Prejudice and Pride

LGBT Activist Stories from Manchester and Beyond

LGBT North West, Cliodhna Devlin, Cliodhna Devlin

• Publisher: HammerOn Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781910849286
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

'It's fascinating and moving to discover and identify those LGBT people in less happy times, who fought for the freedoms LGBT people now enjoy in the UK. This book will make you look back with gratitude and astonishment for what has been achieved.' Sir Ian McKellen

LGBT activist and civil rights history from the 1960s to the 2000s has had a huge impact on our social and political landscape in the UK, yet much of this history remains hidden.

Prejudice and Pride: LGBT Activist Stories from Manchester and Beyond explores aspects of LGBT activist history. It covers educational activism, youth work activism and the history of the LGBT Centre in Manchester.

Through personal stories of activists, heard and recorded by young people from LGBT Youth North West, the book explores the 'wibbly wobbly' nature of people's histories. It reveals how they interlink in surprising and creative ways to form the current landscape of both prejudice and pride. Also contains exercises for interpreting and ideas for collecting activist histories within youth work.

CHAPTER 1

WIBBLY WOBBLY TIMEY WIMEY LGBT HISTORIES

NIAMH MOORE

This is a book about the lives of LGBT activists – who may or may not call themselves activists – in the North West of the UK.

This book is one of the outputs of a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) project in the UK. The project was initiated by LGBT Youth North West, based in Manchester, and partnered with a number of organisations including Schools OUT UK .

This book traces three threads of LGBT activism, loosely based around Manchester and the North West of England, though inevitably with attention to how Manchester and the North West are inevitably enmeshed in national and global politics.

The three strands of the project include:

1.the establishment of a purpose-built Gay Centre in Manchester in 19xx, This Centre is now managed by LGBT Youth North West;

2.work in schools, supporting teachers and pupils, including the setting up and campaigning of Schools OUT UK (formerly called the Gay Teachers Group);

3.histories of LGBT youth work in Manchester

Importantly this project focuses on histories of LGBT activism that rarely receive attention elsewhere – the campaigning of teachers, and youth workers. These are particularly important sites for thinking about LGBT activism because they are sites of intergenerational exchange, and thus useful sites for thinking about change, and how change is understood, and how what counts as change itself changes over time.

While for some an LGBT history based on Manchester and the North West might seem too parochial, too specific, or merely a small story in a much bigger story, LGBT activists in Manchester have always been ambitious, with a long history of displacing London-centrism, or nationalist narratives, and with a commitment to developing practices, such as LGBT youth work, which do not necessarily flourish to the same extent elsewhere – LGBTYNW after all does not have any other regional counterparts in England or Wales. And stories here which are shared LGBT stories, such as around Section 28, have wide significance because the anti-section 28 march in Manchester was much bigger than the one in London. And the Joyce Layland Centre has for instance hosted some incredibly significant visitors, such as Ugandan gay rights activists, David Kato, who was later murdered in Uganda in 2011. In these ways Manchester Gay Centre is deeply enmeshed in nascent acts of solidarity with activists elsewhere.

1967

Legalisation of sex between consenting male adults over 21

1970

Homophile Society set up at Manchester University by the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE)

1974

Manchester Gay Alliance starts at the Friend’s Meeting House

David Kato (1964-2011)

ORAL HISTORY

This project was funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund in the UK, who have a strong history of supporting community history projects, including LGBT history projects. This was a participatory oral history project, where young people in youth groups were trained in oral histories and then these young people then interviewed older LGBT activists, teachers, youth workers, and people who had used LGBT services. Oral history projects can allow special kinds of conversations to take place between people, conversations that do not always happen in everyday life. When we tried to suggest to one young person afterwards that she now had skills to go off and do interviews of her own, she astutely recognised that it was not only a matter of skills, but that the project itself created a space to bring people together in ways not always easy to bring about. So this was a special project for all involved which created the possibility for new and challenging conversations all round.

1974?

