for LGBTQ+ nurse education. Matt's research interests include: queer end-of-life care; transgender dementia care; queer temporality and absent childhoods; transcultural nursing practise; and quality improvement and change methodology in healthcare.

Dying with Pride: A camp romp through queer death.

In this session, Matt Townsend will be discussing the book that he is writing where he interrogates death not as a purely biological endpoint, but as a socially mediated, culturally coded and performatively enacted experience. Situated at the intersection of queer theory, end-of-life care and critical nursing praxis, Matt's research challenges dominant heteronormative narratives that render queer lives - and deaths - both invisible and unintelligible. Dying with Pride draws on theoretical frameworks of performativity, camp, and linguistic coding, exploring how queer communities have historically reimagined mortality through humour, subversion, and shared language. Through weaving of personal narrative, clinical insight and critical literature, Matt examines the tension between institutional healthcare structures and the lived realities of queer individuals at the end of life, inviting practitioners, scholars, and readers alike to reconsider death as a sense of identity, resistance, and ultimately meaning-making.

Holly Stars is a drag queen comedian and writer. She wrote the hit West End murder mystery play, Death Drop, and the OutFlix series, Holly Stars: Inspirational. She performs stand up comedy and storytelling around the UK.

Holly is the author of the Misty Divine Mystery novels, published worldwide by Penguin Random House. The first in the series, Murder in the Dressing Room, was released in 2025. Missing in Soho is the highly anticipated second installment, published in 2026. Holly also narrates the audiobooks.

Naomi Pearce is a writer. Her first novel, Innominate was published by MOIST in 2023 with Iain Sinclair describing the book as ‘a classic of local archaeology’. Her writing on affective and embodied archival methods has been published in Gestures: A Body of Work, Manchester University Press and a special issue of the British Art Studies journal Queer Art in Britain Since the 1980s, both 2025. Recent live projects include Aberration's Out of the Frame at National Library Wales, Aberystwyth and Experimentica 2024, in collaboration with Stuart Middleton, Chapter, Cardiff. She teaches interdisciplinary practice and art history at Aberystwyth University. 

Thomas has presented at a number of conferences and recently organised an LGBTQ+ conference in Aberystwyth University titled “French and Francophone Philosophers and the Development of LGBTQIA+ Movements in the 20th Century.” He is also currently working on an edited collection on LGBTQ French philosophers and LGBTQIA+ movements in the same period. 

His current research sits at the intersection of existentialist philosophy and queer studies, and I work in particular on what I describe as “queer forms of straightness.” His talk is centred on the partnership between Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, revisiting it through the lens of what might be called str8hood - heterosexuality understood less as a fixed identity and more as a socially defaulted relational structure.

It will explore how their famously unconventional relationship (non-cohabiting, open, often described as a form of friendship, and marked by polyamory and disagreement) complicates the idea of a normative heterosexual couple. Drawing on existentialist thought, how their work destabilises essentialist understandings of sexuality, opening space for thinking about sexuality as something lived, negotiated, and contingent. Also touching on how their intellectual and personal trajectories and their respective queer epiphanies.