Last night I attended the largest ever pre-launch event of LGBT History Month in the British Museum. Speakers included the Deputy Director of the museum, which has now launched a LGBT history trail and reference was made to the excellent Hadrian exhibition and others, which have featured LGBT history and major LGBT figures in world history. We also heard from ground breaking projects such as the 'Military Pride' project in the Imperial War Museum North in Manchester, which is now touring around various towns in the region, but there is still an exhibition running in the museum, and which includes hours of oral archives from those LGBT people who served in the armed forces right through from before World War II. Ben Bradshaw, the Culture Secretary, spoke about the importance of the cultural economy and how culture is one of the main methods of changing how LGBT people are regarded in society. He made reference to plays by LGBT playwrights running in major theatres and exhibitions by LGBT artists such as David Hockney.
We were encouraged to support the 'A Day in Hand' campaign http://www.adayinhand.com/
as the last barrier to be breached in tackling homophobia, but as one speaker from the black LGBT organisation Ruckus made clear, this is not always feasible and he described moving from Hampstead to Kentish Town as being similar to moving from London to Zimbabwe in terms of levels of homophobia. All of the speakers mentioned the rising levels of hate crime and homophobic violence and stressed how important the work of some of the projects present last night was in tackling this, as it is predominantly young people who are carrying out these attacks and the work of 'Schools Out' should be particularly mentioned in this respect. One of the curators of the British Museum pointed out how Camden schoolchildren had been brought to the museum that day and shown artefacts and objects from all over the world and from a range of civilisations, which demonstrated that homosexuality was a central part of many different civilisations and is in no way a modern or a Europen phenomenon.
I was also interviewed by the LGBT youth radio station http://www.fyiradio.net/ and will be broadcast there next week speaking about the significance of Vauxhall for the LGBT community in London, on Greens combating homophobia in Eastern Europe and on the importance of young people getting out to vote and voting against the BNP in areas such as Barking etc.
Altogether an inspiring evening and congrats to all who worked hard to pull it off. As Michael Cashman MEP also said, the British Museum also deserves a vote of thanks for hosting the event and for fully supporting LGBT history related activities. There were too many inspiring projects last night to mention but more information can be gained from the LGBT History Month website and certainly people should attend local events in February because, as Trevor Philips, Chair of the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, said last night "LGBT history is part of all our history and we have many identities - black, disabled, female, male, etc." But we are reminded on a daily basis that persecution continues of LGBT people in Iran, Uganda, Lithuania etc and we must continue to resist it.
Finally, as was pointed out in one of the speeches, the struggles for LGBT rights of the past are what have produced the rights we have today but that struggle must be continued, or we risk, as in Weimar Germany, losing those rights in the future.
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