LGBT History Month Magazine - The Official Guide to LGBT History Month 2015 ®

Official guide to LGBT History Month

STUDENT PRIDE HAPPY 10 TH BIRTHDAY

D.R.A.G TAKE IT TO THE STREETS The origins of drag

TEN YEARS ON The tenth anniversary of LGBT History Month

ALAN TURING The man behind the Enigma

Sponsored by

Supported by

In association with www.lgbthistorymonth.org.uk

Also inside: The Prime Minister - Gendered Intelligence - Stonewall - LGBT Fostering & Adoption

Published by Talent Media Ltd and distributed with The Sunday Telegraph.

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The Prime Minister

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Welcome LGBT History Month 2015

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Ten Years of Student Pride

18

Stonewall

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BWAP - Women In Policing

20 Aderonke - One Year On 24 36 42

J.P. Morgan - Fostering Diversity The Long Shadow Of Section 28 D.R.A.G. Take It To The Streets

44 Tinker, Tailor, Solider, LGBT 48

My Name Is Charlie

51

Alan Turing - The Man Behind The Enigma

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Oscar Wilde - A Profile

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Gendered Intelligence

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From The Dawn Of Photography To Now

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Cancer Is A Drag - A Charity

Talent media would like to thank: Sue Sanders and Tony Fenwick (lgbthistorymonth.org.uk), Andrew Dobbin, Tom Guy, Amy Ashendon, Nate Parker, Richard Lane, Jeff Kristian, Carolyn Williamson, Jay Stewart, Dr Andrew Hodges, Barry Quinn, Alan Bugg and Paul Hartnett for contributing to this magazine.

Sponsored by

Supported By

Š 2015. LGBT History Month is published by Talent Media Ltd. Copyright of all images and articles remains with the publisher unless otherwise stated. All other rights recognised. No material in this publication may be used without prior permission from the publisher. Disclaimer: We cannot accept responsibility for any unsolicited text, photographs or illustrations. Views expressed and included in LGBTHM Magazine by individual contributors are not necessarily those of the publishers.

Published by: Talent Media Ltd, Studio N, Container City Building 2, 48 Trinity Buoy Wharf, Orchard Place, London, E14 0FN Tel: 0203 697 9372. Fax: 020 3070 0017. Email: info@talentmedia.org Web: www.lgbthistorymonthmagazine.co.uk www.lgbthistorymonth.org.uk Publishing Director: Darren Waite Sub Editor: Robert Ingham Assistant Editorial: Adam Lowe Art Director: Christopher Powell Advertising: Darren Waite / Elaine Matthews Cover image supplied by National Student Pride - Photographer: Sybilla Patrizia - Hair Styling: Luca Charalambides and Adam Embleton Perea - Make Up: Carleen Gordon and Fali Awosoji Produced by Talent Media Ltd and distributed by the Telegraph on Sunday.

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- LGBTHM 2012 20142015 4LGBTHM 4 -- LGBTHM 2013 4

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Be Free LGBT History month is always a time to reflect on our history. At Stonewall, we’ve recently celebrated our 25th anniversary. We were founded in 1989 by a small, dedicated group of individuals who came together to challenge a deeply pernicious piece of legislation called Section 28. The law banned schools from ‘promoting’ homosexuality, therefore condemning a generation to suffer bullying and abuse in silence.

Teachers felt unable to tackle rampant homophobic abuse, and those growing up LGBT or who had LGBT parents or family members didn’t see their lives reflected in their schools.

We know from YouGov research that even a generation later we continue to live under the shadow of Section 28. More than half of young lesbian, gay and bisexual people suffer

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BY HANNAH KIBIRIGE, SENIOR POLICY AND CAMPAIGNS OFFICER, STONEWALL

homophobic bullying at school. The word ‘gay’ being used to mean ‘bad’ or ‘terrible’ is endemic and mental health and aspiration suffers as a result.

But we‘ve made progress.

25 years after Section 28 was introduced – and 11 years after it was repealed – Stonewall is working with 10,000 schools across Britain to enable them to tackle bullying and celebrate difference.

As well as working with secondary schools and colleges, we’re now working with hundreds of primary schools too.

Over the past few months we’ve sent our groundbreaking new film, Free, to thousands of primary schools in Britain.

The film follows the stories of four children as they explore family, friendship and what it means to be yourself.

The film is accompanied with engaging lesson

plans and games that will allow teachers and pupils to discuss issues raised in the film in an age appropriate manner.

And you can get involved too. If you’re a parent, ask your kids’ school what they’re doing to tackle bullying and celebrate difference. If you want to help your local community you can become a school governor and help support school staff.

You can also get in touch with our Education team to find out more about our work and order some of our fantastic resources. www.stonewall.org.uk/atschool

25 years on from Section 28 we’ve achieved a lot. But we know that there’s still much to do before every child can grow up celebrating their differences and diversity.

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LGBTHM 2015

Welcome

LGBT History Month 2015.

AND IT’S A HISTORIC YEAR FOR US, OUR 10TH ANNIVERSARY.

Being basically a school-based charity, we thought it would be fitting to have History as our curriculum-linked theme for this February.

Hence ‘Coded Lives’ and the inclusion of five inspirational and fascinating names as the latest additions to our very own LGBT Hall Of Fame, otherwise known as the ‘Faces of 2015’.

Anne Lister, a wealthy Tory landowner in late 18th century Yorkshire, whose scandalous affairs with women she recorded in a coded diary which was found

bricked up nearly a century after her death. Actors Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams; who brought the pre-decriminalisation coded anti-language of the London queers – the Polari - to the masses on the family-friendly Sunday lunchtime radio show Round The Horne (celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, which is also Paddick’s centenary). Mexican Artist Frida Kahlo, married to fellow artist Diego Rivera, but having her true connections – sexual, political and inspirational – with women, and expressed these desires through bold interpretive imagery. And finally The Chevalier d’Eon de Beaumont; spy, swordsman and diplomat who lived the latter half of his life in women’s clothing – in the 18th century; a time when such blatant fracturing of the binary construct could well have resulted in his execution.

Five people whom you may have never heard of but who achieved success in the dark days when an alternative sexual orientation was ‘best not mentioned’ or attracted condescending sympathy or

worse – haughty derision, uncomprehending hatred and ignorant violence. To succeed in life as someone Lesbian, Gay or Bisexual (Trans wasn’t even comprehended) meant being invisible, self-denying.

Or at best non-threatening and stereotypical.

In 1985 Larry Kramer, in his potent testament of the AIDS Holocaust, ‘The Normal Heart’, used lead character Ned to rage against the endemically homophobic society of the 80s, where to be gay under the Reaganomic /Thatcherist era self-fulfilling prophecy meant for most a life of self-loathing, lies and secrecy; where the only act of political or societal freedom was the sexual act: “I belong to a culture that includes Proust, Henry James, Tchaikovsky, Cole Porter, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Christopher Marlowe…

Tennessee Williams, Byron … Auden, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, John Maynard Keynes… These are not invisible men”.

We have come so far since then. Far enough at

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least to forgive Kramer’s unconscious paternalism.

We have come far enough for most LGBT people to be open and honest, to be free, to be themselves in their own lifetime. But still not far enough for all of us to live openly.

But why is that? We have Equal Marriage; we have anti-hate crime legislation; we have an equal age of consent…

But we still don’t have an education system that celebrates LGBT lives as valid and equal to heterosexual lives. While the Law has adapted to become more inclusive, so homophobia has evolved to become more subtle, more insidious. The subtle lying by omission is still there.

“Ofsted now scrutinises schools on their ability to tackle homophobic bullying, yet 80 per cent of secondary school teachers say they haven’t received any specific training for doing so, and 88 per cent don’t even realise such assessments exist.

If a pupil asks a question about sexual orientation one in five teachers say they wouldn’t feel confident responding, while nearly half wouldn’t know where to direct an LGBT student for advice about same-sex relationships”.

(The Independent 20th November 2014.)

There is still no compulsory Equality and Diversity training for teachers. Yet the police receive such training regularly,

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as do many other public and private bodies. Equality and Diversity are today’s buzzwords. From an HR point of view the business importance of “bringing your whole self to work” is universally recognised.

If you cannot see yourself, your culture, your identity being reflected around you, if you feel invisible by your company then why would you want to work there?

It is exactly the same in school. Higher rates of depression and other mental illness in LGBT youth are widely known. I myself, as a former teacher have had one former student confess to me recently that he felt isolated and suicidal as a 16 year old only seven years ago. I suspect little has changed. There is a Cult of Verisimilitude in many schools; an unwillingness to admit the deep issues – whether that be homophobia, transphobia, racism, sexism – and instead to blame the victim; for the sake of the school’s ‘reputation’. The euphemistically named “Strategy Meeting” which is really no more than the head teacher and some others getting together to blacken the name of some scapegoat or other in the hope they will resign (news of the meeting is usually leaked to the subject).

“The whole atmosphere is about punishment and failings,” says Tony Fenwick, CEO of Schools OUT, the charity which founded LGBT History Month. “When you create an environment like that what happens? You cover up. Schools aren’t

dealing with homophobia effectively but if they admit that they’ll get in trouble.”

There we have the paradox of the institution of education, the opening of the mind to ideas, run by narrow mindedness. Yet combatting homophobia – a learned behaviour – is incredibly simple and subtle.

Instead of invisibilising, you usualise, and from as young an age as possible – a primary Maths lesson on shape, where the shapes in question are the tents at a Pride festival. A Music lesson where the discussion centres on the lyrics of Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’. And once you usualise, and acclimatise students to the everyday idea of there being LGBT people, by the time students reach GCSE level you can actualise the influence of sexual orientation on the works of Siegfried Sassoon or Dame Carol Ann Duffy.

LGBT History Month has its own free website for teachers – www.the-classroom.org. uk, supplying free fullyresourced inclusive lesson plans in most subjects from Year 1 to Year 13.

Remember that self-fulfilling prophecy - The lonely life of the homosexual? That feeling, when you are 12, 13 or 14 and self-realisation dawns, that somehow you are the only gay in the village, or the school? We should also be giving our LGBT youth that sense of being part of a community.

