 Well, good afternoon everybody. Thank you for having me. Thank you for joining us on this panel, particularly when there's so many other wonderful places you could be, other panels you could be hearing. I've also changed your job title since that went to press. I'm now a Development Officer. As we heard, I'm from London Metropolitan Archives. London Metropolitan Archives is the largest local government authority archive in the country. We hold the records for the city of London Corporation, but also the former Great London Council. y Llywodraeth Cwmptiwyr, a oedd yndod y Llywodraeth yn y bodai gyda'r hosbitwyr, ymwysnysau ac ysgolwyddon ymwysigol. Rydyn ni'n ei wneud o'r gweithio cyflwyno cyffredinol sy'n diremddio'n gweithio ar gyfer dweud i chi. Roeddwn i'n gweithio i gael i gweithio gesgol a bwysig o'r cyfreidau i gael gaen o'r Lywodraeth Llewodraeth, a oedd yn cyfwyr gweithio gweithio gweithio gweithio gwahanol o'r cyflwyno ar gyfer gweithio. yw'r llunio'r llwyddu'r cymorth o'r rhain byddai'r byddai bod yn ymlo wrthoed, mae'r Unedig Wales Gwylgoedd Llywodraeth yn rŷnod ysgrifennid dros yma yma ymlaes bant ar gyfer gwestiynessu sefydlu tioedd o bai'r eich rhan. Roedd y Republica oeddylon wedi gwdelach ei wneud yma yw'r hwn. Beth yw'r cyfalu Seng Fastegol felly rydych chi'n gydulio'r pwysig. Fy wnaeth i'r rhan oherwydd, os ymlaes tîm i'r bobl hefyd yw'r peirion, David Cameron was keen to salvage some good news and the good news he chose to find amongst the rubble was the introduction of the marriage equality. So there's some very hopeful developments. There's also some very sobering realities when it comes to LGBTQ lives globally. In 74 countries there are laws prohibiting so-called homosexual acts in those countries, 13 of those countries punish said acts with a death penalty and within those countries 17s have laws against so-called homosexual propaganda. So there are some very hopeful developments. There are some very sobering realities and there's probably every shade of grey nuance in between. And as archives it's our responsibility to chart those changes to record the memories and the life stories of the people that lived through them as also being a kind of an honest resource for activism and to fight for future changes. I'm very much aware that there are two wonderful presentations to follow and that people come to events like this not only to be spoken to but to speak. So I'm going to do my very best to keep not only to time but actually to come in slightly under time. So the best way I think to do that is for me to stick very closely to the script, perhaps more closely than the script and I might normally. So I'd like to tell you a bit more about the Speak Out London Diversity City project which we've been running at London Metropolitan Archives for the last two or so years. So lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer plus people, LGBTQ plus people have always been part of the fabric of London. Yet the histories have been marginalised. Archives reflect this marginalisation with collections that often cast LGBTQ plus people as criminal, immoral or ill. Speak Out London Diversity City, supported by the Heritage Lottery Funds and the HLF, our Heritage Funding Stream, has started to directly address this marginalisation of this part of London's history. Since 2014 Speak Out volunteers supported by London Metropolitan Archives, LMA, have created a community archive using oral histories and community records to complement and where necessary challenge more formal collections held at LMA. Over the last two years we've interviewed over 50 people and digitised new and existing collections. Between May and August 2016 the new collections featured an LGBTQ plus history exhibition at LMA and are now accessible in our media tech and will soon be accessible online as well. Archival collections reflect the prevailing attitudes and power structures of the societies that create them. LMA's collections date back to 1067 and for most of this period LGBTQ plus people and their experiences have been marginalised. LGBTQ plus people have been variously depicted as criminal, ill or immoral, with prosecution, medical intervention and moral judgement the results. Official bodies records such as courts, hospitals and churches which support and further these depictions reliably make their way into archives whilst accounts from the perspective of the marginalised do not. Consequently, historical record relating to LGBTQ plus lives is often not a record of the lives themselves but of other people's judgments on those lives. And I have here on the slide for you just a very brief selection of records that illustrate that pattern. So our oldest document which gives evidence of LGBTQ plus lives a trial for so-called immorality dating back to 1395, a medical report about homosexuality in women by Dr Albert Winnor, so Albertine Winnor, excuse me, 1947 and homosexual in prostitution from 1955. There are however important and notable exceptions to this pattern in LMA's collection and in other archives across the country. In our collection, deposits from Peter Tatchell, Kenrick, Ruckus and others offer community perspective on LGBTQ plus history. These collections show the wealth potential material available to archives and challenge institutions take an active and strategic role in their acquisition. Following on I suppose from what we heard about the keynote just now, the initial impetus of the Speak Out project was to record the all histories of older members of the LGBTQ plus community. This generation's stories are often undocumented and without action we will lose them as people become frail and pass away. The initial hope was to create a collection of all histories that could grow over time. A successful HLF bid under the R Heritage Funding Stream provided the funds not only to gather all histories but also to create a digital community archive and revisit existing collections. Since the project was addressed in the marginalisation of LGBTQ plus histories, it was essential that the Speak Out project had members of these communities at its core. This allowed LMA to listen to the needs of community members, especially those underrepresented in the collection such as BME, transgender and bisexual groups. By