Trip to the Jewish Museum – (Thanks to Norman for the report back)

Today a party of twenty five from Out In The City had a visit to the Jewish Museum on Cheetham Hill Road, Manchester.

On arrival we were welcomed by staff and a volunteer on reception. Elly took us all into a room with tables and chairs and a kitchen where we were all excited as we were going to make Challah.

We saw some slides about the Sabbath including the shabbat candles being lit to welcome the Sabbath. Also we saw prepared food a family would enjoy for the Sabbath.

Elly gave us each a piece of dough and demonstrated how to knead and plait the dough. This was great fun, and we completed by adding poppy seeds. Our finished product went in the oven for thirty-five minutes.

Some of the group went for a coffee and others had an interesting look around the museum. About twelve of us went into the synagogue, which in the 1940s was the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue. It is very much as it was when in use.

Richard McCarthy explained and answered questions pertaining to the Torah. The stained glass windows all represent a scene from the Old Testament such as Joseph’s dream and Moses in the bullrushes. We were shown the Ark where all the Sefer Torahs are that contain all the services in the year. Richard was inundated with questions.

Before we knew it our bread was ready, and a lovely aroma greeted us as we collected our Challah.

Appreciations were shown to all who made our visit so enjoyable. Occasionally Bar Mitzvahs or weddings are celebrated at the synagogue.

More photos can be seen here.

Derek Jarman Pocket Park

The Derek Jarman Pocket Park team is made up of a small group of LGBT+ volunteers, aged 50+ resident in Greater Manchester. They use their creativity and gardening skills to take care of the Derek Jarman Pocket Park at Manchester Art Gallery.

You may have already visited the pocket park, but if you haven’t, it’s really worth going to see. It’s a calm and queer oasis in the centre of the city!

You can find out more about the pocket park here.

In addition to all the gardening, a couple of years ago, the volunteers put together a zine entitled “Let’s Get Botanical Together”, which really is a fantastic and inspiring read, full of important history and insight. You can find it here. 

More recently, over this summer, the gardeners recorded a soundscape with artist Caro C and LGBT+ people living with dementia. Listen carefully and you will hear the voices of the gardeners, sounds from the garden and noises made with garden tools! The sound piece will be shown as an interactive installation at Bridgewater Hall as part of So Many Beauties, a dementia-friendly music festival this Friday, 20 September. 
The sound piece can be heard here.

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy

Miss Major Griffin-Gracy (born 25 October 1946), often referred to as Miss Major, is an American author, activist, and community organiser for transgender rights. She has participated in activism and community organising for a range of causes, and served as the first executive director for the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project.

Griffin-Gracy was born in Chicago in the 1940s, and assigned male at birth. Her father worked for the post office and her mother managed a beauty shop. She has said after she came out to her parents around age 12 or 13, they responded by enrolling her in psychiatric treatment and taking her to church.

Griffin-Gracy came out in Chicago as trans in the late 1950s, and has described drag balls at the time as places where “You had to keep your eyes open, had to watch your back, but you learned how to deal with that … we didn’t know at the time that we were questioning our gender. We just knew it felt right.” She has also described the influence of Christine Jorgensen, who became well known in the 1950s for having gender-affirming surgery; according to Griffin-Gracy, “After Christine Jorgensen got her sex change, all of a sudden there was a black market of hormones out there,” and she was familiar with how to obtain illicit hormones in Chicago.

Griffin-Gracy has said she was expelled from college for having feminine clothes, and she lost her home with her parents after they refused to accept her gender. She has described working as a showgirl at the Jewel Box Revue in Chicago and New York, and how she developed her name to add “Griffin” to honour her mother. She has also discussed how becoming a sex worker provided the steadiest available income. She recalls that after an incarceration in a psychiatric facility in lieu of jail in Chicago, she moved to New York.

New York

In a 2014 interview with the Bay Area Reporter, Griffin-Gracy said that after moving to New York City, she found the Stonewall Inn “provided us transwomen with a nice place for social connection” and that few gay bars otherwise allowed entry to trans women at the time. She has said she was a regular patron of the Stonewall, and that she was there on the first night of the 1969 Stonewall rebellion. Police raids were common for LGBT bars, and Griffin-Gracy has said, “This one night, though, everybody decided this time we weren’t going to leave the bar. And shit just hit the fan.”

Griffin-Gracy has described the impact of the death in 1970 of her friend Puppy, a trans woman who was determined by authorities to have died by suicide while Griffin-Gracy strongly suspected she was murdered by a client. She has said, “Puppy’s murder made me aware that we were not safe or untouchable and that if someone does touch us, no one gives a shit. We only have each other. We always knew this, but now we needed to take a step towards doing something about it. We girls decided that whenever we got into a car with someone, another girl would write down as much information as possible. We would try not to just lean into the car window but get a guy to walk outside the car so that everyone could see him, so we all knew who he was if she didn’t come back. That’s how it started. Since no one was going to do it for us, we had to do it for ourselves.” She has described this as the start of her activism.

