On Thursday, 26 November from 2.00pm to 4.00pm, there will be an End of Year Party in Cross Street Chapel, 29 Cross Street, Manchester M2 1NL.
Great entertainment from Wolf, buffet and raffle with quirky prizes.
Cheddar Gorgeous will be the MC for the day (I can’t imagine what they will be wearing!!), so expect lots of fun with an LGBT+ Quiz Bingo … and basically, expect the unexpected.
Luchino Visconti (2 November 1906 – 17 March 1976) was an Italian filmmaker, theatre and opera director and screenwriter.
Luchino Visconti 1972
He was one of the fathers of cinematic neorealism but later moved towards luxurious, sweeping epic films, dealing with the themes of beauty, decadence, death, and European history, especially the decay of the nobility and the bourgeoisie.
One of Visconti’s best-known films was Death in Venice (1971) that adapted the novella published in 1912 by Thomas Mann.
In later years, Visconti made no secret of his homosexuality, although he remained a devout Catholic throughout his life. His first 3-year-relationship from 1936 with the photographer Horst P Horst remained discreet because of the prejudices of the time.
He later showed up openly in the company of his lovers, among them the director and producer Franco Zeffirelli, and the actor Udo Kier. His last lover was the Austrian actor Helmut Berger, who played Martin in Visconti’s film The Damned According to Visconti’s autobiography, he and Umberto II of Italy had a romantic relationship during their youth in the 1920s.
K D Lang
Kathryn Dawn Lang (born 2 November 1961), known by her stage name k.d. lang (stylised in all lowercase), is a Canadian pop and country singer-songwriter and occasional actress.
k d lang in 2006
Lang has won Juno Awards and Grammy Awards for her musical performances. Her hits include the songs “Constant Craving” and “Miss Chatelaine“.
Lang, who came out as a lesbian in a June 1992 article of the LGBTQ news magazine The Advocate, has championed gay rights causes.
She has supported many causes over the years, including HIV/AIDS care and research. Her cover of Cole Porter’s “So in Love” (from the Broadway musical, Kiss Me, Kate), appears on the Red Hot + Blue compilation album and video from 1990 (a tribute to Cole Porter to benefit AIDS research and relief).
We travelled by tram from Manchester Victoria Train Station to King Street in Oldham.
Our journey started in 2026, but in a blink of an eye we ended up in 1851.
The storytellers took us on an atmospheric journey through the historic George Street Chapel. As we toured the building and listened to the costumed storytellers, we became part of the stories in the very places they happened.
On our journey back in time to 1851 we visited the inhabitants of the cellar dwellings and those who worshipped and preached at George Street Chapel. We encountered real Oldhammers including Mrs Hall who started work at age 9 and now paid one shilling and sixpence rent each month.
We enjoyed a traditional wash day experience in Jackson Pit with Mrs Hurst. She charged two pence for a bag of washing. Richard Marwood showed us irons and bedwarmers.
We visited the school room and did as we were told as Miss Hopwood was very strict and expected excellent behaviour in her class.
We ended the afternoon with lots of home-made cakes, teas and coffees.
Unsafe: the Carceral Roots of the Anti-Trans Backlash
Professor S Lamble discussed their new book on how problematic ideas about “safety” guide contemporary anti-trans positions.
Professor S Lamble (Birkbeck, University of London) was in conversation with Professor Jackie Stacey (University of Manchester)
The fiercest battles over gender today aren’t just about identity or womanhood-but about punishment, fear and control.
The twenty-first century “gender wars” have been driven by a powerful and seductive narrative: that safety can be secured through exclusion, surveillance and the policing of difference. These punitive logics have gained momentum across the political spectrum, fuelling an anti-trans backlash and distorting the meaning of safety itself.
Unsafe is a clear-eyed and decisive challenge to the toxic ideas at the heart of this backlash. With patient rigour, Lamble exposes how carceral approaches to safety fail to address root causes of harm, ultimately deepening social divisions and legitimising new forms of violence and control.
Drawing on feminist and queer traditions as well as their experience organising against prisons and policing, Lamble makes a principled case for a different vision: one where safety is not built on punishment but on collective care, radical solidarity and transformative justice.
Queer Up North Digital Archive Is Now Live!
After more than a year of research, rummaging through archives, digitising thousands of images, tracking down artists and recording the memories of the people who were there, they are absolutely delighted to announce that the Queer Up North 1992–2002 digital archive is now live.
In 1992, Tanja Farman and Gavin Barlow launched It’s Queer Up North, a bold new festival that brought radical LGBTQIA+ performance, art and culture into the heart of Manchester.
