The Whitaker

Twenty of us set out from Shude Hill Interchange on Bus X43 to Rawtenstall. We stopped for lunch but due to the size of our group we split up into various cafes, before meeting up again. Some settled into The Queen’s Arms whilst others enjoyed the delights of The Fitzpatrick – Britain’s last original temperance bar.

It was a fifteen minute walk (uphill!) to The Whitaker, but it was well worth the exercise. We had come to take part in the installation of an exhibition Contagious Acts.

Contagious Acts is a solo exhibition by artist Jamie Holman at The Whitaker Museum & Art Gallery. The exhibition explores the politics of gathering from medieval battlefields to dance floors. 

Jamie explained what the exhibition was about: 

• The exhibition considers how gathering spaces are battlegrounds of power and protest and sites of cultural production and resistance.
• He combines medieval art history with contemporary iconography.
• He explores the politics of collective gatherings and how they are tied to class, identity and belonging.

The exhibition fills the gallery space with marbles, as a symbol of resistance to state control. We had fun adding extra marbles to the gallery space.

More photos can be seen here.

Gay Couple’s Archive Reveals ‘Peaceful Life’

The lives of a gay couple who lived in a Dorset village for nearly six decades have been turned into an exhibition.

Norman Notley and David Brynley moved to Corfe Castle in 1923 and lived openly as a couple, despite homosexuality being illegal at the time.

The two men were successful musicians who sang together in Britain and the United States and they had many friends in the art world.

Photographs and diaries on display at Dorset Museum reveal they lived peacefully with the local community for 57 years until their deaths.

In 1973, local people organised an event for the couple to celebrate their 50 years in the village.

Museum director Claire Dixon said: “They were known as ‘the boys’ quite affectionately by the community.

They didn’t throw the party, the community threw it for them.

When lots of people were having to hide the fact that they were gay, or think about their behaviour in public space, it seems that they were able to live quite a peaceful life in the village.”

The couple shared a passion for creating art as well as collecting and Notley bequeathed his collection of paintings to Dorset Museum.

Despite being able to live authentically, the only image in the collection of them being affectionate to one another is a photo of Brynley kissing Notley on the cheek.

Notley died in 1980, aged 90, and Brynley a year later, aged 81.

Maisie Ball, an archaeology student at Bournemouth University, began digitising the couple’s photographs and transcribing their journals and letters as part of a work placement at the museum.

She said: “Being able to share their story has been so important as there are not many collections like this that give a glimpse into the lives of LGBTQ+ people from this time period.

The photographs that have stuck with me the most are the ones with their many dogs and the rare few of Norman on his own, where you get to see a glimpse of his personality.”

The display, curated by Ms Ball, with advice from Prof Jana Funke of the University of Exeter, is on display throughout February to coincide with LGBT+ History Month.

There is only one photograph of the couple showing physical affection.

Queer Treasures of the Manchester Central Library – 2

Thanks to Arthur Martland for the second of a short series of articles about queer treasures that are currently to be found in the Archives held at Manchester Central Library.

‘Curiosities of Street Literature’ by Charles Hindley

In 1871, Charles Hindley published a collection of broadsides and broadsheets that he had gathered over the previous six decades. As Michael Hughes in his Introduction to a later reprinting of the volume explains, ‘Broadsides (single unfolded sheets of paper printed on one side only) and broadsheets (printed on both sides) … were the first medium of mass communication. They were simple pieces of paper on which was printed the news of the day, sermons, politics, satire, public events, proclamations, romantic and humorous tales, descriptions of murders – anything, in fact, which would excite popular interest and be saleable’.

Hindley’s book helped to preserve many of these ephemeral documents, including four of notable queer interest.

The first is a ballad concerning ‘The Female Husband, who had been married to another female for twenty-one years’ which begins –

What wonders now I have to pen, sir

Women turning into men, sir,

For twenty-one long years, or more, sir,

She wore the breeches we are told, sir,  (p119)

The whole is a warning to young ladies to ‘Taste and try before you buy’ and ‘See he’s perfect in all parts, sir, Before you join your hand and heart, sir’.

The ballad refers to the case of James Allen, a trans man. In 1807, Allen, a sawyer, had married Abigail Naylor at St Giles’s church in Camberwell. After his death from an accident at work in 1829, an autopsy was conducted at St Thomas’s Hospital in London and his sex declared to be female. His wife Abigail said she was not suspicious of her husband’s sex because he was ‘so strong’.  A sensational pamphlet called ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Extraordinary Career of James Allen, the Female Husband’ was soon published after his death. Throughout most of the work though Allen is referred to by male pronouns and hateful people who tried to disrupt his funeral are described as ‘ignorant beings of the very lowest class’.

A second ballad of interest is the ‘She He Barman of Southwark’, a song based on the life of Mary Ann Walker. Mary loved dressing up in male clothing from a young age and spent much of her early life in helping her father run a pub. When he died in 1860, Mary donned male clothing, presented herself as a man and took a number of jobs that were usually, at that time, strictly reserved only to men. Mary worked as a porter at Jesus College, Cambridge, an engine cleaner for the Great Northern Railway at King’s Cross Station and spent two years as a ship’s steward for the Cunard Line, before taking a job as a dock labourer. In 1867 she assumed the name of Thomas Walker and became a barman in the Royal Mortar Tavern in Southwark.  As the ballad puts it –

She did not like the petticoats,

So she slipped the trousers on,

She engaged herself as a barman,

And said her name was Tom. (p141)

Tom was subsequently however accused of stealing monies after marked coins were found in his possession and swiftly remanded into custody pending trial. On his reception into the prison, the gaoler described him as ‘having a full masculine face, rather sunburnt, hair cut short and slightly curled and a masculine speaking voice’. When Thomas was obliged to take a bath though, he was forced to confess to being, anatomically-speaking, female. On his conviction at trial he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment with hard labour.