Griffin-Gracy has also discussed her years of experience in prison and her experience on parole, including after Stonewall, when she received a five-year sentence following a robbery arrest. She has described Frank “Big Black” Smith, a leader of the Attica Correctional Facility riots of 1971, as a mentor, after meeting him while incarcerated at the Clinton Correctional Facility at Dannemora. She says he encouraged her to learn about African-American history and politics, organising, and the prison industrial complex. She has recalled being released from prison around 1974.

Over twenty years, Griffin-Gracy also experienced homelessness, received welfare, and mostly found hormones through the black market.

California

Griffin-Gracy began work in community services after moving to San Diego in 1978. She worked at a food bank and then in direct community services for trans women. Her work expanded into home health care during the AIDS epidemic in the United States. In the 1990s, Griffin-Gracy moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and worked with multiple HIV/AIDS organisations, including the City of Refuge in San Francisco and the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center

In 2004, Griffin-Gracy began working at the Transgender Gender Variant Intersex Justice Project (TGIJP), shortly after it was founded by Alex Lee. She became the executive director of the organisation, which is focused on providing support services to transgender, gender variant, and intersex people in prison. Her work included visiting trans women and men in California prisons to help coordinate access to legal and social services, and testimony at the California State Assemby and United Nations Human Rights Committee in Geneva about human rights violations in prisons.

While she was the executive director, she gave an interview to Jayden Donahue that was published in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, and described in a review by Arlen Katen in the Berkeley Journal of Gender, Law & Justice as “bluntly and powerfully stating that being trans* is an extension of the prison-industrial complex; even if not all trans* people end up in prison, their gender identities are constantly policed through other social and state mechanisms”.

In an interview with Jessica Stern published in a 2011 Scholar and Feminist Online article, Griffin-Gracy described a sense of exclusion from the broader LGBT movement, described by Stern as for “herself and others, especially transgender people who are low-income, people of colour, or have criminal records.” In 2013, she was part of a campaign to revise wording on a Stonewall commemorative plaque; she advocated for “inclusive language to honour the sacrifice we as trans women displayed by taking back our power.” In 2014, when she was honoured as a community grand marshal for the San Francisco Pride Parade, she said, “We’re finally getting some recognition. I’m proud it finally happened and I’m alive to see it because a lot of my girlfriends haven’t made it this far. I’m trying to get as many girls as possible together at the parade so people can see we’re a force to be reckoned with; we’re not going anywhere.”

Arkansas Griffin-Gracy moved to Little Rock, Arkansas after visiting the city for a screening of MAJOR!, the 2015 documentary about her. She developed a property she initially called the House of GG into an informal retreat centre for trans people. The property includes a guest house, pool, hot tub, merry-go-round, various gardens, and over 80 palm trees. In 2023, she renamed the property to Tilifi, an acronym for “Telling It Like It Fuckin’ Is”.

The Secret Love Story of Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo

By the time the couple met in 1948, Williams had already cemented his status as one of the greatest living playwrights, having debuted the timeless A Streetcar Named Desire the year prior to great acclaim.

Merlo, for his part, was a working-class Sicilian-American actor who had grown up in New Jersey. Despite his screen-ready handsomeness, he hadn’t really managed to break through in the business. He appeared in a handful of Western films throughout the ’40s, but often in bit parts that frequently went uncredited.

Still, he certainly looked like a movie star, and when Williams first laid eyes on him at the Atlantic House bar in Provincetown, he couldn’t see anything else.

“My continual and intense scrutiny must have burned through his shoulders, for after a while he turned toward me and grinned,” Williams wrote of Merlo that night in his Memoirs. It was love at first sight.

And thus began a 15-year love affair that would inspire much of Williams most creative – and romantic – work. Merlo gave up acting, more or less, to become the writer’s secretary full-time, living with him in his Manhattan apartment, his Key West home, and frequently travelling abroad together.

The guise of Merlo’s “job” was largely to protect the fact that the two men were romantically together. Many closest to the two understood this truth – in fact, you could call it an “open secret” – but such was the nature of being gay at the time, and their relationship was never acknowledged publicly in the press.

In 1951, Williams wrote The Rose Tattoo, which he called his “love play” and was clearly inspired by his feelings for Merlo. Though he seldom wrote directly about his own life, it’s been said the character Alvaro – a Sicilian truck driver – was loosely based on his lover, drawing from Merlo’s “playfulness, sense of humour, deep feelings, and athletic physique.”

Despite the secrecy, Williams has described his early years living with Merlo as the happiest and most productive of his life. However, over time, both men’s heavy reliance on drugs and alcohol is said to have put an intense strain on their relationship, and they had their fair share of rocky periods.

In 1962, Merlo was diagnosed with lung cancer, at which point Williams relocated him back to his Manhattan apartment and stayed by his side as his health waned. Before Merlo passed in 1963, it’s said his last words to Williams were, “I’m used to you now,” which the writer understood to be an admission of deep love.

