Playing Offside: The Huxleys’ Bad Sports at Redcliffe Art Gallery
Walking into Bad Sports at Redcliffe Art Gallery felt like wandering onto a sporting field overtaken by camp humour and defiantly queer self-expression. White court lines run across the tennis-green walls, framing seventeen large-scale photographs of The Huxleys leaping, wrestling, posing, and sprawling through different sporting scenes. Their costumes are pure Huxleys: sparkling, sculptural, and meticulously over-the-top, making their bodies read less as athletes than as surreal mascots. At first, the exhibition feels fun and flamboyant, full of cheeky titles and exaggerated poses. But the humour sits close to something more vulnerable: the experience of growing up queer in a culture where sport is so tightly bound to masculinity and belonging.
