The divisive BBC show considered lost for more than 60 years that’s now been given a new life

For the BBC, 1957 was a big year. It marked the first time the Queen’s Speech was televised, and it even featured a hoax April Fool’s Day documentary about spaghetti growing on trees in Switzerland that some people are still convinced is real today. That same year the corporation aired a lesser-known radio documentary which aimed to highlight both the homosexual lifestyle of the time and how those people were perceived by the wider community. It was hailed as both divisive and ground-breaking.

First produced in 1954 but left collecting dust until it was revived and heavily edited three years later to coincide with the release of the Wolfenden Report, which recommended that homosexual acts between two consenting adults should no longer be considered to be a criminal offence, The Homosexual Condition was considered to be lost media. Until a few years ago.

Dr Marcus Collins, a historian of contemporary Britain who currently teaches at Loughborough University, discovered a treasure trove of items relating to the radio production, like transcripts, documents, and other correspondence, whilst traipsing through the vast archives of the BBC. The documentary featured Lord Hailsham, who spoke about how he felt that gay men were ‘eager to spread the disease from which they suffer’, as well as thoughts from Mary Whitehouse, clergymen, psychiatrists and barristers. But it was equally also a trailblazer – marking one of the first times people could easily learn about homosexuality on the public airwaves.

“I was researching something completely different about The Beatles initially, which is what had led me to the BBC archives in the first place,” Dr Collins recalls. “I saw something labelled ‘sexual offences in 1953’, and I thought to myself, ‘well, what would the BBC have to say about that back then?’ It turned out they didn’t actually know what they could say.”

Dr Collins suggests the documentary, which only exists in transcript form now, may have been made without a view of it ever being aired. “It was a lot of viewpoints from people who basically said there was too much of this stuff going on and the solution was to crack down on it,” he explains.

“There was a tension between that and people thinking homosexuality should be decriminalised. The man who presented the show was actually a reformer. He had ended up being one of the founders of the first organisation calling for the decriminalisation in Britain so there were also a lot of good, liberal voices in it for the time.”

Alongside the transcript of the documentary, the archives also featured internal memos between staff as they debated amongst themselves over how, or if, they should air it at all. Dr Collins also found that it was the Director General of the BBC who eventually pulled the plug on the initial 1953 release.

The discovery in the archive led Dr Collins to start a new project of his own delving deep into LGBT+ history. With all the items linked to The Homosexual Condition only existing in paper form, he approached playwright Dr Stephen M Hornby, who had worked on a number of productions on gay history in Britain, to see if there was anything he could do with the documents he had found.

“I was intrigued by this notion of a lost programme that nobody had ever heard of,” Dr Hornby recalls of that first introduction to Dr Collins. “When I read the transcript, the two things that stood out to me most were how the criminalisation of homosexuality was actually getting in the way of these men seeking treatment, with these different experts offering a criminal solution rather than anything medical. There were suggestions that conversion therapy could be an amenable solution, and I thought that was quite fascinating as it’s something that is, amazingly, still a debate in society today.

“And you have to remember that, at the time, the BBC was pretty much the only option. They were the voice of the nation, so whilst they were constantly striving to be balanced and impartial, they also had these experts saying that sexuality could be cured, which is quite a big thing to suggest.”

With Stephen’s background, the decision was made to create a new play inspired by the transcripts and the people who may have been tuning in back when it aired. Called The BBC’s First Homosexual, it tells the fictional story of a young man exploring his sexuality in the 1950s as the impact of the documentary takes its toll on his life.

Both Hornby and Collins hope the play, which has been given approval by the BBC, will not only show how times have changed in the almost 70 years since the documentary was first released but also how many similarities still exist today. “What more do we have to do to get this bloody awful practice banned in this country?” Hornby asks. “I hope it will spark an energising conversation about ways forward. I want it to be a call-to-arms and encourage some positive change.”

The play tours the UK in February to coincide with LGBT+ History Month 2026 as part of a partnership with SchoolsOUT.

Members of Out In The City saw the play at the New Adelphi Theatre in Salford on 4 February, before it heads out to Birmingham, Brighton, London, Liverpool and Loughborough.

Starring Mitchell Wilson, Max Lohan and Andrew Pollard, each performance will be followed by a Q&A discussion with a featured special guest to discuss the issues tackled in the play.

In Salford, following a short comfort break, Revd Augustine Tanner-Ihm, a charismatic African-American educator, theologian, pastor, activist, leader, mentor, trustee, presenter and speaker spoke about his personal experience of conversion practices.

There were then worldwide premiere performances of three short new plays responding to “The BBC’s First Homosexual”. The discussion and plays were excellent and unmissable.

John Henry Mackay (born 6 February 1864 – died 16 May 1933)

John Henry Mackay was born in Scotland to a Scottish father and a German mother. He left there following the death of his father (when John was only about 18 months old) and settled in Germany with his mother and her family.

His early written works dealt mainly with anarchist philosophy and romantic poetry.

