Self-described “black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet”, Audre Lorde dedicated both her life and her creative talent to confronting and addressing injustices of racism, sexism, classism, and homophobia
Former editor and multi-award winning bestselling author Kacen Callender of multiple novels for children, teens, and adults, including the National Book Award-winning King and the Dragonflies and the bestselling novel Felix Ever After, Kacen Callendar is a leading contemporary Black, trans, nonbinary author .
James Baldwin has been praised for writing one of the greatest English language novels, “Go Tell It on the Mountain”. A gay, Black civil and human rights activist, Baldwin wrote essays calling for human equality and became a well-known public figure and orator, especially during the civil rights movement in the United States. Baldwin became equally famous for his essays and political writing, which spanned the gamut of from race to sexuality, love to jazz, and addiction to identity politics, all of which remain as contentious and relevant today as they were when they were first published.
If you are researching the history of the University, the City or any other aspect of local history, don’t forget to check out the University Archive, which brings together records and objects from the current university, its predecessors and associated organisations all the way back to 1869 as well as housing the Landau collection bequeathed by LGBTQ+ author, sculptor and academic Prof. Rom Landau.
Some of our greatest thinkers and authors have been LGBTQ+. They have offered refreshingly different perspectives on everyday life and many wrote stories and essays that shared their intersectional lived experience as LGBTQ+ women and or people of the global …
Today, we celebrate the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings that marked the beginning of the end for the Nazi regime and the turning point of the Second World War, LGBTQ+ Pride Month celebrating sexual and gender diversity around the world, and Gypsy, Roma, Traveller History Month celebrating the rich cultural diversity and history of this marginalised community.
D-Day was the start of the overthrow of the Nazi killing machine. The D-Day invasion represented a major turning point in the Allied battle against the Nazis that had systematically isolated and exterminated millions in an attempt to purge Nazi occupied territories of Jews, Roma, the disabled, LGBTQ+ people and other marginalised groups by forces including many LGBTQ+ people who were forced to conceal their sexual orientation from their own comrades.
Lesbian, gay, bi, trans, intersex and asexual and other sexually and gender diverse people people have survived persecution and having their identities criminalised throughout history and continue to experience prejudice and discrimination around the world. Many LGBTQ+ people also experience intersectional oppression as a result of also their neurodivergent, PGM, and have other oppressed and other marginalised identities. This post begins to explore how you can help make the world a better place for everyone, including LGBTQ+ people.
As LGBTQIA+ History Month draws to an end, it is time to look at the state of affairs as they stand now and ask how far have we actually come and what else should we do?
On 28 June 1969, police raided a gay club in Greenwich Village, New York. Not an unsurprising event – it was still illegal for men to dance together in a nightclub, let alone have consensual sexual relationships, and “masquerading” as the opposite sex, for example, as a drag queen, was also a crime. A club such as Stonewall, which was attended mostly by Black and Latinx men and drag queens, was somewhere the police expected to close down without incident. Instead, the anger of the racially and sexually oppressed erupted into a riot, in turn spawning further riots and protests across the city. The riots focused national attention on the social injustice faced by homosexuals in America and sparked the conversation about tolerance and equality that has seen so much change until today.
Why do we have LGBTQIA+ Pride marches and why have we never had straight pride marches? Which historical figures were gay? What have LGBT people ever done for us? Find the answers in the latest LGBTQIA+ History Month display “Pride in our past”.