ANDREW DOBBIN, PROMOTION OFFICER SCHOOLS OUT UK

A shared history, which LGBT History Month has worked for the past decade to encourage schools to show to their LGBT students, and also a shared language. Is there such a thing as a ‘gay’ language? Well no. But Polari, an ‘antilanguage’ is perhaps the closest thing we have.

Kenneth Williams, as is now widely known, was not at all comfortable with his sexual orientation, and may seem an odd choice to be one of the Faces of 2015. But he did bring Polari to a wider audience, including the many closeted gay men of the era. Together with fellow gay actor Hugh Paddick, and unbeknown to BBC bigwigs, we were let in on a secret; a celebratory camp secret.

Polari, with its mix of cockney rhyme, Italian, Yiddish and back slang allowed gay men (mainly – it was used less frequently by lesbians)

what makes a community? the freedom to talk and more importantly, bitch, about life and men on the bus, on the train and in the street. Life for these men before 1967 was one of constant fear – fear of blackmail, fear of ostracisation at work, fear of entrapment. They were, in the words of comedian Barry Cryer, a close friend of entertainers Danny La Rue and Frankie Howerd “haunted men”.

Imagine the liberation of being able to say, out in the open: ‘Varda the dish on the bona omi ajax’ and simply be thought of as a foreigner rather than a ’pervert’. Polari was both an excluder – of the heteronormative, and an includer – to those in the know, ‘in The Life’.

It was a membership badge as powerful as any masonic handshake.

It was fun, and it was funny. And it created a sense of community.

Julian and Sandy proved to be the hits of the radio

show Round the Horne, so it is in that capacity that we included Paddick and Williams in this year’s Faces. Williams’ catchphrase opening “Oh hello Mr Horne – how bona to varda your dolly old eke” brought howls of laughter every week.

Even though most of the audience had no clue what they were laughing at!

Ironically the success of Round the Horne contributed to the demise of Polari. The secret was out. Coupled with partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967, and there just didn’t seem to be a need for it. Throw in the backlash against the stereotypical ‘queer’ by gay campaign groups in the 1970s and it virtually vanished altogether.

Recently though Polari has received a revival as its importance has been reassessed, particularly in visibilising gay men. Some, like the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence have refused

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to let it die and have produced many pieces, including a version of The Bible. A recent show ‘In the Life’ tells the history of Polari from Medieval Cant to the present day.

Morrissey wrote ‘Piccadilly Polari’. Paddick and Williams only used around a dozen or so words in their act, yet there is an entire lexicon out there just waiting to be revitalised through reuse.

Equality and diversity are surely all about celebrating the things that make us different?

So get on your vacaya and Polari your coves!

LGBT people by making their sexual orientation incidental to the storyline of ‘mainstream’ drama.

Let’s teach our LGBT youth about their history. About the cheerful tenacity of people who lived through periods of institutional persecution. Those who came before them to give them the freedom they have today – encourage them to relish that freedom and celebrate it. But not to take it for granted. And we also have a duty to let the wider heterosexual society know about our history, as it is ignorance that breeds hatred and prejudice.

By having to come out it could be said that everyone living a LGB or T life has heightened dramatic appeal. We have lived through the AIDS epidemic and it is only 47 years ago (or 35 in Scotland and Northern Ireland) that we were all branded criminal.

While it’s great that Eastenders and Coronation Street have characters who ‘just happen’ to be LGB or T, there are much bigger stories to tell.

Andrew Dobbin Promotions Officer

We’re slowly getting there with films like 2014’s ‘Pride’, a film unthinkable a decade ago. But at the same time there’s a danger of tokenising

That would surely be the ultimate in usualising? If the (albeit diluted) story of a gay war hero can be a mass audience winner and potential Oscar contender

January 2015.

LGBTHM 2015

Surely the appeal of a good story is the connection you can make with someone who is not like you? If I can empathise with the plight of the Holocaust victims in World War II while not being a Jew then surely a straight audience would want to know about the gay victims of the camps, who after being liberated by the allies were then rearrested and imprisoned again?

why don’t we see a new version of 1961’s Victim?

Only the title need change.

As a ‘community’ we are still largely stuck in the self-fulfilling prophecy that a heterosexual society seems to expect of us – shallow obsession with youth, good looks and hedonism. Just a different set of stereotypes.

The words of Ned in ‘The Normal Heart’ again show that while much has changed, some things have not, and still need to: “The only way we’ll have real pride is when we demand recognition of a culture that isn’t just sexual. It’s all there - all through history we’ve been there; but we have to claim it, and identify who was in it, and articulate what’s in our minds and hearts and all our creative contributions to this earth.”

Schools OUT UK (founders of LGBT History Month UK)

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TEN

YEARS University is known for being the ultimate place to explore freedom, sexuality and identity.

Whether that means going out in outrageous outfits, dancing the night away or dying your hair bright pink - it should be a safe place to also be open about being LGBT. Unfortunately, the picture on campus is not as easy as it is perceived. A report

by NUS LGBT shows that 1 in 5 students face homophobia, and 1 in 3 face transphobia.

Though incidents of violence appear to be relatively rare, it seems verbal bullying and name calling are almost common place.

Thats why events like National Student Pride, are so important. Robbie

HAPPY BIRTHDAY NATIONAL STUDENT PRIDE.

Young, the NUS LGBT officer, said students are the best resource in fighting LGBTphobia on campus.

and welcoming place to be a student.

This year the event is returning to London for its 10th Anniversary event. Held at the end of LGBT History month (27th Feb - 1st March), the weekend will be centered around a daytime festival with a series of live panel debates, music and caberet. The event also plays host to a careers fair, art gallery and launch pad to a weekend of scandal with nights out at G-A-Y.

The event began at Oxford Brookes University in 2005 as a response to the Christian Union’s ‘Homosexuality and the Bible’ talk. Student Pride continues this mantra in its 10th year. Student pride has chosen to hold its 2015 event at the University of Westminster’s Marylebone campus opposite Madame Tussauds. which last year allowed notoriously homophobic Sheikh Haitham al Haddad to speak at a charity dinner.

At the 2014 event, the Mayor of London Boris Johnson congratulated the event for sending a message to the world that London is a safe

Bridget Nkomo, the Diversity Representative for Student Pride and former president of Westminster LGBTI society said coming to

That’s why Student Pride continues on, providing a platform for debate and discussion, driven by students.

LGBTHM 2015 - 15

Westminster opened doors so the society could highlight the importance of making the University a constant safe space for LGBTI people.

In the ten years of National Student Pride, the event has pulled in celebrities, activists and comedians. In 2014 alone that included the likes of Zoe Lyons, John Whaite (Great British Bake Off), John Amaechi OBE (former NBA basketball player) and Lisa Power (Stonewall Founder).

The popular Warwick Naked Rowers chose the event to launch their charity ‘Sport Allies’. In previous years highlights incude Ben Cohen (former England Ruby star), England Cricketer Steve Davies, former England footballer Graeme Le Saux and the eminent Jane Hill (BBC News presenter).

Its not all bad news for being LGBT on campus, at the beginning of the academic year LGB charity Stonewall said Universities were getting more “Gay friendly”. The 2014 ‘Gay by Degree’ guide rates universities by their commitments to gay and bisexual students.

It uses measures like one and two to rate the universities. This year six universities achieved all

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for T’ session said it’s been a very important couple of years for the T in LGBT. The session heard from second on the independent’s rainbow list Paris Lees who said society does not accommodate trans people.

10 indicators compared to no institution doing so five years ago when the guide began.

The trouble with Gay

By Degree though? It only measures intent.

Robbie Young says he’d like Stonewall go further and see Gay by Degree measure whether the policies are actually implemented. The reason that is difficult for Stonewall, indeed anyone, is Universities have other priorities.

Thats why Student Pride continues on, providing a platform for debate and discussion, driven by students. The 2014 event was a huge success with over 120 Universities and colleges attending.

This year will see a welcome return to a focus on Trans* issues. Evan Davis who hosted the ‘Time

48% of trans people in the UK under 26 have attempted suicide because of discrimination they suffer, sometimes even from within the LGBT community. Paris Lees told the student Pride audience “when you give trans people the help and support they need they can go on to flourish and prosper as everyone should be given the chance to do.”

Therefore, Student Pride have announced a special focus on the ‘T’ by securing the screening rights of highly acclaimed Boy Meets Girl which won Iris Prize’s Best Feature Film. The film is a tender romantic comedy that explores what it means to be a real man or woman.

The evening entertainment will be hosted by the infamous G-A-Y nightclubs.

Notorious for setting entertainment headlines nationwide including

Not only is it an integral part of the daytime event, it provides the opportunity for employers to reach into the incredible diversity of LGBT students recent scandalous performances by Tulisa, Lady Gaga, Nicole Scherzinger and Foxes who played for Student Pride 2014.

Student Pride is also proud to host the biggest LGBT student careers fair. Not only is it an integral part of the daytime event, it provides the opportunity for employers to reach into the incredible diversity of LGBT students. Corporate sponsorship is essential to keep the daytime event free, a part of pride that is so important. The only part of the weekend the organisation charges for is the night time events,

and this year’s premiere of ‘Boy Meets Girl’.

Asda and Enterprise Renta-car are silver sponsors.

National Student Pride is being platinum-sponsored in 2015 by EY for the fifth consecutive year.

Liz Bingham (Managing Partner for People, UK & Ireland at EY and Student Pride ambassador) said: “We are very proud to support National Student Pride for another year.

At EY we are passionate about enabling people to come together in an environment where they feel included and respected. National Student Pride enables LGBT students to do just that.” Law firm Clifford Chance are gold sponsors, with IBM and BP. The Co-operative,

Every single person who contributes to student pride does so completely voluntarily. Just like the push for equal marriage the event is driven by a group of students who ask for nothing in return.

Steered by a group of graduates, activists and former speakers, they do however get to wear some outrageously pink jeans.