contributing to the project, community members were able to develop skills in many areas including all history interviewing, cataloging, archival research, events management, web design as well as exhibition planning and production. Equipped with these skills, volunteers with support from LMA staff embarked on the process of gathering all histories, building a community archive and revisiting collections. Before I move on from this slide, I should stress that these are all facsimiles so that's why we have pens and post-it notes on them. That's not how we treat our original documents at LMA. These are some of our old history participants. All history provides a way of reaching histories that are often inaccessible or overlooked by archival sources. The different approach offered by old histories is valuable in a range of context but especially so for LGBTQ plus histories. This is because for much of the of history, the activities of LGBTQ plus people were taboo and in some cases illegal. As a consequence, central aspects of sexual, romantic and social relationships often do not exist on paper as to record them as to persecution and prosecution. Thus many of the usual archival documents that were used to understand people's lives are of limited use. Gathering all histories allows people to speak about those very experiences that otherwise like to go undocumented. For the Speak Out projects, volunteers were trained in how to gather all histories by experienced historian Claire Summerskill. Over 50 interviews were eventually conducted and transcribed over a two-year period starting in August 2014. We sought in these recordings to capture the widest range of possible LGBTQ plus experiences possible. Stories vary from the personal to the political and the tragic to the comic and all things in between. They include accounts of cruising in post-war Leicester Square, older transgender people getting changed in cars before visiting a full-in restaurant, the first meeting of the Gay Liberation Front, the London School of Economics, the setting up of the lesbian and gay centre, the schisms within the women's movement and the devastation caused by the arrival of HIV AIDS in the 1980s. There's an international perspective on these stories too with people coming to London because of the relative freedom that it offered in these regards. These oral histories that we have gathered not only record people speaking in their own voice against and about their marginalisation but also add new dimensions and nuances to our existing collections. Over the coming years we will continue to grow this thriving collection so it can make a major contribution to British LGBTQ plus oral history. Although the archival record for LGBTQ plus histories is incomplete, it's not non-existent. Records of spaces, groups and personal lives exist especially after 1967 which was a landmark which marked the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in UK and Wales so in England and Wales excuse me. But there is a challenge with these records. The challenge is that the forms these records take can be difficult for institutions to work with and the individuals to let go of. The clearest example of this is ephemera. Ephemera includes receipts, tickets, flyers, newsletters and posters. Any item that was designed to serve a specific purpose and then be discarded after use. These items are hard to catalogue because they often stand alone and archive catalogues are arranged by the providence of items. More challenging is ephemera often has emotional value to its owners. The items in questions may be mentors of happy or important times and people are understandably reluctant to part with them. We met this challenge by inviting people to bring us any items and their personal collections relating to LGBTQ plus history to digitisation sessions held at LMA. Once digitised, items were returned to their owners. These sessions were sometimes stand alone but more often took place in the background and speak out at LMA LGBTQ plus events. This approach allowed digitised items to be grouped together as a single collection and meant that people did not have to part with valued items. In this way, we were able to add over 2,000 new items to our collection. Highlights include magazines such as bi-monthly, anti-claws, 28 posters and early gay liberation front materials. This digitisation process also establishes a relationship and trust with people which has led to more formal acquisitions and we have more formal acquisitions planned for the future. One depositor after working with the project has deposited a personal collection which includes an excellent selection of London Pride photographs stretching back 20 years. These photographs are now one of the most comprehensive, actually they are the most comprehensive visual record of London Pride in LMA's holding. This digital archive that we've created also incorporates items from LMA's existing holdings. A full-time catalogue editor was employed for six months and this catalogue editor compiled an exhaustive list of LGBTQ plus collections which we also digitised and this takes the Speakout archive to now well over 30,000 items. This comprehensive list was also used to produce an updated information leaflet to inform readers about LGBTQ plus collections held at LMA. This process of revisiting the collection also provided an opportunity for catalogue descriptions to be reviewed and new descriptions to be added. This was necessary because the most reliable way to find many records relating to LGBTQ plus lives was to use archaic and legal terms such as immorality, gross indecency or unnatural misdemeanours. Such terms are problematic because they are potentially offensive to readers and they are no longer in common use so they require a degree of specialist knowledge in order to locate records. But the solution to this problem was not to remove these descriptions entirely but rather to add a new level of descriptions to them. The archaic terms themselves are part of the historical record and to remove them will be to destroy historical evidence. So we added a new level and this new level of description includes more familiar tags such as lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans. Although such descriptions