OutStories Bristol

Bristol’s part in the 2016 National Festival of LGBT History gets underway with a formal Civic Launch at our main venue, the M Shed Museum. Our Festival will be formally launched by The Right Honourable, The Lord Mayor of Bristol, Councillor Clare Campion-Smith.

The event will feature addresses from Phyll Opoku-Gyimah of UK Black Pride and Stuart Milk of the Harvey Milk Foundation. There will also be a guest historical presentation from Jeff Evans of Manchester Metropolitan University.

A limited number of tickets is being made available free to the general public. We expect to release more later once we have heard back from all invited guests. To book a place at this free event, register here.

When: Friday, 19 February 2016 from 18:00 to 20:00

Where: The Event Suite, M Shed – Wapping Road Bristol BS1 4RN

Harvey Milk’s Enduring Legacy on LGBT Rights – a global perspective accompanied by the full a screening of the 90 minute Academy Award winning documentary, The Times of Harvey Milk.

Harvey Milk was an openly gay man who was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Milk was assassinated after just 11 months in office, but his death sparked a wave a gay rights activism across the USA.

Robert Epstein’s documentary film, The Times of Harvey Milk, chronicles Milk’s story. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 1984.

Stuart Milk is Harvey’s nephew. After his uncle’s death, Stuart helped found the Milk Foundation which campaigns globally for LGBT rights. Stuart will introduce the screening, and answer questions about the film and his work afterwards.

When: Wednesday, 17 February 2016 from 18:45 to 21:00
Where: Queens Building 1.15 Small Lecture Theatre, University Walk, Bristol, BS8 1TR

To ensure a place at this free event, please register here.

Continuing our series of posts introducing the many speakers who will be giving talks during the LGBT History Festival at M Shed next February. Darienne Flemington and Mark Kelly will be presenting “Out and Proud in Trade unions” as part of the National History Day on Saturday, February 20th.

Inspired by her personal experiences of border agencies, alien courts and deportation, Darienne has worked as an international activist for LGBT rights for over 20 years and was recently elected to sit on the ILGA Europe’s executive board. As a committed trade unionist she is also the Co-Chair of UNISON’s National LGBT Committee, and represents LGBT workers interests on UNISON’s National Women’s Committee. She works in local government where she is committed to fighting discrimination in all of its forms, as well as negotiating and organising for equality at work.

Mark Kelly runs a company which provides specialist support for University students who experience mental health issues. Previously he worked for 10 years at a Further Education College where he managed innovative and groundbreaking projects which engaged with socially excluded groups of young people and adults and won national praise from the Learning & Skills Council and NIACE. Mark’s role in the college also involved him managing a curriculum area, developing and delivering specialist staff training and facilitating an LGBT youth support group.

Mark has been an active trade unionist with UNISON for over 20 years and works at a local, regional and national level. He is a previous co-chair of UNISON’s National LGBT Committee and is a senior activist in UNISON’s South West Region.

Mark also works with Devon & Cornwall Police as an independent LGBT / Diversity advisor and is a trained Critical Incident Advisor.

UNISON is also sponsoring the Festival at a national level.

Continuing our series of posts introducing the many speakers who will be giving talks during the LGBT History Festival at M Shed next February. Members of the Bath Gender Equality Network will be talking about the campaign they ran last year on behalf of the imprisoned Bath trans woman, Tara Hudson.

The Bath Gender Equality Network (BGEN) is a group for intersectional, sex-positive feminists and their allies to discuss topics around equality, support local activism, and look after each other in the Bath and Bristol area. After the success of the recent Tara Hudson campaign, BGEN has built a diverse range of members from all walks of life, enjoying a strong presence (online and offline), socials, and forum discussions, including male mental health, trans representation, the wage gap, sex work, and even comic writing.

As part of furthering the reach and effectiveness of BGEN, plans are in place to host the first ‘public’ event in April, when we will be hosting an evening of ‘lightning talks’, inviting members of the community, and others, to speak for five minutes on the topic of gender equality. This event has received local corporate sponsorship, as well as interest from BANES council, and looks to be the first of many other exciting projects for the group.

More recently, BGEN has been asked to enter into the running for a ‘Bath Life Award’ for its work in local events, community work and education. It is hoped that this visibility will allow the group to expand and continue its work.

Continuing our series of posts introducing the many speakers who will be giving talks during the LGBT History Festival at M Shed next February. Sabah Choudrey will be presenting Forgotten Histories: Trans Activists of Colour, as part of the National History Day on Saturday, February 20th.

Sabah is a Pakistani trans activist with a passion for his communities. His tiny head is full of big ideas, having co-founded Trans Pride Brighton in 2012: the first trans march and celebration in the UK, and started online social and support spaces for queer, trans, and intersex people of colour in Brighton (QTIPOC Brighton), and for LGBT and queer desi people in London and the South East (desiQ).