Now, more than three decades later, we’re bringing the festival’s remarkable first decade back into the spotlight.
Intersex Awareness Day in the UK takes place on Monday, 26 October 2026, marking the 30th anniversary of the first public demonstration by intersex activists in Boston in 1996.
The focus is on grassroots education, human rights, self-determination, bodily autonomy and ending non-consensual cosmetic surgeries on intersex children.
All these questions come from a box they put me in
“Is this the men’s toilet?”, “Why don’t you have a beard yet?”, “Why can’t you sit like a woman?”, “When are you going to become a real man?”
Matthew Shepard
For 20 years, Matthew Shepard didn’t have a grave. His parents kept his ashes in an urn, too afraid of what people would do to the place where he lay.
Matt was 21, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, when two men he met at a bar drove him to a field outside Laramie, attacked him and left him tied to a fence in the near-freezing cold. He was there for 18 hours before a passing cyclist found him – at first, he thought Matt was a scarecrow. Matt died in a Colorado hospital, surrounded by his family, 28 years ago – on 12 October 1998.
Even his funeral wasn’t safe. Westboro Baptist Church picketed it, and his father Dennis wore a bulletproof vest under his suit to say goodbye to his son. A grave would have been a target. “That would be just like killing Matt all over again,” his mother Judy said. “I couldn’t deal with that.”
The answer came from Matt’s own church. He’d served as an acolyte in the Episcopal Church as a boy, and on 26 October 2018, more than 2,000 people filled Washington National Cathedral to finally lay him to rest. Bishop Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church, choked back tears as he spoke to Matt directly: “Gently rest in this place. You are safe now. And Matt, welcome home.”
His ashes now rest in the cathedral’s crypt, the same crypt as Helen Keller’s, in a spot the public can’t reach. “It is so important we now have a home for Matt,” Dennis said that morning. “A home that is safe from haters.”
The Gathering: Stop The Clause
Helen sends a big “thank you” to everyone who contributed their memories for her photographic project looking back on the marches against Clause 28!
Phase one of the work has been on show at the Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool for a few weeks now. Phase 2, 30 photos of the marches accompanied by your words go on show on a digital screen outside the Gallery on 1 November.
If you’re heading to Liverpool’s waterfront soon, do go and take a look!
Open Eye Gallery, 19 Mann Island, Liverpool L3 1BP – Free Entry
Open: 10.00am – 5.00pm, Tuesday – Sunday
The Gathering: Stop the Clause by Helen Constantinou, in partnership with Homotopia
This work brings together twelve separate photographs taken at the beginning of the anti-Section 28 protest march on 30 April 1988. By combining these individual frames into a single image, the work resists the fragmentation of memory and reasserts a moment of collective resistance against legislation rooted in prejudice. Revisiting these photographs is not simply an act of looking back, but a reminder of the profound and lasting consequences that suppression and censorship have on individuals, communities and society. Section 28 was born from fear, ignorance, and hostility, seeking to erase LGBTQI+ lives from public visibility and cultural discourse.
Today, these images resonate with renewed urgency. The rhetoric employed by contemporary far-right political movements echoes many of the narratives that underpinned Section 28, once again questioning the legitimacy and visibility of LGBTQI+ people and communities. By returning to this moment of protest, the work insists that these histories are not closed chapters but ongoing conversations, reminding us that visibility itself can be an act of resistance and that remembering is inseparable from the struggle against erasure.
The Tenniel Chair
A story of two outsiders spanning four turbulent decades.
In 1911 at a suffragette rally in Dublin, a young, strong-willed Catholic woman, Cara, meets a liberal-minded Jewish medical student, Joe. Recognising how her creative potential is being stifled by her conservative family, Joe gives Cara the confidence to become truly herself. Their love, crossing boundaries of convention and prejudice, binds them together … until war intervenes.
Twenty years on in Manchester, their son Kerry, a pacifist, is a young man caught on the dangerous margins of society. A chance meeting with Oliver at an evening class awakens a longing he barely understands. Desperate to do the right thing, he suppresses his ‘unclean thoughts’ and marries Ursula.
As war clouds gather again, Kerry finds himself running a bookshop, his wife expecting twins, and his life balanced on a precipice.
Ned Hopkins’s The Tenniel Chair is the kind of historical novel that reminds us that the great social changes of the twentieth century were lived not in the abstract, but in kitchens, bedrooms, and family homes. Spanning more than four decades and two world wars, it follows a family whose private lives are repeatedly tested by the prejudices and conventions of their age.