risk anachronism as they may not have been used when the records were created and the people that the records are about may not define themselves in those terms, the view was taken that inaccessibility was a greater evil than anachronism and that readers' historical judgement could be trusted to place these terms in their proper context. This new digital archive that we've created can be accessed in a variety of ways so including our LMA's MediaTek area. The MediaTek LMA has both a large screen and single screen terminals. This allows both groups and individuals to access the archive on demand and without prior appointment. The contents is arranged so it's easily searchable but it can also be browsed. This ability to easily browse the archive is an important way to improve accessibility as it allows people with a general interest in the subject area away in without the need for a specific research agenda or specialist knowledge. In addition to the MediaTek, the Speakout archive will be made available online. At the time of writing this paper, a selection of all histories digital archive is being put on and over the next five we have funding for five years of support so it will continue to grow over that five year period and we're hoping it will be a virtuous cycle of more people seeing the website, hearing about the project and choosing to contribute either all histories or materials. LMA has an exhibition space which we use to display and draw attention to our collections. To celebrate and promote the Speakout project, a four-month temporary exhibition was created using materials from this new collection and from our existing collections. As with all aspects of the project, the community was involved in all decisions and they decided on the key message of the exhibition and its themes. They also wrote text and were consulted on design concept. The resulting exhibition was framed as a discussion between older new collections and the archive and its users about themes that emerge from your histories, namely progress, place, relationships, health and identity. Its aesthetic drew heavily from the colourful and often DIY character of the ephemera we collected. I'd like to just talk a little bit more about two of the themes that we addressed there. The theme of identity was the most challenging to present in the exhibition. Much thought was given on how to offer a discussion of identity that was neither trite nor reduced people to stereotypes. Another factor to consider was the mixed origins the exhibition would attract, which included members of the LGBT plus communities, but also school groups and the readers that attend the archive. We wanted to offer some basic definitions to people not familiar with the LGBTQ plus acronym, whilst at the same time we were aware of the contested and changing nature of the words people used to identify themselves. It was in the spirit of the exhibition and the project to make the archive a place that starts conversations rather than presenting conclusions. With these considerations in mind, we settled on the idea of a graffiti wall, displaying posters defining the acronym LGBTQ plus and the words lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and the importance as well of the plus symbol. Visitors were invited to use pens to offer new definitions, dispute existing definitions and share anything else they wanted. By the end of the exhibition, the wall was covered with graffiti. Contributions included alternative acronyms, so quiltbag, which is, see if I can remember this, so it's queer, undecided, intersex, lesbian, trans or transgender, bisexual, asexual and gay, as well as greetings from foreign visitors and an expression of surprise that after nearly four months there were no phallic symbols anywhere on the board. All of these comments and more have been recorded and themselves form part of the Speak Out archive. We did have a kind of pain debate amongst ourselves whether to wipe it clean or not in the end and we did actually wipe it clean at the end because after speaking to our conservator, it's very difficult to conserve something like this. We took the photographs, wiped it clean, but we're now hoping to use this as part of our events as a way to start the conversation again. We decided to make a virtue out of necessity in that regard. The other theme that I'd like to quickly discuss is place. This is a repeating theme that appeared in both our oral histories and the group discussions. Places are a focus for people's memories and experiences. The disappearances of many queer spaces as the result of gentrification is a source of much regret and activism in the LGBTQ plus community. This need to display memories of place led naturally to the creation of an interactive element of the exhibition based around a London map. After several iterations, a simple design was settled on. The only geographical feature was the Thames, which was represented with fragments of text selected from the oral histories and arranged into a found poem. On this facsimiles of documents from the collection were attached with magnets. People were encouraged to bring their own ephemera and attach it to the map, offerings included tickets from the drag star, jinx monsoons later show, membership for a motor sports club, articles about famous venues alongside more point items relating to the Admiral Duncan pub bombing and the killing of Ian Bainham. People were also encouraged to attach small pieces of paper to the wall, which contained descriptions of their memories of places. People shared the locations of bars and clubs, some still existing, others closed, as well as memories of isolation and connections, physical, romantic and social, both fleeting and enduring connections. The Speakout exhibition closed in August 2016 and this marked the end of the first phase of the project. Looking to the future, Speakout volunteers supported by London Metropolitan Archives will continue to grow the Speakout archive by gathering new oral histories and digitising community archives and more of this material will be put online. As well as growing the archives, we'll be working with groups who will be able to use LMA as a queer space in which they can collect, preserve and explore their history. Thank you.