Nevertheless, on leaving gaol, he continued to live as a man and obtained work on the Great Western Railway but lost that job when his landlady discovered his secret. After several other unsuccessful jobs, Tom eventually found fame on the Music Hall stage by returning to his former name of ‘Mary’.

Appearing on stages across the country, he was billed as ‘Mary Walker, the female Barman’, and frequently dressed in male clothing or naval uniform, giving a ‘sort of auto-biographical recitation to the tune of Champagne Charley’.

A third ballad of queer interest is ‘The Funny He-She Ladies!’ which tells the tale of Thomas Ernest Boulton and Frederick William Park, better known now perhaps as ‘Fanny and Stella’. The two men became known for their flamboyant clothing and for their dressing in what was seen as ‘female’ attire; as the balladeer sings –

You would not suppose that they were men,

With their large Chignons and Grecian bend,

With dresses of silk and flaxen hair,

 ……. With their low-neck’d dresses a flowing shawl

They were admired by one and all,

This pair of he-she ladies (p157)

Over several nights Boulton and Park were followed by police detectives as they cruised, in full drag, around the streets of the West End. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, they were arrested and charged with committing the abominable crime of buggery, conspiring to induce and incite other persons feloniously with them to commit the said crime; and with disguising themselves as women and frequenting places of public resort thereby to openly and scandalously outrage public decency and corrupt public morals.  In 1871, after six sensational and widely reported days at trial, the cases against them collapsed and they were declared not guilty. After their acquittal, the two returned to work on the stage, touring Britain as a theatrical act, but the scandal of their arrest never left them.

The final part of Hindley’s book concerns what he terms as ‘the Gallows Literature of the Streets’. This section deals predominately with broadsheets that dealt luridly with crime and public executions. The fourth item of queer interest is the broadside recording ‘The Sentences of All the Prisoners in the Old Bailey’ on ‘Wednesday 11^th September 1822’.  Amongst the list of hapless felons are the names of Holland, King and North, who were to be executed ‘for an unnatural crime’. William North (61 years old) was a retired schoolmaster in the Royal Navy who had been accused of attempting to rape a younger male.

But John Holland (42 years old) and William King (32 years old) however, were heavily condemned as they appear to have had consensual contact. Their ‘unnatural crimes’ together were seen as so despicable that the official record of their trial contains no details of what precisely was alleged to have happened, simply that they were both convicted of sodomy. Courts, not unusually at that time, failed to fully record evidence details which the judges and magistrates in charge deemed unsuitable for the public to hear about.

The judge, Mr Justice Best, was scathing in his closing comments at their trial, as recorded in various newspapers at the time –

‘Prisoners, you have been convicted of a detestable crime during the present Session … You have, by your abominations, disgraced human nature, and dishonoured the country in which you live. In the early ages of the world, the Almighty destroyed whole cities through the commission of crimes like yours; you have polluted the world, and must depart from it.’

The judge continued, ‘Those unfortunate men who have forfeited their lives, (that is, the other prisoners condemned to die for non-sexual ‘crimes’), ‘feel a repugnance to ascending the same scaffold with you, therefore the Court order that you be executed at an earlier and distinct period. Degraded as you are, let me exhort you to devote the little time you have to live, in imploring forgiveness of that Being who is able and willing to extend mercy to the vilest sinner. It is my earnest wish that by your contrition, you may avoid that fire in an eternal world which consumed in former ages the inhabitants of whole cities, for a similar offence to yours.’                                                            

(Morning Post – 25 September 1822)

John Holland’s father, Edward, petitioned for clemency on his son’s behalf, claiming that his son was mentally deranged, but to no avail and both men were hanged. Newspapers were filled with lurid accounts of their final moments on the scaffold –

‘EXECUTION. – On Monday morning, John Holland … and William King … were executed in front of the debtors’ door of Newgate, for an unnatural crime. Holland, when on his trial, was apparently in perfect health, but on Monday morning he was little better than a skeleton, and was so weak as to be almost incapable of sustaining the weight of his emaciated frame. He has left a wife and two children, of whom he took leave on Sunday, after attending the condemned sermon. – King has been attended since his condemnation by the Rev Mr. Baker, to whose advice he paid respectful attention, but observed a sullen taciturnity till the moment of his death. – Holland acknowledged his crime, and the justice of his fate, and ever since the arrival of the warrant for his executing, his time, night and day, has been employed in loud exclamations and petitions to the Supreme Being for mercy and pardon. At a quarter before 8 o’clock, Holland was relieved of his irons. This man had a very effeminate voice, and his screams of mental anguish were most appalling. His whole frame was agonized with terror. King was brought from his cell next, and he approached the anvil, to be relieved of his irons, with the greatest firmness. At a quarter past eight o’clock the executioner said that all was prepared, Dr. Cotton commenced a reading a prayer, and in the middle of it took out his handkerchief, and gave the customary signal, the bolt was drawn, and the men launched into eternity’.    

(Devizes and Wiltshire Gazette – 28 November 1822)

Arthur Martland © LGBT History Month 2025

Trailblazing lesbian journalist and activist to be honoured with rainbow plaque

One of the few out lesbians in the public eye, Jackie Forster, who also worked under the name Jacqueline MacKenzie, was an actress before forging a successful career in journalism.

