Manchester Open Exhibition 2024

The Exhibition is the biggest celebration of Greater Manchester’s creative talent. Artwork by Out In The City members will be presented alongside approximately 480 other amazing and unique artworks.

On Thursday, 8 February Out In The City will be visiting the Manchester Open 24 Exhibition at HOME Cinema, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester M15 4FN.

The work will be exhibited in HOME’s Gallery from Saturday 3 February to Sunday 28 April 2024. We have 20 free tickets to view the exhibition on 8 February from 12.00 noon until 1.00pm. We still have 8 tickets left, so please contact us as soon as possible, if interested.

We can also eat later at the venue.

Is it time to retire the phrase ‘openly gay’?

Andrew Scott, actor, made the suggestion in a recent interview. He pointed out that no one says a person is ‘openly heterosexual’. The phrase ‘openly gay‘ is mostly synonymous with an era of secrecy and shame.

The phrase has its historical uses – one of the remarkable things about Bayard Rustin is precisely that he was out at a time, pre-Stonewall, when it was hazardous to be so. But it would be hard to disagree that the phrase is outdated today. It’s a hangover from that all-too-recent time when there were no queer voices in the media, with the result that any LGBT-related stories were reported from a straight and typically homophobic perspective.

The interviewer, Scott Feinberg, singled out Scott, who stars in Andrew Haigh’s “All of Us Strangers” as a screenwriter magically reunited with the parents who died when he was 12, and Colman Domingo, who plays Martin Luther King’s advisor Bayard Rustin in the Netflix biopic “Rustin”, as “openly gay actors playing openly gay characters who are at the centre of important films”. The remark was intended as a way in to a discussion about representation, though at no point did he refer to the other performers present (Robert Downey Jr, Paul Giamatti, Mark Ruffalo and Jeffrey Wright) as “openly heterosexual”.

“I’m going to make a pitch for getting rid of the phrase ‘openly gay,’” said Scott, steering the conversation in a more illuminating direction. “It’s an expression that you only ever hear in the media. You’re never at a party and you say, ‘This is my openly gay friend’. Why, he wondered, is “openly” always attached to that adjective? We don’t say you’re ‘openly Irish.’ We don’t say you’re ‘openly left-handed’ … There’s something in it that’s a little near ‘shamelessly.’ ‘You’re open about it?’ You know what I’m saying?” He proposed that “it’s time to just sort of park it.”

Agreed. Let’s ditch it!

Pride Events and Dates for 2024

Greater Manchester now has the highest number of individual Pride events found anywhere in the UK and here are the details:

May

Wednesday 15 – Saturday 18 May – Pride in Trafford

Saturday 25 May – Pride on The Range (Whalley Range)

June

Saturday 1 June – Bury Pride 

Sunday 2 June – Stockport Pride

Saturday 15 June – Tameside 

Saturday 22 June – Salford Pink Picnic

Sunday 30 June – Pride in Nature with RHS Bridgewater

July

Friday 12 – Sunday 14 July – Sparkle Weekend

Saturday 20 & Sunday 21 July – Oldham Pride

Monday 22 – Sunday 28 July – Happy Valley Pride (Hebden Bridge)    

August 

Saturday 3 August – Trans Pride Manchester

Friday 9 – Sunday 11 August – Levenshulme Pride

Saturday 10 & Sunday 11 August – Prestwich Pride

Saturday 10 August – Wigan Pride

Saturday 17 August – Rochdale in Rainbows

Friday 23 – Monday 26 August – Manchester Pride

Saturday 31 August – Didsbury Pride

September

Saturday 21 September – Ramsbottom Pride

Sunday 29 September – Bury Rainbow Train

Date to be confirmed – Pride in Bolton

Date to be confirmed – Chorlton Pride

We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible at these events across Greater Manchester (and Hebden Bridge).

How They Reported on a Prominent Trans Man Getting Married in 1952

“Dr Ewan Forbes Semphill, of Brux Lodge, Alford, Aberdeenshire, brother of Lord Sempill, is to marry his housekeeper, Miss Isobel Mitchell.

Dr Forbes Sempill, it will be recalled, recently changed his christian name from Elizabeth to Ewan.

The marriage banns were proclaimed in Kildrummy Parish Church, near the doctor’s home, at the morning service on Sunday by Rev Peter J Macewen.

Miss Mitchell has been housekeeper to Dr Forbes Sempill for several years.

Dr Forbes Sempill was on his rounds when the banns were proclaimed.”

On 21 September 1991, The Scotsman, reporting Forbes’ death:

“Facing personal difficulties with great courage, Ewan lived a full and distinguished life. During the years he spent as general practitioner at Alford, he became much loved by his patients. They recognised his devotion to them and valued the close and sympathetic understanding of their lives and needs which he in particular was able to bring them. He was a wonderfully gifted musician and dancer and knew the spirit of his people.

When the onset of deafness obliged him to retire from the Alford practice he took to farming at Brux, a few miles further up the Don, making full use of that affinity with nature and the land which was such an important and endearing aspect of his character … he was also a devoted husband, faithful elder of the Kirk and a loyal warm-hearted and entertaining friend.”

To find out more about this wonderful man, please see “The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes” by Zoe Playdon.