Hackney celebrates LGBT+ History Month with line-up of events across February
Hackney has launched LGBT+ History Month with the flying of the inclusive rainbow flag, which features extra colours to represent transgender people and queer people of colour, over the Town Hall and throughout February.
This year’s LGBT+ History Month will be supported by a programme of events curated by Hackney’s Pride365, which celebrates the borough’s historic, diverse and boundary-breaking LGBTQIA+ community all year round. Events include:
- LGBT history intersecting with activism talk by Richard and Kieran Kirkwood at VDF (formerly Vogue Fabrics Dalston)
- Hackney history walk with Lavinia Co-Op
- Hackney Archives podcast on collecting historical LGBTQ materials
- Rio cinema panel discussion and screening
- Faggamuffin panel discussion around black carnival and LGBTQ communities - live and streamed online
As part of the LGBT+ History Month programme, February will see the launch of Hackney Archives’ first podcast. Hosted by James Kemp, it will be a curated conversation between Archivist, Hannah Milton, and drag king, Don One, aka spoken word performer Bad Lay-Dee.
This year’s theme for LGBT+ History Month ‘Politics In Art’ shows how art and creativity can be used with great impact to make a strong statement, leaving a lasting legacy for future generations to learn from and remember.
Hackney is proud to be a diverse borough in which people of different gender identities, nationalities, ethnicities and sexualities can safely and happily call home. Our history helps us to recognise that we can never afford to be complacent if we are to maintain a reputation for an open, inclusive and tolerant borough.
The programme of Hackney Pride365 events for LGBT+ History Month promotes some of the valuable work of Hackney’s LGBTQIA+ organisations and highlights many relevant authors, artists and creatives across our Archives and Museum platforms. It also emphasises the Council's ongoing commitment to diversity and gender diverse inclusion which continues to be enhanced and embedded across the borough.
As well as being fun and educational, the programme helps showcase Hackney’s strong history of empowering diverse communities and effecting positive change. It is important we take the time to reflect on our history to learn lessons from the past.
Notes to editors
In 2017 Hackney Museum launched a campaign to collect LGBTQIA+ stories, which resulted in two exhibitions and the recording of five oral history interviews, including Elly Barnes MBE discussing the impact of Section 28. Transcripts are available to read by searching “LGBT” on Hackney Museum’s online collections
The continuation of this work has been taken up by the Museum’s sister service: Hackney Archives. Archivists, based in Dalston’s CLR James Library, have been researching the Borough’s historic collections to find the hidden LGBT+ histories.
There will be opportunities to discover some of the stories and collections at a Hackney Archives at Show & Tell events later in the month.
All event details will be listed on the Love Hackney LGBT+ history page.