Intersex Awareness Day

Intersex Awareness Day in the UK takes place on Monday, 26 October 2026, marking the 30th anniversary of the first public demonstration by intersex activists in Boston in 1996.

The focus is on grassroots education, human rights, self-determination, bodily autonomy and ending non-consensual cosmetic surgeries on intersex children.

All these questions come from a box they put me in

Matthew Shepard

For 20 years, Matthew Shepard didn’t have a grave. His parents kept his ashes in an urn, too afraid of what people would do to the place where he lay.

Matt was 21, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, when two men he met at a bar drove him to a field outside Laramie, attacked him and left him tied to a fence in the near-freezing cold. He was there for 18 hours before a passing cyclist found him – at first, he thought Matt was a scarecrow. Matt died in a Colorado hospital, surrounded by his family, 28 years ago – on 12 October 1998.

Even his funeral wasn’t safe. Westboro Baptist Church picketed it, and his father Dennis wore a bulletproof vest under his suit to say goodbye to his son. A grave would have been a target. “That would be just like killing Matt all over again,” his mother Judy said. “I couldn’t deal with that.”

The answer came from Matt’s own church. He’d served as an acolyte in the Episcopal Church as a boy, and on 26 October 2018, more than 2,000 people filled Washington National Cathedral to finally lay him to rest. Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, choked back tears as he spoke to Matt directly: “Gently rest in this place. You are safe now. And Matt, welcome home.”

His ashes now rest in the cathedral’s crypt, the same crypt as Helen Keller’s, in a spot the public can’t reach. “It is so important we now have a home for Matt,” Dennis said that morning. “A home that is safe from haters.”

The Gathering: Stop The Clause

Helen sends a big “thank you” to everyone who contributed their memories for her photographic project looking back on the marches against Clause 28!

Phase one of the work has been on show at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool for a few weeks now. Phase 2, 30 photos of the marches accompanied by your words go on show on a digital screen outside the Gallery on 1 November.

If you’re heading to Liverpool’s waterfront soon, do go and take a look!

Open Eye Gallery, 19 Mann Island, Liverpool L3 1BP – Free Entry

Open: 10.00am – 5.00pm, Tuesday – Sunday

The Gathering: Stop the Clause by Helen Constantinou, in partnership with Homotopia

This work brings together twelve separate photographs taken at the beginning of the anti-Section 28 protest march on 30 April 1988. By combining these individual frames into a single image, the work resists the fragmentation of memory and reasserts a moment of collective resistance against legislation rooted in prejudice. Revisiting these photographs is not simply an act of looking back, but a reminder of the profound and lasting consequences that suppression and censorship have on individuals, communities and society. Section 28 was born from fear, ignorance, and hostility, seeking to erase LGBTQI+ lives from public visibility and cultural discourse.

Today, these images resonate with renewed urgency. The rhetoric employed by contemporary far-right political movements echoes many of the narratives that underpinned Section 28, once again questioning the legitimacy and visibility of LGBTQI+ people and communities. By returning to this moment of protest, the work insists that these histories are not closed chapters but ongoing conversations, reminding us that visibility itself can be an act of resistance and that remembering is inseparable from the struggle against erasure.

The Tenniel Chair

A story of two outsiders spanning four turbulent decades.

In 1911 at a suffragette rally in Dublin, a young, strong-willed Catholic woman, Cara, meets a liberal-minded Jewish medical student, Joe. Recognising how her creative potential is being stifled by her conservative family, Joe gives Cara the confidence to become truly herself. Their love, crossing boundaries of convention and prejudice, binds them together … until war intervenes.

Twenty years on in Manchester, their son Kerry, a pacifist, is a young man caught on the dangerous margins of society. A chance meeting with Oliver at an evening class awakens a longing he barely understands. Desperate to do the right thing, he suppresses his ‘unclean thoughts’ and marries Ursula.

As war clouds gather again, Kerry finds himself running a bookshop, his wife expecting twins, and his life balanced on a precipice.

Ned Hopkins’s The Tenniel Chair is the kind of historical novel that reminds us that the great social changes of the twentieth century were lived not in the abstract, but in kitchens, bedrooms, and family homes. Spanning more than four decades and two world wars, it follows a family whose private lives are repeatedly tested by the prejudices and conventions of their age.

The novel becomes particularly affecting in its treatment of their son, Kerry, who struggles with his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was both criminalised and condemned. His decision to marry in an attempt to conform gives the story a painful contemporary resonance, while his pacifism further isolates him as Europe edges towards war.

Hopkins’s achievement is to combine the sweep of social history with the intimacy of family drama. The Tenniel Chair is thoughtful, humane and at times deeply poignant – a novel about people attempting to remain true to themselves when the world around them insists they should be someone else.

In the Acknowledgements Ned Hopkins states: “Special thanks also to Tony Openshaw, Norman and the members of Out In The City, Manchester, for giving me the most interesting and enjoyable afternoon and evening in June 2024, when I was researching attitudes to gay men in years gone by.”

Published 4 September 2026
355 pages
Paperback £12.99