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9th February 2022: LGBT History Month – Women and Gay Liberation

Don’t miss out on our special seminar for LGBT History Month, featuring Steven Dryden from the British Library speaking on women involved in Gay Liberation Front during the 1970s and 80s!

Wednesday, 9th February 2022, 4pm GMT

Register on Zoom here.

Women and Gay Liberation

The Gay Liberation exploded into life in London during October 1970 with the founding of Gay Liberation Front (GLF). LGBTQ people came together under the banner of ‘Gay Power’ to better understand their oppression by society, and organise to fight for change. Within the movement the wider discussion happening in the UK around women’s rights and demands for social change began to be articulated. The ‘gay women’ of the GLF Manifesto (1971) quickly began identifying as lesbians and called out the misogyny they experienced within GLF. For many GLF ended when the women decided to step away and organise themselves within the women’s liberation movement.

In this talk, Steven Dryden, Sound Archive and Humanities Reference Specialist, will explore the printed and oral testimonies that capture a history of women within the gay liberation movement in the UK during the 1970s and 1980s.

About the Speaker

Steven Dryden is a librarian working in the British Library Sound Archive, with a research interest in the language and cataloguing of minority communities within library, archive and museum catalogues. In 2017 they co-curated Gay UK: Love, Law and Liberty at the British Library. In 2018 they led a week of student workshops and public lectures at Harvard University, Boston, USA, for the Department of Women, Gender and Sexuality. In 2019, Steven presented the paper TransHistorical: Gender Non-conformity in the Archive at the Archives, Libraries and Museums (ALMS) conference, Queering Memory, at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. In 2022 Steven will curate Proud Words, an exhibition exploring LGBT+ language, activism and identity building between 1970 and 2000, at the British Library.

Sign up now for a place in our Zoom webinar.

The seminar will also be livestreamed on Facebook and available for 24 hours.