437 items

• Film Heritage Volunteering opportunity: Before Stonewall an LGBT Oral History Project
  
• Revealing St James Street
  
• 3000 Lesbians Go to York
  
• Two lesbians and a couple of hats: Wildblood and Queenie's three weddings
  
  Having met in 1993 it took a while for the law to catch up with our love. We made the best of it - DIY wedding in 1997, Civil Partnership in 2008 but it wasn't until 2015 that we finally made it to equal marriage. But as all good queers should do, we made the most of the journey to equality. Celebrating with our chosen family, dancing and laughing - wedding hats not always optional.
• From our Community Champions: Nu
  
  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! Now we can hear from Nu, our Disability community champion: Working with queer in Brighton has been a tremendous experience of locating minority voices in an unspoken community - The queer disabled community. When I first had a meeting with Roni Guetta, I was excited about the proposal and the opportunity to bring together voices that were not often heard. I had so many ideas and a number of different ways to initiate conversation about disability history. It was after that we started discussing how to start the first initial workshops that would enable the community to talk about their individual histories and what it meant to the legacy of Queer History in Sussex. I wanted to make sure that the community felt that the workshop was as accessible as possible, whilst also being fun, enticing and educational. We began this by making sure we made some introductory online workshops with people that I brought together from my community that I knew well. There were many questions and many opportunities to challenge what we knew about consent and protecting the data that we would collect. It was from taking these challenging questions that we decided to dedicate a portion of the first in person session to the subject of data, how that would be displayed and in what way we can make sure that it was secure. When it came to the session at The Ironworks Studios, there was an energy that I had only experienced in pre-pandemic times when I was working in local community groups as a volunteer - an air of anticipation and a longing for progressive change. When it came to the show and tell part of the session, I knew that that was when we were getting into the collaborative vibe that I missed from groups - an opportunity to tell stories and feel that sense of belonging. My friend Suchi Chatterjee was explaining about their heritage and had also brought along an item to be displayed on the online archive Queer in Brighton were managing. It was beautiful to see different members of the community coming together to give a small part of themselves in order for future generations to see themselves in history.
• Let Me Die A Woman
  
  A small feature piece 'Transexual movie' advertising a screening of the film 'Let Me Die A Woman' at Brighton's Continentale Cinema, Sudeley Place, 9 December 1982. This and the accompanying listing come from Issue 2 of The Lavender Letter - courtesy of the Bishopsgate Institute. A review of the film 'Let Me Die A Woman' screened at Brighton's Continentale Cinema, Sudeley Place, 9 December 1982. This comes from Issue 3 of The Lavender Letter - courtesy of the Bishopsgate Institute. This is the concluding paragraph of the review: "The transsexual is far more the sexual outlaw (to borrow John Rechy's expression) than the gay man or woman and a movie like 'Let Me Die A Woman' can serve no purpose other than to titillate those who find humour or entertainment in the anguish of others." The advert for the film comes with the copy: Born a man... Let Me Die A Woman. All true! All real! See a man become a woman before your eyes!
• From our Community Champions: Kate
  
