OTP 2020 Hub Programmes - Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove - Day 1
Saturday 22nd February 2020
Obscured Histories
Timings approximate subject to change on the day
12.00pm Intro & housekeeping
12.25pm
Josh Rivers, Busy Being Black
Archiving Our Futures with Kuchenga Shenje
Busy Being Black, image courtesy of Josh Rivers, Photo Peter Fingleton 2018.
‘Busy Being Black’ is a podcast and archival project that takes an ice pick to the dominant narrative and monolithic portrayals of queer Black people.
Host Josh Rivers speaks with Artists, activists, poets, writers and personalities who have learned (and are learning) to thrive at the intersection of their identities. Each episode is a deep-dive into spiritual interior of human beings who continue to be marginalised, silenced and underestimated. By telling these stories, we uncover more of our past because everyone is here because of someone else.
In this special episode, recorded live at Brighton Museum & Art Gallery for the OUTing the Past Festival of LGBT History, Busy Being Black speaks with writer and activist Kuchenga Shenje. Kuchenga, whose work has been published in online magazines including Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, gal-dem, Dazed, and i-D, will share hard-earned wisdom about spirituality, successes and failures. Looking at figures in the community, both LGBT and BAME and literary who have helped and inspired her as a black transsexual feminist writer.
12.55pm Tour of Queer the Pier exhibition led by community curators
1.25pm 20 minute comfort break
13.45pm
The ‘Special Problem’: Construction and treatment of female homosexuality in England 1947-1977
Dr Sarah Carr & Dr Helen Spandler
Dr Sarah Carr & Dr Helen Spandler in Manchester’s Gay Village, image courtesy of Dr Helen Spandler 2019.
It is well documented that homosexuality was classified as a mental illness in the DSM until 1973, when it was replaced with the diagnosis of "sexual orientation disturbance”, and it is widely known that homosexual men in England were criminalized and risked imprisonment or aversion therapy in a psychiatric hospital. Far less is known about same-sex attracted women in England who were not subject court referral routes into psychiatric treatment. Although female homosexuality was not criminalized in England, it was still officially classified as a mental disorder (“sexual deviation”).
As part of a cohort of studies on the theme of Sexualities and Health funded by the Wellcome Trust, Dr Sarah Carr and Dr Helen Spandler conducted an archival study of women’s and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LBG&T) archives in England. The purpose of the study, called 'Hidden from History?', was to investigate what happened to same-sex attracted women in the mental health system from 1950’s until 1970’. What emerged from the archives was a complex picture of a medical system with no consensus about whether female homosexuality could, or indeed should, be treated. Professional attitudes and practices varied enormously and women could be by turns treated empathetically and encouraged to accept themselves or be subjected to unethical, experimental ‘treatments’.
2.15pm Performance
2.45pm 20 minute comfort break
15.05pm Famine, War & Kindertransport: 100 Years of Quaker Lesbian Pride & Awe - Dr Hilda Clark & Edith Pye LH OBE
Clare B Dimyon MBE
Hilda Clark at work with the Friends War Victims Relief Committee. © 2014 The Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Britain.
In 1919 Dr Hilda Clark, a member of the Friends War Victims Relief Committee, arrived to assess a dire famine in Vienna. Then the capital of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian Empire defeated in WW1. Hilda was joined in Vienna by her ‘life-long companion’ Edith Pye a nurse and midwife.
Throughout the war they worked tirelessly to save lives and relieving the suffering caused by war in a way consistent with their pacifist Quaker beliefs, helping close to the front line in villages, refugee camps, and even establishing an emergency maternity hospital. In 1938 Hilda returned to Vienna and used her unique understanding and connections to help the children of persecuted groups to flee Nazis Europe on the Kindertransport.
Their original correspondence, detailed and archived according to Quaker custom, not only documents their contribution also reveals how very deeply they cared for one another and how painful it was for them to be apart. From the archive we can draw a portrait of two women who are devoted to each other and whose mutual bond and affection clearly sustained them through incredibly trying time.
3.35pm Fighting With Pride
Caroline Paige
Flight Lieutenant Caroline Paige, Iraq, 2005, MOD copyright_2005.
Fighting With Pride is a collection of ten stories of LGBT servicemen and women from the Royal Navy, the British Army and the Royal Air Force, captured in a book that is set to mark the 20th anniversary of the lifting of the British Armed Forces’ ‘gay ban’, on 12th January 2020.
The stories tell of service in the Second World War, the Cold War, Northern Ireland, the Falklands War, the Gulf Wars, the Balkan Conflicts and the Afghanistan Campaigns; they reveal the most remarkable and often complex lives, lived for the privilege of serving their country; because during most of this period LGBTQ+ service was barred in the UK’s Armed Forces.
For those exposed and dragged from the shadows, these are accounts of arrest, harrowing investigations and of being forced to resign or ‘dismissed in disgrace’. For others, their experiences tell of servicemen and women who today enjoy exceptional careers at the front line of operations worldwide. Their stories are of finding their place in an Armed Forces that truly values them and of finding a welcome that was denied so many in the past.
Their stories are profoundly moving testaments to their loyalty to their units, their courage on the battlefield and their unswerving sense of right and wrong, despite immense personal challenges.
Fighting with Pride traces the incredible David and Goliath legal battle for equality and celebrates the lives of LGBTQ servicemen and women who have all been part of a very British success.
4.05pm Tour of Queer the Pier exhibition led by community curators
4.35pm Thanks & Evaluations