OTP 2022 Hub Programme - Suffolk Archives
We are back! Suffolk Archives are excited to announce we will take part in OUTing the Past Festival for the second time in 2022.
Last year was not an easy year for most of us. Thanks to our dedicated volunteers and communities across the county, we succeeded in overcoming the limitations of collecting during the pandemic and still managed to discover untold stories of LGBTQ+ people in Suffolk’s past to be added to the archive and deliver a range of activities to promote the fascinating insights into past behaviours related to sexuality and gender throughout the year. Aligning with the festival’s aims of developing a more comprehensive understanding of past attitudes towards sex and gender diversity, we were honoured to have Sue Sanders and Trudy Howdon last year’s OUTing the Past Festival to introduce the public the history of LGBT history month and an LGBT life. We also had Dr Clifford Williams and Veronica McKenzie to address the hidden historical stories of LGBTQ+ communities.
Our Pride in Suffolk’s Past project also enjoyed a huge success and received positive feedbacks from our visitors in 2021. Supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund and dedicated volunteers, Suffolk Archives successfully delivered our Pride in Suffolk’s Past exhibition from May to July showcasing our work of hidden history of LGBTQ+ people in Suffolk and contemporary stories of the county’s LGBTQ+ community researched and collected through our archives. We would also like to share our joy that the work of the volunteers has recently been recognised as joint winners of the Archives and Records Association (ARA) Archives Volunteer Award 2021.
With the growing public interest in LGBTQ+ history nationally and internationally, Suffolk Archives will carry on celebrating our past, preserving our present and looking towards our future.
This year we are delighted to continue to take part in the OUTing the Past festival 2022 to uncover more hidden history of how past generations have experienced and documented their experiences through a period of monumental societal change towards sexuality and gender identity.
We will be hosting a FREE in person/hybrid event on Thursday 3rd February at 6pm and have been fortunate enough to secure three prestigious speakers:
Rainer Schulze:
‘Who was Suleika Aldini?’
Alex Holmes:
‘The Secret Lives of Scientists.’
Muhammed Ali:
‘Colonial Contradictions: Ethno-religious Homophobia within Intersectional British Pakistani Non-heterosexual Muslim Males' Communities.’
Who was Suleika Aldini? - Rainer Schulze
Transgender history before the 1990s is a hidden, or rather ignored history. Suleika Aldini was a cabaret artist in West Germany from the 1960s until the mid-1990s. She was assigned to male at birth and the only survivor of the Holocaust from her Roma family. She started injecting female hormones and grew breasts in the mid-1950s but she never had the operation. In this talk Schulze will discuss the problems of piecing a life together which, apart from Suleika’s stage performances, was lived in obscurity. It will also ask whether we have the right to probe into the life of someone who was very hesitant while she was alive to speak about her life away from the stage. Suleika’s life is an untold story which documents both the unending struggles of a transgender person in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, but also the joys it held for her.
Rainer Schulze
Rainer Schulze is Emeritus Professor of Modern European History and Human Rights at the University of Essex. He has worked extensively on the Holocaust, and his emphasis has been on the non-Jewish victims of Nazi persecution. In the early 2000s he was one of the project leaders for the redevelopment of the permanent exhibition at the former Nazi concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen. In 2012 he set up an annual prize for schools in Essex and Suffolk named after Holocaust survivor Dora Love, championing equality, diversity, and inclusion. He has also worked more widely on LGBTQ+ history and LGBTQ+ rights, and for two years he curated and presented the programme Tales from the Margins on Latest TV Brighton with films and documentaries about the situation of LGBTQ+ people from around the world. He is keen that we remember the important work of the many activists who have tried to make our world a better place for everyone, and he is a trustee for a number of LGBTQ+ charities.
Colonial Contradictions: Ethno-religious Homophobia within Intersectional British Pakistani Non-heterosexual Muslim Males' Communities - Muhammed Ali
This presentation focuses on various themes such as colonial contradictions, psychological wellbeing, conditional acceptance and izzat (socio-cultural honour). Ali thinks that far too often it is easier and simpler to reduce problems BGPMM experience as located within them as ‘conflicting’ identity ‘issues’. However, Ali adopts a deeper and more holistic approach in this talk to ask where the ethno-religious homophobia of BGPMM comes from and explore the overlooked and silenced stories of South Asian/Muslim sexualities eroded through western imperialism and hegemony. These values align with his activist-like beliefs in decolonising knowledge, but also making academia more accessible.
Muhammed Ali is a racially minoritised Pakistani, Pansexual, non-binary male (he/him), Muslim-raised SBNR (Spiritual, But Not Religious), working class British. Naturally with this identity, he intersectionally explored the experiences of British, Gay, Pakistani, Muslim Males (BGPMM) during his undergraduate degree in Psychology and Counselling. His academic interests lie in decolonialisation and Islamic psychology, a field that was established and founded from Muslim-beliefs, decades before what Eurocentric scholars have taken claim for. His work contributes towards the existing but overlooked and silenced stories of South Asian/Muslim sexualities by correcting the record towards one that isn’t washed to fit colonial narratives. He is currently building on the work of his undergraduate by undertaking a Masters by Research with a similar population (non-heterosexual, not gay). He is sharing his findings and research in accessible formats, including Twitter threads, blogposts and infographics. See his Linktree to access his work.
The Secret Lives of Scientists - Alex Holmes
Can you think of any scientists in history that were Queer? Maybe Alan Turing the computer scientist comes to mind, but how about Isaac Newton who developed the theory of gravity? How about Alan Hart who developed a method to diagnose TB? How about Sally Ride, the first American woman to go to space? LGBTQ+ representation and inclusion in the sciences has historically been erased or kept separate from the work and knowledge produced by Queer individuals, but identity – of those doing the science and those having science done unto them - is key in the scientific process, interpretation of results and how they are fed into the wider community. Alex will introduce and reintroduce you to various scientists by delving into their secret lives, and asking the question – why is there a precedent to keep sexuality and science separate?
Alex Holmes
Alex Holmes (she/her) is a PhD student at the University of Leeds, who’s found herself working somewhere between biophysics and biochemistry to find out how tiny parts of the body function. When she isn’t busy “hacking into supercomputers” or complaining about experiments not working, she is very active in scientific outreach and sharing the experience of being #BiInSci. She thinks the sexuality of scientists is historically erased or they are pushed out of science due to social stigmas, and this continues now with calls to keep science away from politics and topical conversation. Therefore she wants to share and celebrate the sexuality of Queer scientists of the past and learn from previous mistakes. She has been working with Pint of Science, an annual international science festival comprised of informal talks in pubs since 2018 and is currently the Yorkshire Chapter manager. She has also worked as European co-ordinator for the Global Science Show. We hope that this event will be engaging, enlightening and entertaining for you all and will provide an insight into the lives of both our past and present LGBTQ+ community.
Subscribe our YouTube Channel to watch the free webinar
Suffolk Archives continues to work with local LGBTQ+ organisations and charities to support collecting and sharing stories and engaging with the local heritage.
You can find us at:
The Hold
131 Fore Street
Ipswich
IP4 1LR
Opening times: Monday to Friday 9.30am – 5pm, Sat & Sun 10am – 4pm For access to our collections at The Hold and other branches you can book here Suffolk Archives
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