The Books of the Nameless Love

In 1905 he started to write a series of works (of poetry and prose) under the pseudonym of ‘Sagitta’ (Latin for ‘Arrow’), which explored the theme of same-sex male love. These collected works were known by the title of ‘Die Bucher der Namenlosen Liebe’ (literally ‘The Books of the Nameless Love’, the title being a reference to Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem about ‘the love that dare not speak its name’).

Early works in the series were originally banned as obscene by the German government in 1909. Nonetheless Mackay persevered, and by 1913, the full initial collection of 6 works in the series was published, ostensibly in Paris (according to the title page) but scholars now suggest that Mackay had the book published secretly in Germany, Paris simply being a ruse to throw off further government censorship of his work.

Philosophically he was opposed to the research of many of his contemporaries, including that of Magnus Hirschfeld, who were developing a scientifically-based understanding of queerness. Forever the anarchist, Mackay rejected their attempts, as he saw it, to ‘create categories and labels’.

The seventh and final work in the ‘Namenlose Liebe’ series came in 1926 with the publication of his novel ‘Der Puppenjunge’ (The Hustler), Mackay’s tale of a German rent boy in Berlin.

Connection to the work of Richard Strauss

Mackay’s works on anarchist thought and on male love continue to be read, as does his romantic poetry. Next month Out in the City members will be attending a performance of Richard Strauss’s ‘Four Last Songs’ at the Bridgwater Hall; though not represented in that vocal series, the texts for earlier songs by Strauss were taken directly from Mackay’s work (eg Strauss’s Opus 27 song cycle completed in 1894) and by their performance continue to bring his poetry to public attention.

© Arthur Martland – LGBT History Month 2026

Who Was ‘Lisa Ben,’ the Woman Behind the US’s First Lesbian Magazine?

Edythe Eyde published nine issues of “Vice Versa” between June 1947 and February 1948. She later adopted a pen name that doubled as an anagram for “lesbian”.

Edythe started writing under the name “Lisa Ben” after an editor rejected her first choice, “Ima Spinster”.

In the summer of 1947, Edythe Eyde, a secretarial assistant at RKO Pictures in Los Angeles, started covertly publishing a tiny journal she called Vice Versa, subtitled “America’s Gayest Magazine”.

Now recognised as the first lesbian magazine in the United States, Vice Versa appeared at a time when sodomy laws banning “unnatural sexual acts” criminalised same-sex activity across much of the country. To protect her safety and livelihood, Eyde – who later adopted the pen name Lisa Ben, which doubled as an anagram for “lesbian” – published her magazine anonymously.

“In those days, our kind of life was considered a vice,” she said in a 1992 interview. “It was the opposite of the lives that were being lived – supposedly – and understood and approved of by society. And Vice Versa means the opposite.”

The project was very risky, says Lillian Faderman, an emeritus scholar at California State University, Fresno, who is often called the “mother of lesbian history”.

“Sexuality was always a secret from people who were not gay, and the reason it was a secret is because you would get in trouble if straight people knew you were a homosexual,” Faderman adds. A lesbian herself, she recalls knowing women caught when police raided gay bars and gay people who feared arrest in the mid-20th century.

“There was nowhere you could turn for safe harbour,” says Faderman, whose books include The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle and Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: A History of Lesbian Life in 20th-Century America.

Eyde, a 26-year-old lesbian who had recently moved from Northern California to LA to escape her oppressive family, spent her downtime at work typing up issues of Vice Versa. Using carbon paper to create duplicates of typed pages, she produced a total of just 12 copies per issue.

The free, rather plain publication featured no bylines, no photos, no ads and no masthead. It had a blue cover and consisted of typed pages stapled together. Eyde passed it around to friends, who then passed the copies on to other friends. She also mailed copies to a small number of people and gave out issues at gay bars. Overall, Vice Versa probably had no more than 100 readers.

The magazine’s articles ranged from book and film reviews to poetry to reader commentary. Eyde sometimes adopted a protofeminist tone, praising “time-saving innovations such as frozen foods and electrical appliances as making it easier for women to live independently of men,” wrote cultural historian Rodger Streitmatter in a 1998 journal article.

Besides the occasional help of an anonymous straight male friend, Eyde was responsible for putting out all nine issues of Vice Versa single-handedly.

“What Eyde did was unique: No other publication attempted to write about lesbians,” says Faderman. “She did it all herself, except for a few articles.”

Julie R Enszer, a poet and gender studies scholar at the University of Mississippi, emphasises Eyde’s great initiative. Society was much less open-minded than it is today, but after World War II ended in 1945, the feeling that a new, modern era was dawning swept across the nation.

“At a time incredibly different from the current moment we’re in, she just felt so powerfully about being a lesbian and wanting to connect with other women,” says. “That’s really how I think about Vice Versa: a way to write things down, share with people, and make connections with other women and build a community.”

She adds, “What Eyde did with that publication, really – it took a while, but it inspired a lot of what happened in the women’s liberation movement.”