Tickets for the event are on sale now. The daytime festival is free and open to all (not just students) - club nights are £5 for a weekend wristband. Film and Comedy screenings are extra, see www.studentpride.co.uk/tickets

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Listening to

LGBT Voices

BY RUTH HUNT, CHIEF EXECUTIVE, STONEWALL

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Lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans communities are communities like no other. Within three generations, we’ve seen significant change in our rights, status and profile in Great Britain and abroad.

been together thirty years or three years.

We’re starting families, being open about our sexuality and gender identity with our family, our community, our workplace, our place of worship, ourselves.

We’ve therefore become accustomed to fighting for our right to exist.

Those men who were persecuted through the fifties and sixties afraid that they would be punished for being gay - sit alongside a generation who went to school under the shadow of the pernicious Section 28, while both generations received a barrage of messages that ‘homosexuals’ spread disease and danger. The young people of today serve in our armed forces next to sergeants and majors who’ve only felt able to be open about their sexuality in the last few years. Today, we see more couples marrying – those who’ve

We all share a sense of the part we have played in creating the Britain we live in now and have strong experiences that unite us. But the experiences of older LGBT people are often lost and we forget to reflect on where we’ve come from and how those experiences shape who we are today. We must take time to listen to all those from the LGBT community, not just those who have the highest profile or the loudest voices.

LGBTHM 2015

That is why Stonewall has created a new book – LGBT Voices – to celebrate the stories of some pioneers who have fought for equality.

The book shares 25 stories from LGBT people who have lived through inequalities and experiences that are rarely reflected on television, in books, in films or in our schools.

Read the stories and share them, take copies to your local school and find older LGBT people and ask them their stories. Our history is important to all of us. We must make the time to listen. www.stonewall.org.uk/ LGBTVoices

International gathering of women in policing On 23 August 2015 Cardiff city centre will be filled with a rainbow of uniforms, being worn by upwards of 600 policewomen from all parts of the globe.

These women (and a few men!) will be attending the 53rd Annual Training Conference of the International Association of Women Police (IAWP), and the Parade of Nations forms an integral part of the opening ceremonies.

This will be only the third time the event has been held in the UK, the previous ones being in Birmingham in 1996 and Leeds in 2005.

The IAWP is marking its centenary this year, and this will be celebrated at various parts of the conference. In addition, 2015 also is the centenary of the first woman in the UK to be given a power of arrest, so a double celebration

is taking place. We currently have a research assistant pulling together material for an exhibition on British policewomen, and our American colleagues are doing the same for the IAWP. After the opening day, which ends with an Awards Luncheon at which the IAWP’s 2015 Award recipients will be honoured, it will be down to work for delegates, with a wide range of seminars and workshops taking place, 7 at a time, from Monday until Thursday. Topics already confirmed include Laughology, Mindfulness, Ethical behaviour of police officers, Domestic Violence, Sexual Exploitation, Leadership, Nutrition, Coaching and Mentoring.

parallel programme for those not wishing to participate in the training, which will take them on day trips to local places of interest. In the evenings there will be a Cultural Evening at the stunning Millennium Hall, a Medieval Banquet at Cardiff Castle and our Final Banquet to say goodbye for another year.

Attendance is not limited to women directly involved in policing, and you do not need to be a member of IAWP (though attendance is cheaper if you are!). Those attending will be of many colours, faiths, genders and sexual orientations.

More information on the conference is available on www.iawp2015. org, and on the IAWP at www.iawp.org.

It will not be all work, however, as there is a

LGBTHM 2015 - 19

Aderonke ONE YEAR ON

BY AMY ASHENDON

LAST YEAR I SPOKE TO LESBIAN ASYLUM SEEKER ADERONKE, WHO HAD BEEN ARRESTED AND VIOLENTLY ATTACKED IN NIGERIA FOR BEING GAY. SHE PAID A BRIBE TO POLICE AND FLED TO THE UK WHERE SHE HAS BEEN HOPING TO BE GRANTED RESIDENCY.

11 years later, Aderonke is still waiting. But with a LGBT National Diversity Award for being a Positive Role Model and a place on the Rainbow List, she’s been keeping herself busy and not given up on her campaign.

“I’m overwhelmed,” she says. “Signatures on my petition have reached 320,000 and I appreciate them all.”

With a court date finally set for March, 2015 will be the year Aderonke finds out if she will have to return to the country she constantly receives

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death threats from.

“Just google my name,” she says, “comments online haven’t stopped.” A Nigerian newspaper published her name and photo to out her publicly.

isn’t likely yet. “With the culture of disbelief towards immigrants, we are scared in case the Home Office sees it as a sham. We’re waiting to see if I can stay in the UK first,” she explains.

How is Aderonke doing a year on? “I live on £35 a week, and have to rely on food banks,” she tells me. Because of her asylum status it would be illegal for her to work. “I’ve done it in the past but I don’t want to go to jail again.” She’s now living with her fiancée but explains getting married

With little time left until she discovers her fate, Aderonke is getting anxious. “As much as I want it to be over with, it feels scarier as each day passes. I can’t wait for the heavy load to be taken off my shoulders, but I’m terrified it won’t be a positive outcome.”

The asylum seeking process needs to change, she tells me.

Firstly, by shutting down Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre, where sexual abuse allegations are rife and a UN special rapporteur was blocked from investigating claims. Aderonke spent a year there and says it left her psychologically scarred. Being kept in detention “sets you

up to fail,” she says.

“You’re restricted in providing evidence to support your claim it’s not justifiable.”

The European Court of Justice recently put an end to invasive sexuality tests. “It’s a landmark ruling,” she says delighted, “but immigration officers need sensitivity training.” Aderonke is still willing to produce

video evidence to support her asylum case, however. “It’s dehumanising but the alternative is risking either death or 14 years’ imprisonment in Nigeria.” And if she can stay? “I want to do a PhD, get a job as a Public Health Official and continue protesting against inequality.”

As much as I want it to be over with, it feels scarier as each day passes. I can’t wait for the heavy load to be taken off my shoulders, but I’m terrified it won’t be a positive outcome.

LGBTHM 2015 - 21

“We adopted through PACT last year, it was a dream come true to become parents and family life ever since has been filled with love, joy and laughter. PACT has been supportive throughout our journey and we are pleased they are now in Brighton with a new office to help more families to choose adoption.� - Jacek and Andrzej, PACT Family.

“Nothing is more vital to the long-term growth of JPMorgan Chase & Co. than our ability to attract and retain talented and dedicated employees.

Success at our firm requires that employees treat clients and customers respectfully and fairly, and stay true to the values embedded in our culture: personal commitment, honesty, teamwork, diversity and community awareness.�

Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO, JPMorgan Chase

About J.P. Morgan J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. is a leader in financial services, offering solutions to clients in more than 100 countries with one of the most comprehensive global product platforms available. We have been helping our clients do business and manage their wealth for more than 200 years. Our business has been built upon our core principle of putting our clients first.

J.P. Morgan is part of JPMorgan Chase & Co. (NYSE: JPM), a global financial services firm.

Fostering Diversity Diversity is a cornerstone of our global culture, helping us to meet the changing needs of our clients, customers, employees and the communities we serve. Our efforts to promote diversity and inclusion are comprehensive. We hire, develop and retain a diverse workforce and supplier base, cultivating relationships with firms owned and operated by minorities, women and other historically underrepresented groups.

Business Resource Groups are one of the key mechanisms through which we support and encourage diversity in the workplace. Each are sponsored by a member of the firm’s Operating Committee, providing support and career development for different employee groups. Currently more than 52,000 employees are members of these employee-led affinity groups.

J.P. Morgan and PRIDE We have a longstanding commitment to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community — inclusive of clients and customers, employees and the communities in which we operate. We have an impressive story to tell — for example, in 1998, we were one of the first firms on Wall Street to offer domestic partner benefits; additionally our commitment has resulted in more than £1.5 million in charitable support to over 100 different LGBT community partners around the world including Stonewall.

PRIDE is an employee-led diversity group, set up in 1996, that exists to engage and support all employees in promoting an inclusive environment within J.P. Morgan which consistently allows LGBT colleagues the opportunity to build successful careers and reach their full potential. It also serves as a resource to the local and global LGBT communities and to assist the firm in building business within the LGBT marketplace.

Further information about J.P. Morgan is available at www.jpmorgan.com

Anna Mannering-Thorne is a Vice President in the Corporate & Investment Bank, where she is the Business Control Officer for the Prime Brokerage and Equity Finance business in EMEA. Anna is currently a member of the Leadership Team of the EMEA chapter of PRIDE, having previously acted as Co-Chair of the group. Anna began her career at J.P. Morgan in 1994, where she then spent 20 years in a combination of front and middle office roles within the Futures business.

Q: How did you get involved in PRIDE? A: When I came out at work ten years ago it was

a very different time. Although I was very comfortable with my sexual orientation, it felt like being gay was “a guilty, dark secret” which was far from the truth – I was very proud to be who I was. There was no one who could help me find other gay women in the workplace I could speak to for advice. I was lucky to have great support from my senior management team, who fully supported me and my suggestion of having Coming Out Drinks! I joined the PRIDE Leadership team, primarily due to the lack of visible lesbians in my area. Times have changed and I am thrilled to see some of our most senior

leaders being openly out and proud as well as having great senior ally support. J.P. Morgan is great at Diversity initiatives, including fully supporting our PRIDE agenda however as there were very few role models, I wanted to help change this. During this period I also joined the London Gay Women’s Network (GWN) Steering Committee where I helped to organise thought-provoking and inspirational events for LBT women which included a CEO Lesbian Panel event. I am proud to be an active member of PRIDE and have more recently focused on straight ally engagement along with joint events with our other Business Resource Groups internally.

Q: What drives your involvement in PRIDE and other diversity and inclusion initiatives at J.P. Morgan?

A: I am increasingly impressed by the numerous activities and events celebrating diversity across the Firm including Access Ability, BOLD and WIN and those efforts have helped to develop a diverse workforce over the past few years.

Playing a key role in diversity initiatives like PRIDE is my way of contributing to the diversity and inclusion agenda in the hope that one day it’s so ingrained that a specific Diversity & Inclusion (D&I) strategy isn’t needed. I know it is important to be a visible “out” role model for other employees

who may be struggling to be authentic in the workplace – we all need to see other people like ourselves who are successful to inspire us and to reinforce and support the message that it is OK to be yourself.

