To wrap up 2024, our community champions share why they got involved with Queer Heritage South, what has happened with the project so far, and the things they have planned next! First up is Laura (she/they), our QTIBPoC Community Champion:

My name is Laura and I’m a queer person of mixed East Asian and European heritage. I’ve been working as the QTIBPoC Community Champion on the Queer Heritage South project.

I came to the project with no real knowledge or experience of heritage or archiving. It was my previous work with the QTIBPoC community in Brighton and Hove and my connections to people I think that made QHS want to work with me. 

For that reason my main goal when I started was that this was something that the community would benefit from and to really try and work in a way that worked for them. I’ve been learning about heritage along the way and I can now see what huge potential gaps there are and could be in queer archives. QTIBPoC voices aren’t really that present in Brighton and Hove’s history. What I’m keen for now, is that the current community and our voices don’t get forgotten. In whatever way feels right for us, we should be known and remembered in the future.

We’ve had a fabulously diverse array of sessions and I’ve loved them all being so different. I think partly because I’m learning too. I don’t think I can pick a favourite session as they are really hard to compare! We started with quite a radical session called Playing with the Archive [designed and facilitated by Baby Blue (they/them) and Amber (they/she)], which looked at some more unusual forms of archive and heritage, like gossip! That really made me think about the scope we have, especially with the flexibility that QHS has had so far. We can be present in whatever way we choose to - even if not everybody totally understands everything that gets archived. Our second session was a Show and Tell session where folks brought objects, photos and memories and we looked at the different ways we can talk about our memories and how to curate our stories. I loved the vastly different things that people brought in and loved hearing about them. I learnt some really beautiful things about people. Our third session was an online session called We Were Here Before, thinking more about what archives can be and also looking at existing archives that can be accessed online. It was really eye opening to see how user friendly (or not!) those platforms are as well as having a look at some of the things that are out there. Our last session was a trip to a Coast is Queer festival event called Telling Our Stories. I really loved hearing about the importance that publications have had and will have in the future. I was especially interested in the Lesbians Talk Issues pamphlet series that Nazmia Jamal was speaking about. And now I want to create a pamphlet series!