In the 1960s, she joined the Minorities Research Group and wrote for the UK’s first lesbian-specific publication, Arena Three, and set up the long-running magazine and social group, Sappho.

After coming out publicly, she joined the Campaign for Homosexual Equality and marched in the first London Pride parade in 1971. She went on to be a member of the Greater London Council’s women’s committee, a curator for the Lesbian Archive, and set up Daytime Dykes.

In 2017, she was celebrated in a Google Doodle on what would have been her 91st birthday.

After Forster died in 1998, aged 71, writer and academic Gillian Hanscombe told The Independent: “If she had served any cause other than lesbian rights, she’d have been festooned with honours.”

Forster’s plaque will be will be unveiled on 26 February.

Supported by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, the Rainbow Plaques scheme has sought to identify and make visible LGBT+ history in local communities up and down the country.

“It’s fantastic to see a new rainbow plaque unveiled in Warwick Avenue to celebrate the life of Jackie Forster,” Khan said. “These plaques honour the huge contribution that our LGBTQIA+ communities have made, and continue to make, to life in our capital. So it is fitting that we remember Jackie’s significant role in promoting and championing LGBTQIA+ rights.

“Our diversity is what makes London the greatest city in the world and we will continue to ensure that everyone feels represented in our public spaces, as we continue to build a fairer and safer London for everyone.” 

Anne Lacey, Forster’s partner, described the plaque as a “fitting tribute to a wonderful woman and a great character in the history of LGBTQIA+ rights”.

She went on to say: “Jackie spent the last half of her life working unceasingly for LGBTQIA+ rights and visibility. From the day she came out at Speakers’ Corner (in London’s Hyde Park) in 1969, she fought for the celebration of the word ‘lesbian’.”

If you’re raging that ‘Netflix made Alexander the Great gay’, it’s time to learn some LGBT+ history

Matt Cain, author of “One Love” wrote this article for The Guardian on 13 February 2024.

At the start of this LGBT+ History Month, Netflix unveiled its new series about Alexander the Great, only to see complaints that the streaming service had “turned him gay”. When these drew the response that Alexander is widely believed to have had same-sex relationships, a typical reply was that this was “unproven speculation”. As a patron of LGBT+ History Month, I see this as an opportunity to argue for the importance of knowing our queer history.

For centuries, LGBT+ history has been wiped from the record. Oppressors have found it all too easy to deny our existence because in most of the world – for most of history – our lives have had to be led in secret. Exposure could lead to familial rejection, social and professional ruin, imprisonment, torture and even execution. Any evidence of queer lives that did exist was often destroyed, sometimes by descendants keen to protect reputations.

The Renaissance artist Michelangelo, for example, was known to have had several relationships with men, but burned all his papers before he died. And in 1623 his great nephew published an edition of his poetry with many of the masculine pronouns changed to feminine ones (an act of cultural vandalism that wasn’t rectified until the 19th century).

Of course, labels such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender didn’t exist for most of history, making it impossible to know definitively how any figure would have identified in their own time. But it would be ridiculous to use this as justification for erasing us from the past. The understanding of our sexuality contributing to any sense of identity (rather than just sexual activity) may be a relatively modern one, but we have always been here.

It doesn’t help that, as queer people, we’re one of the few minority communities who don’t often have parents from the same minority, so little understanding of our cultural heritage is passed down through the generations. All of this has allowed historians to straightwash the past, to write off our relationships as passionate or intimate friendships, or to declare we were married to our work.

Years of campaigning – not to mention a Hollywood film – means that most people now know the name Alan Turing. But the story of Bayard Rustin is only just coming to prominence, thanks to another film: he was one of the leading organisers of the black civil rights movement and a key adviser to Martin Luther King, but he was kept in the background to avoid his sexuality damaging the movement.

And how many people have heard of Ben Barres, a transgender neurobiologist whose pioneering research at Stanford University revolutionised our understanding of brain cells?

Or that the astronaut Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, had a 27-year relationship with a woman?

And did you know that Florence Nightingale wrote in a letter in 1861: “I have lived and slept in the same beds with English countesses and Prussian farm women. No woman has excited passions among women more than I have”? Why historians ever believed she was celibate is beyond me.

In 19th-century Russia, Tchaikovsky lived life as a gay man with a degree of openness that was remarkable for the time, writing about his feelings in letters to friends and his brother, who was also gay. He even signed one of these using the female name he’d given himself, Petrolina.

But although he enjoyed close friendships with gay men (one, Petashenka, used to pop round to his place to ogle the cadet corps opposite), other letters show that he never stopped wanting to change his sexuality, lived in fear of being outed and disgraced, and struggled with alcoholism and depression.

Like many gay men of his time, he briefly married a woman to maintain a respectable front, but she later accused him of using her to hide his “shameful vice”. Tchaikovsky found release in his music, and this could be why his work has such a joyous quality. Likewise, the range of emotions he experienced in life could have given his ballet scores the depth necessary to tell dramatic, sweeping stories.

Today, Tchaikovsky is considered a national treasure in Russia, but official accounts of his life remove all mention of his sexuality, as does the Tchaikovsky State House-Museum near Moscow. Meanwhile, the widespread persecution of queer people continues in the country, as does anti-queer legislation and the state-sponsored spreading of shame.