Many claim 1961’s The Night Of The Iguana to be Williams’ last truly great work, which is attributed (by even Williams himself) to the fact that he fell into an extended, dark depression after Merlo’s death, turning further into debilitating drug use.

He would continue to write, and eventually found another romantic partner in aspiring writer Robert Carroll, many years his junior, but Williams was never the same. He was discovered dead in a New York City hotel in February 1983, found to have toxic levels of drugs in his body. He was 71.

It was only earlier this year that the Tennessee Williams Annual Review published a never-before-seen poem from Williams called “The Final Day Of Your Life,” which, as the title might imply, provides an intimate portrait of his last moments with Merlo, writing specifically about sitting next to his companion while he was attached to an oxygen tank.

Though Williams and Merlo’s story has a tragic end, we’re still discovering new details about the love these two men had for each other, and the impact that love had on the writer’s body of work – one of the most consequential and influential oeuvres in American culture.

Autumn and Winter Pride Festivals

Many Prides around the world take place in June, timed to coincide with the anniversary of New York’s Stonewall Uprising on 28 June 1969, considered by many to be the beginning of the modern LGBT+ movement. 

But can that be the only reason why June is considered the proudest month? Is it a coincidence that late June is when it’s warm and sunny in much of North America and Europe? Can it really be a big mystery why Toronto, for example, doesn’t hold its Pride festival in February, coinciding with the 1981 bathhouse raids that are considered the turning point in the country’s LGBT+ movement? (Hint: Toronto’s daily temperature in February is an average of -3C.) I mean, who wants to shiver while they party and protest?

But not everybody in the world gets their best weather in June, July and August. Those in the Southern Hemisphere often have their warmest months in January, February and March.

And we who live in more northern, more frigid climates, in search of autumn and winter Pride festivals, are lucky to have those places to visit when the temperature at home drops. So set aside the idea that June is Pride Month. Here are some places you can visit for Pride when you need a taste of the rainbow.

October 

Las Vegas Pride, Nevada – 11 and 12 October 2024

The people behind one of the world’s few night time Pride parades know exactly what they’re doing. The unbearably hot days of the Nevada summer are over, and the evenings bring comfortable temperatures that can almost be called cool. But this is Vegas, so there will be plenty of razzle, dazzle and sexiness on display.

Honolulu Pride, Hawaii – 19 and 20 October 2024

The capital’s Pride parade heads down Kalākaua Avenue at sunset allowing the evening breeze to cool off all the parading hotties. The entertainment starts immediately after the parade with programming continuing over the rest of the weekend. Drag is in no short supply.

Taipei Rainbow Festival, Taiwan – 25 to 27 October 2024

This free weekend-long national event takes place in the square around The Red House, a landmark in Taipei’s gay village, and draws upon the DJs, go-go boys, drag queens and other performers that drive Taipei’s LGBT+ scene all year long. The October weather is usually pleasantly warm and drier than other months. The biggest Pride celebration in East Asia, it attracted nearly 180,000 attendees last year.

Johannesburg Pride, South Africa – 26 October 2024

Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city, with a metro population of 6.2 million, has the biggest Pride festival in the country – and in Africa – with more than 20,000 taking part. For its 35th anniversary year and as part of the organisation’s broader Pride of Africa project, there will also be an empowerment summit, a gala fundraiser and a “secret venue” event.

Greater Palm Springs Pride, California – 31 October to 3 November 2024

This California resort town’s first Pride celebration was in 1986 – it was a dinner and show called Sizzle that didn’t go over very well. The first parade was in 1992, with 35 entries. Now spreading the rainbow across the entire Coachella Valley, it’s a four-day party with 225 parade entries.

November

Buenos Aires Pride / Marcha de Orgullo, Argentina – 2 November 2024

The timing of Buenos Aires’ Pride celebrations point not only to the lovely late-spring weather but also to the anniversary of the founding of Latin America’s (and Argentina’s) first LGBT+ organisation, Nuestro Mundo, in the city in 1967. Although politics and history remain important for this festival, remember that this is Latin America – the party is fierce, as are the entertainers on the main stages. The parade and street festival brought out an estimated million people last year.

Maspalomas Winter Pride, Gran Canaria, Spain – 4 to 10 November 2024

The Spanish resort town of Maspalomas, located on Gran Canaria in the Canary Islands, off the coast of Africa, has a special role in European gay life, namely providing a warm super-gay beach escape during the wintertime. Scandinavians, Germans and Brits flock there to get themselves a winter tan. So it’s not surprising that its Winter Pride, which turns 10 this year, is just as popular as Maspalomas’ springtime Pride celebrations.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – 19 November 2024

Though not as big and famous as São Paulo’s Pride festival, Rio’s is a lot of fun and includes performances and parties as well as protest. It’s often outshone, even for LGBT+ people, by Carnaval and Rio’s massive New Year’s celebrations, which involves millions of people partying on Copacabana Beach dressed all in white, but it’s a great opportunity to celebrate with the community. Take note, November is usually the wettest month.

