Royal Armouries Leeds

The Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds, West Yorkshire is a national museum, which displays the National Collection of Arms and Armour.

Situated close to the city centre on the bank of the River Aire the museum is among many buildings built in the same era that saw a rejuvenation of the Leeds waterfront. It is located on Armouries Square in Leeds Dock.

The Royal Armouries Museum is a £42.5 million purpose-built museum that opened in 1996, and is part of the Royal Armouries family of museums, the other sites being the Tower of London – its traditional home, Fort Nelson, Hampshire for the display of its National Collection of Artillery, and permanent galleries within the Frazier History Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, USA.

The Royal Armouries is a non-departmental public body sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

More photos can be seen here.

Manchester’s protest against conversion therapy

Meet at 3.00pm Saturday, 16 April in St Peter’s Square, Manchester. There were 3,000 to 4,000 outside Downing Street last week:

Petition

Over 132,000 people have signed a petition to ensure any ban on conversion therapy fully includes trans people and all forms of conversion therapy. Parliament considers all petitions that get more than 100,000 signatures for a debate.

It’s shameful that the UK intends to deliberately exclude trans people from a ban in contrast to the approach taken by many countries, despite trans people being at a greater risk of experiencing the harmful and degrading practices.

The government’s own figures show that trans people are nearly twice as likely to be at risk of experiencing the harmful and degrading practices of conversion therapy. A ban needs to ensure all forms of conversion therapy are banned.

You can sign here. There is also another petition here.

Rainbow Call Companions

Re-engage, a charity preventing loneliness and isolation for older people have just launched a new, UK-wide, LGBT+ specific service for older people aged over 75 who would like to speak to someone who’s also LGBT+.

The service is called Rainbow Call Companions and is designed to provide you with a regular telephone befriender who will give you the opportunity to develop friendship, free from judgement. They love a good chat and they are great listeners too.

Calls are usually weekly and last for half an hour or so and you can chat about anything that interests you. What’s great is that the same volunteer phones you every time, so you can get to know each other and share stories and laughter – for as long as you both want.

You can refer yourself here to find a Rainbow Call Companion.

Gorton Monastery

Gorton Monastery is a short 15-minute bus ride from Piccadilly Newton Street.

The monastery is a former church and Franciscan friary, which has been described as architect Edward Welby Pugin’s masterpiece. It is also known as Manchester’s Taj Mahal.

Derelict for many years, it was saved from ruin by the charity and building preservation trust that still maintains and operates the site to this day. Stockport-born broadcaster and writer Joan Bakewell and former Beirut hostage Terry Waite backed the campaign to save the church and are patrons of the Gorton Lane Monastery.

In 1997 the monastery was placed on the World Monuments Fund Watch List of 100 most endangered sites in the world, alongside the Taj Mahal, Pompeii and the Valley of the Kings.

Today, The Monastery operates as a heritage visitor attraction as well as a venue for hire.

Once we arrived we settled in the café and enjoyed soups, paninis, jacket potatoes and toasties all prepared by the wonderful Carl. We then looked round the enclosed garden, church, cloisters, sanctuary café and refectory. More photos can be seen here.

Canonisation of David Hoyle

On 22 September 1991, The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence canonised Derek Jarman as Saint Derek of The Order of Celluloid Knights of Dungeness. The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are an international order of queer nuns with groups all over the world, including here in Manchester.

They perform radical queer and left-wing activism, essentially HIV and community fundraising work that, in their own words, “expiate stigmatic guilt and promulgate universal joy”.

On Saturday 9 April 2022, as a finale to the Derek Jarman PROTEST! exhibition, Jez Dolan (the artist in residence) together with The Manchester Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence held the canonisation of internationally acclaimed performance-art icon, David Hoyle, hereafter to be referred to as Saint David of the Avant-Garde.

As is traditional and time-honoured in these matters, the ceremony began with the procession of the Saint-to-be through the streets to the place of canonisation. The procession, accompanied by the Eclipse New Orleans Parade Band, began from New York New York in Manchester’s gay village.