When I visited Moscow in 2017, I met LGBT+ people and heard their shocking stories, visited queer venues and saw signs in shop windows announcing “No faggots allowed”. But if Tchaikovsky’s queerness was widely understood and acknowledged as part of his artistry, it would be more difficult for Putin and his government to continue their oppression – or at least to argue that queerness is a foreign import and somehow “un-Russian”.

For me, the response to Netflix’s series about Alexander the Great sums up why we need LGBT+ History Month, and the story of Tchaikovsky is a chilling illustration of the dangers of not knowing our queer history.

Understanding history is empowering, and for too long queer people have been disempowered. History can teach us – and others – that we’ve always made a contribution to society, help us understand our place in the modern world and give us pride in who we are.

LGBT+ History Month Coming to an End

Try this quiz to see what you have learnt. Don’t worry the answers are below.

Out In The City Women’s Meeting
Reminder that Out In The City Women’s meeting is on Thursday, 27 February 2025 from 2.00pm to 4.00pm. The meeting is at Cross Street Chapel, 29 Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL and is a drop in. There is no need to book.

Skipton Castle

Skipton Castle is a Grade I listed medieval castle in Skipton, North Yorkshire. It was built in 1090 by Robert de Romille, a Norman baron, and has been preserved for over 931 years.

It is one of the best preserved and most complete castles in England. We followed the tour sheet on a self-guided tour, starting off at the main gate defended by its four strong towers. High above the battlements, in Norman French, the proud challenge DESORMAIS (Henceforth!) is cut in stone facing both north and south.

Skipton Castle was massively strengthened in 1310 by Robert, the first Clifford Lord of Skipton.

Born in Skipton Castle on 30 January 1590 Lady Anne Clifford made substantial restorations after the Civil War.

We ascended Lady Anne’s steps into the Conduit Court which has a yew tree growing in the middle. We visited the dungeon, the banqueting hall, the withdrawing room and many more rooms, often up or down narrow spiral staircases.

It was well worth a visit and another great day out.

More photos can be seen here.

The history of Manchester Pride: ‘It isn’t for anybody unless it’s for everybody’

Article by Matt Horwood in Metro

Affectionately known to many as ‘Queer Christmas’, ​for its ability to bring chosen families together each year, Manchester Pride is one of the most anticipated and best-loved events in the LGBTQ+ calendar.

It’s a celebration that holds a special place in my heart. I have family from the North West and I spent many of my ‘formative’ years in the city after moving there at 18. But it’s not just memories of my former home that makes me think fondly of Manchester Pride. My first job was actually working on the big event itself, as a press officer. 

It’s hard to put into words what it’s like to be part of a team that creates such an epic and incredible occasion.

There’s moments I’ll never forget, such as first seeing Manchester’s Sackville Gardens become a sea of light at its Candlelit Vigil, held on the Monday of Pride each year in remembrance of all lives lost to HIV/AIDS.

Then there are the times that still make me smile, like Alexandra Burke sharing her birthday cake with the backstage team – and saying she liked my hair!

Or when I had to step in for a colleague and interview queer singer-songwriter Patrick Wolf after he’d performed at the event. I remember feeling jittery with nerves; not only did I adore his music, but he was also an early crush of mine. 

Since those days, my life and job may have moved on, but I’ve returned almost every year to Manchester Pride on the August bank holiday weekend. And I can still confirm, ‘Queer Christmas’ is exactly what it is.

Although there are stories that the event was first founded in 1985 when Manchester City Council awarded a £1,700 grant to put on a two-week celebration, other accounts refer to it being born in 1987.

It was said to be the brainchild of Peter Beswick – licensee of the ​long-standing Rembrandt Bar in Manchester’s Gay Village – along with his partner Duncan, after the pair organised a bring-and-buy sale and raffle outside the bar to raise money to support people living with HIV/AIDS.

Back then, many of the Gay Village bars had blacked out windows to protect their patrons and staff, and homophobic police raids were not uncommon. 

The following year, a series of marches and demonstrations for LGBTQ+ rights were held in Manchester, reflecting the way many of today’s Pride events have grown from the seeds of activism. The first was in 1988, to protest Thatcher’s homophobic Section 28 law, followed by marches for equalising the age of consent, in 1989 and 1991.

‘My first Manchester Pride was a protest’ recalls Tim Sigsworth, CEO of LGBTQ+ youth homelessness charity akt. ‘I felt exhilarated and petrified. It was that moment that really sparked a deep, long-life need in me to fight queerphobia.’  

By the early nineties, the Village Charity had established a festival then known as Manchester Mardi Gras, ‘The Carnival of Fun’, making the city’s annual LGBTQ+ event louder and prouder than ever before.

‘We didn’t want the Gay Village to become a closed-off ghetto where it was just us,’ says Chris Payne, a founding member of the North West Campaign for Lesbian and Gay Equality (1987) and prominent LGBTQ+ activist in 80s and 90s Manchester. ‘We wanted to welcome everybody, as long as they respected us and our space.’

So in 1993, the event first went ‘public’ with the parade marching beyond the perimeter of the Gay Village and into the city centre. 

The response? A mixture of shock and humour, recalls Chris, explaining: ‘There was strong HIV/AIDS and LGBTQ+ messaging and controversial outfits. It was in your face but the public loved it.

‘The parade changed people’s views and enticed them into our space, to see we weren’t all devils with two-heads’, he jokes. ‘Families coming in together, kids and big burly dads all covering themselves in rainbow and glitter.

