Bridgewater Hall Community Members Day

The Community Members Day is an annual event held at the Bridgewater Hall at the end of the classical music season.

The season runs from autumn to summer and between September 2024 and May 2025, members of Out In The City had enjoyed 35 concerts. Altogether 400 people attended which equates to an average of 11 people attending each concert. Also 76 different people attended at least one concert. We are really grateful to the Bridgewater Hall for this fantastic resource.

Twenty six of us joined in this year’s event for a day of free music making! We took part in an interactive storytelling percussion workshop led by Afrocats, explored the rich history of the resident orchestra, The Hallé, in a fascinating talk by archivist Eleanor Roberts, and enjoyed an exclusive behind-the-scenes tour of the Hall.

Tea, coffee and a light lunch was provided, before we rounded off the day, by experiencing a captivating performance by the remarkable flautist Sofiia Matviienko, presented by the Manchester Mid-day Concerts Society in the main auditorium.

ALL fm Queeries Radio Show

We recorded the following show which was broadcast live on ALL fm 96.9 on 27 May 2025 on the subject of conversion therapy:

History of conversion therapy

Conversion therapy is the pseudoscientific practice of attempting to change an individual’s sexual orientation, romantic orientation, gender identity or gender expression to align with heterosexual and cisgender norms. 

Methods that have been used to this end include forms of brain surgery, surgical or chemical castration, aversion therapy treatments such as electric shocks, nausea-inducing drugs, hypnosis, counselling, spiritual interventions, visualisation, psychoanalysis and arousal reconditioning.

In the 1920s analysts assumed that homosexuality was pathological and that attempts to treat it were appropriate, although opinion about changing homosexuality was largely pessimistic. Those forms of homosexuality that were considered perversions were usually held to be incurable. Analysts’ tolerant statements about homosexuality arose from recognition of the difficulty of achieving change.

In 1920 Sigmund Freud observed that “to convert a fully developed homosexual into a heterosexual does not offer much more prospect of success than the reverse”.

Beginning in the 1930s and continuing for roughly twenty years, major changes occurred in how analysts viewed homosexuality, which involved a shift in the rhetoric, some of whom felt free to ridicule and abuse their gay patients.

Nowadays, there is a scientific consensus that conversion therapy is ineffective at changing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity and that it frequently causes significant long-term psychological harm. The position of current evidence-based medicine and clinical guidance is that homosexuality, bisexuality and gender variance are natural and healthy aspects of human sexuality.

In March 2018, the European parliament passed a resolution condemning conversion therapy and urging member states to ban the practice.

Despite the Conservative Party promise in 2018 to make it illegal and the government’s stated intention in 2021 that conversion therapy should become a banned practice throughout England and Wales, conversion therapy is still legal in the United Kingdom.

Birthdays