London LGBTQ+ Strand Tours Bishopsgate Institute’s Special Collection and Archives
February 17, 2023
Authored By Roderick Dirkzwager
In honour of UK LGBT+ History Month in February, Covington’s London LGBTQ+ Strand attended an amazing tour of the Bishopsgate Institute’s Special Collection and Archives, which contains the UK’s largest LGBTQ+ archive. The unique tour was guided by the head archivist, Steph Dickers, who is responsible for starting the collection. Since its inception, the archive has amassed a library of 10,000+ titles and 300,000+ press cuttings. Established in 1894, Bishopsgate Institute was "erected for the benefit of the public," with the motto "I never stop learning."
Although anyone is able (and encouraged) to visit, Steph’s tour provided a unique perspective on the objects in the collection. The archive contains several esoteric items, some of which are recognisably ‘important’ to LGBTQ+ history. For instance, objects relating to the ‘Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners’ (the story of which will be familiar to anyone who has seen the British film ‘Pride’). Other items are more everyday, but shed light on personal stories and perspectives that would otherwise be lost without the work of the Bishopsgate Institute. In this category was the diary of a gay couple living in Brixton during the 1940s to 1970s, containing the mundanity of the ordinary life of a couple. Although spanning an era of seismic changes in LGBTQ+ rights, the subject of the diary is simply the banal details of daily routine. On the day that homosexuality was partially decriminalised in 1969, the diaries only document the couple’s ambivalent feelings towards a film they had seen in the cinema that afternoon! Other highlights include a bedframe that once belonged to a prolific London lesbian and a rare set of ‘Gay Monopoly,’ which was manufactured to raise funds to fight HIV in the 1970s.
As an LGBTQ+ person in the UK today, the tour was especially impactful for me. Queer acceptance and LGBTQ+ equality is typically seen as 21st century progress, but learning about so different LGBTQ+ stories reminded me that queer people have been around throughout history - even if their voices and stories were not always heard.
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