‘They’d go back home, to work or to their local bars and people would say: “Been out with the gays, have you?” And they’d say: “Yes I have, and it was a laugh. Come and join us next time!”’

Chris partly attributes this attitudinal shift to the solidarity and support shown to the LGBTQ+ community by Manchester City Council and later the local media.

‘Supportive councillors like [Labour MP] Pat Karney helped make stuff happen. They’d say, “This will be done. The roads will be closed and we’ll give you a small kickstart branch.” It wasn’t huge amounts, but was still a massive help. 

‘It sent a signal that said “this is OK now,” and was followed by support from BBC Radio Manchester, Piccadilly Radio, the late ‘Mr Manchester’ Tony Wilson and BBC North West.’

As Manchester Mardi Gras continued to grow, for the first time ever, in 1999, the Gay Village was fenced off for the weekend’s celebrations. The parade remained – and still remains – free to attend and allowed party-goers to roam the city centre.

Although the festival went on to be rebranded Gayfest in the early noughties, it was finally christened ‘Manchester Pride’ by the tourist board after the city was chosen to host the esteemed Euro Pride event in 2003.

As the scale of Manchester’s celebration of its LGBTQ+ people began to filter far beyond the city, it prompted other members of the community across the UK to sit up and take notice.

‘Manchester Pride was one of the reasons I moved there’, explains Toby Whitehouse, director and co-founder of national LGBTQ+ radio station Gaydio.

‘I visited and saw this really inclusive, welcoming environment and, as a young gay man, thought “I want a piece of that.”’

Alongside co-founder Ian Wallace, Toby created Gaydio as a pop-up station to complement Manchester Pride and similar events. He’s since worked alongside Pride for almost two decades, during which the Gaydio Dance Arena was introduced in 2013.

‘That was a peak moment for me,’ remembers Toby. ‘We’d covered Pride before, from an editorial perspective, but we’d never had a partnership. Things progressed and we ended up with a 2000-capacity, warehouse style club in a car park in the village.

‘Walking into that space, thinking back to being that young, gay man in the Midlands, I couldn’t have imagined this would be what it would all lead to.’

As Manchester Pride’s profile went from strength to strength, it soon attracted big name talent, with the likes of Alesha Dixon, Blue, Dannii Minogue and Texas all performing over the years.

One long-time supporter of the event and wider LGBTQ+ community is much-loved Mancunian singer-songwriter Rowetta Satchell, who famously performed as a singer in the Happy Mondays. 

‘I loved performing at Manchester Pride,’ she recalls. ‘My first was in 2005 and Graham Norton introduced me, which was fabulous, and I did it for several years after.  

‘My favourite performance, which many will remember me for, is where I wore a rainbow feathered dress with twelve dancers and brought my mum up on stage to dance with me.

‘Manchester Pride is such an important space for all LGBTQ+ people to feel safe and supported,’ Rowetta continues. ‘I’m very much proud to have been part of that as an ally.’

These days, the event is recognised as not just one of the best Pride celebrations in the UK, but across the globe. 

‘Over Manchester Pride weekend our hotels are full with visitors from around the world, our bars, restaurants and retailers all have great weekends, and the city and everybody in it always looks fabulous,’ says Victoria Braddock, Director of Marketing at Marketing Manchester.

‘Seeing people get off the train or out of taxis from the airport – wide-eyed, taking in the energy and vibrancy of a city draped in its very best colours always sticks with me. It’s a truly special weekend.’

While 2019 still offered festival-goers the community-focused celebrations with the Gay Village Party, the event also saw the introduction of Manchester Pride Live, a huge outdoor site in Mayfield Depot. ​

Headlining the event was pop sensation Ariana Grande. This was a particularly raw and emotional performance both for the singer and for the many audience members who had been impacted by the atrocities of 2017, when 22 lives were lost after the Manchester Arena attack during her tour.

Although the pandemic brought events to a standstill across the globe in 2020, the event returned with a bang the following year with performances from Zara Larsson and Katy B, as well as LGBTQ+ talent like Mykki Blanco and DJ Jodie Harsh.

But while many welcomed the return of Manchester Pride Live for a second year, as it brought the elements of a festival-life to a safe, queer space, others felt it detracted from the true meaning of Pride, and priced out many regular festival-goers who couldn’t afford its ticket prices. 

After an extensive consultation process with the local LGBTQ+ community about what form they felt the event should take, it was decided that Manchester Pride Live should be stripped from this year’s event taking place across this bank holiday weekend, with full emphasis placed on the Gay Village Party and its Alan Turing, Mancunity and Cabaret stages. 

‘Our consultation was about ensuring we welcomed people to have a voice, in particular those who might have less of a voice,’ explains Mark Fletcher, CEO of Manchester Pride.

‘There was no one clear view, but what was clear was about recognising priorities, and providing more empowerment and support for specific communities.’

Among its commitments, as well as focusing celebrations within the Gay Village, Manchester Pride will prioritise inclusion, safety and accessibility. This has been met with resounding support from the community.

‘Everyone I’ve spoken to is glad to see Pride back in the Gay Village and spotlighting the amazing artists who perform there all year round’ says Monopoly Phonic, a DJ, drag queen and recording artist from Manchester who’s performing at this year’s event.

‘Accessibility in an intersectional way needs to be the way going forward’, agrees Katie Craven, who works at the LGBT Foundation and has worked for the charity at numerous Manchester Pride events. 

‘All members of the LGBTQ+ community [should] feel safe to access events and spaces across the whole weekend.’

