There were still piles of tools and an unmistakable smell of glue when I arrived at the exhibition gallery this morning. Thankfully I have seen Worldcon from the inside and things like that don’t worry me any more. By the time the guests started to arrive, everything was under control.

The choir from Sing Out Bristol got us underway very effectively. If people weren’t quiet before, they certainly were once the songs had finished. The M-Shed’s boss opened proceedings, remarking that we were just the sort of community-focused project that they were created to host. My co-chair, Andy Foyle, then did the traditional speech of explaining how the exhibition came into being, and thanking all and sundry, after which he handed over to me to be political.

We did record the whole opening ceremony. Hopefully it will be on our website soon. I can, however, give you the text of my speech. It wasn’t delivered exactly like this, partly because I prefer to speak without notes and never remember the words exactly, and partly because I was making little improvements to it as I memorized it on the way in this morning. Here’s what I planned to say.

Thanks Andy. It’s a tremendous amount of work that you and the rest of the team have put in, and you should all be very proud.

I’m a fairly recent addition to that team, having only moved near to Bristol in the last few years. I can’t claim to have encyclopedic local knowledge. But I do represent a piece of the jigsaw. I have seen far too many supposed LGBT projects in which the T component is at least silent, if not totally invisible. When it was suggested to me that I should get involved in Out Stories I leapt at the chance because I didn’t want that sort of thing to happen again. I’m absolutely delighted at the reception I got, and at the way in which Andy and the team tried hard to make the exhibition as inclusive as possible.

There are still areas we could improve. In particular I would like to have seen more involvement of Bristol’s ethnic minorities. However, the work of Out Stories won’t end with the exhibition. We’ll continue to work collecting and recording the stories of Bristol’s LGBT citizens for many years to come. Diversity is one area we are keen to work on.

Of course our journey isn’t over either. As the marriage equality bill works its way through Parliament, we can expect to see renewed media attacks on our gay and lesbian friends. These past weeks have also shown, quite graphically, the level of hatred of trans people that still exists in British society, even at a supposedly liberal newspaper such as The Observer.

This exhibition illustrates how far we have come in the space of a lifetime. Acceptance and equality are still a way off, but we have reached the point where we no longer have to hide. In mounting this exhibition, Bristol’s LGBT communities are saying very clearly that we too are part of the city. We hope it will succeed in giving Bristolians a better idea of the sort of people we are, and help us all go forward into the future together.

The speeches were followed by ribbon cutting and cake cutting, and more fabulous singing. Not to mention lots of photograph taking. The official photos should be on the website eventually. I have very few, due to having had to be in most of them and not having Kevin around to take pictures for me.

The exhibition looks great. It isn’t huge, but it is a huge statement on behalf of the city and its LGBT community. I’m also quite pleased with some of the text, for example the mention of forced divorces under the Gender Recognition Act, and the death toll from TDOR. I think visitors will learn something from what we’ve done.

After lunch we had an excellent talk from gay historian, novelist and theatre director, Neil Bartlett. I like what he had to say about history being all about how the world could be different (just like science fiction, really). It also turned out that he knew quite a bit about Boulton & Park (aka Stella & Fanny, Victorian London’s most famous genderqueer people) and we had an interesting chat about the difficulties of assigning trans identities to historical characters.

If you live near Bristol, please do go along and see what we’ve done. It’s free to get in. Even if you don’t like our bit, you can visit the exhibit on the history of chocolate that is on at the same time. As for everyone else, hopefully we’ll get the panels and pictures of some of the artifacts online once the exhibition is over.