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.
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.
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.
The Aberystwyth University School of Nursing Special Interest Group, or SIG, are a student-led research group aiming to raise awareness around the impact of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) on adult populations, and the need for trauma-informed care (TIC) to be embedded in national healthcare policy. This ongoing work is extremely important broadly, but particularly when considering minority groups who will access healthcare, and for whom trauma-informed care is particularly necessary. Our aim in this short presentation is to introduce the idea of ACEs and Trauma informed Care, and the specific impact both have on the LGBTQ+ community, especially as it relates to the recent, worrying enshrinement in law of trans-exclusionary practices, and how those might impact members of the LGBTQ+ community when accessing health services.
Theo (he/him) graduated from a Master's degree in Sex, Gender and Sexualities last year, where he had the opportunity to explore queer history and theory through a multidisciplinary lens. His dissertation focused on experiences of queer rural life in Ceredigion using excerpts from the LGBT magazine archive. He is passionate about rural queer life, particularly in Wales, and finding ways to connect the community in Ceredigion. In his undergraduate degree in psychology at Aberystwyth University, Theo's dissertation looked at the psychological benefits of queer representation that is widely accessible, positive and optimistic, through analysis of reactions to the first season of Heartstopper premiering on Netflix. Outside of academia, Theo is a grants team lead, Co-administrator and manager of Trans Aid Cymru, and a homelessness support worker. He can also be found reading, reciting dinosaur facts, and swimming in the sea.
Ceredigion CWIAR Stories from the Archive
Theo will be presenting some of the stories he discovered in his research into queer rural experiences in Ceredigion, spanning four decades of LGBT magazine entries. He'll explore the lasting presence of Ceredigion's queer community, from lesbian mayors to quiet icons. Please note this talk will have some very minor mentions to sexual topics, and some discussions of prejudice, but is largely a positive celebration of our community.
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.
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