January

Melbourne Midsumma Festival, Australia – 19 January to 9 February 2025

Australia’s second-biggest city does things its own artsy way -Melbourne’s Pride festivities are embedded in a 22-day LGBT+ arts and culture festival, with a variety of free and ticketed events. If three weeks of performances, exhibits and parties aren’t enough for you, the annual parade takes place on 2 February 2025, with an estimated 7,400 marchers proceeding down Fitzroy Street in St Kilda, watched by more than 45,000 supporters.

February

Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, Australia – 14 February to 2 March 2025

It’ll have been two years since this antipodean city hosted WorldPride and they’re still buzzed. Of course, the flight Down Under is a long one, so visitors will want their money’s worth. With 100 events across 17 days, there’s literally something for everyone, even those who just want to stand jaw-dropped before all the spectacular costumes and floats in the Mardi Gras parade. There are few Prides with this much dazzle on display.

Auckland Rainbow Parade, New Zealand – 15 February 2025

New Zealand’s largest city, with a metro population of about 1.7 million, also has beaches, a bustling Central Business District and Pride celebrations that will have you smiling and dancing. A Pride-like festival called Hero was the thing through the 1990s; the current organisation making things happen was founded in 2013. Unlike the name suggests, Pride is a full-fledged festival, with dozens of parties, shows and exhibitions around the city – some official, some by independent organisers – leading up to parade day. 

Mumbai Queer Pride, India – February 2025 (To Be Confirmed)

India’s biggest city, with a population of more than 12.5 million, hosts a month of Pride events – circuit, literary, artsy, health-oriented, history-minded – leading up to its annual Pride march. The march itself usually starts in August Kranti Maidan, the park where Mahatma Gandhi launched the Quit India Movement, which led to India’s independence, on 8 August 1942.

March

Cape Town Pride, South Africa – March 2025 (To Be Confirmed)

The city that’s home to Africa’s only rainbow crosswalk knows a thing or two about throwing a Pride party. More than 30 years after South Africa decriminalised homosexuality, and almost 20 since it legalised same-gender marriage, the city’s LGBT+ community continues to grow and celebrate with a variety of events leading up to parade day. The parade itself is not as big as Johannesburg’s, but the vibe and backdrop make it an amazing experience. 

LOUD Cabaret

LOUD is The Met’s monthly queer cabaret night, showcasing the most fabulous of rising stars from across Bury and beyond!

Expect tantalising musicians, side-splitting comedians, captivating dancers and a line-up of talented additions for your delight on a monthly basis. Thursdays have never been so exciting!

September’s event will feature Val the Brown Queen, King Navassa and Maisy Whipp. Your host for the evening will be Mancunian writer, actor and activist Nathaniel J Hall, Artistic Director of Dibby Theatre.

Thursday, 19 September 8.00pm – The Box @ The Met, Market Street, Bury BL9 0BW

£11 standard / £9 subsidised / £13 supporters (inc fees)

Tickets available here.

Shibden Hall

On a beautifully sunny day, twenty of us travelled to the West Yorkshire town of Halifax.

We walked to The Piece Hall where a bronze statue of the 19th-century diarist Anne Lister, known as Gentleman Jack, was installed in September 2021. Lister is sometimes described as the first modern lesbian, and lived near by in Shibden Hall for many years.

Anne Lister is Shibden Hall’s most well known owner, She was a noted diarist whose 27 volumes (4 to 5 million words), written between 1806 and 1840, give a unique insight into her daily life as a landowner, business woman and traveller. Anne devised a code to keep some of her thoughts concealed. Once cracked, the diaries revealed her most intimate private life including her love affairs with women.

Anne Lister was born 3 April 1791 in Halifax and grew up at Skelfler, a small family estate in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Anne attended school in Ripon and then the exclusive Manor School in York. Her hobbies included walking, riding and shooting, and she made many visits to Shibden, home of her uncle James and his sister, Anne. After the death of her brother in 1813, she became heiress to the Shibden estate and moved in with her aunt and uncle, taking over the management of the estate.

In 1832, Anne developed a relationship with the wealthy heiress Ann walker (1803 – 1854) and they later set up home together at Shibden, which Anne became sole owner of in 1836.

Anne was a keen traveller and set off with Ann Walker in June 1839 to travel through Russia and overland to Persia. She was bitten by a fever-carrying tick and died on 22 September 1840. Her remains were brought back to Halifax, arriving in late April 1841.

Once again, we had a very interesting trip out. More photos can be seen here.

Bette Bourne Obituary – by Neil Bartlett / The Guardian

Bette Bourne, actor and activist, born 22 September 1939; died 23 August 2024.

In 1980, the New York magazine the Village Voice captioned a centre-spread photo shoot of Bette Bourne and his radical drag troupe the Bloolips with the phrase “living proof not only that rhinestones and politics can live together, but that they must”.  

Bette, who has died aged 84, doubtless received the accolade with the same arched-eyebrow disdain that greeted all attempts to summarise his work or life – but it’s not half bad as an introduction to the world of a man who revelled in turning contradiction into an art form.