In Vice Versa’s inaugural issue, published in June 1947, Eyde wrote an introduction to readers on a page titled “In Explanation.” She argued that newsstands held many publications but nothing like hers, because society would deem it too vulgar.

“Hence the appearance of Vice Versa, a magazine dedicated, in all seriousness, to those of us who will never quite be able to adapt ourselves to the iron-bound rules of convention,” Eyde wrote. “This is your magazine.”

Eyde stopped mailing copies of Vice Versa after someone warned her that doing so violated the Comstock Act, an 1873 law that forbade sending “obscene, lewd or lascivious” materials through the postal service.

“She very naively said, ‘Why? There’s nothing about sex in here,’” Faderman explains. “But it’s about homosexuality, and that’s against the law, and you could get arrested for it.”

Eyde published the last issue of the magazine in February 1948, after aviator and business tycoon Howard Hughes bought out RKO and she lost her job. No longer a private secretary in a private office, she worked in a typing pool with many other people, making it difficult for her to produce a clandestine publication.

It wasn’t until 1956 that the Ladder, the next-oldest American publication specifically for lesbians, debuted. The Daughters of Bilitis, a pioneering lesbian organisation based in San Francisco, published the underground magazine, which used pseudonyms and ran until 1972. One of the Ladder’s contributors was Eyde, who started writing under the pen name Lisa Ben after an editor rejected her first choice, Ima Spinster.

In the years following Vice Versa, Eyde continued working as a secretary and started singing in lesbian bars and clubs. Her identity as the person behind both Lisa Ben and Vice Versa surfaced sometime after the 1950s, according to Faderman, but Eyde later distanced herself from the lesbian community. “She sort of put it behind her,” Faderman says.

In 2002, J D Doyle, then-host of the “Queer Music Heritage” radio show, reached out to Eyde to request an interview. He published her response, which contained a polite but firm refusal, on his website of the same name.

“I am sorry to disappoint you, but I have gone into seclusion and no longer desire any publicity,” Eyde wrote.

The previous year, someone had discovered the Eyde-Lisa Ben connection and circulated a photo of her at a gay festival to many newsletters, she explained. The incident rattled her.

“As many of us approach our declining years, it is not unusual to regret unwise behaviour in days gone past,” Eyde added. “No, I have not ‘gone over to the other side,’ but I no longer actively participate in the gay lifestyle. To do so at this stage of my life would be inappropriate.”

Eyde died in 2015 at age 94 and was buried in California’s Forest Lawn Memorial Park alongside such notables as Humphrey Bogart and Carrie Fisher.

Eyde showed great fortitude during an era when society was so hostile to gay people.

Enszer stated: “She had extraordinary courage and bravery. But I also think there are people that just have a deep understanding of and commitment to who they are, and they just do not feel the same type of societal pressure to be silent.”

Faderman, who was a child during the Vice Versa era, wishes she had a publication like Eyde’s when she “started going to gay bars in 1956.” She adds, “It would have been so important to me, just to know someone could be brave enough to write about lesbians and not say that we were doomed to drown in a well of loneliness … or be converted to heterosexuality.”

50+ HangOuts – LGBT+ icons who have inspired us

10 February 2026 – 6.00pm – 8.00pm – Free online event
Join this free online event with LGBT Hero, celebrating LGBT+ History Month by looking at LGBT+ icons who have inspired us.

In this session, the discussion will be looking at who you choose as your LGBT+ icon. This may be someone that inspires you or someone that you feel connected to on a personal level.

Together we will make new discoveries and build a greater visibility of LGBT+ people past, present and potential future.

This session is part of LGBT Hero’s 50+ HangOuts, a twice-monthly friendly and welcoming online social and support group for all older LGBT+ people aged 50 and over. You can read more about the group and sign up for the session below.

Details:
Date: Tuesday 10 February 2026
Time: 6.00pm – 8.00pm
Venue: Online event

Book now

LGBT History Month

Science and innovation impacts our daily lives, from the technology we use to developments in healthcare, as well as helping us to address global challenges such as climate change and access to clean energy.

Diverse teams are essential for the development of solutions which benefit everyone, yet we might often struggle to name LGBT+ scientists and innovators. The 2026 theme for LGBT+ History Month aims to highlight the contributions of LGBT+ people historically and today, and to raise awareness of the people behind them. 

Alongside celebrating LGBT+ people, it is important to highlight the harm that LGBT+ people have historically faced as a result of the ways in which science has been explored and misapplied in the past, such as through the medicalisation and pathologisation of LGBT+ identities, and how we still need to address this today. 