  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! Kate (they/them), our 'older lesbian' champion, chats to us next:   So this is my community champion blog. My name is Kate Wildblood and I’m a 55-year-old non-binary lesbian living in Brighton. I moved here in 1990 and have been playing records and calling myself a DJ ever since. I’ve written most of my adult life, for DJ Magazine, Diva, Gay Times, Real Brighton, Queer Company. GScene and more. Alongside my wife Queenie I still DJ across the city dancefloors and airwaves of 1BTN radio. I have a neurodivergent special interest in queer clubbing, especially those soundtracked by disco and house music and have a suitably large if slightly obsessive collection of flyers and nightlife ephemera filling the shelves of my home. Queer history really matters to me, the stories we share are as important as the songs we dance to and I love finding new ways to share the lives we lived back in the day.  Any excuse to wax lyrical about my LGBTQI+ nightlife community and the 12”s we shared.    The Queer Heritage South Live Archive project has enabled me to reconnect with lesbians I’ve known and not known as we reach out to our community and encourage the represent. To bring the tales of Brighton and Hove’s lesbian lives to the front, ensuring space and appreciation for the images, objects and stories that are us. And to connect the generations, those who once fought for the fundamentals of equality to those pushing the fight forward today as we raise all aspects of our diverse community – regardless of gender identity, disability, age or race. I see it as a chance to reunite the many dancefloors I’ve had the pleasure to play for, to bring together the parties that made us, the campaigns that shaped us, the businesses we built and the families (never pretend) we created,.    Queer Heritage South Live Archive is a project deserving of a future as our past continues to inspire. To take the tales lesbians have to share and ensure they matter. To guarantee a city venue, an event, a particular place, or a moment in time has a connection to our present lives, that those accessing those spaces have a chance to know that history. I want the project to become a first stop for anyone creating in Brighton and Hove, for historians and students, for campaigners and creators, and yes for DJs with very special interests. For young lesbians arriving as so many of us did to Brighton back in the day all wide-eyed and hopeful, I want the history of our city to have no gatekeepers, no barriers to connecting to those who had been before – dancing, loving, living, campaigning. To turn “I never knew that” into “Did you know about this lesbian who lived and loved here?”   The hope I have that our tales should and could be shared across the city comes from the QHS Live Archive community archiving workshops I’ve had the pleasure to be part of. Calling the workshop events Rebooting The Archive was no accidental play on words, I wanted us to declare our dyke intentions, to kick down the norms of archiving, to take the doc martins worn down by our lesbian history of dancing, marching, loving and living and kickstart our true inclusion in our city’s LGBTQI+ history. Part workshop, part community reminiscence therapy, the two Rebooting The Archive sessions at Ironworks Studio Brighton brought together different generations of lesbians to tell different stories about the same city. The same places, the same dreams, the same heartache, the same fights for equality. We shared tales, photos and laughter as PowerPoints and presentations from myself, oral history royalty Jane Traies and QHS archivist Rowan Rush Morgan delivered the inspiration we needed and a community tagged Kate Shields-made city map become the only nudge we needed to travel back in time. Music mattered, memories strong, the workshops becoming a talking shop we wanted to return to over and over again. When the fizz of the youth meets the knowing nods of age there was a respect I wasn’t expecting, creating a hope for the project I didn’t know we could fulfil as every participant – regardless of their past – realised their stories mattered.    And as we hit the scanners and find the moments that matter to us now live on the QHS digital archive the shoulders of those participating seem to rise. The sense of our importance to the timeline of LGBTQI+ history in our city of Brighton & Hove and beyond is growing. The difference we made back then being appreciated right now, right here.  For many what we did back in the 70s, 80s, 90s and 2000s may have seemed unremarkable. Day to day. Surviving, creating, becoming. But with the hindsight of history we distance ourselves from those days with decades of just getting on with it. It has become clear how remarkable our unremarkable was. Lesbians changed lives – our own and that of so many in our city. Rebooting The Archive dyke style has proved we have an incredible lesbian community just waiting to find their way to stand in the spotlight. To find their space and shout about the lives they lead. Their past is making our present sounder and it’s been an honour for this DJ to help turn up the volume and for us all to listen.   Credits Photo one: Hannah Sherlock Photo two and three: Rosie Powell
• Endorphine Visions
  
  Club flyer for 'endorphine visions' at The Royal Pavilion Tavern, 7–8 Castle Square in Brighton on Monday 14 April 1997. Djs: Sophie, Laylah, Lettuce. Fetish, leather, rubber, pvc, tv, fantasy, cyber, uniforms.
• Horsham Pride Pin 2017
  
  A badge handed out at the first Horsham Pride event in 2017, run by students involved in the National Citizenship Service. The pride event ended up being about 20 teenagers sitting in a park wearing flags.
• Phone Bought In A Country Where It's Illegal To Be Yourself
  
  This Phone was bought from The Only Samsung Store In Barbados (After i dropped my old one in the pool, whoops!), A Country that as Of Writing (December 2024) Is Illegal to Be Transgender thanks to a Law Left Over from British Colonial Times that Hasn't Been Changed, Despite Homosexuality Being Legalised there in 2021.
• Trans Pride Medal
  
  Medal from the 2019 Trans Pride 5K fun run
• Apocalipstick
  
  Flyer for a club night at The Cavern, West Street, Brighton (below Swifts) on Wednesday 9 April 1997. £1 B4 10.30 + flyer, £2/2.50 after.
• From our Community Champions: Laura
  
  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!
• Riaz Thompson
  
• Laura Edmans