Despite Pride continuing to make strides to showcase and celebrate diverse talent, many LGBTQ+ people of colour still face racism within their own spaces.

‘I wish I could say it was shocking but it’s not,’ Mark admits. ‘I’m one of a few queer leaders of colour. I experience and have experienced racism in my life and in this job. For me, what we can do is tackle it and not be afraid.

‘Manchester is such a pioneering city and Greater Manchester communities are thought leaders. 

‘The level of “live and let live” has existed for a long, long time,’ he adds. ‘We champion our diversity. We aren’t afraid of it. That’s embedded in the fabric of Manchester.

‘Pride isn’t for anybody unless it’s for everybody.’

Radio Opportunity

All FM is in need of 8 people from our LGBTQ+ community across Manchester for our Tuesday afternoon project focusing on learning how to make radio shows and the experience of being LGBTQ+.

Anyone interested or know anyone who might be? It’s on Tuesdays from 1.30pm -3.30pm starting 25 February for 6 weeks, followed by a live show a month until September.

We are really in need of folks to join up, we have only a tiny representation on our airwaves. Participants will be trained radio broadcasters by the end – and the whole thing is free.

Can you help? If interested please contact Jane on jane@allfm.org

Rainbow Lottery Super Draw!

Please support Out In The City by buying a Rainbow Lottery ticket or two (or more!)

With each Rainbow Lottery ticket, you are not just entering to win exciting prizes, you are also supporting our mission to support older LGBT+ people.

It’s a vital part of our fundraising as we receive 50p for every £1 spent and you have the chance to win cash prizes each week from £25 for three numbers up to a jackpot of £25,000 for six numbers – while helping us to achieve more for the LGBT+ communities over 50 years.

Buy tickets here.

In this weekend’s Super Draw one lucky supporter will win an annual family membership for English Heritage, the National Trust, and a Merlin Pass too (or of course, £1,000 cash alternative)!

Play Now!

Precarious Lives

It is becoming increasingly evident that many LGBT+ people face financial and material problems in later life. Despite this, there has been little research to date as to why these problems are so prevalent.

On 25 February Tonic Housing is publishing a major study, entitled Precarious Lives, that explores financial and material hardship among LGBT+ people in London aged 50 and above. There are four themes in their research:

Discrimination – They look at the long-term impact of discrimination on the financial wellbeing of older LGBT+ people, and at the intersectional nature of this problem.

Social isolation – They explore the high levels of social isolation, and the low expectations of institutional support, among older LGBT+ people, and how these affect financial wellbeing.

Long-term health conditions – They look at the high levels of disability among older LGBT+ people, how disability can increase social isolation, and how both impact financial health.

Financial stress – They show how living in London is a mixed blessing for older LGBT+ people, exploring factors such as the precarity of life in the private rental sector.

Launch / Webinar

Precarious Lives will be launched with a webinar. This 90-minute event will be on Tuesday, 25 February at 10.30am – 12.00 noon.

To register for the webinar please click here.

Participation is free. The event will be held on Zoom.

The webinar will be chaired by Baroness Barker (House of Lords). It will include short presentations by:

• Rob Berkeley (BlkOutUK.com)
• Anna Kear (Tonic Housing)
• Mark Sladen (Tonic Housing)
• Ben Thomas (London South Bank University)
• Sarah Wilkinson (Centre for Ageing Better)

Report

The report will be published on Tuesday 25 February, and will be available from that date.

Credits

The first phase of Precarious Lives was organised by the charity Opening Doors, which sadly closed in February 2024, after which Tonic took on this important project. They would like to thank all of the older LGBT+ people who answered the survey and took part in the focus groups and interviews, as well as the panel of specialists in the Advisory Group. Precarious Lives has been funded by Trust for London.

LGBT+ Stories on BBC iPlayer

This LGBT+ History Month dive into comedies, dramas and documentaries celebrating the LGBT+ communities in all its fabulous forms.

There are lots of programmes on the BBC iPlayer including:

Gentleman Jack

Halifax, 1832. Anne Lister shakes up her shabby ancestral home, determined to restore its fortunes and find herself a wife.

Gentleman Jack Changed My Life

Six British women rediscover their sexuality, come out to themselves and their families, and rekindle long-lost love after watching drama series Gentleman Jack.

Gateways Grind: London’s Secret Lesbian Club

Sandi Toksvig goes behind the iconic green door of one of the most famous lesbian venues in the world, The Gateways Club.

HIV, PrEP and Me

Dan Harry explores how a drug that has contributed to a steep decline in HIV rates among gay and bi men could help end new HIV infections across the UK. 

Olly Alexander: Growing up Gay

Documentary in which Years and Years frontman Olly Alexander explores the mental health issues faced by members of the LGBT+ community.

A Change of Sex

Groundbreaking BBC series that follows Julia Grant’s life as a transgender person, from her first year living as a woman to her gender reassignment surgery and beyond.

🎵 Season Just Announced! Live at Lunchtime 2025 🎵

All concerts are free, unticketed events in the Stalls Foyer – just turn up!

Run Remedy

Friday, 2 May 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Chetham’s School of Music

Friday, 9 May 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

The Apple Sellers

Friday, 16 May 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Lorena Paz Nieto & Helen Glaisher-Hernández

Friday, 23 May 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Dimitra Ananiadou & Richard Whalley

Friday, 30 May 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Music for the Mind and Soul: Jonathan Mayer & Kousic Sen

Friday, 20 June 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Hannah Brine

Friday, 11 July 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Union Chapel Jazz Band

Friday, 1 August 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Canter Semper

Friday, 5 September 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Duo Gimeno-Sanchís

Friday, 12 September 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

So Many Beauties Collective

Friday, 19 September 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

Tracey Browne

Friday, 26 September 2025 – 12.45pm to 1.30pm

In addition to the above there are free concerts (with a ticket) at the Royal Northern College of Music, 124 Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9RD.