Diversity is integral to business performance and studies show that teams comprised of individuals from diverse backgrounds perform better than homogeneous teams. I’ve seen the benefit first-hand of having a variety of different voices and opinions and believe this enables us to enhance the services we provide to our clients.

J.P. Morgan is a marketing name for JPMorgan Chase & Co. and its subsidiaries worldwide. © 2015 JPMorgan Chase & Co. All rights reserved. JPMorgan Chase is an equal opportunity employer.

Q: What skills are required to succeed as a leader of PRIDE? A: Partnership, creativity and time as the many meetings, calls and events management. PRIDE collaborates with other Business Resource Groups and teams at J.P. Morgan to host events and share best practices, so the ability to work together successfully is key. Most of the events and activities we develop are sparked by informal conversations within the PRIDE Leadership Team; the creativity to constantly come up with new ideas and shape them into successful initiatives is invaluable. Strong time management skills are also essential,

required to lead a successful Business Resource Group are in addition to my day job and home life. Strong influencing and communication skills are also advantageous – not everyone gets it and some believe that there are no longer issues for LGBT staff in the workplace, so an honest dialogue and a willingness to understand other view points is something that I believe helps move us towards a truly inclusive environment.

“I think it is important to be a visible ‘out’ role model for other employees who may be struggling to be authentic in the workplace.”

Q: Are there any specific achievements under PRIDE of which you are especially proud?

A: There are many that come to mind.

One of our focus areas in more recent years has been raising awareness of the important role that straight allies can play in creating a truly inclusive workplace for LGBT colleagues. We have hosted a number of events and road

shows to encourage allies to get involved.

We also produced a number of branded items including mugs, post-its and lanyards, enabling our colleagues to visibly show their support. Our allies initiative has helped grow our membership three-fold.

Q: What advice would you give to someone interested in starting a career at J.P. Morgan?

A: J.P. Morgan prides itself on hiring and

developing the best and brightest, and there are so many opportunities in a firm of our size. I would encourage someone interested in a career here to educate themselves on the different businesses we have and the wide variety of roles we offer. Find something that you are passionate about and that matches your skill set, and that will come through clearly when you apply. Be true to

yourself, be credible, be authentic – your working relationships will flourish and you will be more likely to succeed.

Strong performance, adaptability, and a team player attitude are all important components of the balanced skill set required to succeed in the firm’s high-performance environment.

J.P. Morgan’s vision of doing “First-class business in a first-class way” encapsulates this perfectly.

Unified under a single purpose EY employees united to advance LGBT workplace equality

Š 2015 Ernst & Young LLP. Ernst & Young LLP is an equal opportunities employer and welcomes applications from all sections of the community. All Rights Reserved.

EY has long been a strong and vocal supporter of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) workplace equality. Our UK and Ireland LGBT employee network was set-up in 1995 and was one of the first of its kind in the private sector. Since then, sister networks have become established across the EY world, from the USA and Canada to Australia, Japan, Hong Kong and beyond.

In 2014, EY embarked on a project to bring our LGBT employee networks around the world closer together under a single, consistent brand identity — Unity. This ‘network-ofnetworks’ approach has enabled us to connect our global networks more effectively while at the same time maintaining their individual ability to tailor their activities locally to best address the needs of their members.

It is also important to us that the network is open and inclusive to everyone, whether LGBT or an ally. Therefore Unity is EY’s ‘LGBTA’ network, with the ‘A’ there for Ally. Our network was established to bring together individuals regardless of sexual

orientation, gender identity, status or extent to which they are ‘out’ — unified in purpose.

EY is committed to doing its part to build a better working world.

Unity contributes to this by focussing on the development of our people, strengthening the impact of the network in our offices throughout the UK and Ireland, and supporting a variety of LGBT organisations.

We’re very proud that, after many years of consistent high performance in the Stonewall Workplace Equality Index — featuring in the Top 10 between 2010 and 2014 and being named ‘Employer of the Year’ in 2012 — EY has now graduated out of the Index to become one of Stonewall’s eight inaugural Star Performer organisations.

This is superb recognition of our work on LGBT workplace equality, but we can’t rest on our laurels.

As a Star Performer, we have agreed a number of challenging goals that Stonewall will be measuring us against over the coming three years, and these will continue to drive the advancement

of workplace equality both in the UK and Ireland and beyond.

We are in great company, and expect that the Star Performer organisations will continue to work together to effect change.

We are also delighted to be supporting National Student Pride again this year, having been headline sponsor since 2011.

It is a great way of connecting young people from across the LGBT community and also introducing them to forward thinking employers who value diversity and different perspectives in the workplace.

At EY we passionately believe that recruiting, developing and nurturing a diverse range of talent helps creates the highest performing teams and enables us to reach better decisions and provide better advice to our clients. It’s a business imperative and each of our Unity members helps to bring this culture to life.

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At Metropolitan, we recognise that people perform better when they can be themselves.

METRO also liaises with our National Customer Group to ensure that LGBT issues affecting our residents are identified and addressed.

A leading provider of social housing and care BENIDORM‘S NEWEST BAR and support services, we have spent 10 years As an organisation, we are part of as a Stonewall top 100 employer. We work HouseProud – an industry forum designed hard to ensure that the organisation is a to share best practice for supporting LGBT Our European “Pride” also caters to those with The bar and spirit wall has a greatdestination place forof lesbian, gay, bisexual and residents and staff. choice for many dietary requirements. different texture, compared 2015 is Benidorm, is to the walls, to balance the transgender peoplewhich to develop their career, Migration quite the buzz with The idea behind Through the setting the Metropolitan intensity of the surroundings. and creating that our services are in tune with and a huge influx of people to of eGo was to recycle natural Foundation, we have commissioned responsive to Numbers LGBT issues. celebrate. have materials as much as possible Offering a new dining research on the rights and treatment been growing year on year, in the design. With an experience with food, starting METRO, LGBT of LGBT refugees asylum seekers. and itMetropolitans is quickly becoming one staff oldgroup, meets new approach, with and Breakfast from 10.00am of THEsupport places to and headraises to. this is the setting published until 1.30pm andand then2012 from provides awareness ofperfectReports in 2009 for diners searching for a 5pm till late taking a twist on LGBTSo,issues in the workplace. (‘Over Not Out and ‘Over Not Out after a day on the beach, range of local and European a tapas based menu, both– if your parched crowd wants beers and a selection of designed around healthy Refreshed ) identified a range of key Lastayear wealaunched Allies bar with difference - our Straight local and international eating, with options for the issues and made recommendations somewhere offering good carefully selected wines Meat lover, Vegetarian, Vegan, programme which has enabled colleagues to both government working drinks, at good Glutenand free,services Lactose and to sign upgood andfood, show they support LGBT prices, but isn’t your usual The furniture haswith comerefugees from Healthy Heart seekers. diners. and asylum equality.

The initiative raises not- recycled from run-of-the-mill bar - look no awareness everywhere than eGo Restaurant old castles, is a lovely bar in the Old only further in Metropolitan, but also among the vintage At stores, Metropolitan,eGo LGBT awareness begins and Wine Bar, a great markets and collected from Town, a hidden gem amongst businesses we work with. from the minuteallyou join us as a colleague, little attitude-free venue, all around local towns to the hustle and bustle of or business We are tucked away on one of the blend in with thecustomer walls.

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Chair of METRO, IMAGES © MATT GAGE Metropolitans LGBT staff group

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After careful planning and many splinters, eGo opened its doors as Benidorm’s newest Cafe bar with a twist. Aimed at local residents and tourists wanting to try something different to Benidorm which

Pamela Sinnott

LGBTHM 2015 - 31

MUM. DAD. I’VE GOT SOMETHING TO TELL YOU. I’M JOINING THE POLICE

Worried what your friends or family would think about you working for the police? Don’t be. As a member of Hertfordshire Constabulary, you’ll be reducing crime, strengthening communities and helping all kinds of people feel protected and safe. And that’s something anyone should be proud of.

There are lots of different ways you can contribute, whether as a Police Officer, Special Constable, member of Police Staff or volunteer. There are also lots of ways you’ll be supported, such as through Keystone, our dedicated LGBT support group.

Find out more and apply at hertspolicecareers.co.uk

ke the pledge ta , lm fi e th h Watc ovement and join the m

Marriage

is a reminder of how far we’ve come, and the work still to do

BY RICHARD LANE, MEDIA MANAGER, STONEWALL When Stonewall was founded in 1989 it was illegal to discuss same-sex relationships in schools. Lesbian, gay and bisexual people could be fired from their jobs, were forbidden from serving our country in the military and had no legal recognition of their relationships.

are unique, our ambition to love and live freely is shared.

In our schools young people are still bullied and berated because of who they are. On the streets of our cities, towns and villages we still hear stories of people being heckled and harassed or thrown out of taxis or off of public transport for holding their partner’s hand.

We’ve come so far since then.

It’s been almost a year now since the first same-sex couples were able to marry in England and Wales. Since March 2014 we’ve seen images of joyful celebrations up and down the country as thousands of couples tie the knot. In Scotland the first ceremonies took place in December with hundreds of couples sharing their happy day with friends and family. And couples in civil partnerships were finally able to convert their relationship to marriage from December too.

Around the world these celebrations stand as a beacon to those fighting for their own fundamental freedoms. While our journeys

This is entirely a decision for faith communities but we share the sadness of our supporters that this isn’t yet possible for everyone. We hope one day it might be.

Sadly, in countries all around the world and even in Britain, people are still all too often not free to love the person they want.

At Stonewall, we hear from many people of faith including lots of heterosexual parents with LGBT sons and daughters - who wish that their place of worship would allow same-sex couples to marry. We hear from couples who want to marry in the same place where they worship. They want to make a solemn commitment to each other in the eyes of their God and their Church.

And in countries around the globe repressive regimes are turning the clock back on LGBT equality with new laws to curtail fundamental freedoms.

This LGBT History month it’s important for us to celebrate what we’ve achieved – and for many of us, attend some celebratory same-sex nuptials – however we mustn’t lose sight of the work still to be done.

