Rooms With a View: Seeing Victorian-Era Boston through Queer Eyes

The Red Study

This blog post is a preview of an article that originally appeared in the Boston Pride Guide 2018.
Be sure to follow the link at the end of the preview to read the rest of the article. 

As you wind your way up the staircase of the Gibson House Museum, you leave behind the public spaces of this elegant Back Bay townhouse and enter the family’s private quarters. The third floor was formerly the master bedroom suite—two separate bedrooms linked by a shared bathroom, as was common in wealthy 19^th-century homes—of Charles Hammond Gibson, Sr. and Rosamond Warren Gibson, from their marriage in 1871 until Charles’s death in 1916.

What used to be Charles Gibson, Sr.’s bedroom is now the Red Study. It’s an apt name. The carpet is crimson; the walls and drapes a rust-red. The room is packed tightly with furniture: armchairs—also red—by the small fireplace, a desk, and several tables. Even a sofa is tucked in. In the years following Charles, Sr.’s death, this room became the domain of Charles Hammond Gibson, Jr. Known by his family as “Charlie,” he was the second of Charles and Rosamond’s three children, born in 1874. We can learn much about Charlie simply by looking at the objects that fill this brooding, close space: his books on the desk, with several ashtrays nearby; his portable projector on the center table; framed letters from American and British notables, thanking him for his thoughtful words; a memento from the Revolutionary War. Charlie’s story is both at the heart of the museum—he was, after all, the museum’s first curator—and shrouded in some mystery, as his status as a lifelong bachelor provoked some rumor and conjecture over the years.

-Meghan Gelardi Holmes, Curator

To read the rest of this article, visit: Boston Pride Guide 2018.