The night before we had attended Dame Gracy’s Memorial at Tribeca. We learnt that Gracy, back in the day, had led a march from the Rembrandt pub along Sackville Street. However before the dozen or so people reached Portland Street they were all arrested by the police.

Today’s parade took the same route out of the Gay Village and continued through China Town to the renowned splendour of the Manchester Art Gallery accompanied by flags and banners, smoke and mirrors.

Once we were in the Art Gallery, Jez Dolan announced: “In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the Fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas. And Gloria cackled, Let there be sparkle: and there was sparkle.” This made the whole event truly fantabulosa!

More photos can be seen here.

Pride in Nature

The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) Garden Bridgewater organised a Pride in Nature event and members of Out In The City attended. We walked through the gardens, enjoyed refreshments and listened to the talks from Queer Out Here (an LGBT+ walking group), Hidayah LGBT (a group which supports LGBT Muslims) and Let’s Get Botanical Together (a collaboration between Pride in Ageing at LGBT Foundation and Manchester Art Gallery to create a pocket park inspired by Derek Jarman’s garden at Prospect Cottage in Dungeness).

UK Government’s LGBT+ Conference cancelled

The UK has cancelled its first-ever international LGBT+ conference after a boycott by more than 100 organisations.

The three-day “Safe To Be Me” conference was scheduled to begin in London on the 29 June, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of London’s first official pride marches, to promote LGBT+ rights within the UK and globally.

The event will not go ahead after LGBT+ charities and other groups pulled out over the government’s stance on conversion therapy. They also failed to get sponsorship from Vodafone, BP, Virgin Media, NBC Universal and OVO Energy due to the government’s poor record on LGBT+ rights.

The Stonewall statement (below) is backed by more than 100 LGBT+ and other organisations including GIRES, Gendered Intelligence, Mermaids, The LGBT Foundation, The Peter Tatchell Foundation, The Intercom Trust and The Proud Trust.

Stonewall Statement on the “Safe To Be Me” conference

“Due to the Prime Minister’s broken promise on protecting trans people from the harms of Conversion Therapy, we regret that we are withdrawing Stonewall’s support for the UK Government’s Safe To Be Me conference. We will only be able to participate if the Prime Minister reverts to his promise of a trans-inclusive ban on conversion therapy.

This is a decision we take with a heavy heart. As the UK’s first global LGBT+ conference, Safe To Be Me should be a moment for redoubling efforts globally to improve LGBTQ+ people’s rights and experiences. This is why we have worked hard with government and civil society organisations over the last few months to try to make the conference work.

However, last week’s leaked plans, which revealed that Number 10 planned to scrap the conversion therapy ban, have left us with no choice but to withdraw our support. That the Prime Minister would so casually walk away from four years of promises to the LGBTQ+ community is appalling, and we cannot in good conscience back Safe To Be Me at a time when our community’s trust in the UK Government is shattered.

We recognise that in response to outrage from the LGBTQ+ community and our allies, the Prime Minister’s position has shifted. He now proposes a partial ban, one that protects lesbian, gay and bi cis people, but leaves trans people, including trans children, at continued risk of abuse. This is out of step with every other nation that has recently introduced a ban on conversion therapy and ignores all credible international research that is available, including the position of the UN Independent Expert.

It is apparent that trans people have once again been sacrificed for political gain. Commissioning a separate body of work to unpick something that has already been resolved many times the world over, can only be read as an attempt to kick the issue of protecting trans people into the long grass. This is callous and unacceptable.

Conversion therapy is happening to LGBTQ+ people in the UK right now, and every day without a ban is a day where LGBTQ+ people remain at risk of lifelong harm. Trans people are amongst the highest risk groups in our community – the latest research from Galop shows that 11% of trans people have been subjected to conversion practices by their own families.