The Bloolips’ riotous early performances mixed tap dancing, repurposed musical comedy show tunes, elaborate white-face makeup and polemic gay lib narratives. The defining feature of the radical drag for which the company became well known was that it had nothing to do with traditional female impersonation. Instead, the all-gay, all-male company arrayed itself in gender-defying combinations of visibly second hand gowns with junk-shop accessories. The effect was to turn the whole world queer; as Bette himself once put it: “It wasn’t so much a question of me doing Hedy Lamarr, as of me doing John Gielgud doing Hedy Lamarr.”

After 13 shows in London, numerous tours of Europe and six seasons off-Broadway – and never a penny of public subsidy – Bette retired the Bloolips as a company in 1998. By then, his work at the 180-seat Drill Hall in London – notably his appearances in my own A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep (1989-90) and Sarrasine (1989), both created with the composer Nicolas Bloomfield – had begun to draw the attention of the theatrical mainstream. Some of its more adventurous directors duly began looking for roles in which his unique combination of Old Vic technique with simmering sexual threat could be suitably employed.

Highlights of Bette’s later career included a notably savage Jaques in As You Like It for Maria Aitken at the Open Air theatre, Regent’s Park, in 1992, a magisterial Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest for English Touring Theatre in 1995, and a flinty yet giggly Pauncefort Quentin in Noël Coward’s The Vortex for Michael Grandage at the Donmar in 2002. He also made time to work for younger queer producers such as Duckie in London and Marlborough Productions in Brighton, and often went out of his way to encourage the many young queer artists who approached him for advice or inspiration.

In 1990, Bette and his long time partner and fellow Bloolip, Paul “Precious Pearl” Shaw, had collaborated with the New York lesbian performance troupe Split Britches on a notable reworking of A Streetcar Named Desire (retitled Belle Reprieve), still at the Drill Hall; however, he also worked on a grander scale at the National Theatre (2005), for the Royal Shakespeare Company (2007) and at the Globe (2004, 2013).

From 1999 to 2001 Bette toured the world in Resident Alien, Tim Fountain’s homage to Bette’s own good friend Quentin Crisp; in 2003 he contributed an unforgettable Gower to my Olivier-nominated staging of Shakespeare’s Pericles at the Lyric Hammersmith. In 2009 he collaborated with Mark Ravenhill to create A Life in Three Acts, a performed (and later filmed) memoir that documented the extraordinary range of his theatrical (and life) achievements.

Born in Bangor, during the wartime evacuation of his East End family from London to north Wales, Bette was christened Peter (the name by which he was known for the first 20 years of his career) then brought back to the family home in Stoke Newington at the age of six weeks. His father, a driving instructor, was distant and violent, creating in Peter a lifelong mistrust and even hatred of conventional masculinity. His mother, Jeretta (“Jet”), however, was a glamorous and fun-loving medical secretary with a passion for amateur dramatics, and it was she who nurtured her son’s early talent for singing and showing off.

Peter was educated first at Church Street School then at Upton House in Hackney. Seeking employment as soon as he could, in 1954, aged 15, Peter got temporary work in rep at the Intimate theatre in Palmers Green, where his duties included playing a corpse. Only his feet were visible, sticking out from behind an upstage sofa, but Peter insisted on applying full makeup for every performance. Aged 16, he began working first as a trainee printer and then as an assistant electrician at the Garrick theatre in the West End.

In 1958, with Jet’s encouragement, Peter secured a funded place to attend the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. He graduated three years later, and his striking good looks and assured vocal technique – plus his willingness to play by the rules in the homophobic world of the 60s British entertainment industry – soon secured him regular work. He featured in seasons at the Bristol Old Vic (1961-62), the London Old Vic (1962) and the Nottingham Playhouse (1963); in 1969, he toured in the Prospect Theatre Company’s famous pairing of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II with Shakespeare’s Richard II, playing opposite the young Ian McKellen.

He appeared regularly on TV, featuring in Dixon of Dock Green (1963-65), The Saint (1967) and The Avengers (1966-68). He was also – briefly – a boyfriend of Brian Epstein, manager of the Beatles. Throughout all of this, however, although he had come out to his mother in 1961, he stayed firmly in the professional closet.

By the time Peter was working for Prospect, the first wave of gay liberation was already hitting London. Frustrated with being obliged to endlessly edit his personality out of his performances, he became an eager attender of the early London Gay Liberation Front meetings; he later claimed that this was only because of the abundance of good-looking men at the meetings. By 1974, all attempts at a conformist career had been gleefully abandoned; Peter had become a full-on activist, living in a drag commune in Notting Hill and working in drag in the nearby Powis Square children’s playground – and preaching the fieriest possible version of gay lib to anyone who questioned the wisdom of doing so.

It was at this point that Peter was rechristened with the drag name Bette by his fellow queens; he never referred to himself as Peter again. As well as his firebrand daily presence on the street and at meetings, his activism also included taking a leading role in demonstrations such as the “zap” which so successfully disrupted the Christian morality campaigner Mary Whitehouse’s Festival of Light at the Methodist Central Hall in London in 1971.

