Category Archives: LGBTQ culture

What does your love look like?

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We stand with Orlando ribbonSo here I am – driven to leave my quiet-ish hiding place (of late) and send some comments out into the world. It’s hard to have anything new or powerful enough to say about the atrocity in Orlando, FL, USA this weekend, but I must register my voice of grief, outrage, solidarity and connection with LGBT+ communities and allies everywhere. My thoughts are with all those who have been affected directly through the loss and injury of loved ones, and through the weight of being witness.

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Susan Calman and Me

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Cheer Up Love book cover by Susan CalmanThere’s nothing going on between me and Susan Calman – honestly! It’s just we seem to have a number of things in common.

Susan Calman is a lesbian, she lives with depression, and she resigned her job back in 2006 to become a stand-up comedian. If you don’t know much about me yet, let me be even clearer about the fact that I’m a lesbian. I also recently resigned my job in order to locate a new quality of life because I need to find better ways to manage my own experiences of depression and anxiety. There’s more! Would you believe we both adore cats? And most importantly of all – it seems we’d both be ecstatic to find ourselves within the world of Cagney and Lacey.

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Some of us are Literary: Get Over It!

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Gregory Woods was invited to talk about his new book Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme this morning. You can catch the interview for the next 29 days from 02:47:25 into the broadcast.
homintern

Sarah Montague is in the Today chair, and she is joined in the studio by Ruth Hunt, Chief Executive of Stonewall. Greg participates on the phone from Nottingham. So an interesting dynamic is created, where what Sarah Montague can see – the facial expressions of Ruth Hunt next to her – become more important than what can be heard. This is radio and it is my place to listen. I soon find myself feeling that Sarah Montague and Ruth Hunt would do well to remember this.

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Lost and Found: the importance of archiving for personal and cultural memory

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Archive boxMy depression has returned and it does an amazing job of punishing the memory and subjecting me to self-doubt. As I sit at home, wondering who I am, I’m trying to remind myself of all that I’ve done in the hope this will help me recover a more solid sense of self.

It’s as though someone has rummaged through my mental folders and thrown their contents all over the floor, leaving confusion and disorder. I’m almost certain I have been robbed of something which goes way beyond my self-confidence. Its very likely that I have, but can I know for sure? Because if I ever did make an index or inventory, that’s one of the things which has now disappeared.

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