Into The Outside: The Story So Far

Into the Outside is a major, multi-partner heritage-learning project with local young people, re-examining the city’s rich LGBTQ+ past and creating a new archive of queer youth experiences.

The exhibition charts the progress of the project and includes creative writing, photography and archive material.

Supported by respected photographer Helen Cammock, young participants are examining how issues faced today by young people identifying as LGBTQ+ compare with those faced by young LGBTQ+ people over the past forty years.

Participants are exploring a range of archive materials, including the National Lesbian and Gay Survey – an extraordinary collection of autobiographical writing and ephemera submitted by over 700 people between 1986 and 1994.

A collaboration with the Mass Observation Archive, Brighton & Hove Libraries Service, the East Sussex Record Office and Queer in Brighton.

University of Brighton Galleries – Grand Parade, 58-67 Grand Parade BN2 0JY. 1st October to 30th October. Free.

Download the beautiful exhibition guide here.

Writing The Century: The Experience Of Love

In 1993, Christopher Green was a scared young man, sitting alone in a hospital room with a dying man he barely knew. Chris had volunteered to be a Terrence Higgins Trust buddy, and had been introduced to the man in the bed: Kenneth Barrow, an actor and writer who had set up a mass observation diary project involving 700 gay men and lesbians. Asked to write anonymously about their everyday lives and loves, the contributors documented their lives during the years when HIV and AIDS first came to public attention, and Section 28 of the Local Government Act 1986, forbidding the 'promotion of homosexuality', was fought over and passed into law. They continued well after Kenneth's death and for over twenty years, when they were finally collected and archived as the National Lesbian and Gay Survey, alongside the Mass Observation archive at the University of Sussex...

BBC iPlayer.

The most beautiful, powerful and moving thing I've heard on the wireless all year.

Mass Observation: 75

Happy birthday!
And thanks for all the great work you've done - most of my favourite books are down to you.
"Ordinary people" rarely are - thank gawd.

x