Manchester Gay Switchboard (MGS) begins, first at 7 Birch Hall Lane, then at the Friend office. Gordon Fryer and Terry Waller got beaten up while fly posting for it the night before

Schools Out is founded

1975

CHE sets up the ‘Friend’ office at 178 Waterloo Place

WIBBLY WOBBLY TIMEY WIMEY

‘People assume that time is a strict progression of cause to effect, but actually from a non-linear, non-subjective viewpoint, it’s more like a bag of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey stuff’.

No. 10, Russell T. Davies, Doctor Who

In our very first session about what LGBT history might be it was already clear that it was a wibbly wobbly picture.

The use of the term ‘wibbly wobbly timey wimey’ by one of the young people in our first oral history training session was hardly a coincidence, in a building that has often been referred to as a ‘Tardis’; such is its capacity to both transport people to different realms, parallel universes, different pasts and presents, and repair rips in the fabric of the universe, as well as its apparently amazing capacity to expand and house a multitude of people and stories over time, and to hold on to the messiness of lives and time.

Young people’s thoughts on ‘LGBT History’ during first training session, including the first use of the phrase ‘wibbly wobbly’

A curious timey-wimey effect of this project is that though we now know so much more about LGBT histories, we also know more about what we do not know, about how we might have done the project differently, about what stories are not included, about how certain stories get told and retold and more marginal stories often require a lot of work and space. These are some salutary learnings. One abiding memory of the process of the project comes from the first ‘Memory Day’ held in the Joyce Layland LGBT Centre, and as interviews were happening in smaller rooms off the main room, an impromptu focus group emerged as four white, middle-aged professional gay men who had been centrally involved in the early years of the Centre, gathered around youth worker Amelia Lee, filling her on stories about the history of the Centre, and their involvement. It was a moment of recognition of the capacity of projects such as this to draw people (back) in, of the very different histories of involvement in the Centre, and of power of particular stories, and how some stories get told and others remain marginal, and how it can require significant work to bring these other stories to the centre of attention.

1975?

Youth Group and Icebreakers (gay men’s coming out group) established at Waterloo Place

1978

£5,000 Urban Aid grant received from Manchester City Council (MCC) and Waterloo Place becomes the Gay Centre.

First grant provided to MGS

And a book such as this also raises intriguing questions about people who do not appear to require some of the support and services that continue to be on offer. This book, and this project, by definition, involves people who have accessing services and/or been involved in activism, we know less about those who do not appear to have these needs.

‘And some people can cope with it, and others can’t, so we are try--, we try to be there for the ones who can’t quite cope with it’. Another noted ‘don’t necessarily get people who can find their own way, there have always been people who’ve said, “Well to be honest with you it’s never been a problem, I found my own way, I was perfectly confident, I was out in the village.”

LIVING WITH HOMOPHOBIA

Like many books on LGBT history, this one too emerges out of complex urges to document ephemeral histories, to try and insist on and mark a series of changes, while at the same time also recognising that there is much work yet to be done, that for most there is still a sense of a need for an LGBT Centre, for organisations like Schools Out UK. As one participant reflected: ‘I just find the whole like politicisation of sexuality weird. I don’t know, like it’s just weird, why do people care? Why? It doesn’t affect them in any way, do you know what I mean. It’s just weird.’ And another said: ‘When the village doesn’t exist, then we will have won. When there’s no need for a safe space, why should there be a need for a safe space?’

1978

TV/TS helpline starts

Start of the Friday night Poly Disco (at what is now Manchester Metropolitan University’s Aytoun campus) – an alternative to the mainstream gay music scene which continued well into the 1980s

Meantime there are the effects of decades of living with homophobia and despite a sense of improvements and change, no sense that the job is yet done.

In the project we hear many apparently small stories of living with homophobia, such as how it was experienced through families: ‘My dad used to do things like taking me into the garden and making me kick footballs about because he thought that would make more of a man of me.’

