OTP 2020 Hub Programmes - Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove - Day 2
Sunday 23 February 2020
Timings approximate subject to change on the day
On the Front Lines of Revolution
12.00pm Intro & housekeeping
12.25pm
Gay Liberation: 50 years of history in the making
Stuart Feather
GLF Street Theatre protesting the inaugural meeting of Christian fundamentalist group The Festival of Light as a Choir singing “All things bright and beautiful , 1971, Image courtesy of Stuart Feather.
2020 is the 50th anniversary of the arrival of the Gay Liberation Front in London. Two English sociology students Bob Mellors and Aubrey Walter having heard of gay liberation in America spent their 1970 summer holiday there investigating the phenomena meeting for the first time in Philadelphia at the Black Panther Party’s Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention. They returned to England in the autumn hungry for revolution and held the first meeting of the GLF the London School of Economics where Mellors was a student.
In a far seeing, brave and courageous act of intersectionality, Huey P Newton, Supreme Commander of the Black Panther Party for Self Defence, recognising the politics behind the demands of Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation, invited them as revolutionary sisters and brothers to join the conference. History in the Making looks at the achievements of GLF and its legacy of LGBT activism, from the response to the AIDS crisis and Section 28 through to the activism of today, but also looks at how its brand of LGBT activism has its roots in this 500 year old struggle against racism.
12.55pm Tour of Queer the Pier exhibition led by community curators
1.25pm 20 minute comfort break
1.45pm
Space Invaders - Queer representations in videogames throughout history
Sacha Coward
Sacha Coward leading a Video Game tour at British Museum, image courtesy of Sacha Coward 2019.
The whole world is playing video games more than ever before, they truly are becoming ubiquitous. As an art form they are now slowly gathering the same kind of credibility as film, theatre, fine art and music, yet we are only just starting to pass the same critical eye over them as we do these other mediums.
Video games are played by everyone but until very recently they have been created solely with a cis-gendered white male audience in mind, meaning LGBTQ+ characters were usually rendered from this perspective. Only now as the art form matures are we starting to ask who games are for and how they tell people's stories.
Videogame fanatic, escape room designer, and queer historian Sacha Coward invites you to explore the history of queer representation in videogames. Starting at the inception of the industry, he examines collections, historical records, research in the field, and testimony from LGBQ+ video game designers and players as he looks at the evolution of the community’s engagement with and representation by the gaming industry.
2.15pm Performance
2.45pm 20 minute comfort break
3.05pm
A Brief Encounter with Non-Binary History
Leo Adams, Non-Binary Leeds
Quote from Rabbi Yose on androgynous genders, image courtesy of Non Binary Leeds, 2019.
In a heady journey across, time, space, faith, and cultures Leo Adams of Non-Binary Leeds presents an exploration of material produced by members of the local Leeds non-binary community for a History Zine project.
The traces of non-binary identity in history are fragmentary and are often transferred to us by people that try to marginalise or eradicate such identities, so recording your history own history and looking for kin in these fragments becomes an important act of self-affirmation.
The search takes us to Jewish Rabbinical literature, artists such as Claude Cahun and Marlow Moss, the lives of individuals from distant times; like Thomas(ine) an English colonist in Elizabethan Virginia, and participants personal histories.
3.35pm
Stormé DeLarverie: the forgotten heroine of the Stonewall Riots
Deirdre Swain
Promotional photo from Stormé DeLarverie's time with the Jewel Box Revue. Widely circulated in advertisements since the 1950s. Photographer unknown.
Stormé DeLarverie was an androgynous biracial lesbian who was a male impersonator and the ‘Guardian of the Lesbians’ of Greenwich Village. She was quite likely the person who initiated the Stonewall Riots of 1969 when she retaliated against police violence, but her involvement is disputed and she has been essentially erased from LGBT history. Although lesbians share the same concerns regarding prejudice and injustice as gay men, they also face enduring patterns of discrimination against women, while black lesbians contend with belonging to three minority groups. These imbalances are often expressed as the erasure of the contributions and achievements of these individuals in the historical narrative, indeed when the Stonewall Riots and the struggle for LGBT rights are mentioned, figures such as Craig Rodwell and Frank Kameny are often the first and only individuals who come to mind. This talk looks at DeLarverie's life and career and what drove her to fight injustices against the LGBT community throughout her life.
4.00pm Tour of Queer the Pier exhibition led by community curators
4.30pmThanks & Evaluations