Stonewall wil keep fighting for equality at work, at home, at school, both in the UK and internationally. We’ll need your help to do that too.

Join us by visiting www.stonewall.org.uk

LGBTHM 2015 - 35

The long shadow of

Section 28

THE CONTINUING NEED TO CHALLENGE HOMOPHOBIA

BY SUE SANDERS AND ARTHUR SULLIVAN

The Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act received royal assent in July 2013, following six months of debates in parliament and outside.

During the course of those debates, the Schools OUT organisation gave evidence at the Commons Committee stage and our representative was questioned extensively about a survey purporting to show that some 40,000 teachers would resign rather than teach about marriage equality. In the Lords, amendments to the Bill were proposed to give teachers immunity from disciplinary action if they failed to recognise marriage equality in class, and to require schools to give parents a week’s notice of any teaching about same sex marriage in order to give them an opportunity to withdraw their children from such lessons.

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LGBTHM 2015

Where schools make an effort, action is often restricted to external organisations providing lessons on homophobic bullying Although neither of these amendments was passed, the debates were a reminder that the consequences of Section 28 remain.

Section 28 required schools avoid teaching the ‘acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship’. Throughout the late 1980s and the 1990s, as equality awareness grew following the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, consideration of LGBT issues inevitably fell behind. For schools, the topic was unmentionable.

Post-Section 28, the Labour government conceived a single equality act. This gave us the impetus to finally launch LGBT History Month. However, we waited nine years before schools were required to comply with the Equality Act’s public sector equality duty (PSED).

It was local authorities that most readily engaged with the PSED. With the legacy of Section 28 still hanging over schools, take-up was slow. Talk of LGBT matters was considered too difficult.

The Children’s Commissioner’s report on exclusions, They Go the Extra Mile, notes the education system’s compliance with the Act is patchy, and understanding of the PSED is poor.

Those opposed to diversity claim LGBT equality has no place in schools. They exploit confusion by publishing misleading information and telling scare stories about how children will somehow be ‘indoctrinated’. Sections of the media also play their part, deliberately making these issues difficult to approach in class. Schools need the support of authoritative,

unambiguous and universally applicable expectations. We recommend that the Department for Education should publish clear and unambiguous expectations of all maintained schools.

Where schools make an effort, action is often restricted to external organisations providing lessons on homophobic bullying. But use of external organisations means the school is not itself engaging with the issue – a message students interpret any number of ways. We can’t eradicate bullying unless prejudice is addressed throughout the curriculum.

The implication that the only important thing about LGBT people is not to bully them smacks at best of ‘tolerance’, reinforcing a narrative of victimhood which may lead young people to LGBTHM 2015 - 37

fear reactions they have never experienced. It’s unlikely to contribute positively to their personal development.

It is purely concerned with eliminating negative outcomes without considering positive ones. Schools should be explicitly required to go beyond anti-bullying in dealing with LGBT matters.

Of course, homophobic bullying and casual homophobia are a real problem. We worked with the NUT, asking teachers about the level of homophobia they have seen in their schools, and found high levels of bullying and abuse. The majority of teachers feel they need training to combat this.

But schools require

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external motivation, just as the criminal justice system needed the Lawrence Inquiry before it began to take race equality seriously.

The criminal justice service has recognised the importance of education to crime reduction.

Homophobic ‘banter’ in school is hate crime when it takes place outside the school gates. Casual sexism left unchallenged in the classroom may lead to dismissal in the workplace. It’s essential, then, that schools take seriously their duties in respect of equalities education.

One aspect of the 2013 review of the PSED we endorse is its emphasis on the role of regulators, such as

Ofsted, in making public bodies accountable.

Particularly encouraging is the requirement that ‘teaching and curriculum materials in all subjects have positive images of disabled people; of gay and lesbian people; of both women and men in non-stereotypical gender roles; and of people from a wide range of ethnic, religious and cultural backgrounds’.

We work with teachers to help them become more inclusive of LGBT people in the curriculum.

We provide subjectbased resources through The Classroom’s lesson plans (the-classroom. org.uk). This includes cross-curricular ideas for teachers for usualising LGBT people in their routine teaching. We

also have a checklist of twenty things a school can do to make it safe for LGBT people (schools-out.org.uk/ teachingpack/20Things. htm).

will, however, inform all students of the contributions made by LGBT figures in history and will provide private reassurance to those who may identify as LGBT.

successful History Month can re-inspire students whose sense of aspiration has been lost because of fear, enabling them to feel safe, respected and able to learn.

The message of LGBT History Month to a student may be the most powerful they have ever heard: ‘you exist and are part of our community’.

This is not a rallying cry. It won’t encourage swathes of students to make sudden public declarations of their own LGBT identity. A well presented programme

The second message of LGBT History Month – contrasting significantly with the anti-bullying approach - is ‘you are not just a victim’. The materials produced over the past decade showcase a range of inspirational people whose achievements encompass all kinds of human endeavour. A

The ideas in The Classroom about actualising – making real the life of LGBT people – and usualising – incorporating LGBT people into everyday life – have different messages. A maths question about how large an extension Seema and Julia can add to their house without needing

Writers on equality often point to the importance of having diverse teachers in schools.

LGBTHM 2015 - 39

Schools Out and LGBT History Month Founder – Sue Sanders

planning permission, in amongst other questions on the same piece of homework, sends another and equally powerful message: ‘So what? Lesbian couples exist. They may be your neighbours, your aunts, your parents or your friends.’

Writers on equality often point to the importance of having diverse teachers in schools. Things remain more problematic for LGBT teachers. Recently an assistant head in Birmingham faced parent protests when he

confirmed he was gay. He has since moved schools.

Lucy Meadows took her own life following a press campaign around her transition. Her school was supportive, unlike another in the South East where a new head overruled a previous decision to allow a teacher to transition.

The teacher won an industrial tribunal, but the disproportionate paucity of teachers from the trans community suggests many abandon teaching before gender affirmation. We frequently hear from teachers unable to come out at school. What a school would consider a precious resource in relation to race or religion is kept buried when it comes to LGBT people.

and indeed offer support to organisations such as ours. It is sad to see schools lagging so far behind the private sector.

Most schools have taken only small steps towards including the LGBT members of their communities.

The statistics on antiLGBT behaviour, and the individual stories of teachers forced to resign, indicate we’re only at the start of a long journey. The PSED is critical for ensuring this journey continues.

Sue Sanders is the chair, and Arthur Sullivan is the director of operations, at Schools OUT UK

Private institutions have embraced equalities, however. They have LGBT employee networks, take seriously their obligations to avoid discrimination,

The statistics on anti-LGBT behaviour, and the individual stories of teachers forced to resign, indicate we’re only at the start of a long journey 40 -

LGBTHM 2015

Help us build a sustainable future.

As one of the largest investor-owned energy companies in the world, National Grid delivers electricity and gas to millions of people. We care about ensuring our workforce is as diverse as the many people whose homes and businesses we power.

After all, our people are our greatest asset – it’s their dedication and innovation that gives us the power to deliver.

From sites and offices to our huge range of after-work clubs and social events, the National Grid culture reflects a commitment to inclusion and diversity. Our people are actively encouraged to treat everyone with respect and value every contribution.

We only truly succeed together.

To ensure the whole community feels welcomed and valued, we’ve created Employee Resource Groups. They’re designed to support our people at work and champion improved understanding. Our LGBT network, Pride, is a great example. It supports our LGBT colleagues, and is open to all employees, acting as a point of contact for anyone interested in or affected by LGBT issues. We are proud to be a member of the Stonewall Diversity Champion programme.

We’ll never stop striving to be an open and friendly place to work. And we’ll never stop investing in people – from personal wellbeing to professional development.

To find out more about opportunities within National Grid, visit our website www.nationalgridcareers.com

D.R.A.G. TAKE IT TO THE STREETS

BY JEFF KRISTIAN WWW.JEFFKRISTIAN.COM

We’re kind of used to the way society tolerates men dressing as women – in film, television and on stage.

Echoes of early Chinese and Shakespearean theatre, when only male actors were allowed to play female parts, still reverberate through our sub-culture (the word drag is considered by some to have in part originated from Shakespeare’s script abbreviation: DR.essed A.s G.irl). So it’s perfectly acceptable to laugh at a bloke in a bra and high heels in a movie and it’s

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not thought odd taking children to interact with a Pantomime Dame every Christmas. Safe and acceptable – from a comfortable distance!

However, the defiant leap across the footlights into public life – taking drag to the streets, if you like – is still a difficult pill for many parts of society to swallow. Although, whether you dress to perform or dress to be your true self, the meter is very slowly swinging further from tolerance towards acceptance, as humanity creeps closer

towards true equality and can become slightly more proud of its own evolution. It could be said that travesty in all its fabulous, colourful forms, is the branch of our LGBT community which challenges society the most. This is nothing new. History records a delicious array of rainbow sisters who took it to the streets…

FANNY AND STELLA - 1870 Miss Fanny Winifred Park and Lady Stella Clinton, otherwise known

Echoes of early Chinese and Shakespearean theatre, when only male actors were allowed to play female parts, as Frederick Park and Ernest Boulton, visited the Strand Theatre in London in full evening dress. They had also been seen in full drag attending the Oxford and Cambridge boat race. A police raid on a house used by them and several of their close male friends turned up an array of glamorous dresses, wigs, undergarments and shoes. Outside the Strand, the law pounced.

They were paraded in the dock the next day, still in full drag with stubble, on a charge of conspiracy to commit a felony (sodomy). Perhaps due to a lack of gay subculture knowledge, the jury acquitted the pair, putting it down to merely disgraceful behaviour.

A NOTABLE HOUSE IN HOLBORN - 1718 A campaign against immorality by selfappointed reformer Charles Hitchin, led to the arrest of a group of men returning to a molly house (gay venue)

in Holborn, having wandered the streets dressed as milkmaids and shepherdesses.

Arrested and sent to the Workhouse, there they remained for some time until one of them threatened to tell of Hitchin’s secret liaisons with ‘hewhores’. Subsequently, an application to the Lord Mayor procured their swift discharge.

