OutStories Bristol

Harry Pick, a BBC documentaries producer, has approached OutStories Bristol seeking gay men who have memories of gay life before 1967.

I work for the BBC in-house, and I am working on a new BBC Two film marking 50 years since the passage of the 1967 Sexual Offences Act. I thought I’d reach out to you because I believe you might be able to help put me in touch with gay men who have memories of the period before private sexual acts between gay men were legalised.

The film we want to make will use a mixture of drama and personal testimonies about gay experience pre-1967 to create a sense of the experience of trying to live as gay men in the shadow of that law and the associated social attitudes. We are particularly interested in hearing about against the odds romantic relationships and experiences with the police, the courts and the psychiatric profession and the pressures this put on individuals and those in relationships. Ultimately we also want the programme to draw to the public’s attention what life was like for gay men in this time – a story too rarely told or reflected on.

At this moment in time I’d just be very keen to speak to anyone for research purposes who can reflect on gay life before 67′ to help inform the dramatisation of the period, so we are as accurate and true to the experience of the time as possible. It’d be fantastic if you could put the word out to any of those who you have interviewed in this age bracket and see if some are willing to have a chat on the phone with me initially. No filming required!

Happy to talk further with you or anyone keen to help out.

Thank you for any help and best wishes,

Harry Pick
* BBC Documentaries, 07C BBC New Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London, W1A 1AA.

If you are interested in helping, please send a message for the attention of Andy Foyle and we’ll pass it on to Harry.

Sadly Bisi Alimi is no longer able to join us for the LGBT History Festival on Saturday. He has to go to Africa as part of his campaign work, and we have been unable to arrange his talk and flights so that he can do both. Our thanks to Bisi for trying hard to accommodate us. Hopefully we’ll be able to have him in Bristol some other time.

Of course we do have many other fine speakers available on Saturday. We hope we will still see all of you there.

About 25 people gathered at Clifton Hill House, Clifton, on 5th October 2015 to celebrate the legacy of one of Victorian Britain’s greatest scholar-writers, John Addington Symonds.

Born in Bristol in 1840, Symonds was the author of numerous works including The Renaissance in Italy, in seven volumes, and the first major study of ancient sexuality A Problem in Greek Ethics, published in just ten copies in 1883. These writings were a profound contribution to the early homosexual rights movement.

Clifton Hill House was Symonds’ home for many years so it was fitting that the event was held in a room that would have been very familiar to him.  The house is now a hall of residence for the University of Bristol.

Members of OutStories were the guests of Tom Richardson, Warden of Clifton Hill House, and Nicoletta Momigliano, Director of the Institute of Greece, Rome and the Classical Tradition (IGRCT) at the University. Other guests included members of the IGRCT and senior student residents of the house.

In March Hugo Award winning author and OutStories Bristol co-chair Cheryl Morgan gave a Flagship guest lecture at Liverpool University on how Transgendered identities have been represented and evolved within science fiction writing and comics. See it on this video.

Cheryl herself is an active Trans writer, blogger, editor and publisher.   http://www.cheryl-morgan.com

The event was sponsored by the Liverpool University Special Archive and Collection (University Library) and the Science Fiction Foundation.

Exploring Gender Fluidity through Science Fiction and Fantasy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. Copy and paste this code to embed this video in another web page:

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OutStories Bristol is developing a major new collaborative project with the Know Your Bristol project at the University of Bristol and Know Your Place, a website run by Bristol City Council. We are calling this project Mapping LGBT+ Bristol and it will create a permanent digital archive of the LGBT history of the Bristol area.

The project is being funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council, a government-sponsored body that finances research and post-graduate projects. It will:

• Support OutStories volunteers in researching and mapping the LGBT history of Bristol and surrounds.
• Add a dedicated LGBT history ‘layer’ to Bristol City Council’s digital mapping website Know Your Place. Know Your Place provides a series of map bases from 1750 to the present to which community information is attached.
• Create a new user-friendly interface embedded in OutStories’ own website that will directly access the LGBT layer on Know Your Place and facilitate crowd-sourced contributions.
• Create a custom-made mobile app for smart phones and tablet PCs that will interface with the LGBT layer on Know Your Place. This will feature walking tours, push notifications and connections to social media.
• Produce a series of ‘story-maps’ – geo-coded digital stories – on different facets of LGBT history.
• Collaborate with Bristol’s LGBT youth group Freedom Youth in producing curriculum materials to be used in Bristol schools to combat the stigmatization of gender diversity and homosexuality.
• Add new material to the LGBT archives at the Bristol Record Office and other museums and archives.

Copyright: Anna Henderson.

Mapping LGBT+ Bristol will be a series of explorations of LGBT lives, both historic and present. The project will draw teams of people together to research and record histories of the diverse individuals and communities that make up Bristol’s LGBT life.

Places of significance may range from common places where people meet (now or in the past), the shifting map of the LGBT scene, sites of memory or life events significant to one individual or small groups, places of religious toleration, dissent and diversity, and sites relevant to public, political and civic oppression and acceptance.

The project formally commences in October and will last for one year.

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Everyone is welcome to get involved. We seek people to do research, conduct oral history interviews, produce video/audio, and create digital material for uploading to Know Your Place and our own website. Get in touch via our contact form.

Mapping LGBT+ Bristol is funded by the Arts & Humanities Research Council

Lord Mayor of Bristol, the Rt. Hon. Councillor Alastair Watson, raises the transgender flag in front of City Hall

November 20th  was Transgender Day of Remembrance and,  for the first time ever, Bristol City Council held a public event aimed specifically at trans people. At 2pm the Lord Mayor, the Rt. Hon. Councillor Alastair Watson, raised the transgender flag in front of City Hall. A number of other City Councillors were in attendance.

