Murals of Norfolk: a bisexual artist celebrating queer history
In Norfolk's historic Ghent neighbourhood, a stretch of brick wall has become a living archive of queer resilience. Painted across once-bare facades are figures lifted from letters, photographs and oral histories gathered from local elders, drag performers and activists. The hand behind this archive belongs to Jordan Castillo, a bisexual muralist who treats the city's walls as a public journal.
Castillo's path from small-town Virginia to the harbour city's arts scene mirrors the layered histories they now paint. Childhood visits to Norfolk with their grandmother, a former navy nurse, opened an early window to the diversity of the city's neighbourhoods. After studying painting in Richmond and spending formative years in Sydney's Inner West scene, Castillo returned to Virginia with a sharpened sense of how public imagery can quietly shape belonging.
Roots between two coasts
Castillo grew up reading zines borrowed from older cousins and sketching portraits during long bus rides between rural counties. Bisexuality, they often say, was the least labelled part of their identity for years, overshadowed by questions about class and regional accent. Moving to Sydney for a partner's academic posting brought a new vocabulary: attending Fair Day at Victoria Park, swimming at Coogee and catching queer film retrospectives at the Sydney Film Festival reshaped how they thought about visibility.
Back in the United States, the experience lingered. Castillo began volunteering with a youth homelessness project in Norfolk, where many young people identified somewhere on the bisexual or pansexual spectrum. The conversations were direct, often raw, and they inspired the first wall commission in 2019. The artist has described that early project as a dare to put the word on the wall before someone else could erase it.
Painting the archive
Each mural in Castillo's Norfolk series is preceded by months of archival research. Local LGBTQ archives, libraries and church groups have shared photographs and letters that rarely appear in mainstream histories. The artist sketches from these sources, then reimagines the figures at full scale, often in collaboration with community members who pose for the final compositions.
The process borrows from techniques Castillo observed in Melbourne's Hosier Lane and Sydney's Newtown graffiti corridors, where artists work shoulder to shoulder with passersby. Scaffolding, primer, then layers of aerosol and brushwork become a kind of public rehearsal. Neighbours bring tea; cyclists stop to ask about colours. The wall, Castillo explains, belongs to whoever sees it first.
Castillo treats the finished mural as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end. Audio tours accessed by QR code sit alongside each work, a feature borrowed from the walking tours the artist joined in Adelaide's Hutt Street during a 2018 residency. The audio layers mean the murals travel beyond Norfolk, listened to by curious audiences who may never stand in front of the walls.
Norfolk's queer past on public walls
Norfolk carries a layered queer history that often goes unmentioned in tourism guides. The city hosted early gay rights demonstrations in the 1970s, and its naval presence created unique social worlds where sexuality, race and class intersected in particular ways. Castillo's murals aim to surface these stories without smoothing them into nostalgic celebration.
The 1989 candlelight vigil, for example, marked a turning point after a hate crime in the Ghent area. Painted as a slow procession of figures, the mural avoids triumphal imagery in favour of grief and solidarity. Similar candlelit gatherings still happen in Australian cities, including the annual vigil in Melbourne's Fitzroy Gardens, reminding visitors that public space is rarely neutral.
Religious communities form another strand of the archive. Queer-affirming congregations have long gathered across the state, and resources such as friendly churches and spiritual communities document how these groups sustain LGBTQ life. Castillo has worked closely with several local pastors to ensure the murals reflect the breadth of spiritual expression, including bisexual and queer Muslim voices that often receive little public attention.
The murals completed so far capture these strands in different ways.
| Mural title | Location in Norfolk | Year completed | Subject and historical reference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Letters from the Lantern | Granby Street, downtown | 2019 | 1970s lesbian correspondence circle |
| The Harbour Carriers | Chelsea waterfront | 2021 | Dock workers and LGBTQ union organising |
| Voices from the Pulpit | Ghent residential block | 2022 | Queer-affirming congregations since the 1980s |
| The March Remembered | Town Point Park edge | 2023 | Commemoration of 1989 candlelight vigil |
| Saturday Nights at the NorVa | Granby Street alley | 2024 | Drag and music history of the 1980s–2000s |
Each work now belongs to the city's public memory, even as developers and weather threaten the painted surfaces.
Community, commissions and the cost of paint
Murals of this ambition do not pay for themselves. Castillo funds projects through a mix of city grants, private commissions and small online fundraisers. Australian readers will recognise the financial choreography from how local creators rely on mixed income streams, including platforms that reward engagement, such as the PayPal bonus review Australia enthusiasts often discuss when setting up international transfers for cross-cultural collaborations.
Volunteer days are central to the work. Local high schoolers, retirees and queer sports teams have rolled primer onto walls beside the artist. The social dimension matters as much as the finished image. In Brisbane and Perth, similar mural projects have used community painting days to bring together newly arrived families and longer-term residents, and Castillo has consulted with organisers in both cities about best practice. The shared labour, Castillo believes, is what keeps the murals from becoming decorative backdrops.
Funding remains precarious. Late invoices from city partners and rising insurance costs have eaten into the modest budget for each new wall. Castillo has spoken openly about how bisexual artists in particular often slip through funding categories designed for either gay or straight applicants, a bureaucratic quirk mirrored in older Australian equalities data that counted only same-sex couples.
A wall that reads back
Castillo's practice treats the city as a conversation partner rather than a canvas. New works are often paired with public panels, zine launches and small exhibitions in queer-owned cafes along Colley Avenue. Visitors are encouraged to add their own reflections in notebooks kept at each location, an approach borrowed from community archive projects in Hobart's North Hobart and Sydney's Marrickville.
There is also a digital dimension. Listings pages such as the Q Pages directory help connect readers with allied businesses, events and creative practitioners, creating a wider ecosystem around the physical murals. For Castillo, the directory represents the kind of infrastructure that lets queer art survive between major exhibitions. Visibility, they often say, is a long project rather than a single unveiling.
Local politics shape the work in subtle ways. Virginia's nondiscrimination statutes, updated in 2020 to include sexual orientation and gender identity in housing and employment, give the murals a legal footing that some earlier activist art did not have. Castillo draws a careful line between celebration and protest, conscious that a single painted wall can be both.
Where the work goes next
The next commission will sit on a wall facing a new transit line, where thousands of commuters will pass daily. Castillo plans to integrate braille panels and audio descriptions from the outset, an accessibility-first approach inspired by work seen in Adelaide and by Indigenous-led public art projects across Australia. Family, friendship and chosen kin will all appear, reflecting the artist's bisexual community in its full complexity.
Conversations around queer-friendly baby shower planning, for instance, have informed how Castillo thinks about intergenerational queer family imagery, celebrating the many shapes parenthood and caregiving can take. Wedding photography and family portrait projects sit alongside the murals as another way the artist explores love in public.
Further ahead, Castillo is in early talks with curators in Adelaide and Cairns about a touring exhibition of sketches and audio recordings. The aim is to bring Norfolk's queer archive into Australian galleries, just as Australian living histories have quietly shaped the Norfolk walls.
The murals remind anyone walking past that history is rarely written only in books. A bisexual artist in Virginia has turned brick and paint into a layered, accessible and ongoing record of queer community. Visibility grows when it is shared, painted and spoken aloud in places where everyone passes by.