ELIZABETH I - 1543 A school of thought suggests that Good Queen Bess might have been a geezer! Moved out of London to avoid

The Plague, legend has it that the ten-year-old girl fell ill and died the day before her Father, the formidable Henry VIII, visited. Her panicstricken guardians, Lady Kat Ashley, and Thomas Perry, knew this would mean certain execution.

The closest they could find to a solution to fool the King and buy time to flee was a local boy called Neville. Surprisingly, the deception is said to have worked. Virgin Elizabeth never married, despite the importance of continuing the Tudor dynasty. Many had their suspicions, though the secret remained close to Elizabeth’s (false) bosom. Her tutor noticed and the skeleton of a young girl in bejewelled royal clothing was later dug up. The shaved eyebrows, heavy makeup, wigs and stylised portraits are perhaps clues. No autopsy, no state funeral, she was instead interred with her sister Mary at Westminster Abbey.

Maybe her quote, ‘I have the heart and stomach of a king,’ was accurate.

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Tinker, Tailor, Solider,

LGBT The UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)’s mission is to help keep the UK safe. It is one of the UK’s intelligence and security agencies, along with MI5 and SIS. GCHQ works to protect the UK and its citizens from a range of threats to national security, including from terrorism, serious and organised crime and cyber-attack. It also works to protect UK forces wherever they are deployed and, through its Information Security arm CESG, provides policy and assistance on the security of Government communications and electronic data. We sent along our Rob to have

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GCHQ’S 21ST CENTURY TURINGS

a chat with Carol and Aaron, two members of GCHQ’s LGBT Network to find out what it’s like to be openly gay and work for the British Intelligence in this day and age.

to the nature of our organisation and the speed that things change, it’s a really busy role and puts me in contact with most of the department at one point or another.

What is your role at GCHQ?

How long have you been part of the LGBT Network at GCHQ and what part do you play in it?

C. I am a commercial officer involved in Information Assurance.

We help secure other government departments IT systems so that the UK’s government network is safe from cyber-attacks.

A. I work in the internal communications team managing GCHQ’s internal websites. Due

C. I joined the LGBT network not long after I started at GCHQ back in 2001. GCHQ also have an official Pride committee, which I was elected on to in 2014.

As a committee member, I help promote LGBT

GCHQ HEADQUARTERS@CROWN COPYRIGHT

issues in the department and also liaise with other government departments to promote local events and causes such as Transgender Remembrance Day. A. I have been a member of the LGBT network for the past 5 years or so.

Like Carol, within the last year I decided I would like to take a more active role and was also elected to be a member of the Pride@GCHQ committee.

What is GCHQ’s LGBT Network like, are there many members and is it a social group?

C. The network was formed in the 1990s following the lifting of the ban on employing homosexuals at GCHQ. The purpose of the network is to support its membership and help the Department achieve its diversity and inclusion objectives.

A. At last count, there were approximately 80 members, though that’s probably increased now.

The group has been fairly quiet with regard to social events in the past, but it is something we are trying to actively work on.

What kind of events and activities does the Network promote - internally and/ or externally?

A. There are a number of events that we mark internally for example, IDAHO (International Day against Homophobia), World AIDS Day and of course LGBT History Month. For IDAHO last year, among other activities, we raised the Rainbow Pride flag outside the building for the day. We plan to repeat this again for 2015 and our director is really supportive of our activities.

C. Externally there are articles listed on the GCHQ External website including an interview with an employee on Shout Out; an online radio station based in Bristol. Employees also attend Stonewall Annual Conference and several members participate in the Stonewall Leadership Programme.

A. During LGBT History month, we usually pick a subject to look in to and write a series of internal articles about.

This year we’re focusing

on what it’s like to be LGBT around the globe.

Do you think it’s important companies in general have an LGBT Network and why?

C. Yes it is important companies in general have an LGBT network because staff perform better when they are able to be themselves and a network scheme encourages this.

Companies showing serious commitment towards diversity issues have better skilled workforce and are more responsive, creative and flexible.

A. I think it is really important too. Even if you aren’t an active member, just having an LGBT network in your organisation gives a strong, positive message about your company’s attitude towards LGBT issues and diversity in general C. Of course, it was only in 1993 that you were allowed to be openly gay and work at GCHQ, so for us when the group was established in 1996, it was a really positive step.

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GCHQ HEADQUARTERS@CROWN COPYRIGHT

Have you seen “The Imitation Game”?

Did you enjoy it?

C. No, but I have heard a lot about it. I have already pre-ordered it on blu-ray waiting for its release date 9th March. I have noticed that there is an online petition started

by Benedict Cumberbatch to get a pardon for all 49,000 gay men who were prosecuted before 1967. It is a shame that many of them may no longer be with us.

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A. My partner and myself have unlimited cinema cards, so there aren’t many films that we haven’t seen! In all honesty, he didn’t think much of it, but it’s not his kind of film. I really enjoyed it though.

Seeing a person whose life and work affected so much of what we do today (both at GCHQ and generally), portrayed on film was really interesting.

Plus, who doesn’t like Benedict Cumberbatch.

In order to be offered the job as code-breaker at Bletchley Park, Alan Turing had to complete a Daily Telegraph crossword in less than 12 minutes. Would it be safe to assume it’s a little different these days at GCHQ? C. Yes very different today although I’m sure we have some that could rival that time!

A. The recruitment process can be fairly intense, although it depends on which campaign you apply for. When I joined the department in 2008, we had series of texts to test our analytical skills as well as things like Mathematics and Literacy etc. (no crosswords though).

How do you think Alan Turing would be treated in today’s society and at GCHQ? C. Hopefully he would have been treated like a hero and would also have received a knighthood.

A. There are still a lot of similarities between the code-breakers of the Second World War and those that we employ today. Both groups are highly intelligent people who work selflessly towards catching unpleasant people and preventing terrible things from happening.

C. Although the challenges and threats we face are very different, the organisation is still full of computer whizzkids and we’re still at the forefront of technology.

What qualities are looked for in order to work for GCHQ?

A. His homosexuality certainly wouldn’t have adversely affected him nowadays, nor would it bar his availability to hold a security clearance.

I like to think that he would have stayed at the organisation for a long and fulfilling career and would have retired from a high ranking position as a happy man.

A. We actively look to employ a really diverse workforce, so it’s really hard to list exactly what we look for in our staff. I guess some of the main qualities are an inquisitive mind, the ability to work in a team towards a common goal and an appetite for puzzle solving.

What similarities are there between the codebreakers of the Second World War and those who work for GCHQ?

C. We look for people with a range of technical and non-technical skills. We employ everything from brilliant Mathematicians and Computer Programmers;

to highly skilled Project Managers and Finance Specialists.

Finally, how would you fare if you were pitted against Alan Turing today in a code-breaking competition and why?

C. Badly, my skills are not in code-breaking!

I would have to find a colleague to help or some sophisticated device equivalent to Alan Turing’s Bombe, the machine he was instrumental in developing during World War II, to crack the Enigma code.

A. Unaided, I’d do terribly! I’m a communicator, not an analyst or a code-breaker!

However if we had use of the computers which he was so instrumental in creating, I might stand more of a chance.

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My Name is Charlie MY LIFE , MY JOURNEY , MY TRUTH

BY CHARLIE

My name is Charlie and I’m a 22 year old and Transgender woman from London. I realised I was Trans about a year and a half ago, or rather I accepted I was Trans a year and a half ago. Really I have always known I was Transgender but growing up on a tough council estate where boys are expected to be men, my femininity was something that got me bullied so I tried my best to repress it, but this only led to me spiralling into a deep depression.

I vividly remember the night I accepted I was transgender though. I remember looking in the mirror and seeing my long hair as a signifier of the femininity I resented within myself and I decided that shaving it off would turn me into the man I was trying so hard to be. 5 minutes later I stood surrounded by the hair I had spent so long trying to grow and I looked in the mirror

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expecting to see this tough man looking back at me but I didn’t see a man, I saw a scared, bald, sick, little girl. I’ll never forget that reflection. I looked into my sunken eyes and in that one defining moment I could see what I had been trying to deny for so long. I am transgender.

I came out the bathroom and broke down to my mum. I wasn’t crying because I was worried she would reject me for being transgender and I wasn’t crying because I didn’t want to be transgender, I was crying because I was so angry that I had forced myself to be someone I wasn’t for so many years, I had wasted some of the best years of my life being painfully unhappy because I hated who I was. Not gonna lie I was also crying because I was just about to start living my life as a woman and I’d just shaved all

my damn hair off…but mainly the first reason.

The first thing I did was book an appointment with my GP because naturally I’d Googled “what to do if you think you’re transgender” and that’s what Google told me. Sadly Google didn’t tell me the way I would be treated by my GP when I came to him for help. The first thing he asked when I told him I was transgender was what the word transgender meant. They must have forgot to teach him that during his ten year medical degree, but I kindly informed him what the term means and he in return kindly informed me that I “will never be a woman” and that “the NHS do not do that”. I told him that the NHS do care for people like me but he insisted that there was nothing he could do for me and he asked me to leave. I cried all the way home, tears of anger

more than anything else, I was just so furious that this man who had been put in place to help me was blocking me from the help I am entitled to by law. I still lose sleep over that experience to this day and it’s a sad reality that I’m far from the only trans person who suffers this discrimination and neglect from my GP (sort it out NHS).

Luckily, the people who actually matter in my life accepted and embraced me when I told them I’m transgender. Initially, I told everyone apart from my Nana, because being 85 years old and the most religious person ever, I was worried she might not ‘get’ the whole trans thing and she really is my world so I didn’t want to risk losing her. But then one day we were having a chat over a cup of tea like we did every Friday when I’d come over and care for her and she could tell there was something wrong with me. I told her it was nothing, but she wouldn’t give in until I told her and in the end I just burst out crying and told her that I’m Transgender and she just looked me in the eyes and said “God loves you and I love you and that’s all that matters”. I

will cherish those words for as long as I live.

Not long after this my Nana passed away, but I am so thankful I told her my truth and got her blessing because I carry those words with me everywhere I go with such pride in my heart.