He spent his rebellious years living in Brighton where he fell into LGBT youth work and development in LGBT BME/faith communities. He moved back to West London in 2015, where he is currently a trans youth worker for Gendered Intelligence, mentoring and facilitating groups for trans young people and trans young people of colour.

Sabah likes talking about his feelings and he likes to write about them even more; He spoke at TEDx Brixton 2015, and has been published on The Huffington Post. He shares his experiences of being a hairy brown girl, an angry brown man and a queer brown person and writes regularly on www.sabahchoudrey.com.

Continuing our series of posts introducing the many speakers who will be giving talks during the LGBT History Festival at M Shed next February.

Sandra Stancliffe will be presenting Pride of Place: ‘Gay Buildings’ and England’s LGBTQ Heritage, as part of the National History Day on Saturday, February 20th.

Sandra has worked in the area of public engagement and heritage for 23 years. She has worked at museums in Derby and Carlisle and was at Bristol Museums Galleries and Archives for 12 years. She was then employed by English Heritage as Education Director and Head of Education and Interpretation. Since April 2015 she has worked for Historic England where her role as Head of Education and Inclusion includes overall responsibility for the Pride of Place project. She speaks regularly on the theme of increasing participation in heritage through learning and engagement programmes and is constantly striving to ensure the organisations she works far are inclusive in their approach. She is particularly interested in the role of heritage in shaping sense of place and identity.

Sandra has lived in Knowle for 15 years. She is also a trustee of the Bristol Architecture centre and a Governor at Victoria Park Primary School.

Continuing our series of posts introducing the many speakers who will be giving talks during the LGBT History Festival at M Shed next February.

Rosa Fanti & Lori Streich will be telling us all about the 20 year history of Freedom Youth, as part of the Local History Day on Sunday, February 21st.

Rosa Fanti is a member of Freedom Youth Bristol. When she realised that the group would be 20 in 2015, she had the idea of capturing its history through this project. Rosa’s interests include LGBT history and the social contexts in which it develops and changes.

Lori Streich is managing the project on behalf of Off the Record Bristol, and guiding and supporting the Freedom Youth researchers. Lori has a background in project development and management and a passion for enabling heritage projects that tell untold (and often difficult to find) stories about histories that are too often overlooked or left out of the mainstream. She has compiled an oral history of Westmoreland House in Stokes Croft, and was a Trustee and Chair of Arnos Vale Cemetery Trust in Bristol.

Mapping LGBT+ Bristol is a collaboration between Bristol University’s Know Your Bristol project, Bristol City Council’s Know Your Place website, and OutStories Bristol. The project will create a permanent digital archive of the LGBT+ history of the Bristol region.

Activities include:

• Gathering the stories of LGBT+ people through oral interviews.
• Research in the Bristol Record Office, libraries and other local archives.
• Collating and storing the digital material we collect and uploading it to websites.
• Creating a custom-made mobile app and a user-friendly interface embedded in OutStories’ own website.

Read more about the project here.

Activities are co-ordinated at monthly meetings, usually the 2nd Tuesday of each month. The next meeting is:

(c) Bristol Record Office

OutStories Bristol have researched and documented a fraction of the huge variety of LGBT+ lives past in Bristol and its surrounds – there is so much more to uncover!

Come along to our first workshop at Bristol Record Office (BRO) for a behind-the-scenes tour of the strongrooms where 800 years of historic documents are stored.

(c) Bristol Record Office

Following this we will have a short ‘research skills’ workshop lead by staff from BRO which caters for complete beginners upwards. Learn about handling documents, the variety of sources available and how to start researching the archives and online sources that can be accessed from BRO.  Finally we will put our new-found skills into practice by finding and ordering some LGBT+ themed historic documents and revealing their stories ready to be mapped.

The workshop is free but places are limited – please book via Eventbrite.

Continuing our series of posts introducing the many speakers who will be giving talks during the LGBT History Festival at M Shed next February.

Jonathan will be presenting Mary Renault and The Charioteer, as part of the Local History Day on Sunday, February 21st.

Born in Bristol in 1958 Jonathan has lived in the Brislington area all his life.

He helped to form Brislington Conservation and History Society in 1984 and has been Chairman since 2005. He has written many leaflets, articles and books of Brislington local history as well as producing two DVDs. He has also been Secretary of his local drama group, St Luke’s Church Players since it began in 1988, and has written fifteen plays for the group. He researched Mary Renault’s Bristol connections, after reading The Charioteer, set in the fictional, “Bridstow”, and regarded as a landmark work of post war gay themed literature.