OUTing The Past 2019 Festival Programme: Royal Museums Greenwich-National Maritime Museum
As part of LGBT History Month the National Maritime Museum will be hosting OUTing the Past – an evening of free talks by gifted speakers from around the UK and Ireland.
Our chosen theme for this year’s festival will explore the experiences and perspectives of queer youth at different points in history. This evening is guaranteed to ignite community spirit and general curiosity by revealing powerful political ideologies and social accounts from urban landscapes and marginalised groups in the UK.
Our speakers will bring to the surface important queer histories and advocate for the young people whose voices are not easily heard – drawing from personal experiences and dynamic visual examples.
Join us to experience some rich and diverse conversations at the National Maritime Museum.
Speakers: Clifford Williams, Peter Scott-Presland, Emily Jeffers, Laura Harmon
Guest Host: Sculptor Eve Shepherd
(9 February 2019, 18:00-21:30)
Programme:
Speaker: Clifford Williams
Title: A History of the London Gay Teenage Group; The first gay teenage group in the world?
Using LGBT archives from the London School of Economics (LSE) and elsewhere, as well as personal recollections, this presentation paints a picture of gay youth in 1970s and 80s Britain. The London Gay Teenage Group was conceived in 1976 and provided an innovative and ground-breaking meeting place for gay youngsters. Out of it sprang the Joint Council for Gay Teenagers and the Gay Youth Movement, helping other gay youth groups to spring up around the country.
Speaker: Peter Scott-Presland
Title: What shall we tell the children?
At a time when sex education in schools is still a contested area, and the Government is still consulting over the issue, it is useful to look back over the last 170 years and survey the history of an area in which the treatment of the subject of homosexuality has been a litmus test for the effectiveness of a liberal SexEd in general. This talk draws reference to the work of the Gay Liberation Front and the Campaign for Homosexual Equality during late 1960s and early 1970s.
Speaker: Emily Jeffers
Title: Hidden histories of North Tyneside: youth research on the lives of older LGBT+ individuals.
Hidden Histories was a youth-led research project conducted as part of Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) Young Roots fund at Barnardo’s The BASE Young People’s Centre in Whitely Bay (Sept 2017 – Sept 2018). This presentation explores the process of the project itself in addition to sharing some of the interviews, statistics, and places of interest for the North Tyneside LGBT+ community from 1960 to present-day.
Speaker: Laura Harmon
Title: Made Grá the law: a history of the student movement’s campaign for marriage equality in Ireland.
This presentation details the Union of Students in Ireland (USI) campaign for marriage equality, highlighting a forty-year history and focus on the campaign tactics, messaging and youth voter registration strategy used by USI in the lead up to the referendum in 2015. The story of this decades-long endeavour by students for marriage equality in Ireland remains to be told.