She was the strongest woman I’ve ever known and I hope to one day be half of the woman she was. I’ve recently legally changed my name and I took my Nana’s name and my mum’s name for my middle names, honouring the 2 most inspirational and important women in my life.

a supportive family and friends, I still face discrimination on a daily basis like every other trans woman in this world but despite this I have never been happier than I am now because I’m finally living my truth authentically and when you love and accept yourself for who you truly are it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks, does or says. Now I not only accept myself as trans but I’m so proud to be transgender so when I look back to that defining moment a year and half ago, I don’t see it as a breakdown, but rather as a break through.

My break through.

Though I really am very lucky to have such

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ALAN TURING

THE MAN BEHIND THE ENIGMA

BY DR ANDREW HODGES

ALAN TURING IN AUG 1939 WITH THE REFUGEE BOYS PIC PERMISSION FROM THE TURING FAMILY

Alan Turing lived from 1912 to 1954 in a British world that is now hard to imagine. Many people don’t know, or just can’t believe, that all gay male sexual activity was illegal until 1967. Until then, public discourse was all of prevention, treatment, vetting, punishment — or, for the bravely progressive, tolerance.

Few pictures of love and friendship survive. And there are few pictures of Alan Turing: no film, no audio recording. There are, of course, documents and writings. Many are held in the Cambridge archive and can be seen on www.turingarchive.org.

One of them is a copy of his will, made shortly before his death. It is raw gay history.

A recent government statement described him as leaving his estate to ‘colleagues’, and this is unfortunately typical of how gay and lesbian history, even now, is thoughtlessly hidden. They were not ‘colleagues’: they were his gay-supportive friends, his Geordie boyfriend Neville amongst them. His will was a very strong statement of resistance to social conformity, and one that could not be blotted out.

Otherwise, in the 1960s,

a single line in the King’s College, Cambridge, magazine describing him being a ‘retailer of scandal, particularly that concerning himself’ was the only coded reference in print to Alan Turing’s own open and unapologetic gay identity.

Fortunately, those friends’ personal memories survived as well as documents, and this is how Alan Turing’s story reached me in the early 1970s. Turing was well known in science as the great theorist of computer science, and as a mathematics student myself, it meant something special when I

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which was cut off by his death in 1954.

heard through his friends of what had happened to him when prosecuted in 1952. In 1977 I also learnt that he had also been the chief scientific figure in Second World War codebreaking, and then I knew there was an aching gap in world history, which needed to be filled. Everything about Alan Turing was in disconnected fragments. I set out to join them together in a complete story, describing his life as a gay man in the changing twentieth-century world.

He was at the centre of that change. His

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1936 concept of the universal machine created the principle of the computer and of computer programming.

When in 1939 he tackled the Enigma-enciphered messages, as used by Nazi Germany, it was part of the sweeping digital revolution that he began in the 1930s, which culminated first in his electronic computer design of 1946 and then his futuristic proposals for Artificial Intelligence.

In 1950 he started afresh with a new biological theory, and this was the computer-based work, at the forefront of scientific research today,

The breaking of the Enigma ciphers was kept secret until the 1970s.

Only then did it emerge that this industrial-scale operation was based on the Bombes, brilliantly designed by Turing and his colleague Gordon Welchman in 1939, and which chugged away in their growing hundreds from March 1940 onwards. Only in the 1970s was it possible to understand and put together such disparate things as Turing’s pre-war projects, the Polish mathematicians’ contribution, and the dramatic events of the Battle of the Atlantic.

But even the origin of the post-war computer had its hidden history too. One fascinating part of conducting a biographical study lies finding the links which anticipate the emergence of great events. One such came to light through investigating Turing’s role in the later part of the war. In 1942-43 he was the top-level technical liaison when the Enigma breaking became a joint Anglo-American enterprise. But while in the USA, he also had to vet the advanced

speech scrambling used for Churchill-Roosevelt conversations, and this role gave him access to the new technology of electronics. His 194445 work on a speech scrambler of his own design gave him handson experience, and it was this that allowed him to emerge at VE day with a plan for a first modern electronic computer.

Remarkably, this also marked his emergence into the post-war world with a more confident gay identity, as he chatted away to his rather shocked young engineer assistant about his life.

Alan Turing was never pushy, perhaps to a fault, because he didn’t work to win people over. He did his own thing, a scruffy beatnik ahead of time, and perhaps too much expected other people to appreciate it immediately.

When he met with resistance, he tended to move sideways rather than confront it. He didn’t promote himself and never advertised himself as architect of the computer revolution.

Rather typically, the most direct statement he made was to a newspaper sports reporter, interviewing him after an athletics meeting on Boxing Day 1946 (Turing was a champion longdistance runner). He was reported as ‘diffident’ in asserting his central role in the Electronic Brain but as saying that the Americans had done the ‘donkey work’. Hi wry, somewhat edgy humour bounces off the page in his famous ‘Turing Test’ for Artificial Intelligence, which begins with an ‘imitation game’ of a man posing as a woman and goes on to imagine a computer responding to a teasing allusion to Shakespeare’s sonnets.

Those looking for coded lives (and deaths) will find rich material in the cyanide-poisoned apple with which he met his death. Here is a surreal strand of story that goes back at least to his frustrated love-life of 1937. It runs through seeing Disney’s Snow White in 1939, and his setting up of a home

chemistry lab in March 1953 at the time of a new crisis. The police (‘the poor sweeties’, he called them) were watching him, and his defiant escapes from British law to Scandinavia and Greece must have been the last straw for security officers. (Their reports would make interesting reading!) A year later he performed the chemistry experiment, in a way that allowed others to believe it was an accident.

The fatal apple also involves his young running partner Alan Garner, in 1951 a Manchester Grammar School sixth-former, who heard Turing expound on the ambiguous life-anddeath imagery in the Snow White scene. We can only guess at what Alan Turing made of his own extraordinary life, but public recognition of it has certainly ended his Sleeping Death.

Copyright Andrew Hodges 2015

Alan Turing was never pushy, perhaps to a fault, because he didn’t work to win people over.

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Oscar Wilde A PROFILE

BY BARRY QUINN

The infamous “Wilde Trials” of 1895 are often cited as English society’s first insight into the homosexual identity, and they sparked a century-long struggle for equality amongst minority sexualities still ongoing today.

The trials resulted in Oscar Wilde, a celebrated writer and poet of his day, being incarcerated for two years for “gross indecency”, a term at the time used to describe any so-called unnatural sexual practices.

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It is impossible to separate Wilde’s life from his literature and it is often noted that Wilde’s blatant writing of homosexual desire, as he so did in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, saw to his downfall. Wilde chose to write about same-sex desire, and he went as far as saying that he saw himself in the character of Dorian Gray. He is quoted to have said “Basil is what I think I am; Lord Henry is what the world thinks of me; Dorian is what

I would like to be - in other ages, perhaps”.

According to some literary critics, the term “homosexual” was only introduced to the English Language because society had become aware of the homosexual identity due to the well-publicised Wilde Trials, and therefore needed a term by which to refer to it. The term “homosexual” was not introduced to the English Language until 1892, through a translation of Krafft-Ebing’s

Psychopathia Sexualis (first published in 1887), two years after the publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. “Homosexual” predates that of “heterosexual”, the latter of which was only coined to differentiate once the homosexual identity had been fully realised. It is because of Wilde’s novel and subsequent incarceration that English society has a term by which to refer to same-sex desire.

Because of the instability of terminology at the time when Wilde was writing, Dorian’s sexuality is never named, and is rather only hinted at numerously. Instead Wilde implemented several literary tropes to hint, without ever specifically stating, that Dorian Gray engaged in same-sex encounters.

These include darkness and secrecy, opium abuse and referring to Dorian’s desires as a disease.

These references were explicit enough for extracts from The Picture of Dorian Gray to be used to help strengthen legal claims made by the Marquess of Queensbury, John Douglass, which led to Wilde facing prosecution. Wilde had engaged in an affair with Douglass’ son and his legal council

appropriated Wilde’s own words and interpreted them as a representation of homosexual love.

Reportedly the section “I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly.

I wanted to have you all to myself’, taken from The Picture of Dorian Gray, was quoted during the Wilde Trials, from which Wilde was asked by Douglass’ prosecution whether he had ever adored a young man madly. To this Wilde replied “no, not madly. I prefer love.” By answering the question without dismissing the prosecutions interpretation of the novel, Wilde all but confirmed its homosexual content which inexplicably led to his downfall.

Following two years incarceration, Wilde exiled himself to France where he died of meningitis in isolation three years later aged just 46.

Indeed, Oscar Wilde himself became a sort of substitute for “homosexuality” within society; E. M. Forster famously referred to the titular character in Maurice as “an unspeakable of the Oscar Wilde sort”, suggesting that many recognised the impact that Wilde, and the Wilde Trials, had upon shaping and

defining homosexuality within society.

If Oscar Wilde’s famous downfall is indeed the starting point for English society’s insight into homosexuality, it is surely Wilde whom many have to thank for the current state of things. English society has come a long way since Wilde’s incarceration 120 years ago. Reportedly over 1,000 men were in prison in England and Wales by 1955 for homosexual acts, and in 1957 the Wolfenden Report was published in Britain which advised the British Government to legalise homosexuality. It took a further 10 years for homosexuality to be legalised in Britain, when the Sexual Offences Bill of 1967 came into effect. This allowed two consenting men over the age of 21 to engage in homosexual acts in private. No third parties were allowed to be present, and these acts had to take place in the engaging parties’ homes.

It required a further 33 years for these shackles to be overturned.

Because of these changes it cannot be stressed enough how important Oscar Wilde, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, are.

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How far we’ve come GENDERED INTELLIGENCE

BY JAY STEWART In the last year a lot of people have been talking about a tipping point around trans visibility.

We can agree things are certainly changing for trans communities across England as well as further afield. We might also agree however that there is a lot of work to do if we are to ensure that trans people, and young trans people in particular, feel happy and safe at school, at home

as well as out there in the wider community.

