I’m loving the fascinating interviews on Making Gay History podcast
The Making Gay History podcast mines Eric Marcus’s decades old audio archive of rare interviews — conducted for his award-winning oral history of the LGBTQ civil rights movement — to create intimate, personal portraits of both known and long-forgotten champions, heroes, and witnesses to history.
It’s been 35 years since the first Pride event took place in Cardiff
Nice article on the BBC.
“At one of the [gay social] meetings he [Mr Foskett] said ‘I think we should have a gay pride march in Cardiff’.
That might not sound particularly strange now, but back in 1985 it was like, ‘are you serious?’ He was very keen and his sort of enthusiasm was very infectious.”
The small group got planning and the event took place on 20 June.
With placards reading “gay love is good love”, the procession marched from Queen Street to the students’ union in Cardiff.
“It was a small band of people, but it was a huge step for Cardiff I think, because of what it represented,” said Mr Brown.
Mr Foskett remembered it being “quite fun, and very small”.
“The people that we encountered were friendly. People laughed. People were incredulous, but they weren’t hostile.”
Today, the Pride Cymru events draw in 50,000 people, with 15,000 attending 2019’s parade, but the first march was less than 30, according to Mr Brown.
BBC, Pride Cymru: 35 Years since ‘huge step’ in Cardiff
Larry Kramer, playright, author, gay rights and AIDS activist, died this week at 84.
The Advocate, Larry Kramer Towering Figure of Aggressive AIDS Activism, Dead at 84
Making Gay History Podcast, interview with Larry Kramer
Hollywood Reporter, Larry Kramer, ‘Normal Heart’ Playwright and AIDS Activist, Dies at 84
Pink News, Larry Kramer’s furious, impassioned HIV speech is essential viewing 30 years on
Rest in Power.
I meant to post this a while ago but got distracted by, well, a pandemic. My friend Norena (author of the groundbreaking Forbidden Lives: LGBT Stories from Wales) wrote a great roundup of all the events that happened here for LGBT History Month 2020: Wales + LGBT History Month round up.
It’s heartening and moving to see so many activities happening across the country. We have come such a long way, even if as Norena says, we now need to move beyond events being restricted to celbratory days and months.
Llongyfarchiadau LGBTQ+ Wales!
The shops, who supported each other by sharing news and ideas, became cornerstones of the communities they served, hosting political organizations and providing safe spaces for people to explore and embrace their sexuality. Such inclusiveness — along with the spirit of the anti-war, anti-establishment revolution that fanned out before and after Stonewall — encouraged others to build upon the idea started by Rodwell and the Oscar Wilde. By the mid-1980s, queer bookstores were in more than 20 cities across North America as well as venues in Germany, France, Australia, the Netherlands and the U.K.
Jason Villemez
Good article about the history of LGBT bookstores
Lesbian activist, Phyllis Lyon has died at the age of 95. Lyon and her wife, Del Martin, did an enormous amount to progress LGBTQ civil rights from the 1950s onwards. Here are some articles about their legacy:
The Advocate, Phyllis Lyon, Pioneering Lesbian Activist, Dies at 95
Autostraddle, Phyllis Lyon, Incomparable Lesbian Civil Rights Activist, Has Died at 95
The Guardian, Phyllis Lyon, LGBTQ rights pioneer, dies at age 95
Bay Area Reporter, Lesbian pioneer Phyllis Lyon dies
Rest in power.
My goal this week was to get through it without letting stress take over my life. I knew it was going to be busy at work, and when this happens, I tend to let self-care drop just when I most need to keep it up.
I delivered online training on Tuesday, went to Mid Wales for an all-day meeting on Wednesday, and gave a presentation to an important meeting on Thursday.
Overall, I managed the stress pretty well. I kept up other activities and didn’t have any anxiety attacks. I even had drinks with colleagues on Friday which was nice.
