LGB/T Heritage Project
February 2008: What's On Where!
Find out what's on and what the Intercom Heritage project is up to during LGBT History Month (February) 2008! Have a look at our What's On page!
LGB/T Heritage in the peninsula
Thanks to stunning support from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Intercom has just started (June 2007) an eighteen-month project to enable local groups and local volunteers to celebrate LGBT History Month right across the South West peninsula.
Our ew Heritage Project Worker, Sarah, is already involved in:
- creating events and helping other people and organisations (including schools) to create their own events,
- facilitating and supporting local volunteers,
- researching local history,
- creating an archive for the future.
If you're interested---specially if you'd like to be involved in this yourself---send an e-mail to heritage (at) intercomtrust.org.uk, or call Sarah and the team on 01392 678743.
2008 will see the launch of LGBT History Month Footprints. These will be vinyl floor mats, which can be used safely on any flat surface!! (Floors, windows, walls etc.)
LGBT Footprints will be a sustainable resource which can be used throughout the year, in public spaces shopping arcades, schools, and hospitals—anywhere there is a flat surface! To do this and include all the organisations, groups, businesses and media who support LGBT people will be a great thing to see.
Help! and Get Involved!
The Intercom Trust is going to have a footprint / timeline made up for each of Devon, Somerset, Dorset and Cornwall. We need brief historical information about LGB/T social groups, campaigns, nd community projectswhatever, past and present. Suggested information could include:
- When was the group or project started?
- how many people were involved at the start?
- How much has changed since starting the group etc?
- Brief history ‘outline’—why, what, who, when—that kind of thing!
We would like to include as many groups, projects etc as possible in our LGBT History Month footprints. If you feel you have a few spare hours to dedicate to collecting this info it will make a huge difference.
And we would also like to know what events or activities are going in the South West Peninsula so we can produce a 'what’s on guide' to LGBT History Month 2008. I know that you are very busy and this is one extra thing to do—but this resource will inspire current and future generations so don’t miss out!
This project is making history, as well as discovering it. Future LGBT History Month workers and others will be able to draw on the archive when they want to know about what LGB and Trans people have done, and been, and lived through---and what we are doing now---and all about our communities' positive contributions to life in Cornwall, Devon, Dorset and Somerset.
Every February is national Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered History Month: "Claiming our history, Celebrating our present, Creating our future!"
National LGBT History Month gives a great opportunity to celebrate what we and our forebears have achieved, to remember the dead and damaged with love and respect (and with anger), and to explore the forgotten facts about our contribution to history.
History Month is one of the achievements of Schools Out, the national organisation of LGB and Trans people in Education. This is absolutely as it should be: schools are the places where we all ought to have learned pride in ourselves and pride in our communities. This has not of course been the case in the past: instead, young LGB/T people have been so marginalised and ignored in education that school was, and all too often remains, the place which has most consistently oppressed and scared us.
We look to schools to take on the challenge and enable their young people to create celebrations of LGB and Trans pride to benefit the whole varied community of the South West.