Iris Prize LGBTQ+ Film Festival – HOME, 2 Tony Wilson Place, Manchester M15 4FN

Wednesday, 11 February – Saturday, 14 February

Wednesday, 11 February – 6.30pm – Iris 2025: Best Bits + Q&A

Award winners, audience favourites and unforgettable stories

Thursday, 12 February – 6.00pm – Blue Boy Trial + Q&A

The ground-breaking true story of the moment that changed LGBTQ+ visibility in Japan

Saturday, 14 February – 3.30pm – When Love Broke the Law + Q&A

Celebrate desire, protest and the power of love this Valentine’s Day

Queer Contact Festival – Contact Theatre, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6JA

Thursday, 12 February – Saturday, 21 February

The annual Queer Contact Festival is back with a bang with two weeks of varied and exciting programming from a diverse range of queer creatives. With theatre, cabaret, art, film, line-dancing and more, all available at a range of accessible prices, we think there’s something for everyone this year.

Main Character Energy (Thursday 12 – Friday 13 February)
A beautiful and supremely talented black actress is putting on an autobiographical one woman show to finally take up the space she’s been so routinely denied. It’s your privilege, your honour and your pre-eminent pleasure to give her all the attention she deserves. Tickets available from £10.

You’re Not Getting Any Younger (Saturday 14 February)
This Valentine’s Day, Chanukah Lewinsky thinks you should get out the house more because you’re running out of options. A cabaret night for single people and their allies, non-ethical non-monogamy (just have the affair!), and anxious bisexual window shopping. Tickets available from £5.

Social Experiment – Queer Contact Edition (Thursday 19 February)
Social Experiment is a gathering at Contact for anyone interested in Live Art and contemporary performance to meet, chat, and try ideas out. A free and informal, semi-regular evening event with the upcoming Queer Contact edition featuring work from Queer Artists. Free to attend.

Comedy at Queer Contact (Friday 20 February)
As part of this year’s Queer Contact, join us for a hilarious evening of stand-up comedy, featuring a line-up of all queer comics curated and hosted by Ben Hodge. Tickets available from £5.

Less Like Ourselves, More Like Each Other (Saturday 21 February)
Artist and filmmaker Graham Clayton-Chance presents Less Like Ourselves, More Like Each Other, a body of work rooted in queer country and western dancing in San Francisco spanning his multi-award-winning film Last Dance at the Sundance Stompede and immersive installation developed for Queer Contact. Tickets available from £3, some parts free to attend.

Manchester Queer Art Market (Saturday 21 February)
Manchester’s premiere monthly market for Queer artists and makers takes over the Contact Castle for the very first time! Free to attend from 1.00pm – 5.30pm.

A Northern Tr*nny Hootenanny (Saturday 21 February)
Join Trans Artist Hunter King in his gender journey of self-discovery in his uplifting queer parody musical, maid in the Wild, Wild, North West, A Northern Tr*nny Hootenanny. Tickets available from £10.

See the full schedule and buy tickets 

LGBT+ History Month Party in Cross Street Chapel

Thursday, 19 February – 2.00pm – 4.00pm – Free

featuring Joe Cockx (from the Golden Age Big Band) performing Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra and Andy Williams.

There will also be a raffle and buffet. 

RSVP for catering purposes here.

Local Heroes

Forever Manchester are bringing back their ‘Local Heroes’ series:

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The Manchester Village Pride

Pride is coming back to Manchester this summer, and this time it is being rebuilt from the Village up.

A new not for profit Community Interest Company called Manchester Village Pride CIC has been set up to deliver the event, following the collapse of Manchester Pride Events Ltd last year. The aim is simple. Bring Pride home. Make it safe, inclusive and rooted in the community that created it.

The four day celebration will take place over the August Bank Holiday, from Friday 28 to Monday 31 August. Core parts of Pride will return, including the parade, the Village party and the vigil.

Manchester Village Pride has the backing of key partners including Manchester City Council, Marketing Manchester, CityCo and Equity, alongside LGBTQ+ organisations, charities and community groups.

Alongside the main programme in the Village, there will also be a Pride Fringe, made up of LGBTQ+ arts, culture and nightlife events across the city.

Local Village venues have already backed the plan with £120,000 in loans to provide the working capital needed to get things moving. It is a clear show of commitment from LGBTQ+ businesses to protect Pride and keep it community led.

The CIC is run by an unpaid board working on a voluntary basis. Any profit made will be reinvested back into the community, supporting LGBTQ+ charities, grassroots organisations and services.

The Council will also host engagement sessions with LGBTQ+ organisations to help shape the event, and a Community Advisory Board will be created through an open application process to ensure community voices are reflected in the planning.

Carl Austin-Behan, a founding board member and spokesperson for Manchester Village Pride CIC, said the focus for 2026 is about rebuilding trust, reconnecting with Pride’s origins and reinforcing the Village as the heart of the celebration. From 2027 onwards, there are plans to develop a wider citywide programme around Pride.

“Manchester Village Pride is built around a simple belief,” said Carl. “Pride has a home – and that home is the Village – but Pride belongs to everyone”. 

Birthdays

Paradise Island Adventure Golf

We travelled by tram to the Trafford Centre – a large indoor shopping centre and entertainment complex in Trafford Park. After lunch at The Mardi Gras, we walked to Paradise Island Adventure Golf – a mini golf in a tropical paradise. There are two amazing 18 hole courses.