It was a visit to the Oval House in Kennington by the New York gay performance troupe the Hot Peaches in 1976 that originally lit the fuse on the explosive connections between Bette’s queer politics and his work. He briefly joined the company on tour; then, when the Peaches left town, assembled his first crew of Bloolips, rehearsing in the commune’s front room and quickly building the company’s reputation. Although the following decades saw many changes in his career, the wit, anger and sheer magnetism of those early performances remained his trademarks.

Bette’s relationship with Paul began in 1977; in 2013, they became civil partners. In 2015, Bette was diagnosed with dementia. The disease gradually robbed him of the ability to learn and deliver lines, but he continued to make personal appearances and to teach the occasional master class. All through his illness Bette was indefatigably cared for by Paul, and their deeply committed relationship was an inspiration to those who knew them.

Bette is survived by Paul, his younger brother, the actor and singer Mike Berry, and his sisters, Val and Pam.

Creating Inclusive Artspaces for Older LGBTQ+ People

Join the Pride UK team on Wednesday, 25 September from 12.00 noon to 1.30pm to learn more about the lived experiences of older LGBTQ+ people and explore how to create inclusive art spaces.

The free online session – delivered by lesbian and gay HR professionals with 30 years’ experience of LGBT+ equalities training and consultancy – will address:

• Relevant research into the lives of older LGBTQ+ people
• Living as LGBTQ+ in the hostile climate of the 1950’s – 1980’s
• The medical establishment treatment of homosexual illness
• Later life as LGBTQ+ and anxieties of approaching home care alone
• The Pride movement and section 28 fightback for LGBTQ+ human rights
• How induction, training and accreditation strengthen LGBTQ+ inclusion in the arts.

Join us to share ideas, refine your working practices, and meet other progressive people who are striving to innovate and excel in services for older people.

Get tickets here.

Lord Mayor’s Parlour, Bolton

We had lunch in The Spinning Mule in Nelson Square, Bolton. Bolton is a mill town where Samuel Crompton invented the spinning mule in 1779, so called because it is a hybrid of Arkwright’s water frame and James Hargreaves’s spinning jenny – machines used to spin cotton.

It was only a short walk to the Town Hall in Victoria Square, which was built between 1866 and 1873. The cost was expected to be between £70,000 and £80,000 but more than doubled to £167,000, equivalent to £18.7 million in 2023.

Our guide, Richard, took us to the Lord Mayor’s Parlour where we were greeted by the Mayor and Mayoress of Bolton, Andy Morgan and his partner Karen as well as town hall officials. The Mayor was wearing a gold chain with 72 links and a pendant badge that represents the history of the Mayors of Bolton.

We had tea, coffee and biscuits sitting on chairs valued at £3,000 each round a table valued at £500,000.

We were shown a replica of a key in solid silver. The original was taken to London by Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband) and never returned. Recently King Charles III and Camilla visited and the Mayor asked that the key be returned. The King promised to have a look.

We visited other parts of the Town Hall including the Council Chamber, The Albert Hall, Festival Hall, Hall of Memories and a corridor dedicated to the women of Bolton including the first Muslim woman Mayor.

It was a fascinating trip and more photos can be seen here.

Britain’s first gay anthem? Why the UK’s pioneering LGBT+ protest band reunited

“There is a little bit of gay in everyone today,” sing Michael Klein and Gillian Bartlam, the lead singers of Everyone Involved, a collective of musicians formed by Klein and the UK Gay Liberation Front (GLF) activist Alan Wakeman. “Gay is natural, gay is good, gay is wonderful,” the song continues. “Gay people should all come together, and fight for our rights!”

The aptly titled A Gay Song is thought to be the first LGBT+ protest song to have been recorded on vinyl. It was written by Klein and Wakeman, then recorded in London in 1972, with backing vocals from GLF members – only five years after the partial decriminalisation of male homosexuality in England and Wales.

Now, the anthem has been re-recorded by the original members of Everyone Involved, as part of an exhibition of the same name by London-based artist Ian Giles. He first discovered A Gay Song while working on another project, On Railton Road, a play about a group of gay squatters in Brixton. “As part of the research, I came across this song,” he remembers. “And it really encapsulates the activism of that era.” Re-recording it was also a nod to the not widely known LGBT+ history of Southampton. In 1976, the annual conference of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality was held at its town hall, after other councils refused to host it.

Listen to the 1972 recording of A Gay Song by Everyone Involved

A special train, nicknamed the Away Gay, was chartered from London to allow 600 delegates to attend for just £5 return. Overall, attenders received a warm welcome in Southampton, although some faith groups picketed the event. One person wearing a Gay Liberation badge was refused service at a local pub, resulting in delegates showing up en masse to protest. The landlord eventually backed down.