Trans people are no less worthy of respect, care and protection than cis lesbian, gay and bi people. If the UK Government cannot stand behind and respect all LGBTQ+ people’s fundamental human rights, it should not be convening an LGBTQ+ rights conference on the global stage.

Stonewall remains a civil society co-chair of the Equal Rights Coalition, and we continue to engage with ERC processes and events. This includes the upcoming ERC conference, which is separate from the UK government’s ‘Safe to be Me’ event, and which we will continue to be a part of. Our commitment to this mechanism, and to progressing global LGBTQI+ rights, remains unchanged.”

RHS Garden Bridgewater

Have you got your garden ticket ready for #PrideInNature on Sunday 10 April?

There’s a cracking line up of performances, talks and workshops to celebrate the LGBTQIA+ community who work and make a difference in the horticulture, environment and nature sectors.

Out In The City has 15 free tickets (usually £11.50 each). There’s still two left. Please contact us here to be added to the guest list.

RHS Garden Bridgewater is at Occupation Road, off Leigh Road, Worsley, Salford M28 2LJ.

In April 1938 Homosexual Prisoners Were Sent To Concentration Camps

Paragraph 175 was a provision of the German Criminal Code established in May 1871 that made homosexual acts between males a crime. It was not until April 1935 that the German Nazi party broadened the law so that the courts could prosecute any “lewd act” whatsoever, even one involving no physical contact. That move caused convictions of gay men under Paragraph 175 to multiply by a factor of ten to over 8,000 per year by 1937.

Just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse for gay men in Germany, on 4 April 1938, the Gestapo publicly announced that men condemned for homosexuality would be deported to concentration camps.

Under the orders of Heinrich Himmler, leader of the SS, the police and the Gestapo arrested around 100,000 men suspected of the crime of homosexuality.

In his memoirs, Rudolf Höss, commandant at Auschwitz, describes how the camp guards would often assign homosexuals, forced to wear pink triangles for recognition, to some of the most dangerous jobs and they were sometimes separated from other prisoners to prevent homosexuality being “propagated” to other inmates and guards. Judges and officials at SS camps could even order the castration of homosexual prisoners without consent whenever they wished.

Survival in camps took on many forms. Some homosexual prisoners secured administrative and clerical jobs. For other prisoners, sexuality became a means of survival despite the Gestapo’s best attempts to stop it. In exchange for sexual favours, some Kapos protected a chosen prisoner, usually of young age, giving him extra food and shielding him from the abuses of other prisoners.

SS doctors also performed cruel experiments on prisoners to “cure” them of their homosexuality. In fact, these tests resulted in illnesses, mutilations and the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of gay prisoners.

Even though there are no definite statistics on the number of homosexuals murdered at the Nazi camps, estimates range anywhere from 100,000 to 200,000 gay men were detained in concentration camps under the Nazi regime with little chance of survival.

Paragraph 175 stayed in effect in Germany until 1969. Even after the concentration camps were liberated gay prisoners who had survived would be sent to regular prisons to finish out the terms of their sentences.

In 1985, gays and lesbians had wanted to place a plaque in the camp at Dachau, but it was not until 10 years later, in 1995, that they would be officially recognised as victims of the Holocaust.

Requests for help

Out In The City has been contacted by Alex Schellekens, a trainee journalist, who is producing a TV documentary about gay men who were convicted under historic anti-gay laws, in light of the recent amendment in January to the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill to waive those convictions.

He is currently looking for more interviewees! If you were previously arrested due to old homophobic laws, or maybe had a close encounter with the police, he would love to hear your story. Equally, if you have any friends or family members who were arrested and convicted he would love to hear from you as well.

All interviews will be handled sensitively, and if you prefer to remain anonymous that is something that can be arranged.

If you’re interested in speaking to Alex, it would be great to arrange an initial chat soon, with a view to hopefully filming interviews between 11 – 24 April. Please contact us here and we will put you in touch.

