Archives for BACKGROUND PERSPECTIVES

Why we all need our own tribe, whatever our age, wherever we live

Collective living can be difficult for older LGBTQ+ people when residents or staff are unwelcoming or downright hostile but connecting with other queer people can make all the difference. This is Cecilia’s story. When Cecilia moved into sheltered accommodation with Anchor Trust Housing 10 years ago, she was initially wary about coming out to the other residents in her new East London home. She had moved to London to escape not one but two bouts of homophobic harassment, first in Manchester and later in Derbyshire, and wanted to do everything she could to avoid a third in her new surroundings. Cecilia

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Unlocking the closet doors in our care homes

When older LGBTQ+ people leave their own flats or houses and move into sheltered housing or care homes, many of them have to ask themselves if they want to come out to everyone in the collective living community they are joining. There are all sorts of reasons that might give them pause. The marketing leaflet may not have included any photographs of same-sex couples. The onsite staff may have assumed they were heterosexual or cis-gendered without asking them. Their new neighbours may have been overheard making prejudiced remarks – about other residents, staff members or people on TV. And all

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Outside, looking in

Veteran gay activist Ted Brown, who came out before LGBT people had any rights in the UK, has dedicated his life to combating racism and homophobia since joining the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1970, after meeting a group of activists picketing The Boys in the Band in London’s West End. Ted Brown had been aware of his feelings for other boys at school when he was 11 or 12, but it was the discovery of a Tom of Finland book in a Popular Books store in New Cross, London, when he was 15 that convinced him this was not a phase. “I

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Answering the call of the dancefloor

He was playing Donna Summer records at his sister’s house parties when he was still at primary school, won a DJ contest when he was still a teenager in Italy, and has been spinning at Horse Meat Disco for more than a decade. Who better to DJ our preview party than Severino Panzetta? From the moment we started organising the preview night for We Raise Our Hands In The Sanctuary at The Albany this summer, our first choice to DJ the after-party was Severino Panzetta, the languidly approachable resident at Horse Meat Disco, the south London gay night that no less an authority than legendary

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The thump of the music, like some powerful creature barely contained

Steve Swindells, the club promoter, musician, photographer and all-round creative, reflects on how he put together the pioneering and inclusive LGBT club The Lift in the 1980s, and helped inspire gay novelist Alan Hollinghurst. Tracking queer spaces of the past can be tricky when there is so little trace left in the present – even when the past in question is the relatively recent 1980s, the era in which we have set our new show, We Raise Our Hands In The Sanctuary. The wrecking ball has demolished the bricks and mortar of many spaces, change of ownership or wholesale refurbishment has

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Dancing to a different beat in Deptford: from Outdance to We Raise Our Hands

  Back in the late 1980s, the Albany used to host a weekly LGBT club night that attracted hundreds of revellers from the local community and beyond every Saturday. Former promoter Brendan Nash explains how it all came about. The Albany in Deptford has a fantastic tradition of developing LGBTQ work like our new show We Raise Our Hands In The Sanctuary, which tells a gay friendship story set in the 1980s London underground gay club scene. Around the same time they scheduled a week of research and development for this show as part of their Hatched new writing programme,

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The marriage night is the entrance into some prison: getting out of textual jail in rehearsal

Long before we started rehearsals for Cover Her Face, our adaptation of John Webster’s The Duchess Of Malfi as a 1950s trans honour killing, we spent a lot of time working on the text. By the first readthrough, we thought we had cracked most, if not all, of the problems we had set ourselves by re-casting the protagonist as a wealthy socialite from 1950s London who wished to live as a woman (around the time that French gynaecologist Georges Burou was conducting the first wave of post-war gender reassignment operations at his clinic in Casablanca.) Many ‘sisters’ had become ‘brothers’,

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