Getting the members of Everyone Involved back in a room together was surprisingly easy, Giles says, because the band had already considered marking the 50th anniversary of the song, before Covid scuppered those plans. Giles says the band – who have continued to make music individually – were delighted to perform together again. “Nigel Stewart, the pianist, recently wrote an opera with his partner,” Giles explains. “And Richard Lanchester, who plays percussion – his whole life is basically gigging and working at festivals. He has a solar-powered festival stage.”

It is difficult not to be moved by the footage of the colourfully dressed members of Everyone Involved reuniting, now that their once fringe message of gay acceptance is mainstream. They seem like a group of friends who swap in-jokes and quickly slide back into their old dynamic, even though it’s been years since they last saw each other. “It was magical,” Giles says, recalling the atmosphere.

After a slightly nervy rehearsal day, when some of the group had “a wobble”, the band brought their A-game to RAK Studios – previously used by musicians ranging from Michael Jackson to Adele. “It’s one of those buildings where you can just feel the history,” Giles says. “Being there does something to you.”

Making this film, Giles discovered that the members of Everyone Involved are the same “radical hippies” that they were in the 70s. Sometimes, activists become more straight-edged as they get older, “but actually, in a great way, they’ve all had these wonderful, creative lives.”

In the film, the band – mostly now in their 70s – reminisce as they perform. They giggle and gossip about how, on the original recording day in 1972, members of the GLF bickered with each other. “They never followed the rules,” they say of the campaign group, which disbanded the following year amid factional infighting but left behind a radical legacy.

Documenting the queer histories of this era can be a race against time. “The gay liberation generation of activists are dying out,” Giles says. “For me, there is a power in thinking about the depth of lives they have lived, so this is a moment to celebrate them and to capture their histories.”

Giles could just as easily be described as a historian as an artist. “I used to struggle with how that all sits together,” he says. “But equally, when I’m fatigued and wondering why I’m doing all this, the activism side does make it feel worthwhile. I hope I can use the small platforms I have to keep the fire burning around LGBT+ rights, because we never know when the wolf will be at our door.”

Danny Beard

Danny Beard is the stage name of Daniel Curtis (born 27 May 1992), a British drag performer and singer, who appeared on Britain’s Got Talent and Karaoke Club: Drag Edition and won the fourth series of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK.

In 2022, Danny Beard was announced as part of the cast of Series 4 of RuPaul’s Drag Race UK, becoming the sixth bearded queen in the Drag Race franchise and the first to appear on one judged by RuPaul.

During their run, they won four main challenges, and made it to the finale without ever being up for elimination. Danny Beard was announced as the winner of the season, becoming the first bearded winner of any Drag Race franchise.

This Danny Beard artwork is in Manchester’s Gay Village.

Meet the Queens

SShh! Don’t tell anyone but the time has come … to meet a new set of gorgeous queens, who are all vying for Mama Ru’s seal of approval and the ultimate accolade of being crowned the UK’s Next Drag Race Superstar.

Who do you think has the charisma, uniqueness, nerve and talent to slay the competition and snatch the crown?

Four of the queens come from or now live in Manchester!

This message will self destruct in 3 … 2 … 1 !

Austin Allen is 74 – he has a powerful piece of advice

Austin Allen, now 74, was raised in Middlesbrough in the Baptist Church and came out in his late 20s. He worked in academic research in chemistry before working as a singer in the early part of the 1980s, then moved on to supply teaching but was sacked the morning after Section 28 became law. He now lives in mid Wales and has given ‘coming out’ assemblies at local schools.

Austin grew up in an era where nobody talked about being gay, when students at the school where he taught would shout homophobic slurs and throw planks and bricks at him. At the time if he were presented with an opportunity to become straight he would have “grabbed at it with two hands”.

Austin stated: “I suppose the biggest challenge growing up in the 50s and 60s was just total closeted-ness. I knew I was gay when I was eight years old and I came out about 20 years later. My friends, family, neighbours, being brought up in the Baptist Church … they didn’t even talk about it. Nobody was gay.

But that actually had advantages, because back then in the 60s in senior school we believed two things: firstly that every boy went through this homosexual phase in puberty, and secondly that these ‘queers’ (the word ‘gay’ wasn’t invented then for homosexuals) were dirty old men who hung around in shop doorways with raincoats on, and we weren’t old men who hung around in shop doorways.

So I actually had quite a nice ‘puberty’ in mid teens … playing with other boys ‘willy-nilly’ if you can forgive the pun! It didn’t really bother me at all while I was at school.

But it was when I left school and then thought: ‘I’ve gone through puberty, I therefore must be straight, and God is taking rather a long time’ – that’s when the problems started and I forced myself to have girlfriends and then eventually to have sexual relationships with women. It was only in my late 20s that I realised I had been trying to fool myself all these years and came out of the old closet.

I was 27 years old before somebody sat down at a table and we chatted and he said to me ‘I’m gay.’ And I had never met anybody else in my life that knowingly admitted to being gay. It was completely taboo.

I remember Malcolm Muggeridge, the old interviewer, on the telly introducing somebody once. He said something like: ‘Author, entrepreneur, traveller, self-confessed homosexual …’ That was the era. If you were homosexual and you were out of the closet you were ‘self-confessed,’ it was a crime.