Out In The City has also been contacted by Alex Bingham, who is working on a feature-length documentary which will celebrate 50 years since the first official Pride march in the UK. The aim is to tell a story not just of how Pride events in the UK have developed since 1972, but also how Pride’s history reflects broader changes in LGBTQ+ lives and communities during those five decades – including key battles fought, and those yet to be won. The film is being made by BBC Studios for broadcast premiere on Channel 4 at the start of July this year. 

Central to the documentary will be the voices, memories and perspectives of a diverse range of LGBTQ+ figures from around the country.

If you have memories or stories relating to Pride events, please contact us here so we can link you up.

More than a century ago, rural gay men were invisible. Thankfully, this same-sex couple had a camera.

A new book spotlights a photogenic gay couple in rural New Brunswick in the 1910s and ’20s

While LGBT+ history goes back millenia, our records of it tend to focus on urban experiences, leading us to believe that rural gays didn’t exist. They did. But without the critical mass to create institutions like bars, associations and clubs – or the freedom granted by the anonymity of city living – they tended to be discreet about their lives, making it harder for us to see them across time.

We would probably never know about Len and Cub, a gay couple living in rural New Brunswick in the early 20th century, if it wasn’t for the self-timing camera. Self-timers started to become more widely available in Canada around 1917, just in time for Leonard “Len” Olive Keith to use it to document the halcyon days of his relationship with Joseph Austin “Cub” Coates. 

Born 14 December 1891, Len was eight years older than Cub – their families were neighbours in a rural area about 50 kilometres west of Moncton. Len’s family owned a match factory and grist mill, and their prosperity is probably why the family could afford a camera with a self-timer in the first place. In 1911, Len’s father became the first person in his village to own a car. Then seen as a “rich man’s plaything,” the vehicle provided Len with more mobility and freedom than his peers; he’d take Cub out for rides.

In their new book Len & Cub: A Queer History, Meredith J Batt and Dusty Green use Len’s photos as a window onto the lives of the two men and what it would have been like for them in the context of their time. Batt and Green are co-founders of the Queer Heritage Initiative of New Brunswick, which is dedicated to collecting and preserving the records of LGBTQ2S+ history in the province, including conducting oral history interviews. In this excerpt, they write about who the men were and how they might have thought about themselves.

Leonard Olive Keith and Joseph Austin “Cub” Coates were both born in the rural community of Butternut Ridge (known today as Havelock), New Brunswick, at the end of the 19th century.

Len was an amateur photographer and automobile enthusiast who went on to own a local garage and pool hall after serving in the First World War. Cub was the son of a farmer, a veteran of the First and Second World Wars, a butcher, a contractor and a lover of horses. The two were neighbours and developed a close and intimate relationship with each other. Len and Cub’s time together is documented by the many photos taken by Len showing that the two shared a mutual love of the outdoors, animals, alcohol and adventure. As many amateur photographers do, Len photographed what was important to him, and Cub’s prevalence among the hundreds of photos is striking and impossible to ignore. The photos taken in the 1910s and 1920s show the development of their relationship as Len and Cub explore the wilderness of Havelock and spend time alone together. Unfortunately, these adventures would cease when Len was outed as a homosexual by community members in the early 1930s and forced to leave Havelock.

Cub, however, remained seemingly untainted by scandal and stayed in Havelock until 1940, when he married Rita Cameron, a nurse born in Chatham, and relocated to Moncton after the Second World War. He would go on to become a prominent figure in New Brunswick’s harness racing circles before his death in 1965. Len never returned to Havelock, residing near Montreal before succumbing to cancer in 1950. Len’s photos were donated to the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick decades after his death by Havelock resident and local historian, John Corey, who had purchased the albums at the Keith family’s estate sale in 1984. Growing up, John heard stories of Len and Cub from his father, Roy Manford Corey, who had been a classmate of Len’s. When John donated the albums [to the Provincial Archives of New Brunswick] in 2011, he described the pair as “boyfriends” – a term noted by the archivist in the collection’s finding aid. The archivist also noted, after a conversation with John, that Len had been “driven out of town for being a homosexual” by a group of Havelock men. This anecdote is written on an envelope containing a photo of one of the men responsible for Len’s outing.