I went to a really good LGBTQ History Month event at The Senedd on Saturday. The speakers were all excellent and it was nice to catch up with some people I hadn’t seen for a while. I learned about this project, Out in the Museum, which started at the V&A in London and is now being picked up by other museums across the UK. There was also a showing of a powerful short film, Invisible Women, about intersections between women’s and LGBT rights activism in the 1980s.
We were planning to see Portrait of a Lady on Fire but my partner has a cold so we’ll try and see it next weekend.
I finished Nalo Hopkinson’s short story collection, Falling in Love with Hominids. It’s a really good collection and well worth reading, although the stories were much closer to horror than I expected. Proper post to follow.
Pride and Prejudice is my current bedtime book.
Mainly watching Schitt’s Creek at the moment.
I’ve been listening to Nina Simone this week after twitter reminded me that 21 February was her birthday. So many incredible songs, but I think my favourite – right now anyway – is ‘Sinnerman’. The energy of this performance grabs me every time.
An LGBT book collector “passionate about justice” has left his 30,000-piece collection to a university.
Jonathan Cutbill, a founder of Gay’s The Word bookshop in London’s Bloomsbury, died last May aged 82.
His collection, which dates back to 1760, will be moved from his Shrewsbury home to the University of London.
Geoff Hardy, a friend of Mr Cutbill, said the “incredible legacy” featured the history of LGBT issues and the oppression people had faced.
Mr Cutbill’s collection includes novels, pamphlets and newspapers, including all the copies of Gay News, which ran for 11 years.
BBC News Shrewsbury book collector gifts LGBT ‘legacy’
Great post about Gay’s the Word bookshop
Interesting read, Voices: Lessons from LGBTQI History
If you’re on social media, I’m sure you saw the photograph of the two women who experienced a homophobic/misogynist hate crime in London being circulated last week. One of the women, Chris, has written a brilliant, deeply intersectional, piece in the Guardian, challenging the media discourse that centres white, cisgender “victims” and demanding that we care about all forms of homophobia and oppression. What a way to turn an awful experience, and an unwanted platform, into something powerful.
A refrain I’ve heard ad nauseum is “I can’t believe this happened – it’s 2019”. I disagree. This attack and the ensuing media circus are par for the course in 2019. In both my native United States and here in the United Kingdom, it always has been and still is open season on the bodies of (in no specific order) people of colour, indigenous people, transgender people, disabled people, queer people, poor people, women and migrants. I have evaded much of the violence and oppression imposed on so many others by our capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal system because of the privileges I enjoy by dint of my race, health, education, and conventional gender presentation. That has nothing to do with the merit of my character.
You saw me covered in blood on a bus. But do you get outraged about all homophobia?
Michael Nava has published a thoughtful article in LARB about the author Joseph Hansen Gay Noir Pioneer
I recommend reading the Dave Brandsetter mystery novels if you can get your hands on them. They feature an openly gay detective and offer a fascinating window onto the lives of gay men and, to some extent, lesbians in the 1960s and 70s. Hansen also has a really interesting writing style.
Queer Bible, U.A. Fanthorpe
LGBTQ Nation, Meet the Harlem Renaissance dancer who made sure lesbian history wasn’t forgotten
Queer Bible, Natalie Barney
Autostraddle, All Bones and Blood and Breath: Remembering Barbara Hammer
Quill and Quire, The 88-year-old creator of mystery’s first lesbian detective reflects on the character’s return
Lambda Literary, review of My Butch Career by Esther Newton
Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Poppy Jenkins by Clare Ashton
Great article from Dazed about the 40th birthday of London’s fabulous LGBT bookshop Gay’s the Word
It’s a special place and we always pay a visit whenever we’re in London.
14/03/2019 – Updated the picture after a trip at the weekend!
Well, this is fabulous – The Queer Bible
Ransom Centre Magazine, The Ransom Center will digitize the papers of British author Radclyffe Hall and partner, artist Una Vincenzo, Lady Troubridge
Autostraddle, Revisiting “Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist” in a World Needing Her More Than Ever
Terri Windling, Hen Wives, Spinsters and Lolly Willows
iNews, The lesbian ‘blood sisters’ who cared for gay men when doctors were too scared to
What a lovely story.