The number of people identifying themselves as trans or questioning their gender identity is growing. In addition, this self-recognition is often happening at an earlier point in life. Nowadays there are so many young people who are speaking out and speaking up for who they are and who they wish to become. The

The number of people identifying themselves as trans or questioning their gender identity is growing.

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problem is that despite all the media presence people in everyday life (parents and carers, teachers and other professionals as well as other young people) still don’t know enough about what it means to be trans or non-binary or when a person is questioning their gender identity or expressing it in ways that are different to social expectations.

In the last twelve months Gendered Intelligence has branched out to deliver more youth groups in different parts of the country and at different age ranges. We now have an 11-15 year old group, we have a group for black, Asian and ethnic minority trans people, and new groups

in Leeds and Bristol.

Last year we worked with just over 100 people, now we work with about 100 young people every month.

At these groups we focus on improving social networks and reducing isolation, achieving a sense of selfempowerment through access to accurate, up to date and age appropriate information and increasing confidence.

We want our young people to be resilient, which means being able to manage setbacks and difficult situations. But we believe that in order to really improve the lives of young trans people we need to make the world more intelligent about gender. This is a big project and to achieve these grand ambitions we work in partnership with other organisations in order to get messages out there that celebrating gender diversity is good for everyone.

We talk a lot in our community about the “politics of representation”, which

is about how trans identities are made public and for what purposes those representations serve. We know that a significant way to improve the lives of young trans people is to get important messages out there. It makes sense for Gendered Intelligence to work with those sectors and industries that engage in culture – this is not just TV and newspapers, but also museums, galleries, theatres… Recently we have worked on great projects including ‘What makes your gender?’ at the Science Museum, ‘Transvengers’ at the Wellcome Collection as part of the Institute of Sexology, ‘Puffball’, the LGBTQ circus production at the Roundhouse

and ‘Pronoun’, the play produced as part of the Theatre Connections at the National Theatre.

We are also currently working with the Football Association supporting them with their trans inclusion policies and guidance. We have made a short film in order to reach out to other arts, sports and cultural organisations up and down the country. You can check it out here: http:// genderedintelligence. co.uk/professionals/ partnerships

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FROM THE DAWN OF PHOTOGRAPHY TO NOW MY JIGSAW PIECES OF LGBT HISTORY

BY PETER PAUL HARTNETT

Beyond almost four decades of my own personal photographic work documenting global youth culture in a raw and real way, beyond my contemporary collection of the best street and club photography by the likes of Sex Pistols photographer Ray Stevenson and New Romantics chronicler Derek Ridgers, is a personal collection dating back to the dawn of photography. In amongst the earliest forms of photographic processes depicting all manner of sartorial splendour are images of private parties, sometimes wildly themed and risqué.

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I have collected photographs of affectionate same sex couples for close to twenty years in a wide range of formats, from tintypes to cabinets and real photo postcards.

As a child, I was raised in my parent’s old people’s home in Ealing, West London. Heywood House was a business both owned and managed by my resourceful mother, a home for two dozen ladies and gents. Each room was a different world.

Each individual had one thing in common.

They all came to their final stop with a photo

album amongst their collection of prized possessions. How they loved to tell stories.

Perhaps it was those albums, all those stories, which later steered me towards being a photographer and writer.

I loved those large, thick, heavy albums; the various formats of photographic image, from elaborate studio backdrops to the various stamps of the photographer’s name and address. I was always impressed by the delicate images, those which needed to be kept under glass in hinged cases, lined with worn-thin satin or velvet, and the often scratched and dented

images produced on small strips of steel, tintypes.

Of course, these subjects of various ages, races and relationships are a visual mystery tour. The subjects are invariably unidentified people in often unidentified places, captured by anonymous photographers. Visuals from another time, another world, no longer in frames or albums that once cherished them.

Astonishingly, around 25,000 vintage photographs are up for grabs on e-Bay each day, available for bids or BUY IT NOW clicks. For a couple of years my bank statements were reading PayPal, PayPal, PayPal.

I also buy at specialist fairs, auctions, and I advertise in specialist photographic magazines in the WANTED section.

Totally anorak!

Educated by Benedictine monks at an all boys Catholic school in West London’s Ealing that would make the tabloids for all the wrong reasons in later years, I first began taking photographs at the age of nine when I won a little black plastic camera as a bingo prize at a British holiday resort. My first subjects were weary donkeys on the beach and starfish trapped in shallow pools.

New Romantics in the 80s to Ecstasy-driven ravers and total fashion victims in the 90s and fashion freaks at Fashion Week Events, I’ve spent close to four decades documenting midnight’s children and the world of the heavilyaddicted fashionista.

Within all that, there has always been an LGBT element that extends beyond the marginal.

I’m drawn to outsiders, eccentrics, those who want to have a gay ol’ time, whatever the oppression around them.

I’m drawn to individuals who go against the flow of mainstream culture,

From punks in the late 70s, Goths and

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PETER PAUL HARTNETT’S PHOTOGRAPHY AND WRITING characters who dare to be themselves.

With the vintage photographs that I collect, I feel a strong link to the past, from the manner in which subjects were posed, right down to the basic photographic techniques that those largely unknown photographers adopted, similar to my own approaches, avoiding complication.

What these vintage photographs have in

DIGEST. HE HAS CONTRIBUTED TO WGSN (THE INDUSTRY-BASED

common is that they are heart-warming visuals, jigsaw pieces of LGBT history.

In terms of Social History, such vintage treasure has survived perhaps with a message, being one that demonstrates that same sex love was daring to glow, long before changes in law, back in the late 1960s and that we have to unite to fight against LGBT oppression in countries where some are jailed and even given a death penalty for daring to be ‘different’.

HAVE BEEN PUBLISHED ON AN INTERNATIONAL BASIS AND EXHIBITED IN LONDON, NEW YORK AND SHANGHAI. HE IS AN AWARD-WINNING AUTHOR OF NOVELS SUCH AS SIXTEEN AND ROCK ‘N’ ROLL SUICIDE AND ONCE RAN A CLUB FOR DRAG KINGS, WOMEN WHO DRESS AS MEN. (NAIVE, 1995-1996.) HE HAS EDITED THREE COLLECTIONS OF SHORT FICTION, TWO OF WHICH WERE FOR GT. OVER THE YEARS, PETER PAUL HAS CONTRIBUTED TO PUBLICATIONS RANGING FROM I-D, DAZED & CONFUSED, V MAN TO CHINA’S VISION AND FASHION TREND

Gay activism comes in many forms, and generations need to remember the likes of Culture Club’s Boy George and clubland’s Leigh Bowery daring to show their individuality and lead others to dare to be anything but the ‘norm’. Behind those masks of seeming eccentricity, there was often rage, rage against decades of oppression.

FASHION FORECASTING SITE) FOR PROLONGED PERIODS IN THE PAST AND REGULARLY LECTURES UPON FASHION DESIGN, FASHION JOURNALISM AND PHOTOGRAPHY AT A NUMBER OF LEADING UNIVERSITIES IN THE UK. PETER PAUL HAS A REGULAR COLUMN ENTITLED ‘THOUGHT GRENADE’ ON UTHZINE.COM, WHICH OFTEN INCORPORATES VALUABLE ASPECTS OF LGBT HERITAGE. TO SEE SOME OF PAUL HARTNETT’S COLLECTION GO TO WWW.PYMCA.COM AND SEARCH : HARTNETT

WORDS AND PHOTOGRAPHS BY PETER PAUL HARTNETT (C) HARTNETT / YOUTH CLUB

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CANCER IS A DRAG CANCER IS A DRAG IS A NEW SMALL CHARITY ON THE LGBT SCENE, BORNE OUT OF FIRST-HAND PERSONAL EXPERIENCES OF ITS FOUNDER, ALAN BUGG. Alan was diagnosed with Grade 4 Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma in September 2010 and initially spent nearly a year off work whilst receiving 8 cycles of RCVP chemotherapy treatment.

A successful remission was challenged with a second diagnosis seven months later. This meant more chemotherapy, time off work and financial hardship, with difficulty finding the money to keep up mortgage and bill payments. After seeking support from Macmillan Cancer Support and talking to others living with cancer, Alan soon realised that he was not alone in his financial struggle and found that very little help was available to release this added burden - struggling to survive physically, mentally, emotionally and financially became a real drag!

Being a fan of Drag Artists on TV and in cabaret, and having tried a bit of drag himself at parties

and in Pride Parades as his alter-ego Diva Vera, Alan came up with the idea of fundraising to give financial support to people and their families living with cancer by organising drag related events. June 2012, Cancer Is A Drag signed a Small Charities Constitution, and an official fundraising group was created with Macmillan Cancer Support to assist in providing much-needed financial assistance to people living with cancer and their families.

A soft launch took place on the scene at London/ World Pride 2012, but unfortunately this was followed by Alan’s third cancer diagnosis, necessitating a stem cell transplant to survive. This put things on hold for a while, but Alan bounced back with an official launch on the LGBT scene at London venues Halfway II Heaven and The Wayout

PHOTO CREDIT – FRANC-OFF GODEVI

Club, raising a very encouraging £2026.81.

Last year CIAD again took part in London Pride, once again supported by many of the scene’s well-known Drag Queens. Enough money was raised to enable the charity to award more than £2300 worth of Financial Assistance Grants (ranging from £100-£300) to individuals and their families living with cancer, give children and young adults over £300 worth of Christmas presents on cancer-related wards and respite homes in London and Cambridge and also donate just under £1500 to Macmillan Cancer Support’s grant giving pot.

CIAD’s main aim is to provide financial support where it is most needed, freeing up the beneficiaries to deal with the disease and its treatments – to stop cancer being any more of a drag than it already is - a much needed resource unfortunately not readily available elsewhere.

As well as much-needed donations, CIAD urgently needs sponsorship and willing volunteers to donate a little time so that the charity can support more beneficiaries. To make a donation please visit their website at www.cancerisadrag.org.

If you would like to volunteer in any way or can help with sponsorship you can contact the Founder and Trustees by email at info@cancerisadrag.org. To find out more you can give them a visit on social media at facebook.com/CancerisaDrag and twitter.com/cancer_isadrag.

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LGBTHM 2015

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