Even with the remaining records of Len and Cub’s lives, loose ends and ambiguities abound. As time passes, anecdotes fade, records crumble and living contacts pass away, a certain amount of reading between the lines of history is necessary. Still, it is remarkable that these photos exist at all. To end up housed at the Provincial Archives, they first had to have been taken by Len, sent for developing and preserved by Len throughout his life, then held on to by his sister Lucy, acquired by John Corey at the Keith family estate sale and finally donated to the archives. During this time, photos have no doubt been lost or destroyed, as Len, Lucy or even John may have been concerned with the legal or social repercussions of owning records that depicted a same-sex relationship too transparently. As far as we know, there are no love letters between Len and Cub and no photos of them being more intimate than those in this book.

As we explore what Len and Cub’s relationship might have been, it is important to remember that the remaining records are a product of their time, when a homophobic undercurrent prevented same-sex couples from living and loving openly. Gay records from the early 1900s are rare, and as such, scholarship on gay rural Canadian experiences from this period is scanty. It is clear Len was smitten with Cub, and vice versa. Many of the photos support this narrative and show the means by which their relationship was allowed to blossom in that time and place and the lengths they would have gone to conceal the true nature of their affection.

During Len and Cub’s formative years, the terms homosexual and heterosexual were not part of the vernacular of the villagers of Havelock. Such definitions of sexual orientation were largely reserved for use by early sexologists working to develop new models of decoding human sexuality. Still, an absence of language or classifications to define oneself did not mean that same-sex love was accepted. “Unnatural” sex (i.e. non-procreative sex) was stigmatised by religion, gay sex was prohibited by law, and to live and love openly was virtually impossible for same-sex couples. So how might the boys have understood and interpreted their same-sex attraction? Would they have been bothered at all by any notions of stigma around gay sex and love? 

While the LGBT+ subculture of New York’s nightlife would have no impact on the lives of two young rural New Brunswick men, a lack of visibility or alternative representations of gender and sexuality in Havelock allowed Len and Cub to fly under the radar, or pass as straight. The fact that Len and Cub were young men who worked and dressed in conformity with their masculine gender status would have been enough to avoid public suspicion from their fellow villagers for some time. Yet this view of same-sex attraction may have contributed to Len being driven out of town, though not Cub. Len was older than Cub, a seemingly confirmed bachelor who never dated or spent much time with women; he may have been perceived as truly queer in the derogatory sense, an oddball, someone suspect, who just didn’t fit in and was therefore worthy of being ostracised.

By the early 1930s, North American society had become increasingly concerned with policing the boundaries of gender and sexuality as a direct response to the perceived decadence and debauchery of the Roaring Twenties. By mid-century this policing had led to an extremely rigid divide between heterosexuals and homosexuals, firmly entrenching heterosexual men as the pious, patriotic, masculine standard and homosexual men as their immoral, feminine, perverse opposite.

With this in mind, it makes sense that Len would be outed in the 1930s as the stigma around gay people was on an upswing, and society’s moral policing of gender roles more actively sought to suppress deviation from the norm. Ironically, the fact that men and women operated in distinctly segregated social spheres inadvertently provided space for same-sex romantic friendships to develop without intense scrutiny as to why two men or women might be spending so much time together.

Len and Cub lived in a complex era, but in some ways their love may have been less complicated than our preliminary stage-setting suggests. It is possible that Len and Cub’s relationship developed without much worry over the personal implications of their same-sex desire for their sense of identity. Where you did it mattered, and who knew about it, but the boys no doubt took precautions to hide the true nature of their affections. Yet, same-sex desire was in no way endorsed, and so their romantic entanglement could never have been acknowledged publicly.