Transgender Day of Remembrance is an international event held in memory of the hundreds of people killed every year simply because they were deemed to have transgressed social gender norms. In the last year alone, 226 victims from 28 different countries are remembered.  There have been a total of 1,612 reported killings of transgender people in 62 countries worldwide since January2008. Transgender murders often involve extreme violence and torture.  Several of the victims were teenagers and the youngest was just eight- years-old.  The vast majority of the victims identified as female.

Bristol City Council equalities officer Simon Nelson, Lady Mayoress of Bristol Sarah Watson, Lord Mayor of Bristol Councillor Alastair Watson, Martin Spellacey and Amy Mosley of Bristol City Council Rainbow Group, Bristol City Council employee Jessica Davidson and Cheryl Morgan of TransBristol”. Photo: Amy Jones.

Although there was only one known British victim this year, life for transgender people in the UK is by no means easy.  Negative portrayals in the media, discrimination and difficulty accessing health care are all major issues. According to the Trans Mental Health and Emotional Wellbeing Study 2012, 48% of British transgender people had attempted suicide at some time during their lives.

Councillor Watson said: “By raising the transgender flag over City Hall on this important day, Bristol is sending a clear signal to the many trans people who live and work in the city that they are valued members of the community, with as much right to life, health and happiness as any other citizen.”

Martin Spellacey of Bristol City Council Rainbow Group – which organised the event together with Bristol LGBT Forum – said: “While Bristol has recently been voted the best city to live in Britain, this is unfortunately not the case for many transgender people, many of whom face discrimination on a daily basis.”

Listen here to a conversation on Ujima Radio between TransBristol’s Cheryl Morgan and Simon Nelson, the Equality Officer of Bristol City Council. They discuss the Trans Day of Remembrance and how the City Council can do more for its trans citizens (starts 36 minutes into the programme).

When Bristol Lesbian and Gay Switchboard (BLAGS) stopped taking calls earlier this year, they were left with a dilemma: what to do with the money they had accrued over the years? £1,000 was donated to the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard who now answer calls to the Bristol helpline. The remaining £2,000 was placed in a Community Fund and BLAGS invited bids from local LGBT community groups.

We are delighted to announce that BLAGS have granted a £600 award for OutStories Bristol’s proposal to buy three portraits from Bath artist Malcolm Ashman for donation to Bristol’s M Shed museum.

Portraits by Malcolm Ashman. Photo: copyright Matthew Seow www.facebook.com/matthewseow,

The pencil portraits were drawn by Malcolm for the Revealing Stories exhibition at M Shed in February/March 2013 and portray three people significant to Bristol’s LGBT history:

• Daryn Carter who worked for Pride’s revival in 2010 and is now Director of Bristol Pride;
• Peggy Hancock was barmaid at the Radnor Hotel, Bristol, from 1955 and a friend to many LGBT people at a time when most were not;
• Dale Wakefield who was co-founder of Bristol Gay Switchboard in 1975.

The portraits are to be donated to M Shed and will become part of the permanent history of the city of Bristol.

Many thanks to BLAGS for generously giving the money for their purchase. It is particularly appropriate that one portrays Dale;  for its first three years the helpline operated from a bedroom in her home in Hill Street, Totterdown, using her private phone line.

Thanks also to the artist, Malcolm Ashman, who agreed to sell the portraits at well below their market value.

Clifton Hill House

In the 1880s and 1890s writer and art historian John Addington Symonds wrote ground-breaking books in which he argued for a rational approach to homosexuality and for law reforms. For many years Symonds lived in Clifton Hill House in Clifton, now owned by the University of Bristol.

University Heritage Volunteering are seeking volunteers to help restore the historic gardens much beloved by Symonds to their former glory. The digging might find “busts of those unlovely emperors and philosophers” that Symonds brought back from Greece and are known to have been buried in the garden by his descendants when they left the house.

If you are interested in finding out more, contact Louise.Hopkins@bristol.ac.uk.

 On 30 March 2014, the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act allowed same-sex couples to marry for the first  time. The historic change was celebrated by several couples in Bristol and received news coverage.

Here’s a round-up of the stories in the press:

• ITV News;
• Bristol Post;
• Bristol 24-7.

If we missed coverage elsewhere, please add a link to the comments.

Did you get married on 30 March in Bristol or attend one of the weddings that day? Tell us your story.

The success of the Revealing Stories project resulted in encouragement from the Heritage Lottery Fund to bid for further funding for a new long-term project. We propose to create a project about place.

Place will be a series of explorations of LGBT lives, both historic and present. The project will seek to draw teams of people together to research and record histories of the diverse individuals and communities that make up Bristol’s LGBT life.

Radnor Hotel
Copyright: Anna Henderson

Places of significance may range from common places where people meet (now or in the past), the shifting map of the LGBT scene, sites of memory or life events significant to one individual or small groups, places of religious toleration, dissent and diversity, and sites relevant to public, political and civic oppression and acceptance.

The internet offers the most flexible and powerful way for us to deliver a new project. We envisage an interactive map-based system from which multi-media information would be accessible – including images, film, photographs and artworks inspired by place, sound clips from oral history recordings, music, text and digitised extracts from local press or publications.

The Bristol Archives website Know Your Place is well-established and provides a series of map bases from 1750 to the present to which community information is attached. We are already discussing with Bristol City Council how we can use Know Your Place as a platform on which to build our ‘layer’ of LGBT history data. This approach would extend our partnership with Bristol Museums Service and the Bristol Record Office. We will also aim to include links with educational/schools groups which was a notable success for Revealing Stories.

Everyone is welcome to get involved. We seek people to do research, conduct oral history interviews, produce video/audio, create artwork and construct the website. Get in touch via our contact form.