The novel becomes particularly affecting in its treatment of their son, Kerry, who struggles with his sexuality at a time when homosexuality was both criminalised and condemned. His decision to marry in an attempt to conform gives the story a painful contemporary resonance, while his pacifism further isolates him as Europe edges towards war.
Hopkins’s achievement is to combine the sweep of social history with the intimacy of family drama. The Tenniel Chair is thoughtful, humane and at times deeply poignant – a novel about people attempting to remain true to themselves when the world around them insists they should be someone else.
In the Acknowledgements Ned Hopkins states: “Special thanks also to Tony Openshaw, Norman and the members of Out In The City, Manchester, for giving me the most interesting and enjoyable afternoon and evening in June 2024, when I was researching attitudes to gay men in years gone by.”
Published 4 September 2026 355 pages Paperback £12.99
Port Sunlight is one of the finest surviving industrial worker villages in the world – an inspiring place to live, work and visit. Built on the banks of the River Mersey for soap factory workers in 1888, today Port Sunlight is home to unique history, beautiful architecture and a thriving community.
On a wet and windy Wednesday we travelled from Manchester to Liverpool Lime Street and then changed trains to Port Sunlight. We had lunch in The Bridge pub.
The Lady Lever Art Gallery is a museum founded and built by the industrialist and philanthropist William Lever, 1st Viscount Leverhulme and opened in 1922. The Lady Lever Art Gallery, set in the garden village of Port Sunlight on the Wirral, is one of the National Museums of Liverpool.
The Lady Lever Art Gallery is regarded as one of the finest art galleries in Europe, housing a large collection of Pre-Raphaelite paintings. There are 30 rooms of incredible paintings, sculptures and decorative art.
We also enjoyed teas, coffees and cakes in the basement café.
‘He could not find a relationship’ … the Beatles with Epstein, right, at the premiere for A Hard Day’s Night in 1964. Photograph: John Rodgers / Redferns
The email from Sotheby’s might easily have gone unread. Despite his deep appreciation for the musical heroes who came before him, Gary Kemp is not a collector of rock memorabilia. But there, among the auction lots, was something that caught his eye: a 160 x 100mm black Twinlock binder that once belonged to the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein.
The listing detailed 57 pages containing 404 entries, many handwritten by Epstein himself, cataloguing the social and business network of the Liverpudlian impresario in 1967, the year of his death. Kemp immediately recognised this was much more than simply an address book: it was a who’s who of 60s London at its swinging peak, from David Bailey and David Frost to most of the Rolling Stones. “I just thought, ‘I’ve got to have this. I’ve got to hold it,’” he says. “It’s got DNA on it.”
On the day of the auction, Kemp, the songwriter and guitarist of Spandau Ballet, was in a recording studio bidding by phone. As the price quickly soared, so too did his determination. “I’m still pressing the yes button,” he remembers, “thinking, ‘My wife’s going to kill me for this!’”
After bidding £10,710, Kemp became the book’s fifth owner. After Epstein’s death, it had passed to his brother, then his nephew, and then one more sale before reaching the auction at Sotheby’s. For Kemp, owning it felt like the culmination of a lifelong fascination with the Beatles and a long-held admiration for Epstein, the man who discovered the group at The Cavern in late 1961.
Kemp is talking from his study in an elegant five-storey Georgian townhouse he attributes, in part, to the inspiration and opportunities the Beatles gave him. “If it hadn’t been for Paul meeting John, I wouldn’t be living in this house,” he says. “But really, if it hadn’t been for Brian walking down those steps that November lunchtime, I wouldn’t be in this house either.”
One visitor to Kemp’s home shortly after he’d acquired Epstein’s address book was art film-maker Simon Halfon, a friend since the 90s. He was just leaving when Kemp thought to show him his latest purchase. “I was obviously thrilled to look at it,” says Halfon. “An address book in many ways is a very personal thing. It’s not a diary, but it tells you who your friends are, your family, your business acquaintances, the places you hang out. It’s quite telling of an individual’s personality.”
Halfon was an auspicious person to show it to. He had spent years fascinated by Epstein, developing a biopic of the manager with Jude Law attached to star, but it never came to fruition. Now, confronted with Epstein’s address book, and the revelatory list of contacts within, he saw a different story waiting to be told. “I called him on the way home,” says Halfon. “I said, ‘Christ, Gary, this is a book.’ And he was up for it straight away.”
“I realised,” says Kemp, “the only way to do this is to tell Brian’s story through his contacts. This was Brian 360.”