Excerpts were originally published in Len & Cub: A Queer History by Meredith J Batt and Dusty Green, co-founders of the Queer Heritage Initiative of New Brunswick, an archival and educational initiative that aims to collect the queer histories of LGBTQ2S+ people.

Protest!

Sixteen of us squeezed into the China Buffet restaurant on Nicholas Street. It’s in the Chinatown area of Manchester under Ho’s bakery and next to the Chinese arch. It’s aptly named as it’s a small all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet style restaurant.

It’s very popular, fills up quickly and is just two minutes walk from Manchester Art Gallery, where Protest! a major retrospective of the work of Derek Jarman was being exhibited.

Jarman (1942 – 1994), one of the most radical and influential figures in 20^th century British culture, is best known as a pioneer of independent cinema.

Artist Jez Dolan gave us a guided tour of the exhibition which expanded our understanding of Jarman’s wider practice which encompassed a range of media and disciplines: painting; filmmaking; design; writing; performing and gardening. More photos can be seen here.

There are two more events before the exhibition closes – Stormy Weather, a day of debate defiance and celebration on Friday, 8 April from 10.00am to 6.00pm (book here – cost £5) and The Canonisation of David Hoyle on Saturday, 9 April from 2.00pm.

Jez Dolan and The Manchester Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence invite you to the most solemn occasion of the canonisation of internationally acclaimed performance-art icon, David Hoyle, hereafter to be referred to as: Saint David of the Avant-Garde.

The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a worldwide Order of queer nuns, the tenets of the Order being the promulgation of universal joy and the expiation of stigmatic guilt. It is with this in mind that The Sisters will be making their first English Saint since Derek Jarman (Saint Derek of Dungeness) in 1991. As is traditional and time-honoured in these matters, the ceremony will begin with the procession of the Saint-to-be through the streets to the place of canonisation. The procession, accompanied by the Eclipse New Orleans Parade Band will begin (2.00 pm sharp) from New York New York, a legendary queer space in Manchester’s gay village.

Join us on the procession to Manchester Art Gallery accompanied by flags and banners, smoke and mirrors to the ceremony of canonisation within the Derek Jarman Protest! exhibition. The slogans are: “Everyone equally VALID, Everyone equally BEAUTIFUL, Everyone equally JUSTIFIED”. Afterwards ALL are welcome for thanksgiving sherries at New York New York.

Transgender Day of Visibility

Transgender Day of Visibility is an international event on 31 March dedicated to recognising the resilience and accomplishments of the transgender community. On this day, we celebrate the trans people amongst us, raise awareness about the struggles that they face, and advocate for more protected rights for them in a bid to reform society and empower this community – as it so rightfully deserves. Let’s join hands together with the trans community to celebrate not ‘fitting in’ when we all yearn to stand out!

History of Transgender Day of Visibility

There is no doubt that the transgender community continues to face discrimination worldwide. Be it in the workplace, schools, or society, it has been subjected to immense harassment and inequality in every part of the world for the ‘sin’ of being born different.

Rachel Crandall, a US-based transgender activist, founded this day in 2009 to raise awareness for the incredible burden of discrimination the community faces in every setting imaginable. The need to bring a day of ‘visibility’ for the transgender community is indicative of the oppression they face in many sectors of life. Crandall wanted to highlight the fact that the only transgender-centric day that is internationally recognised is Transgender Day of Remembrance, which is in mourning of members of the community who had lost their lives, and that there was no day to pay homage to living transgender people.

In 2015, many transgender people took part in the event by participating in social media campaigns. They successfully made the day go viral by posting selfies and personal stories. Therefore, on Transgender Day of Visibility on 31 March, annually, we recognise and revere their contributions, successes, and relentless resilience in standing tall and strong in the face of injustice. Through this Day of Visibility, we hope to induce moral responsibility and tolerance, and lift the restrictions on the rights of transgender people.

Tennessee Williams