The absence of role models, or only limited role models, was a recurring theme:

‘Well, I was a teenager in the ‘60s and so when I was 15 men were sent to prison for four years for being gay. So that meant that there weren’t any role models, there was not one single out gay man or woman in the public eye that I could look to and go, hey I can have a happy life. There was nothing, you know, you’re taught to hate queers long before you know you are one.’

‘The television images were always negative, there weren’t any positive ones. We had no--, we had no Jack Harkness or anything like that, I mean we had Larry Grayson and John Inman which didn’t really help. ‘Cause they were older for a start, so they weren’t us, so there was no publicity that we could relate to, there were no icons, there were no role models, all of the role models for young people were straight. You didn’t have--, I mean in those days--, not that I liked their music, but in those days you didn’t have the boy bands or anything like that where they’d, you know, I think it’s almost the law that one member of each boy band has to be a gay person.’

Many people we interviewed recounted horrendous experiences, compounded by secrecy:

‘60s because I was under 18--, under 21, I was raped by a so called friend, obviously I knew he was gay, er, and I--, erm, yes, so I was raped in the--, I must--, I can’t even remember the year but it was, I was definitely under 21 so I must have been late teens so it must have been early ‘60s and I was seduced by this gorgeous man who was posing as my friend and he--, I treated him like a friend and he raped me. Erm, and after--, I mean obviously it wasn’t nice, it hurt, but the hurt was--, eventually the hurt was all up in the head. What do I do about this? What do I do? Who do I tell? And I told nobody until, erm, and it must have been mid ‘80s and I went to a conference, I went to a conference about some, I can’t even remember what the conference, I know what it was about, it was about, erm--, it was a legal conference about--, and amongst other things it was about dealing with gay and LGBT clients, how do solicitors deal with--, anyway, I went to this conference and I found myself talking at the end of a mic and telling this entire conference of 200 or 300 people in Brighton it was, no it wasn’t, it was in Bournemouth, telling people that I was raped as an 18 year old. And I’d never--, I’d never told anybody and I even--, I shocked myself to hear myself telling this story and it was at a time when male rape was not an offence because male rape didn’t become an offence until--, and again I might be wrong, but I don’t think it became an offence until the late ‘90s,’

1978

Friend starts a Gay Youth Group, affiliated (later?) to the Greater Manchester Youth Association (quite a big deal at the time)

1978/9

First Gay Centre Annual Report

1979

Conscious decision to make the Gay Centre more inclusive. Lesbians from Switchboard and Friend form Lesbian Link (helpline and socials), funded by MCC

There were significant consequences to living with homophobia:

‘Because if you’re constantly told that you’re abnormal, you start believing it so there was--, so there was that, and it was constant. I know I’ve come back to this a couple of times, but it’s very difficult to explain because there’s so much less of it now, and the laws have changed so much, but it was a constant battle, every day was a battle of, you know, oh my God is anyone going to find out today, am I going to lose my job today. Or, you know, is someone going to beat me up, or is someone going to ban me from a shop or a restaurant, they did things like that, you know.’

Another reflected that: the most suicide rates is highest in gay males aged 14 to 18 or something. But I find that most gay children do harm to themselves over other people doing harm--, obvious physically not mentally ‘cause obviously to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: This is How We Got Here: Project Summary
• Chapter 3: Under the microscope: Government Politics and the Medicalisation of LGBT Lives
• Chapter 4: Section 28: Section Twentyhate
• Chapter 5: Promoting EdYoucation
• Chapter 6: Trials and Tribulations of the LGBT Community: Difficulties and Collaborations Within the LGBT Community
• Chapter 7: Journey to the Gay Centre of the Earth
• Chapter 8: Acting Up and Acting Out
• Chapter 9: A Woman’s Place
• Chapter 10: Outness: To Be or Not To Be
• Chapter 11: A Friend of a Friend of Dorothy
• Chapter 12: In Every Ending There is a Beginning
• Activists
• Contributions
• Notes