Forget crazy golf – this is adventure golf!

Holocaust Memorial Day

On 27 January each year, people throughout the United Kingdom unite to reflect on the six million Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of people who lost their lives under Nazi persecution of other groups, as well as those in more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur.

The theme for International Holocaust Memorial Day this year is ‘Bridging Generations’ – a reminder that the responsibility of remembrance doesn’t end with the survivors – it lives on through their children, their grandchildren and through all of us.

This theme encourages us all to engage actively with the past – to listen, to learn and to carry those lessons forward. By doing so, we build a bridge between memory and action, between history and hope for the future.

International Holocaust Memorial Day – commemorating the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp – is for everyone. It brings people together from all walks of life to strengthen communities and stand up against hatred and discrimination.

“Lesbian Love”

America deported her for publishing a book titled “Lesbian Love”. Years later, she was murdered by the Nazis for being Jewish.

Eve Adams, an immigrant and the proprietor of a 1920s lesbian tearoom, was imprisoned for disorderly conduct and obscenity, then sent back to Europe, where she became a target of the Holocaust.

In the 1920s, lesbians in New York City flocked to 129 MacDougal Street, a tearoom in the heart of Greenwich Village, for conversation and camaraderie. This hangout – a relatively safe space at a time when sodomy laws criminalised same-sex activity nationwide – was run by a Jewish immigrant from Poland who went by the name Eve Adams. A bold and mysterious woman, Adams attracted the government’s unwelcome attention due to her unorthodox activities and forbidden book on lesbian love. She was under surveillance, then arrested, charged with disorderly conduct and obscenity and finally deported back to Europe.

Adams’ business – known mainly as Eve’s Hangout – but also referred to as Eve’s Tearoom and Eve & Ann’s – was a long time coming when it opened in 1924. It operated for just two years, but in that time, it made a crucial difference to the community. Being openly lesbian in the 1920s took significant courage, and Adams provided a great service by creating a cosy space for lesbians to congregate. Greenwich Village, with its population of free-spirited artists and bohemians, was the perfect setting for this venture.

There were places where you could sort of cocoon and assume everyone around you accepted you, and Greenwich Village was one of those places in the 1920s. People who came to Eve’s Tearoom knew what the place was, and they felt safe making a pass at a woman who came there.

Born in 1891 as Chawa Zloczewer, Adams immigrated to the United States in 1912. Settling in New York City, she joined a group of anarchist organisers, speakers and writers. By 1919, she was working as a travelling saleswoman for radical publications. She caught the attention of the Bureau of Investigation, as the FBI was then known, which considered her an “agitator” and started watching her activities.

In early 1921, Adams moved to Chicago, where she co-managed a tearoom called the Gray Cottage – a refuge for leftist thinkers that also attracted lesbians – in the neighbourhood of Towertown, which was essentially the Illinois city’s version of Greenwich Village. Two years later, Adams returned to New York, where she opened Eve’s Hangout. The tearoom, operating during Prohibition, likely doubled as a speakeasy, and visitors probably brought flasks of illicit alcohol with them to use in mixed drinks.

Adams, who had many affairs with women, seemed to consider herself a member of the “third sex,” which was neither male nor female – similar to today’s nonbinary identity. Her adopted American name, “Eve Adams,” was a deliberate choice: It is a play on the biblical Adam and Eve, serving as a statement that she was simultaneously neither and both. (Adams also went by Eva Kotchever.)

Jonathan Ned Katz, author of “The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams”, calls his 2021 biography’s colourful subject “just one of those people.”

“She came to stand out and make this active life for herself,” Katz explains. “She found a way to make a living selling radical literature about the things that were wrong in the country.” At the same time, however, “she was really busy, working-class, and never made much money. She was always busy making a buck.”

Katz is a Greenwich Village native who regularly dines at La Lanterna, an Italian restaurant in the mixed-use building that once housed Eve’s Hangout. The owner has named multiple drinks after Adams.

“It’s rather spooky downstairs,” Katz says. “I really can imagine Eve being here. It’s a dark, low ceiling.”

In 1925, Adams published a short book titled “Lesbian Love”, which was intended for private circulation and limited to a print run of just 150 copies.

The short text – reprinted in full in Katz’s book – documents the lives and loves of some two dozen lesbians, all of whom were based on real people Adams knew but identified in “Lesbian Love” only by pseudonyms. Characters included Jonnie, described as “tall, broad-shouldered” and oval-faced, wearing “strictly tailored clothes,” and Ann, a West Coast woman with “striking yellow curls” and a deep voice. “Ann is the magnet, the fire, and wherever she appears, she always leaves behind some victim,” Adams wrote. “She is like a butterfly and is only attracted to virgins.” Then there was Sara, “just a slip of a girl; Ann’s first love here.” Sara experienced terrible anxiety over losing Ann, who had a love-them-and-leave-them reputation, to one of her “many rivals.”