What followed was an exhaustive piece of detective work. Name by name, Kemp scoured books, newspapers, magazines and online archives, trying to establish not only who each person was, but why they had crossed paths with Epstein. Meanwhile, Halfon was tasked with sourcing corresponding imagery. Some names proved straightforward, while others were little more than shadows they’d futilely chase.
The result is 1967: The World of Brian Epstein and the Beatles – not a biography in the traditional sense, but an alphabetical list of fragments that, read in sequence, reveals an unexpectedly intimate picture of a complex man unravelling in the last months of his life. Through the people he knew, it captures Epstein juggling the increasingly elaborate business affairs of the Beatles within an international set of artists, managers and lawyers, while wrestling with the more tormenting aspects of his own life. And because these are the people who surrounded him in 1967, the book also depicts the circumstances closing in around him.
“It was really a key year for Brian,” Kemp explains. “His contract is up with the Beatles. And the Beatles have stopped playing live, which gives him less purpose.”
This sense of unease permeates the book. Struggling to keep pace with his expanding empire, that January Epstein merged his NEMS Enterprises with Robert Stigwood’s agency to ease the workload, causing friction with the Beatles. “He’s terrified,” says Kemp. “He finds these boys who he transforms into the biggest phenomenon the world has seen, but then it starts to run away from him. And we’re at this stage now where he is panicked. He can’t sleep. He’s taking uppers and downers.”
‘It was nice to push Brian to the foreground’ … at Abbey Road in 1967. Photograph: David Magnus / Shutterstock
Epstein’s drug use exacerbated an already precarious mental state. The book traces his encounters with addiction doctors, the gambling dens he frequented, and his stints in rehab at The Priory in London. His Jewishness often made him feel like an outsider, and he was gay at a time when it was still a criminal offence – part of the complicated landscape he privately navigated.
“There’s such a strong sense of the gay community within the book,” says Kemp, “whether it’s Brian’s lawyer, David Jacobs, the people he brought down from Liverpool … or people in the book, like Robin Maugham, Somerset Maugham’s nephew, who all had gay relationships that were quite open in that they lived together.”
What’s striking about this book is that despite reconstructing the remarkable breadth of Brian’s orbit, he emerges as a lonely, isolated figure. “He couldn’t find a relationship,” says Kemp, who uncovers in these pages a handful of likely liaisons – men who passed briefly through Brian’s life.
The most disturbing of these is John “Dizz” Gillespie, an aspiring American actor with whom Brian had a volatile, on-off affair. The last time they’d met, in August 1966, Dizz had stolen Brian’s attache case from his Los Angeles hotel room, making off with $20,000, contracts, incriminating photographs, and – perhaps – his previous address book. The betrayal, distress and persistent threat of blackmail and / or exposure sent Brian into a downward spiral.
It is startling, therefore, to find Dizz’s name here at all, whether Brian included it out of guilt, desperation or lingering hope. Gillespie left almost no trace of himself. “There’s not even a mugshot,” says Halfon, “which you’d think there would be, because he was a bit of a villain in his own way.” Finally, Halfon discovered a signed copy of John Lennon’s A Spaniard in the Works, inscribed to Dizz with a characteristically acerbic note. “That was at least something,” he continues, “to prove his existence and interweave it into Brian’s world.”
Epstein was alone when he died, aged just 32, of an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, on 27 August. He’d spent the bank holiday weekend at his country house in Sussex, but a guest he’d hoped to see failed to show, and a disappointed, drunk Epstein drove home to London that same night, locking himself in his Chapel Street bedroom.
Kemp imagines Epstein there, withdrawn and despondent, reaching for his address book in need of friendly reassurance. “It was almost certainly on his bed when he was found dead,” Kemp says, “because he was calling people, and he would have been calling people using that book.”
The reward for months of scrutiny into Epstein’s short life was, for Kemp, a closeness with the man himself. “I came out knowing him more. I felt I’d walked with him down different streets,” he says. “Because the book has addresses in it, you see it geographically as well.”
A lonely, isolated figure … Brian Epstein in 1966 when homosexuality was still illegal. Photograph: C Maher / Getty Images
Those locations are vital in bringing the physical world Epstein inhabited so vividly alive in the book. London sparkles with references to its clubs, offices, restaurants and homes, while further afield, the feverish nightclub culture of New York and the glamorous Hollywood scene (via Dean Martin, Colonel Tom Parker, Orson Welles) crackle with the same electricity. Epstein feels present throughout, fluttering through the worlds of music, theatre, business and bohemia, constantly making new connections along the way.