Glasgow’s LGBT book shop a ‘wonderful success’
The owners of an LGBT book shop in Glasgow say they could not have imagined how successful it has been.
Category Is Books, on the city’s Allison Street, opened three months ago and is Scotland’s first LGBT bookshop in more than 20 years
For World Aids Day on the 1st December, the Act Up Oral History Project
A collection of interviews with surviving members of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, New York.
The purpose of this project is to present comprehensive, complex, human, collective, and individual pictures of the people who have made up ACT UP/New York. These men and women of all races and classes have transformed entrenched cultural ideas about homosexuality, sexuality, illness, health care, civil rights, art, media, and the rights of patients. They have achieved concrete changes in medical and scientific research, insurance, law, health care delivery, graphic design, and introduced new and effective methods for political organizing. These interviews reveal what has motivated them to action and how they have organized complex endeavors. We hope that this information will de-mystify the process of making social change, remind us that change can be made, and help us understand how to do it.
Autostraddle, The Gay Love Stories of Moomin and the Queer Radicality of Tove Jansson
NPR, New biography of Lorraine Hansberry
Autostraddle, Portraits of Lesbian Writers, 1987 – 1989 (these are awesome)
The Rumpus, The Queer Syllabus: The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye
Folk Radio, Grace Petrie: Queer as Folk review
The author of “Tinderbox” on the untold story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire, which until the Orlando shooting was the worst mass killing of gays in history.
In this new wondrous age with Supreme Court decisions affirming gay and lesbian marriages, and gender being redefined as nowhere near as rigid as it has previously been defined, I sometimes wonder if anyone knows what our lives were like at the time when I was a young woman, trying to figure out how to live my life honestly in the face of so much hatred and danger. Who are we if we cannot speak truthfully about our lives? How did we come to this new age in which we can take our lovers home or to church or walk hand in hand down the street without lies or pretense or a carefully crafted fictional stance to protect us?
Speaking truth to power was a tenet of the early women’s movement. We would change the world by the simple act of declaring our truth and refusing to back down or lie no matter how virulent the response.
How virulent was the response? Take a look at the coming-out stories shared in Crooked Letter i: Coming Out in the South (NewSouth Books). You will see the internal evolution of people who wanted simply to be themselves. It was not easy or simple or even a matter of confronting prejudice. Most of these people’s deepest struggles were with themselves, their families and their faith, their most personal convictions.
Confronting the enforced silence of manners and social expectations, we claimed our lives for ourselves. Was it heroic? Was it audacious, marvelous, scary and day by day painful? Of course. Did we change the world? Look around you and marvel.
Dorothy Allison, Gay and Grateful: On the Crooked Path to the Crooked Letter
A little round-up of posts about Leslie Feinberg who sadly passed away this week at the age of 65. It’s only through the immense courage of people like Feinberg that our own lives have become possible. We should remember them with honour and gratitude.
My favourite quote appeared in Sassafras Lowry’s Lambda Literary piece Losing our Hero:
“As queer folk, so many of us have been rejected and abandoned that we’ve had to build our own worlds. So many of us have found ourselves so alone when we come out. We grow ourselves up. We build our own families and in a way queer books become our parents, our grandparents, our best friends and families. We curl up with them on cold nights on borrowed couches uncertain of where we will sleep tomorrow, or in bathtubs, our ears ringing with the sound of a lovers footsteps walking out the door a final time. We turn to books to prove that we exist. Books keep us company, raise us up, and give us hope that survival is possible. In a way, through queer books we build a relationship to that book’s author as well. For so many of us, Leslie is more than a beloved author. Zie has been part of our family. Now, as we mourn hir loss, we’re left trying to understand a world that is much darker and colder without hir to fight for us and protect us.”
Books by Leslie Feinberg
Stone Butch Blues
Transgender Warriors
Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time has Come
Website: Transgender Warrior
“Remember me as a revolutionary communist.”
