I spent yesterday at the conference in Brighton co-organized by the Brighton & Sussex Sexualities Network, Queer in Brighton, and Brighton*Transformed and held at Brighton University’s Grand Parade campus. It was a lot of fun. Personally I was very happy to spend time with a bunch of queer folk who were academics, radical, intersectional and (because even intersectional doesn’t always include me), trans-friendly. I gave a paper about understanding the gender identities of people from history, which I should be posting a podcast of in due course, and I made a bunch of new friends. What follows is a brief overview of the event.

Session one began with Katherine McMahon, a performance poet who argued convincingly for the spoken word community, not just as a focus for revolutionary politics, but as a valuable means of enabling people from marginalized minorities to feel good about themselves.

She was followed by Rabbi Elli Tikvah Sarah, who is a chaplain at the university, and who talked about being queer and Jewish. I find progressive Judaism fascinating. Their rabbinate is apparently 50% female and 15% queer. Rabbi Sarah is a former lesbian separatist. She has a book out called Trouble-Making Judaism, which some of you may be interested in.

I was up next, and I was followed by Jane Traies who studies the life stories the life stories of lesbians over the age of 60. For some of those people the scars of the homophobia of past times have never faded. Jane told of people who were still not out to their families, and who were afraid to take advantage of new political freedoms because they didn’t trust government not to take them away again once they had everyone’s names on file.

The final session was by Raphael Fox, one of the stars of My Transsexual Summer, who talked about the film production company that he and his co-star, Lewis Hancox, had set up to allow trans people to tell their own stories, free from interference from big media companies with their own agendas. I have enthused about the My Genderation films here before, and will continue to do so because they are great. I have an interview recorded with Fox which I will podcast once he’s had a chance to vet it.

After a coffee break we were treated to keynote speeches by representatives of the organizers. Brighton*Transformed is a new, Heritage Lottery Fund backed project that seeks to collect and tell the stories of trans people in Brighton. Their presenter, E-J Scott, spent much of his time telling us just how important it is for trans people to be able to tell their own stories, because once the mainstream media gets hold of them we are inevitably exploited and almost always denigrated in some way. Only by making our stories available free from media bias will we be able to let the rest of the world see that we are ordinary people, not disgusting freaks. The same points are made in the project’s launch video below.

The other keynote speech was by Lesley Wood of Queer in Brighton which has produced a more general QUILTBAG history of the city. Those of us who have been involved in such projects all smiled quietly when Lesley explained some of the difficulties involved. “There is almost no end to the ways we can upset people,” she commented. Oh dear me yes.

During lunch, Fox, E-J and I did short video interviews for QTube, an LGBT programme on Brighton’s local TV station. They also filmed a lot of the presentations including mine. I was really pleased to see that sort of thing happening. I’m looking forward to seeing Bristol having community TV as well.

After lunch the papers resumed with Lisa Overton talking about her research into queer communities in New Orleans and how they have rebuilt their lives after Katrina. Lisa’s academic field is disaster studies, and before she mentioned it I hadn’t quite realized just how hetero-normative news reporting of such events is. Of course I’m always happy to hear about N’Awlins, a city that I love. And I was delighted to find out in the pub afterwards that Lisa and I have a shared passion for pretty dresses, food, and Angela Carter novels. Lisa introduced me to her friend Vanessa, and that’s how I ended up at Dig in the Ribs for dinner.

The next paper was from Jeff Evans who has been painstakingly sorting through court records from Lancashire to try to get a true picture of gay history in that part of England. What he found was very different from the picture you get from reading about gay life in London. His research period stretched (as I recall) from the mid 19th Century to the mid 20th. The number of prosecutions for buggery in his data are too small for many statistically significant conclusions to be drawn, but it was interesting that 98% of them involved working class men, and a high percentage, particularly earlier in the period, were for bestiality rather than male-male sex. Also very interesting was that there were some parts of the county where the police were keen to prosecute, and others where they never did. The moral panic that supposedly gripped London in the wake of the Oscar Wilde trial apparently didn’t make it as far as parts of Lancashire.

Kate Turner’s paper was all about queer identities in Scotland, as exemplified by Scottish writers such as Ali Smith. She was followed by Kath Browne who presented Ordinary in Brighton, an academic study of QUILTBAG life in the city. That sounds very interesting, but being an academic hardback book it is hideously expensive. You can find out more about the project here.

The final session opened with Rose Collis who had run a fascinating project teaching young queer folk in Worthing about the history of QUILTBAG folk in their town. Alva Traebert, from the University of Edinburgh, talked about her research into QUILTBAG folk in Scotland and some of the negative attitudes she has faced from colleagues in academia as a young, and not obviously lesbian, woman doing queer studies in a redbrick university. My favorite was the guy who told her that there were hardly any gays in Scotland and that she should move her research to Canada where they apparently “like that sort of thing”. Be proud, Canada, be proud.

Pawel Leszkowicz is a freelance museum curator (who knew that there were such things? I didn’t) who has been looking around the museums of Sussex and has discovered a wealth of early 20th Century art by painters mostly famous for their war work, but who also happen to have all been gay men.

The final session was from Sally Munt who, together with a number of the other local academics, is bidding for a big government grant that they will use to study QUILTBAG communities to understand how they work to provide social support in the absence of traditional family structures. This will all be done through the medium of art (due to the nature of the funding). One of the people they have on board is Alison Bechdel. And thanks to this presentation I think I have a paper topic for Loncon 3.

The final session was a round table in which we all discussed ideas for next year’s conference. I suggested that we do something on queer creativity. Obviously that would give me an opportunity to talk about my favorite writers, but I’d also love to see Jon Coulthart as a guest speaker, and Katherine McMahon organizing a spoken word event in the city in the evening, with Hal Duncan as a guest. Stella Duffy could come and talk about theatre. I think Brit Mandelo will still be in Liverpool then, so we could get her along. I want to see Fox giving a workshop on movie-making. Yeah, I know, I am full of ideas. I’m bad.

Now if only we could have conferences like that in Bristol…