I was 17 before the law changed in 1967 to allow men to have sex with each other, but I wasn’t aware of that. I had no idea I could have gone to prison for two years. It’s kind of interesting. People are an awful lot more aware of all sorts of political issues, not just gay issues. We’re more aware nowadays.

One of the reasons I was sacked in ‘88 for being gay was because I’d been relatively comfortably ‘out’ as a gay teacher with the kids previously to that. Part of that was because I’d been asked to go into classrooms for form tutors and take their sex education lessons, because they were forbidden to do that under the 1986 Education Act.

The insidious thing about Section 28 was that it was so woolly-worded … it was ‘intentionally promote,’ and it’s almost impossible to define those words, but what it did do was create this climate. I’m sure the individual head teacher that sacked me was just as homophobic the day before … he probably thought ‘I’ve now got an excuse, I’ve now got a reason, I’m now being backed by the government.’

There was never a prosecution under Section 28; nobody was ever taken to court because it was just impossible. But it created this climate. Some local government libraries were removing Oscar Wilde from the shelves because they said that it was ‘promoting homosexuality.’ I wasn’t the only teacher that was sacked. I was the one that rolled up my sleeves and said ‘you want a fight, you’ve got one!’

When I went to Wales I stopped all formal gay rights involvement, but I still did the full ‘coming out’ assemblies in senior schools in Powys. Just a few years ago I was walking home this lad, then in the upper sixth, crossed the road and he came up to me.

He said: ‘I would just like to thank you for your assembly when I was in year 7. Because I’ve just come out as gay – I haven’t told my family yet. It was such a big help.’

It makes me quite emotional now, and it’s very nice. I don’t dwell on it too much but it does make me have a little tear in my eye now and again. I know that along the way I have helped people.

There was no social media in the late 70s when I came out of the old closet. It was going down to the local gay bar in Bradford. I went down three times and walked up and down outside the pub and then went home terrified! Thinking it was going to be full of these ‘queers’ – urgh! Eventually of course I went in and found it was full of extremely nice people!

Of course it was lovely in the end. In a sense in those days you did have to go out and find, in a gay bar or gay club or whatever – real live people. That seems now to have been replaced to a large extent for some people with apps like Grindr – that’s all they want, they want sex. In one sense it’s kind of destroyed that ‘gay community,’ the places to meet.

But then I remember talking to much older people than even I who said it was an awful lot better before 1967, mainly in London when you could go to these clubs and knock on the door three times and ask for Big Bertha or whatever it was. You were in a quiet, completely closeted place. They felt they could be happy there; relaxed, for an hour or two.

The incredible sadness of some people stands out. People that I’ve known who were very very closeted ‘til the day they died. But also the light-hearted side of it as well because some of them made the best of a bad job.

My advice is to be honest and ‘accept yourself.’ Because that’s what I didn’t do, right the way through until I was 28. I didn’t accept who I was.

Now at 74 I’ve had 34½ wonderful years with my beloved Andrew and if I could have seen that at 17 I would have put up with anything.

Dora Richter (16 April 1892 – 26 April 1966)

Dora “Dörchen” Richter isn’t a household name to most people, including those in the trans community. Which is a shame, because she’s one of the most historically significant trans women out there. And we just discovered that she survived Nazi Germany.

Richter is famous for being the first trans woman to get a vaginoplasty. She previously received an orchiectomy and a penectomy at the Magnus Hirschfield Institute of Sex Research, where she worked as a cook and domestic servant in the midst of Weimar Germany, a time where trans people struggled to find work and social acceptance.

Shortly after her penectomy, Richter received the first vaginoplasty surgery conducted on a trans woman in history.

It’s been long thought that Richter died when the Nazis stormed Hirschfield’s Institute, killing those inside and burning it to the ground, destroying the many decades of research at the facility.

Recently, however, researcher Clara Hartmann discovered, while investigating historical trans figures, that Richter’s amended birth certificate had a peculiarity to it. The certificate, which was amended to reflect Richter’s true name, was corrected years after Richter was presumed to be killed.

It turns out that Richter survived the attacks after all, and had moved to Czechoslovakia, where her birth certificate could be changed to reflect her correct name and gender. After Germans were expelled from the country when it joined the Soviet bloc in 1946, Richter re-entered her home country, residing in Nuremberg for the next 20 years.

She lived to be 74, where she died 26 April 1966. According to the German news outlet RBB 24, there are some people alive today that even remember her as a kindly older lady with a handbag who would always feed the birds. This is good news to the whole trans community, as it’s important to remember those who came before us and those who lived to become queer elders. Against all odds, Dora Richter found a way to survive and live a full life even when her country tried its hardest to destroy her life, and the lives of those like her.

Manchester LGBT+ Archives

The Library and Archive Team are keen to record oral histories for people who are LGBT+ over 50 years of age.

If this sounds interesting and you want to share your story, or you just want more information, please contact us here and we can get this set up fairly soon.