In the appendix, called “How I Found Myself,” the book’s unnamed narrator – likely a stand-in for Adams herself – describes her sexual awakening at age 19, when she was living in a rural colony of artists. She met a beautiful older woman, about 30 years old, who invited her to sit on her lap. Tired of men and feeling like something was missing, the narrator, who had dreamed for a long time of experiencing a woman’s loving caress, spent the night with the stranger.

“All that I know is that it was one of the greatest and most significant events of my life, which will never be forgotten, and that the memories are always just beautiful,” Adams wrote.

Katz emphasizes Adams’ courage in publishing “Lesbian Love”. “She was speaking the word out loud, ‘lesbian,’ which had such a negative connotation at the time,” he says. “It was so heroic of her to put together these stories. It’s different types of women: some sort of funny, some dominating. She was seeming to make the point that lesbians are just as crazy as everyone else. It was so unusual for this time.” The book wasn’t “professionally written,” Katz adds. “It’s an amateurish view of women she knew.”

In his biography, Katz details the stories of many of Adams’ known romantic companions, combining these accounts with fragmentary records of her life. A key question posed in the book is why Adams failed to obtain US citizenship despite stating her intent to do so in 1923. This status would have made it harder for authorities to kick her out of the country; Adams’ decision not to follow through ended up costing her her life.

In 1926, Adams was arrested and jailed for publishing “Lesbian Love”, which was considered “obscene” in the eyes of the law. She was also found guilty of disorderly conduct for supposedly trying to seduce an undercover policewoman named Margaret Leonard, who’d been assigned to entrap her. On top of her one-year sentence on obscenity charges, Adams was sentenced to six months at a women’s penitentiary – a pair of punishments that allowed authorities to start considering whether to ship her back to Poland upon her release from prison.

At a November 1926 deportation hearing, Adams argued that she hadn’t done anything wrong. “I can’t see why I should be singled out and sentenced to imprisonment for writing my book, which was only meant to show the humorous side of life, the serious side of life and tragedy, all in one,” Adams testified.

Despite Adams’ protests and pleas to remain in the US and seek citizenship, she was deported back to Europe in December 1927. After that, she spent more than a decade rebuilding her life – but the rise of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis cast an ominous shadow on life in Europe, especially for Jews.

While working as a journalist in Paris in 1933, Adams met Hella Olstein, a Jewish singer who performed at cabarets. The two women soon moved in together, residing in the same home for the next ten years. Although the stated nature of their relationship wasn’t entirely clear – at some point, Olstein married a man and became Hella Olstein Soldner, yet Adams continued to live with the couple – the two women appeared to be more than friends. Perhaps Hella was bisexual.

After the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Adams and Olstein evaded arrest by the Nazis, even as the collaborationist Vichy regime started ramping up mass deportations of “foreign and stateless” Jews in 1942. (The Nazis also targeted lesbians with harassment and sent thousands of gay men to concentration camps). But this reprieve didn’t last: On 7 December 1943 – exactly two years after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour that brought Adams’ former adopted country into the war -authorities arrested Adams and Olstein. Five days later, the pair arrived at the Drancy internment camp outside of Paris, where they endured crowded, unsanitary conditions and hunger.

On 17 December, the two women joined about 848 other Jewish prisoners on a transport bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland. Neither survived Auschwitz’s liberation in January 1945, but the exact circumstances of their deaths are unknown. They may have been among the 112 women from their transport who were selected to work at the concentration camp; more likely, they were gassed to death shortly after arrival.

Eran Zahavy is a great-nephew of Adams. His grandfather, Yerachmiel Zloczewer (later changed to Zahavy), was Adams’ younger brother. Five of Yerachmiel’s six siblings were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. Yerachmiel only escaped this fate because he’d emigrated from Poland to British-occupied Palestine in 1931.

The last postcard Yerachmiel received from Adams was dated in June 1940. Though Yerachmiel was unable to find out what had happened to his older sister, he maintained a lifelong belief that she was still alive out there somewhere and had perhaps escaped to Spain during the war.

On his deathbed in 1983, Yerachmiel issued an appeal to his grandson. “He said to me, ‘Look, you need to find Eve,’” Eran recalls. “‘I’m sure she is still alive.’”

Yerachmiel didn’t tell Eran about his sister’s sexuality and her life in New York. He was very religious, and the subject was taboo. It was a different time, Eran says. While Adams was a “very dedicated professional,” he adds, her naïveté regarding the limits of what was culturally acceptable in the early 20th century probably led to her arrest and deportation from the US.

“She trusted people that she shouldn’t have trusted,” Eran says. “She was brave. She was not reckless. I think she was naïve. She did not understand the real danger in what she was doing. People told her, ‘We’re in America. Nothing can happen to us.’”

Years before Stonewall, a cafeteria riot became a breakthrough for trans rights

As February is LGBT+ History Month, we thought we would start early. Before Stonewall, and before the Black Cat protests, there was the Compton’s Cafeteria riot.