Get tickets via box office 0161 907 5555 on Mondays and Thursdays from 2.00pm to 5.00pm or via the website rncm.ac.uk

The upcoming concerts are:

Monday, 24 February – 1.15pm – Violin and piano duos by Brahms and Wieniawski

Thursday, 27 February – 1.15pm – Kai Strobel directs the RNCM Percussion Ensemble

Monday, 3 March – 1.15pm – Piano music by Chopin and Beethoven

Thursday, 6 March – 1.15pm – RNCM Guitars with director Craig Ogden

Monday, 10 March – 1.15pm – Two duos from the Popular Music course

Wednesday, 12 March – 1.15pm – European Chamber Music Academy Recital

Thursday, 13 March – 1.15pm – Kleio Quartet performs Bach and Bartok

Monday, 17 March – 1.15pm – Duos by Mangani, Mellits and Bowen

Thursday, 20 March – 1.15pm – Harp students perform

Monday, 24 March – 1.15pm – Soprano and piano duos by Burleigh and Falla

Thursday, 27 March – 1.15pm – Chamber music from Silja Trio and Palmieri Piano Quartet

Monday, 31 March – 1.15pm – Sonatas by Schubert and Harberg

Thursday, 3 April – 1.15pm – Rob Buckland directs the RNCM Saxophones.

Also The Martin Harris Centre for Music and Drama at The University of Manchester have a dynamic arts programme. There are 20 music concerts, open to the general public, free of charge and no booking necessary. For details see: http://www.manchester.ac.uk/mhc

Happy Valentine’s Day! from Out In The City to YOU!

We’ve always been here!

Edmund White on lust, love and literature

“I think the French are best in bed, because they’re the most perverted,” the great American author Edmund White divulges from his book-crammed apartment in Chelsea, New York. In France, he says: “All kinds of vices are allowed and encouraged. Although I’ve had wonderful sex with English people,” he adds, kindly.

Is there any sex act at which he would draw the line? “Um, no,” says the 85-year-old, barely pausing to consider the question.

White is certainly an authority on the subject of sex. For a full 20 years, he reckons, he “tricked” with three different men each week. In fact, he has had so much action that this pivotal figure in gay literature – who has written more than 30 books and whose 80s trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels starting with A Boy’s Own Story is a key plank of the queer canon – has now devoted an entire memoir to his sexual exploits. It’s called The Loves of My Life. Why not The Shags of My Life? “Somewhere in the book I say that, like Jean Genet, I never experienced sex in a pure state,” he says. “I always had some affection for the person, or felt some love.”

There was certainly plenty of love to feel. In New York during the 70s, the author writes: “I thought it was quite normal to take a break from writing at two in the morning, saunter down to the piers, and have sex with 20 men in a truck. When I wrote that I’d had sex over the years with 3,000 men, one of my contemporaries asked pityingly: ‘Why so few?’”

The Loves of My Life tears down taboos on virtually every page and is frequently hilarious. “When I started the book I thought, this will never be published,” White says. “But I got a wonderful review in Harper’s magazine by a man who identified himself as heterosexual but said: ‘This book made me wish I were gay.’ That seems very funny to me. In the 70s, straight critics would greet my work with the words: ‘I, comma, a heterosexual …’”

Over the course of his long life, White has seen homosexuality go from a terrible secret whose disclosure could ruin lives, through gay liberation, AIDS, apps such as Grindr and the sexual fluidity of Gen Z. The Loves of My Life details White’s sex life, from his youth as a recklessly horny gay teenager in the repressive 50s to his current relationship with Rory, a younger man with whom he interacts mainly on Skype. “He keeps annoying me, wanting to have sex, but I don’t really want to do it,” White says, adding that age has now extinguished his libido. “Most people my age who want to remain sexually active take male hormones, but I can’t because I have a heart problem.”

“Rory was my student,” says White, who has been a professor of creative writing at Princeton University since 1998. But surely it’s an abuse of power to have sex with people you’re meant to be supervising? “Well, in all my years of teaching in maybe 10 different universities, I never had sex with a student while he was a student,” he replies.

Was there anything White didn’t put in the book because it was too shocking? “So many of my novels have been about sex or contained lots of lurid passages,” he says. “I didn’t want to repeat anecdotes from previous memoirs” – this is his fifth (the previous one, The Unpunished Vice, was about his life as a voracious reader) – “so I came up with new ones.”

Characters include Keith McDermott, the gorgeous star of the stage play Equus, who lies in bed beside him but doesn’t put out (“I was content to have that constant access to his beauty and company”); the alarming gerontophile Pedro, who beats him up in drunken rages; and the bearded “satyr” he meets in a 70s bathhouse who “impaled me as if he were a warrior-priest and I an unstoppable vampire” – their furious congress in the bushes on Fire Island leaves White with poison ivy welts all over his body.