Together, those details create an evocative, three-dimensional portrait of a man often overshadowed by the towering legends of his most famous charges. “It’d just be nice to push Brian slightly to the foreground,” says Halfon. “It’s very hard to stand in front of the Beatles in a way, as a character, because they’re so larger than life. But people can say, ‘Well, this was the guy who made their dream come true.’”
But what of the Fab Four themselves? Anyone flicking through the pages expecting to spot John, Paul, George or Ringo’s names will be sorely disappointed. Their exclusion, Kemp suggests in the introduction, may be down to security reasons – particularly in light of Dizz Gillespie’s thieving. But appearances, as readers will find out, can be deceiving.
It’s been a voyage of intrigue that Kemp seems reluctant to end. “Maybe I’ve started a thing now,” he laughs. “Frank Sinatra’s got an address book out there somewhere.”
1967 – The World of Brian Epstein and The Beatles by Gary Kemp and Simon Halfon (Harper Collins, £25).
Play the Rainbow Lottery and support Out In The City
The Rainbow Lottery is the UK’s first and only lottery supporting LGBT+ good causes.
How the lottery works:
• £1 per ticket (payable at £5 monthly).
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• Match all 6 numbers and you win the JACKPOT! There are also prizes of £2000, £250, £25 and 3 free tickets for the following week.
Rainbow Lottery Super Draw!
• Every month there is a Super Draw. October’s Super Draw (on 31 October) is an Apple iPhone 18 Pro Max 512GB (or £1,000 cash alternative or go green and plant 1,000 trees!)
The Golden Age Big Band treated us with another spectacular afternoon of great big band music in Urmston.
We sang and danced along to the classics. The seventeen member big band honoured musicians such as Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, Ted Heath, Nelson Riddle and so many more!
We enjoyed the sandwiches and cakes in the break. Although the concert was sold out and the room was packed, Out In The City members won all three hampers in the raffle (for the second time!)
A date for the diary – The Golden Age Big Band Christmas Show is on Sunday, 13 December from 8.00pm to 10.30pm at LMRCA Railway Club in Altrincham.
Image Credit: ‘Frank & Percy,’ Icon Film Distribution
Frank and Percy
Love can find us when we least expect it. Sir Ian McKellen and Roger Allam star in Frank and Percy, a romantic story about two older men who meet while walking their dogs in London.
Adapted from Ben Weatherill’s West End play of the same name, the film finds the pair of esteemed actors reprising their stage roles: McKellen plays Percy, a proudly gay man who’s in his 80s but is still young at heart – with a fondness for dating guys many years his junior! – while Allam plays Frank, a seventy-something widower still grieving the loss of his wife, and who has always believed he was straight.
Image Credit: ‘Frank & Percy,’ Icon Film Distribution
What begins as casual conversation gradually develops into an unexpected romance which will have you laughing, crying and restoring your faith in humanity.
It’s also a reminder to keep our hearts and minds open even as we get older, much like Frank, who never felt attracted to men before, but doesn’t try to deny how he feels about Percy. While Allam himself has been married to a woman for many years, his casting in the role underscores that sexuality is a spectrum – nothing in the world is so black-and-white, especially when it comes to love.
Image Credit: ‘Frank & Percy,’ Icon Film Distribution
In addition to its esteemed stars, Frank & Percy is stacked with out LGBT+ icons including Stephen Fry, Jessica Gunning, Ncuti Gatwa, Hugh Skinner and the great Sir Derek Jacobi, McKellen’s longtime friend. The cast also includes Dame Joanna Lumley, Dame Siân Phillips, and Rob Brydon.
The film premiered at the BFI London Film Festival on 13 October, offering a heartfelt reminder that love, tenderness, and self-discovery have no age limit. Their story gives older LGBT+ characters the chance to experience romance, uncertainty, and hope on their own terms. Because sometimes, life still has beautiful surprises waiting, even when we think we know our own story.
Watch the preview here:
African Soul Rebels
Last Tuesday a small group of us went to see African Soul Rebels at The Bridgewater Hall.
African Soul Rebels celebrates fearless artists who reshape tradition, challenge borders and put rhythm at the centre of resistance and joy.
We heard Gasper Nali and N’famady Kouyaté before the electrifying Les Amazones d’Afrique.
They are a collective of West African artists whose music fuses ancient roots with urgent, future-facing sounds and a message of strength, unity and change.
We stood up and danced in the joyful celebration of feel good world music.
