Edinburgh is known for its gruesome past and ghost tours with visitors taking any opportunity for a scare. Hannah Mackay has launched her own tour that provides a fascinating and refreshing flavour of the city’s history.
Mackay started the tours over summer. “I started with a couple of short YouTube videos and for Pride Month I decided to do one on Edinburgh’s LGBTQ+ history.
“People seemed to enjoy them so I decided to start filming longer tours as paid content to try and replace some of my lost income from guiding this year, as obviously there haven’t been many tourists.”
Mackay’s LGBTQ+ history tour is her second full-length tour following her debut Hidden Secrets of the Royal Mile.
Although the tours are only an hour-long, Mackay explained they take a long time to research and film. She is currently planning a women’s history tour as well.
Hannah Mackay is exploring the lesser-known aspects of Edinburgh’s history with LGBTQ+ tours
“I really just wanted to do something to keep myself busy and keep my guiding skills sharp. I really enjoy researching these things and digging up new stories to tell, so this year has actually been a brilliant opportunity to use all my free time to look into the things we don’t always talk about on tours.
“For the LGBTQ+ history tour specifically, I really wanted to explore some of the stories that have been left out of the historical narrative over the years. Some of the people I ended up featuring in my tour are famous historical figures who I had heard of, but I had no idea they were members of the LGBTQ+ community before I started researching.
“I think it’s so important that people know these kinds of stories and understand that there have always been LGBTQ+ people. They just often had to hide who they were, so their stories can be harder to find.
“The most important thing I want people to understand from learning about this history is that LGBTQ+ people have always been part of society. There were always gay people and bi people and trans people and all kinds of people. But for most of history, in the western world anyway, they had to hide who they really were. People would have been in social and physical danger if folk knew they were LGBTQ+.
“That’s one reason these stories are so overlooked. Even when someone was writing in their own diary, they might be afraid to write down anything that could out them if someone else read it. It’s even harder to find out stories about lesbians and trans people in history, because gay men were often prosecuted for having sex with men, so there’s more of a historical record of their existence.
“Some of the difficulty comes from people hiding their own identities through necessity and self-preservation, and then some of it comes from these stories being deliberately erased from history or just left out of the narrative.”
Mackay also explained the difficulties of operating a job based in tourism during lockdown. “Even when it has been technically possible to run tours within the restrictions, it’s really tough for the kind of work I normally do,” she said.
“I’m a Blue Badge guide, which means I have a tour guiding qualification with the Scottish Tourist Guides Association. Most of us are freelance, so we normally work with private clients and the majority of my jobs would usually be with Americans and Canadians.
“In normal years, I often do tours for things like educational travel groups or conferences coming to Edinburgh, and obviously that market doesn’t really exist this year.”
Mackay’s virtual tours are available on her website.
Image Credit: Hannah Mackay
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