In August 1966 – the exact date is unknown – drag queens and transgender women who frequented Gene Compton’s Cafeteria in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco rose up against police harassment.

Here are the facts as we know them about the riot and its aftermath.

Harassment and hot coffee: What happened?

The restaurant, open 24 hours, was popular with trans women and drag queens; they were not welcome in many of the nearby gay bars. Some of them were sex workers, and they could be arrested not only for that but for cross-dressing. One night, a police officer tried to arrest one of Compton’s trans patrons on some charge or other, and she responded by throwing hot coffee in his face. Others started tossing chairs, dishes, and sugar shakers around the cafeteria. Outside, they smashed squad cars’ windows and set fire to a newsstand.

“We were tired of being arrested for nothing,” Felicia “Flames” Elizondo, a trans woman who lived in San Francisco at the time, said in 2018. “Arrested for being who we wanted to be. Thrown in jail for obstructing the sidewalk. Thrown in jail for dressing like a woman, because in those days it was illegal. Anything they could think of to make their quota or just to make our lives a living hell, they would do.” Flames often visited Compton’s, but given the fog of time, she couldn’t remember if she was there that night.

She did remember how difficult life was for LGBT+ people then, especially drag queens and trans women, even in supposedly liberal San Francisco. “LGBT people were thrown out of hotels, they were stabbed, they had their breasts cut, they were mutilated because of their genitalia,” she said in the 2018 interview. “We were something that could be thrown away in a trash can.”

Amanda St Jaymes, who did participate in the uprising, was interviewed for the 2005 documentary Screaming Queens, written and directed by Susan Stryker and Victor Silverman. “Oh, the sugar shakers went through the windows and the glass doors,” she said in the film. “I think I put a sugar shaker through one of those windows.” Outside, the fighting continued, and many of the restaurant’s customers were taken away in police vehicles.

Nevertheless, “there was a lot of joy after it happened,” St Jaymes told Stryker. “A lot of them went to jail, but there was a lot of, ‘I don’t give a damn. This is what needs to happen.’”

The owners of Compton’s responded to the uprising by barring drag queens and trans women from the restaurant, a decision that immediately led to protests. But life got marginally better for this community.

“The developments in the Tenderloin following that night attest to its impact,” Johnny Damm wrote in Guernica Magazine in 2020. “After Compton’s, the city could no longer claim not to see the Tenderloin trans community. Tenderloin residents also suggest police harassment lessened in those months following the riot, but the law forbidding ‘dress not belonging to his or her sex’ continued as a basis for arrest until finally removed from the municipal code book in July 1974.”

Preserving a legacy

No local media outlet reported on the Compton’s uprising; the subject was considered unworthy of attention. Police claim to have no arrest records from that night. But LGBT+ activists and historians wouldn’t let it be forgotten.

Stryker is chief among them. She found a scrap of information on the riot while going through some archives, then realised, “There’s a story here that I need to tell,” she told The Guardian in 2019.

“So she slowly built her own paper trail and learned how the corner of Turk and Taylor streets, where Compton’s was located, was ‘trans central,’” The Guardian noted. She met St Jaymes and others, and the Screaming Queens documentary was the result.

The Compton’s riot has been memorialised in other sources. It figures prominently in the permanent collection of the Tenderloin Museum, which opened in 2015. The Compton’s Cafeteria Riot, an interactive play, has been presented at the museum’s Larkin Street Café.

The overall history of the Tenderloin district is recounted in the book The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime, and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco by Randy Shaw.

Six blocks in the Tenderloin have been designated as the Transgender District, the first legally recognised trans district in the world. It was founded in 2017 by three black trans women, Honey Mahogany, Janetta Johnson, and Aria Sa’id, and originally named Compton’s Transgender Cultural District. Transgender District staffers work to bring economic empowerment and stable housing to the community, promote cultural competency and offer arts and culture programmes.

The current tenant is controversial

Compton’s Cafeteria closed in 1972, and its site is now home to a halfway house for formerly incarcerated people, operated by the private prison firm Geo Group. Activists would like to reclaim the Compton’s site as a community centre or supportive housing. Janetta Johnson envisions “studio apartments and one-bedroom apartments for people with mental health issues, with mental health providers on staff, not a prison”. Advocates have vowed to go on working for such a use of the site.

Stop Sex Matters infiltrating the Council of Europe

The Council of Europe will be voting on 29 January to ban conversion therapy. This would be an incredibly important step to stop the rollback in the rights of LGBT+ people. But Sex Matters is infiltrating the vote. They have set up a tool for transphobes to email the MPs that are part of the council, bullying them to uphold transphobic ideas and asking them to vote against a ban.

The British parliamentarians who represent us in the council should represent what the people actually want, instead of reflecting the views of a small, hateful minority. After all, banning conversion therapy was in the government’s manifesto – let’s make sure they keep their word.

We have to stop this. Email the MPs and let them know they can stand up for what’s right.

We only have a few days, but together, we can stop hate.

Through the Queer Lens: with Stuart ‘LINDEN’ Rhodes and Rachel Adams

Thursday, 26 February from 6.00pm to 7.30pm at The Whitworth, Oxford Road, Manchester M15 6ER.

Join Stuart ‘LINDEN’ Rhodes and Rachel Adams as they discuss what it means to capture the Queer community through photography.

Join us for an evening discussion called Through the Queer Lens where Stuart and Rachel will discuss photography’s role in building community and shaping culture and how they have captured these within their own practice.

Get tickets here £3 – £5

Out on the Radio

The next edition of Out In The City‘s radio show “Out on the Radio” will be live on ALL FM 96.9 on Tuesday, 3 February from 2.00pm to 3.00pm.

The new show features special guests Lizzie and Sarah from Out In The City‘s Women’s group.

If you missed the previous shows

Listen to Show 1 here

Listen to Show 2 here

Re/Assemble

Re/Assemble at the Peoples History Museum is an exhibition that draws inspiration from the 1988 Section 28 protest marches

Re/Assemble’s starting point is the largest LGBT+ demonstration in British history, when 20,000 people gathered in Manchester in 1988 to protest against Section 28 – a clause in the Local Government Act that prohibited the ‘promotion of homosexuality’ by schools and local authorities.  For 15 years, this legislation cast a dark shadow, fostering a climate of fear and hostility that remains in the memories of many.

Developed following a two-year long research project, Re/Assemble is a new exhibition by Manchester-based arts organisation IAP:MCR, which creates and presents work across the visual and performing arts by artists who identify as queer. It features newly commissioned artworks by Sarah Joy Ford, Yuen Fong Ling and Anna Appleby that respond to the legacy of Section 28. It also explores themes of protest and resilience and celebrates queer voices and creativity. These works are displayed alongside historic artefacts from People’s History Museum’s own collection, including protest banners and objects, in Gallery Two.

You can also download the song “Never Going Underground” by Anna Appleby (ft Sherpa K and Norrisette)

Re/Assemble is open from Saturday, 17 January 2026 to Sunday, 3 January 2027 (10.00am to 5.00pm)

More photos can be seen here.

Smiley Charity Film Awards!

The Pride in Ageing 2025 film, produced by Film on the Brain with assistance and footage from our Brand & Storytelling Coordinator Scarlett and starring the amazing team of Pride in Ageing volunteers, has been nominated for a charity film award!

Please vote for the film here. Voting is open until 30 January 2026.

Play the Rainbow Lottery and support Out In The City

The Rainbow Lottery is the UK’s first and only lottery supporting LGBT+ good causes.

Welcome to the Rainbow Lottery, the exciting weekly lottery that raises money for over 200 LGBT+ good causes totally, openly and exclusively.

The hope is to make a difference to good causes so they can carry on their vital work – which helps us all. Play the lottery, support the community – it’s fun, it’s simple and everybody wins!

How the lottery works:

• £1 per ticket – that’s right, unlike many other lotteries, the lottery tickets are only £1 per week.
• For every ticket you play, 80% goes to good causes and prizes.

£25,000 jackpot prize

• Match all 6 numbers and you win the JACKPOT! There are also prizes of £2000, £250, £25 and 3 free tickets for following week.
• Every month there is a Super Draw.

The Super Draw Prize is an amazing £1,000 Aldi Gift Card (or, of course, £1,000 cash).

Imagine stepping into your local Aldi with £1,000 to spend: from stocking up on fresh, high-quality groceries to indulging in unique Special buys from the middle aisle, the options are endless.

Whether you’re planning a luxurious dinner party, filling your pantry with everyday essentials, or treating yourself to their award-winning wines, this gift card will go a long way!

Buy tickets here.

LGBTQ+ Affirmative Counselling Training: Applications Open!

elop’s counsellor training programmes equip you to work as a qualified, affirmative counsellor. The courses are taught in a Queer environment and open to all LGBTQ+ people and embedded allies.

The Foundation Certificate in LGBTQ+ Affirmative Counselling is a 3-month course for people starting their counsellor training journey or wishing to enhance their skills for supporting clients, colleagues and peers. The course includes online, and in-person learning sessions, and could be an entry pathway to professional qualified counsellor training. The course runs twice a year; the next programme commences late February 2026 and is open to applications now.

To receive further information, details of course fees, and an application pack please contact training@elop.org and/or to book onto one of the upcoming online information sessions (details below).

The Advanced Diploma in Integrative LGBTQ+ Affirmative Counselling is a 2-year part-time qualifying counsellor course taught at a venue in East London. The next programme commences September 2026.

To receive further information, details of fees or an application pack – please contact advanced-diploma@elop.org

Counsellor Training Online Information Sessions – if you are interested in becoming a counsellor and finding out more about the training pathways, please book and come along to the next online information session where you can hear more details, meet the course programme leader and ask any questions you have.

The next date is Tuesday, 27 January 12.30pm – 1.30pm.

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