Others in the book’s teeming cast include a meth-addicted Mormon hustler he takes to the Edinburgh books festival (“he enjoyed it thoroughly”); a heterosexual hippy who flees midway through the act; a Scottish sadist who sports a cock ring under his sporran; two women he gets engaged to in his 20s and whom he hopes might turn him straight; and stoned friends with benefits “feasting on hard cock” in 70s New York. There is a furtive encounter in a Spanish bullring during the Franco era (where he gets robbed at knifepoint by a man who knows that White can never report him to the fascist authorities without disclosing his then-illegal sexual behaviour), and alfresco frolics on Hampstead Heath during trips to London, where, he says: “I must have felt or been felt by hundreds of men.”

Michael Carroll, his husband and partner of almost 30 years, gets a passing mention or two, but White says he is loath to write about him in case he loses this precious relationship. Like Vladimir Nabokov, he says: “I’ve always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off.” Sex during marriage isn’t something White’s otherwise comprehensive book covers, either. “Michael has a full-time lover who lives with us,” the author says. “We’re very, very close, but not sexually.”

While the book has plenty on sex as hedonism, there’s not much on sex as an expression of tenderness or intimacy. “Well, I hate cuddling,” White says. “I would rather die than cuddle with somebody. I just find it cloying and annoying, somebody who strokes your hair when you want to be left alone. I was fortunate that when I wrote The Joy of Gay Sex” – a pioneering sex manual published in 1977 – “I collaborated with Dr Charles Silverstein because I think if I wrote it alone it would have been called The Tragedy of Gay Sex. He brought in the warm, cuddly part.”

White adds that his interest in sex with someone tended to wane after the initial excitement, an exception being Aaron, the Mormon hustler. “I probably had more sex with him than anybody, even though I had to pay for it.”

White is unashamed about paying for sex and has done so since his teens. The first sex workers he hired were Kentucky “hillbillies” who charged $10 a time. In his 30s, by which time he was a writer, he would order a sex worker to come over to his place at 3.00am. “That would keep me at my desk until then. You’d call up the madam and say: ‘I want a six foot two blond,’ and he’d say: ‘Hold on, doll’, arrange it all and then the most exciting moment would be hearing the footsteps on the staircase.”

In the 80s, he would holiday in a Cretan village where “everyone was available for a price, even the mayor”. What does he say to the accusation that paying for sex is exploitative? “Well, who’s exploiting who, I wonder?” White says. “I always felt the best gay bars in New York were the hustler bars, because while everyone was giving each other the cold shoulder in normal gay bars, in the hustler bars everyone was jabbering away because they were either buying or selling. It was partly mercantile, but it was also a ‘we’re all in this together’ kind of feeling.”

White’s sexual obsession started when he was growing up in a well-to-do family in Chicago. “I would be horny all the time,” he says. “I would look up the word ‘homosexual’ in the dictionary and get very excited just by seeing it.” Queer representation was almost nonexistent: the first book he read that had any kind of gay theme was Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, about an ailing writer’s obsession with an adolescent boy, “which isn’t very positive, but it is about desire. I read also Plato quite young, which was eye-opening about love between members of the same sex.”

He lost his virginity at 13 and the most alarming passages in The Loves of My Life are the ones in which White remembers encounters with much older men. He also describes seducing schoolmates, such as the “underwashed” youth of whom he writes: “I’d been telling him that gays gave better blowjobs than girls and, with scientific curiosity, he pulled out a musty boner. When we’d finished, he said with ruthless objectivity: ‘That wasn’t that much better.’”

 White found his tribe in 60s New York. One June evening in 1969, he and a friend came across a disturbance in Greenwich Village at a dodgy mafia-run gay bar, the Stonewall Inn. “We noticed there was a police wagon and all this brouhaha, and we stayed and watched the riots. I was such a middle-class twerp that I kept saying: ‘Come on, guys, relax! You know that you’re breaking the law?’ Before Stonewall, White writes in the book, gays had always fled from the cops for fear of being arrested and jailed, but “these Stonewall African Americans and Puerto Ricans and drag queens weren’t so easily intimidated. They were used to fighting the police.”

The Stonewall riots launched the gay liberation movement and, White writes, “inaugurated an epoch when partners of the same sex could claim, maybe for the first time in history, their common humanity, their dignity, their rights”. Gay culture went overground and the gay populations of New York and San Francisco boomed, along with several other cities White went on to explore for his riveting 1980 travelogue States of Desire: Travels in Gay America.

Then on 3 July 1981, the New York Times ran a piece with the headline: “Rare cancer seen in 41 homosexuals”. It was the first knell of AIDS, a pandemic that would lay waste to those nascent gay communities and go on to kill an estimated 42 million people. White was one of five co-founders of the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, the first organisation aimed at combating AIDS. “I knew I should take the whole thing seriously,” he says, “but I moved to France, partly because I wanted the party to go on, for myself at least, and then it caught up with me there too.”

White was diagnosed HIV positive in 1984. “I wasn’t surprised, but I was very gloomy,” he says. “I kind of pulled the covers over my head and thought: ‘Oh gee, I’ll be dead in a year or two.’ I did have a number of opportunistic diseases, like shingles, but it turned out that I was a slow progressor.” White’s T-cells, which fight infection, were declining, but much more gradually than those of other people with HIV, “and by the time they got dangerously low there were the new drugs, and so I survived. But I didn’t think I would.”

For White, sex and erudition have always gone hand in hand, so one final question. Are people better off reading lots of books, or having lots of sex? “Well, it depends on their age,” White replies. “If they’re as old as I am, then books are a bit better. But if they’re young, they should have lots of sex.”

The Loves of My Life was published on 28 January by Bloomsbury, £20. 

Manchester’s gay village in 1995, presented by David Hoyle for Granada TV: