 So, the next panel is LGBTQ site preservation and international perspective, and Ken Lusbader is going to be moderating that. Ken is one of the founders of the New York City Sites Project and was involved with the map that I mentioned that we did 25 years ago. And really was a pioneer in this issue because he did his master's thesis on lesbian and gay preservation in Greenwich Village. Thank you. Thank you, Andrew. Thank you, Columbia, for having us here. And as Andrew said, it's sort of bizarre for me to be here at a symposium on LGBTQ heritage when about 25 years ago I was a student here and came up with this harebrained idea to do a thesis in historic preservation on gay and lesbian history in Greenwich Village. So it's very gratifying to see that. Well, it seems like, you know, two minutes that's 25 years ago progress has been made. So that said, thank you for joining us this afternoon. We're going to shift the geographic focus and start looking at LGBT history with an international perspective. And I think the degree of LGBT site preservation and public recognition of LGBT past and history and culture can often represent the state of LGBTQ rights and policies in that particular country. For example, in Western Europe, there are various LGBT archives documentation, oral history, mapping projects already in existence, which benefit from the paper trail and record of historic resources that could be identified and voices to that point being made before. Also in Amsterdam, we have the Homo Monument in Berlin. We have the Monument to Nazi persecution. In San Francisco, we have the Ring Rangold Leather Monument commemorating leather culture in San Francisco, yet elsewhere where LGBTQ lives are criminalized and the battle for LGBT rights are being fought. The focus of site preservation is really non-existence and limited to obvious reasons. And we're going to hear about those issues. The study of LGBTQ heritage in itself is a new field of inquiry starting basically in the early 1990s. And that was basically 23 to 25 years after the Stonewall uprising. So now in the U.S., we have the privilege of really looking back at the tangible past and making that tangible past have intangible benefits of pride, community, continuity and identity. And we're hoping that that's what the goal of this preservation is doing. So as the fight for LGBTQ rights in other countries are being fought and political change and advocacy are being paved, I'm hoping that those countries are recognizing or taking stock of their own history so future generations 25, 30, 50 years from now can look back and have those monuments discussed and presented. The first presentation is going to be via video and that is going to be a 10 minute video by Ankit Bhupani. He's a gay rights activist in Mumbai, India. He's the founder and chairperson of the Gay and Lesbian Vishnasa Association and has organized the Mumbai LGBTQ Pride Parade since 2010. In 2014, he traveled throughout India and delivered over 500 talks discussing section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which made sexual activities against the, quote unquote, against the order of nature illegal. And that code was repealed in 2018. And he wants me to make that point because in the video, he said 2017. So I think that is going to be the first. We're going to then pause and I'll introduce Matt Cook who will go forward and then we'll continue the discussion. I'm not sure if it was mentioned earlier. I just want to give people some reference points in terms of LGBTQ place based information. If anyone doesn't know about it, the National Park Service put together the LGBTQ theme study in 2016. That's available online. And it's a great resource for those who are interested in historic preservation, any intersection of LGBT history. So that's just something I wanted to mention beforehand. So here we go. My name is Ankit. I'm from Mumbai, India. As a child, I always remember that my mom used to take me to Indian temples. And over there, what ritual she will make me do without a miss is the ritual called protection. A devotee enters a temple, especially in Eastern temples. A devotee goes around the circle of the deity or the God statue, whichever the God statue is there in the temple. And the reason behind that is that it allows us to understand that the same truth has multiple dimensions. There is not one way to look at the things. There is not a single way to look at the lives and things around us. There is there are multiple ways to look at it. And until the time you do not include all this interpretations, all these thoughts as part of your own journey, you do not reach to the final destination of the truth. In your journey towards the truth, you need to accommodate all the truth which exists. And that is why we have this very beautiful ritual called as production up in an Eastern faith. In my presentation today, I'm going to talk from my perspective, the way I look at the Indian queer history. Our mythology is full of queer characters, where in our gods have queer gender sex sexuality, the devotees around gods have depicted queer gender sex sexuality. I'm going to talk about two particular stories from Indian queer mythology, which plays a very important role to showcase how queerness was accepted and celebrated in India. We have a character called Shikhandi, which which is coming from a very famous epic called as Mahabharata from Indian scriptures, where Shikhandi is a queer character. She had both the gender she was born in one gender and identified as other gender. And and she's been a very important role in killing off very powerful character named Bishma. Till the time Bishma would have not been killed in the battlefield, the principle of Dharma would have not been established. So we are the till the time a queer character does not enter the field of Mahabharata. It does not reach to the end, where in we have a second very celebrated God called Lord Shiva. And her image is portrayed as Ardhanaharishwara, where in he accommodates his wife, Devi Parvati as half of his body. And that's why we have the very beautiful picture and the deity called as Ardhanaharishwara, where the Ardhanaharishwara is half man Lord Shiva and half female God, God is Devi Parvati. And both are equally worshipable. Till the time a devotee does not accept Lord Shiva without Parvati or a devotee of Parvati does not accept Lord Shiva. Their worship is not considered as complete, both as Ardhanaharishwara reaches to the completion of the devotion. We have a portrayal of queerness and our temple also as well. It's not just the queer stories. So we have around 52 temples in India which depicts queer gender, sexuality. We were very famous are the group of temples in Khajuraho in Madhya Pradesh India, where in sex is with or trade in a very beautiful way, which shows that how sexuality was very much celebrated in in asian India. Till the time we were ruled by other faith and by other parts of the world. So we have temples, walls predicting queer gender and sexuality in an amazing way. Criminalization of homosexuality in queerness is alien to India because it was bought by a British. They bought Icruci 377 which is Indian Penal Code 377 which criminalized unnatural sex. And what was the definition of unnatural sex? Any sex which is not between Penal and vagina. So biblical idea of what is natural and unnatural. So it is because of the British the criminalization of homosexuality happened in India. After that the Kuit India movement happened which is a very important part in Indian history. A place from which Kuit India movement started is from the Agaskranti Maidan in Mumbai from where we are celebrating Mumbai queer pride parade since 2009. From that place itself Mahatma Gandhi gave a message to all the Indians to unite ourselves and fight against British but with non-violence. And the long battle of Kuit India movement followed by many other movements which led British to leave India. And finally in 1947 we got independence. A very famous and well-known character who played a very important role in Kuit India movement is Pandit Jawaharlal Meru who happens to become our very first prime minister of independent India. A very important character called Dr. Bhavasaheb Ambedkar who led the constitutional committee along with Pandit Jawaharlal Meru and Mahatma Gandhi and he drafted the constitution. The constitution of India talks about in preamble it talks about the principles of equality, justice and human dignity in human life. However they still continued the criminalization of homosexuality. So the Indian penal code 377 which was there in British Raj continued even after India got independent. So me as a queer individual was still striving for my independence and not just me so many queer individuals like me had to fight up till now in 2017 when Indians in Indian Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality. We were considered as criminals because of our sexual orientation. It was very difficult for people to meet each other, people to socialize and know each other and make friends group. So people used to meet each other in very closeted way. There used to be this magazine called as Bombay Toast where which was the very first gay scene published in India and over there people used to give their post box number and that they will give a message that I will meet you on this date and on this platform under the Indic Railway Indicator and I'll be wearing a pink shirt or a blue shirt I'll be having a red rose in my hand and you can meet me so people used to meet each other without seeing their pictures or knowing them they all used to know was their post box numbers and with the help of post box number published in the Bombay Toast magazine they used to have this personal letter exchange and then they used to share their thoughts and if you find somebody interesting you would meet them and it used to be complete blind date and Chodrigal station and CSD station Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in that time it was called as Victoria Terminus railway station and Chodrigal railway station in Mumbai you were very happening place for meeting another very happening place when internet was not very popular in India especially in Mumbai was the Gokul's bar which is just behind the gateway of India and where though it's not a gay bar it's just a straight bar but on Friday evening all the gay crowd and queens and queens of queer community used to gather around at this place and then meet each other and then socialize because these are the venues from where the movement of quit 377 started of the community mobilization started in which plays in so important role and then community get together and then decide that yes enough is enough we need to make our voices heard when I look at this journey it plays in very important role in my individual life and many other people that we were born as criminal in the independent India and we got our independent after struggling for so many years really we have reached to the stage wherein we could say that we have got our independent in an independent India in last in 2017 when Indian Supreme Court decriminalized homosexuality and just after the Supreme Court's judgment the changes we are observing in the in the country in this country is phenomenal we is the even the last pride parade which happened in 2018 2nd of February we saw 15,000 people coming on the street marching for equality and not just queer community who were participant with that many corporate organizations we had a parents group of queer children called Svikal marching on the streets of Mumbai for equality and their rights and the rights of their children we had a students group we had doctors association marching for equality we had senior citizens marching for equality not all of them were queer they were community supporters from straight community and all of this came together and marched for equality we are seeing that so many educational institutes after the Supreme Court judgment making changes and making their HR policies inclusive they talk about sex gender and sexuality and not being discriminatory against any employee irrespective of whatever their sexual orientation be educational institutes being talking about gender and sexuality we are seeing many support groups coming out in support of it so India is seeing a drastic change after Supreme Court's judgment on IPC 377 and we are moving towards good thank you very much we're now going to have Matt Cook speak he is a professor of modern history at Birkbeck College the University of London Matt is also a cultural historian specializing in the history of sexuality the history of London and public history and has worked extensively with museums archives and heritage sectors in the UK on issues of LGBTQ representation most recently co-authoring the National Trusts of England's prejudice and pride guidebook his current project is called Queer Beyond London and he is co-authoring a book on the same name so I'd like to now introduce Matt Cook thanks so much for inviting me and having me here thank you I've gone for the combination of heritage camp in my choice of PowerPoint slides I should just say there's a health warning you're getting this presentation through a fog of caffeine and jet lag so it may go very off-beam but what I wanted to do with my 15 minutes is to try and chart the shifts in a relationship between LGBT public history in the UK and the museums and heritage sector over the last 15 or 20 years and in a kind of scattergun fashion flag up various examples conundrums and issues and debates that shift raises in which we might want to pick up in discussion later how am I moving forward is it this there we go okay so I primarily want to do this by focusing in on Brighton which is the UK's attempt at San Francisco and community history and museum engagement in that local context and then look at the National Trust which is our main national heritage body and the work that they've been attempting to do around LGBT heritage but before I get to those two examples I want to fill in a little bit of context which explains some of these shifts over the last 15-20 years and there's quite a lot of information here but I just want to give you the kind of headlines the first headline is that the new Labour government between 1997 and 2010 legislated for social inclusion and equality and forced publicly funded bodies to take these issues seriously the second key context was the repeal of clause 28 so clause 28 was this absolutely notorious measure introduced by the Thatcher government in 1988 which forbade local authorities from promoting homosexuality so when this measure was repealed in 2004 the shackles in a sense were off and local authorities and the museums and libraries that they funded were able to engage more freely in these issues so this was a huge shift and in a way what I'm doing here is riffing a bit on what Ankit was saying about the importance of legislative change you know it actually had some impact in the UK in terms of the historical environment that we were then able to occupy The Heritage Lottery Fund had until 2002 only been allowed to invest in capital projects like for example the refurbishment of the Royal Opera House but from 2002 the government changed its remit so that community groups could bid for relatively small amounts of money to do community history work and this again was a huge shift and there's been about 160 LGBT community history projects funded by the HLF since then which I'll talk a little bit about later and then from the bottom up was the inception of LGBT History Month initially around taking LGBT history into schools and they came up with this idea of having a month echoing Black History Month which we also celebrate in the UK and this was this was what was so interesting about LGBT History Month is that it got taken up very rapidly by local authorities by libraries and museums as a kind of hook to fulfill their equalities and social inclusions responsibilities so I mean this sounds rather too cynical but by putting on a talk or an exhibition in February the local authorities were able to tick that box as it were which sounds rather more cynical than I mean it to mean it to be okay so let me hone in on Brighton and three key projects there at different moments so if we look on the left hand side this was the Brighton Our Story project initiated in 1988 very significantly at the moment when Clause 28 was passed at a moment when the LGBT community felt that our voices were about to be silenced also in a city or town at that point it was before it had city status which was hit particularly hard by the AIDS crisis so we were literally losing voices and so this the inception of the Brighton Our Story project was very much in the tradition of history from below oral history it was staffed by volunteers and it was about creating a community archive for the community and it ran roughly until 2013 but hit some of those problems that community history project will often hit that is the initial volunteers were getting older they were less able to commit the time it was all voluntary people were losing interest in a more equalities centered environment they were ceasing to get donations they were struggling to fund the room where they kept the material they were struggling to actually open it up to researchers and so on and so the decision was made to transfer the archive or a large section of it into a state of the arts records office the local authority records office the keep here being opened by the queen in a nice florid pink and you can see the archivists were trying to team themselves a little bit I think and this raised again some really significant issues there was some real resistance to this archive going this Our Story archive going into the keep I mean there was arguments about assimilation about flattening out community history about access about ownership which really brought to the fore some of the some of the ways in which some of the pearls and possibilities of community history I mean what I think is quite interesting about it is that it allows this queer community story to be read and examined alongside broad at the broader history of Brighton and Hove and in fact the keep has done a good job I think of making this history accessible and thinking about it in those broader perspectives but there's certainly a kind of sensitive a sensitive area of debate when it first emerged the other two projects are very different so these were both HLF funded so they had professional project workers they were time limited they had an amount of money and certain things they had to do they had to fulfill the criteria of the HLF not least in terms of the ideas of community building and community strengthening and in these ways they've had less in a sense they've been very important in terms of building community but on another level they've perhaps been less connected to the community so there's something quite interesting about what this kind of funding does and I'm really not criticizing it I mean it's been hugely valuable but there's a very different orientation around what community means in these latter projects than it did in the Brighton R story project what's been really interesting about I mean the other thing to say about these is that whereas the Brighton R story was very much a community history project for the community because some of the outputs from Queer in Brighton and Brighton transformed especially have been more outward facing there's the idea of an articulation of a community with an urban or city history so for example Brighton transformed one of their outputs was this brilliant kind of billboard project where they took trans stories and images of trans people in Brighton and plastered them over billboards in the city and it really became a talking point for all sorts of people in the city and a kind of source of civic pride at this point in 2015 and it spurred or mobilized other projects too so E.J. Scott who was involved in the Brighton transformed project initiated the Museum of Transology by going into a pub in Brighton called the Marlborough and asking trans people there if they'd like to donate their stories or items that were significant to their trans journey and what was very interesting in this changed environment was I think in 1988 it might have stopped there with that single glass case but in this changed environment the Brighton Museum which is kind of this landmark mainstream museum telling the city's story seized onto what was happening in the Marlborough pub and invited E.J. to expand his single cabinet into a whole gallery and the Museum of Transology has occupied that gallery in the Brighton Museum for the past two years it'll come to an end shortly and what's really interesting about that work I think is that the museum has experienced a phenomenal increase in footfall so not just trans and LGBT people coming to see that exhibition but it's drawing a much wider audience and has actually been kind of mobilized and bound into a broader kind of civic pride about Brighton's notorious liberalism so there's something quite interesting about the way in which this equality's environment has kind of meshed mainstream history mainstream institutions with what would have been considered minority histories so there's something very interesting going on there it's worth saying that these projects all three of these projects these are some of the exhibits from the Museum of Transology they're very much living memory testimony-based objects that have had personal significance and this has been a hugely important way of hooking people in it's also really worth thinking and it's wonderful so I'm not I'm again and this isn't a this isn't a criticism of these testimonial-based projects but it does tend to limit the time frame so these projects don't go don't go back any further early than the 1950s and it's as if almost there's not an LGBT history before that so that's been the emphasis of the HIF-funded projects and the Museum of Transology because of this emphasis on the individual I think there can also be a tendency not to delve into the wider social and cultural contexts in which these lives are being lived so it becomes the because the individual becomes primary we can sometimes lose that wider context and I'd say that to varying degrees with the different projects and I think the other issue around these projects is that they are self-consciously proud histories which of course is hugely important but also problematic I've never yet seen a community history project that properly engages with misogyny in the gay community for example and I think what we tend to do is produce these histories in these contexts which can be self-consciously celebratory and proud very important but I wonder sometimes what happens about tugging through these other strands these other important threads of our past which may now feel more shameful so I'm not going to talk about these because I'm aware of time but these have been proliferating projects across the country fostered through engagement with important museums this is the People's History Museum in Manchester which has been really important to LGBTQ history work with the Heritage Lottery Fund and it's also been taken up by our rather belatedly by our heritage bodies so this was something Shane talked about in San Francisco something very similar being piloted by our heritage body Historic England which was a national mapping project so individuals and groups getting together and pinpointing literally places of historic interest and it resulted in what I'd see as a kind of eclectic uneven utterly compelling mapping of England and you can delve into these different places and what I find especially interesting about it is it gives a kind of snapshot of a historical queer consciousness in 2015 in other words we can see what people are seeing as historically significant and I'd suggest that the things that we're seeing as historically significant in 2015 are very different from the things people were seeing as historically significant in 1988 for example and those things tend to be personal experiences so this was the place I was homophobically attacked this was the place I had my first kiss and so on so again very much within living memory very much in a way allied to traditions of family history what's in my direct alignment okay so there's something very interesting I think about what these projects throw up about which histories matter and which histories matter to us now let me come to the National Trust so the National Trust I think felt a push to take up these issues it was the last heritage body to do so and it was a particular challenge I think for the trust which cares for our historic houses and places of outstanding national beauty and though it has very radical roots in the late 19th century it's become associated closely with a staid middle-class white and rather conservative Englishness now the National Trust engaged in localised place-based projects in London they commissioned an audio guide of SoHo for example which I was involved in and they were behind the recreation of a 1930s queer club the Caravan Club also in London but these catered or have been taken up were taken up largely by queer audiences and very much on queer turf SoHo and London and so the bigger challenge for the trust was thinking about its stately homes and properties and to try and fulfill this new mission statement which was forever for everyone and what they came up with was a series of anniversaries of which the LGBT was the first so this was 2017 it was 50 years since the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK last year was the feminist year it looked at suffrage this year is looking at black history in association and the idea is to kind of pull through threads through their through their interpretation of some of their historic houses in this work now it created absolute tabloid fury especially in our big circulation tabloid conservative tabloid the Daily Mail they saw this as political correctness gone mad there was the idea I think that these were queer imposters in this history rather than a part of that history so when at Kingston Lacy there was an artistic an art installation of nooses each one representing one of the sodomites hung in the UK the the reportage in the Daily Mail was that this was a PC stunt so this was the kind of environment in which I was working and I think that the trust was really trying to walk a very fine line this was very different from a museum in Britain's gay capital very different from the People's History Museum in Manchester where the radical and the off-beam might be expected neither was it an explicitly labeled queer exhibition this was historic houses where people might stumble upon a gay display or installation and we were talking about our stately homes and our national heritage and who belonged to that so this was quite a complicated dialogue which I don't think I was fully aware of when I agreed to co-author the guidebook and what I want to do very briefly is just highlight a couple of the issues that we had to confront in writing this guidebook and then say a little bit about intangible heritage if I have a couple of spare minutes at the end so this guidebook turned out to be a real negotiation I've been very used to writing the histories I wanted and not negotiating them with a heritage body who were thinking about the Daily Mail and the first thing was around this conservatism which we decided needed negotiating rather than confronting so we decided to go for a guidebook that actually very closely followed their conventional layout and approach so initially we'd thought of looking at queer themes but in fact in the end we went for people and places which is exactly what all their guidebooks do and I was convinced in the end that this was the right approach because it made the familiar a little queer or strange it was more likely to be picked up by an audience which might not otherwise have done so and it enacted a dance of queer and normal which is after all at the root of the histories we're trying to present the other problem was who or what we should include and there was a particular debate around Octavia Hill who was one of the founders of the National Trust and herself had long-standing intimate friendships with other women she was married she was married she was buried with one of her female friends the National Trust asked us not to include her because they were worried about the conservative response from the Daily Mail and others and they were also concerned about how we could claim her as a lesbian you know she never said I'm a lesbian we argued this was the one we really argued for we said you know she's absolutely fundamental to the foundation of the Trust and we said she gives us an opportunity to think more expansively about queer history and what it means so about intimacy, friendship rather than necessarily identity at a point in time before this binary organization of sexuality really became entrenched finally they agreed that we could include her that's the spoiler although at the end rather than at the beginning of our guidebook so you'll find her in there if you want to have a look the other problem that we came up against in writing this guidebook is around evidence and the burden of proof and evidence and in a sense with Octavia Hill we were fine we had love letters we had the joint grave and so on so we could make that argument and discussion about same-sex love and friendship but typically this kind of material tended not to be available for lives deliberately lived under the radar or lives viewed as too insignificant to be of much account now the national trust because they felt they were treading on such sensitive toes wanted very clear and direct evidence of our claims they wanted to be incredibly robust in what we were presenting which might be all right and proper but it made an already aristocratically laden guidebook even more so so this is the front and back cover both prominent Bohemians and aristocrats we manage side stories of a few servants and a jockey but the more speculative and I think more interesting pages that we produced to draw in working-class lives for example will ultimately cut and this led me to think a lot about intangible heritage and the way in which we might suggest and signal lives and connections beyond direct material traces beyond for example the recent listing of sites of LGBT significance and blue plaques in the UK as crucial as those endeavors are and I'm going to talk really fast now because I've got a minute left let me just very quickly give you one example so these are the back-to-back houses that the National Trust owns in Birmingham in the English Midlands one of the very few working-class properties that they own I wanted to include these they've been beautifully restored by the trust but with no mention of queer strands to lives lived here because there's no evidence of that and yet what I argued in the page that ultimately got dropped is that we can confidently suppose that the lives these people were living brushed up against queerness on a daily basis and that by evoking the ways in which that happened we can begin to imagine something of that dance of queer and normal and something also about the wider conditions in which intimate lives were lived this I supposed might be as interesting as showcasing the life of a man exposed in a court case for gross indecency and would make a different point now my time's up can I have a minute and I'll just wrap up really quickly just to say in haste that what I tried to do is build up layers around this so rather than finding a particular individual I tried to build up different layers so around the physical environment and space and what that meant for ideas of intimacy privacy and friendship the lack of washing or adequate washing facilities which meant people that lived in these properties would go to the local bathhouses which were the subject of various scandals we can confidently suppose that people that went to these bathhouses witnessed brushed up against maybe were involved in queer goings on there and we can say the same about the theatre and theatrical pub that were opposite that were visited regularly by Fred Barnes who occupied another back to back nearby and was a drag performer involved in a local scandal there are local public sex sites as well they're not usually as busy as this so in this specific example and also in what I've said about weaving of LGBT experience into mainstream collections and exhibits I think we can see ways of exploring that dance of queer and normal rather than separating one from the other the other issue I'm raising in relation to class is about evidence and how we read buildings and their surroundings a lack of evidence shouldn't stop us thinking creatively, clearly about how contexts stack up and what they suggest to us this might be the only way of signaling lives that have been lived beyond the record and which without such supposition might disappear from view altogether shifting countries we're going to be having now Michael DeGarro immigrated as a refugee to the United States in 2012 from Nigeria after being outed in a Washington Post article in his native Nigeria Michael was a grassroots organizer supporting homeless gay teens and founded the first Nigerian organization to support HIV positive men and since moving to New York Michael continues to advocate for improved social systems and services for LGBTQ IQ asylum and refugee seekers he's currently the program manager of the AIDS vaccine advocacy coalition providing strategic support for HIV prevention globally while attending the new school I'd like to introduce Michael now Hi everyone so I did not prepare a presentation I'm in a PowerPoint presentation but I did I'm just gonna have a conversation with you guys and I'm Michael DeGarro I'm Nigerian I moved here about 12 years ago let me repeat that 80 years ago 2012 and I am an activist and LGBT organizer in Nigeria and also across the continent of Africa so I'm going to speak a little bit about our history as an LGBT activist in Africa an history that we are still making it tells you why I didn't have a proper presentation because we are still right now in history and it's still a very young movement in Africa and I'm going to share with you from my experience of working on the continent and organizing in Nigeria specifically and how we have moved from the early 2000s till 2019 so I'm just going to share a particular story a little bit about myself first so I left my parents so I'm at the age of 14 I'm 28 now and because they find that I was gay and I moved the streets and from there I started working with gay teens in the street I think by that time we were just trying to really survive we didn't know we're quitting the movement we're just trying to survive and live sitting next day I think from there we were anchoring out under the bridges and friends house living by ourselves and I think at some point we have about 12, 13 young gay men between the ages of 12 to 21 living in the same apartment just trying to survive and I think at that point some of us were just dying we didn't know what was happening to us I think we let our fund that was HIV but then we just thought there was something that was wrong gay people were just dying I think there was thing about HIV then that came out in the early 20s was HIV was a disease or an infection that only affects heterosexual individuals and for gay men in Nigeria or in the continent of Africa we had this thing about being gay in Africa that if you could go through what we've gone through there must be something protecting us we thought there was a fairy godmother that protected gay people in Africa because we've been through hell and we continue to preserve and continue to exist in our own little world so earlier then we thought we could be infected with HIV because nobody talked about it all the information about HIV then was between a male and a female so we just assumed that it was something that never could affect us so that's how our movement started our movement started from trying to survive from this daily disease that there was a killing of our friends and we went to know more about it I think from there we got some organizing and for me particularly I started an organization that particularly cared for gay men who were living in HIV because I just lost like five friends within five months and it was devastating for me so I ended up finding out what was going on and we created an organization called Brothers Keepers which cared for gay teens between the ages of 12 15, 16 to 21 just to try to see what was going on and I moved from my little town called Benin City in Nigeria to the capital city, Abuja so I found out about this more advanced gay organization it was the first LGBT organization in Nigeria it was called Alliance Right which has now changed its name to International Center for Advocating on Rights of Health so all of our movement building was tied to HIV and not a lot of folks cared about what was going on between our human rights like violations some of us were being attacked some of us were really homeless there was a law in 2017 that was introduced into the parliament by the then Nigerian president Olisha Kono Bassinger and I think the law came just before in 2005 when Nigeria hosted the first Africa AIDS conference and then we had a young movement then that was vibrant that cared about health reasons so we had a parade during the opening ceremony of the conference and the president was angry it was anger like how where did this people live like I just got from Nigeria like how come like we allowed these individuals to come protest about their rights here this is not normal we're not protesting about our rights we're just asking for access to prevention and care services at that conference because the conference was about HIV so it was normal for people who are working in this field to come protest but some of us were dressed in drags and looking fabulas and queens so the president got angry and the next morning he introduced the bill the first anti-gay law in Nigeria in 2017 because of that process that happened later that year it took him like from 2005 to 2017 to 2017 to decide what he really wanted to the law to be because already we had this British pinnacle that the British came up with like my friend earlier I spoke to the guy on the Indian guy spoke about the British because the British only they introduced almost slightly in pinnacle in Africa a lot of us we knew we had history back like our grandparents told us stories about their friends or they are a king or a queen who had wives a king who had other male as wives as well so we had history about homosexuality we had native languages for it it wasn't criminalized until the British came to the continent and introduced this law that this is not normal you guys should be criminalizing this so beside the already existing law the president wanted to advance it because he felt that was good enough so he wanted to tie into marriage so marriage is an institution in Nigeria that is really really you know strong like Africans think marriage is something that should be protected and it should be between male and female and also necessarily it wasn't really about not that you know lesbianism wasn't criminalized in the continent but it was more about Anissa in our sex masculinity people felt like a man and a man shouldn't be involved in sexual acts that is an abomination and that is what that was a call what Africans a lot of African government especially in Nigeria wanted to criminalize so for us we thought like we I think then I was like 18 already and we felt like we wanted to fight back and we wanted to like you know fight against our law and there were public hearings that happened in Nigeria and at the same time we had the same conversations going on in Ghana and the Uganda so it was like a continent especially West Africa people were having this discussion about how do we criminalize LGBT populations specifically gay LGBT people so and I think in 2011 so this law was not passed from when it was introduced in 2007 till until 2011 but before then there was a window where a lot of LGBT organizations was coming up in different part of the continent because we had this our government making speeches and in like I know there was the Congo president making a speech at the UN saying there's no LGBT people in this country so that brought people in that country to organize and there was the first LGBT organization in that country that came up so people around the continent started like organizing and I think activists in Nigeria, Uganda were taking the lead in terms of organizing and highlighting our friends in other parts of the continent so I traveled from Liberia to Ghana Sierra Leone Sudan sort of just trying to understand what our friends our stories in those part of the world what they felt like if it was different from us or how we could organize together so we felt like it was the same so our stories were similar we had a very young group of activists who were trying to define what their movement need to look like because it felt like people did not understand that this is your right like your constitution said it can be protected and you have a basic human right that your government has signed it to so you need to protect it so a lot of them were just thinking about hey first of all I'm hungry I'm on the street you know I have this daily disease I just don't survive so I don't care about this or that right I cannot just get this basic things first so that was what people really cared about like I want housing I want education I want I don't want to be afraid of walking on the streets I just want to be safe I don't really care about having gay rights or you know marriage rights I just really want to be safe so those are the core things that our movement I think considered to be the core themes of our movement in Africa a lot of us do not really not that we don't care about getting married we do care about getting married but we don't see as a reality in our country right now but what we do see as a reality is that we want to be protected right we want to have access to healthcare we want to have access to education and jobs like everyone else so that's why I said our movement is very new like you know we're still you know trying to understand what our movement would need to be the core values of our movement so again back to 2011 my friend David Kato who was the the lead of an organization sexual minority Uganda was murdered in January of 2011 so that brought a lot of attention to LGBT rights in Africa the UK the UN you know the US a lot of people started paying attention before that people didn't really pay attention to Africa LGBT movement people thought you know you had people were there but I don't really know who is there you know who works there I mean we had a lot some friends who work in foundations who work in UN needs for instance who you know had contacts with LGBT organizations the continent but before 2011 people didn't really care too much right so I think David Kato's that brought a lot of attention and people wanted to find out what was going in Uganda specifically Uganda all right and I think a lot of us in the West Africa thought well Uganda this attention to Uganda what can we learn from it right this was like a bad bad bad thing that happened this guy was murdered someone who's very close to me was murdered so and you know the world not pays attention to the situation so how do we owe the attention now to see how we can create a movement from this tragic incidents so that was when the first African um meant for social health and rights organizations was founded by my friend Joel Nana who is also late now so it was like an organization that cared that connected the continent LGBT first of all gay organizations together and then we were trying to organize and define what what we need to look like but our first intention was to was to start to organize and just be ourselves right to create a space where we can be free and I think Joel I was just speaking about you all with some students yesterday and I think he brought something unique to our movement before that we used to be very it's very sad movement right like we used to like there was not so much fun about it like about organizing about it's very like trying to not to get killed for instance trying to you know get medication like those really really real life issues but Joel brought fun to want to be an activist and the continent and let me see I want to remember him Joel organized the first African LGBT conference since in Johannesburg, South Africa in 2011 in November and he brought a lot of gay activities from all over the continent to to Johannesburg and that just being there seeing those people people that we work with that you're creating a movement with and before that we didn't have the time to do that because a lot of us are really busy like very young people and he made it for you to see that beyond the sufferings and beyond the things we're going through there's a light at the end of the tunnel which is like you might not leave to see this amazing continent becoming to accept people like Angola now but there's a light ahead of the tunnel so we can really work hard now and have fun while doing it Joel passed in 2013 and he's so rest in peace so our movement then was really you know NGO based really structured around healthcare but I think I was just in Nigeria last month where I'm doing a documentary for HBO and we went there to see what the movement now looks like and I can tell you I'm not just in Nigeria like there's a young vibrant movement changing the way we used to work in the continent which is like we don't necessarily those guys don't not necessarily need to be part of an organization they can be young they can go on social media which is taking charge and beat themselves and be free on social media right like we have a ton of like social media activists they don't call them activists they're just like young gay transgender intersex people beat themselves on Instagram and they have millions of followers they're Nigerians and Africans Kenyans and people follow them but they have that they show themselves their real self on the internet but they're they're not able to do that on the street but people can buy into it and see them this is the person that I want to be and it's the person I want to be free to look like and they're changing that and we don't know what that looks like yet a lot of us that study the movement we are surprised by this new wave of you know young people being themselves on social media which will not understand how we can buy into this but also we are letting them have fun right this is you this is like the new movement like this is what it looks like right now how do we make this already structured NGO movement that we've created for the past 10 years to not buy into this 2019 way of people being themselves that they don't that they are not afraid of being attacked or they're not afraid of being arrested anymore yes people are still being arrested people are still being killed but this fearless new wave of activists I call them actors because I think it takes you braveness to be able to show yourself no matter how you do it so I think they are activists to to to to be able to show themself online and be themselves online even though they are not able to do it on the streets so I think how do we buy into that how do we kind of mesh for them put of them and I told my friends I think our movement is as I say is like Facebook and the new movement is Instagram when I say Facebook like it's like nobody don't go on Facebook anymore people go on Instagram now so so our past movement like Facebook so the new movement right now in Africa is Instagram so how do we kind of buy into that and mesh that I make and take the what we've learned from it the old guys to merge this new wave of activism and make our continent and tell our own story and although we don't have it reaching down and it's it pains me that all of those things that happened 10 years ago we don't have we don't have pictures I mean we have some pictures but I think a lot of folks were so scared to show our faces in those times and there wasn't real documentation of it and right now for me what is important to me is is to tell our stories and I think using the media and I think also protecting our story and not let people centralize it and I think it's important that black gay queer lesbian transgender people no matter what we are to tell our stories and to show our stories and that's why I'm so great for HBO for doing this series with me and to see the way that beyond what the Western what is created about LGBT people that Africa like we have LGBT history we have places where by you know we grow up and we have those stories those amazing stories we want to tell want to show our people and want to create that yes it can be written down but we can portray it on media where people are now able to see things differently yeah I think for me my life has been you know on the scale I think I feel I'm like 50 years old or 80 years old now I'm just 28 years old and I think it's it tells you the and I'm talking about LGBT history in Africa so it tells you where our movement is and what we're going and we're learning from our friends in San Francisco and in New York and I think you know I think for us one group that we've really really looked up to is ACTOP in New York and I think ACTOP is one group that you know for me specifically back in Nigeria I've always heard about them the AIDS movement in Africa in the US and I think we've also learned from them to see how it can replicate what it gets started because our movement started with HIV too right so our friends who are dying we're trying to see how it can make our friends survive and how do we tie those things together and make our own story and tell our own story better I understand that I speak so fast I hope you guys heard some things I said well thank you very much well thank you I wish advocate could be here thank you Matt and thank you Michael I think it's amazing because it really has offered such varying perspectives and actual real world risks and lives are on the line and again as I said earlier the privilege we have sitting here in New York City talking about LGBT place-based heritage is quite profound considering what what you fled and what you just came back to but the trajectory of that is really pretty amazing I'm just curious I'll you know listening to you talk and knowing that you're you were just back in Nigeria is the documentary did you go to some of the places that you were living as place you know placed historians where is there a residence a resonance for you of going to a place where you were or you protested or survived that is part of the documentary yeah actually I haven't been back home since I left I mean when I mean left my parents home I left at the age of 14 and I haven't been back home ever since then this film took me back home to my parents' house for the first time which was like really emotional for me to be back and to see where I grew up and I couldn't really remember some part of it so this documentary although it's centered around me and my friends it also around you know the growing wave of new LGBT movement in Africa basically Nigeria so going back and seeing those places where I grew up and where we started so we had this when I was growing up we had this like under someone on the bridge where we normally like meet up every Sunday afternoon so we went back there to film there and you know all the places changed a lot you know the years so yeah so we like go to specific places to see things like those we don't see them as like an LGBT historical site we'll say but this is a site that we remember as a place where our movement sort of just started from yeah I'm also curious before we just open it up you know you mentioned act up and on our project we self-consciously I love the term you use self-consciously proud we include act up and this New York stock exchange for example as a place where they protested the price of AZT in 1989 and so forth it's interesting how Stonewall was a crappy mafia rhombard that people loved to hate and I should say hated but loved because it was an only opportunity but the issue of it changing over time to a place of celebration and commemoration that now just has national and international ramifications but how do you deal with shifting meanings over time and authenticity Stonewall just happens to be a bar named Stonewall that went in there in 1990 if it was the Chinese restaurant at one point that it was do we really care about the impact of Stonewall today if it was a shoe store or something else and is it an issue for you in the UK it's a really interesting question I think I was very struck on the walking tour this morning how the Stonewall in significance grew in the years that followed and the way in which it became a kind of icon retrospectively and one of the very interesting things that's happening in the UK in the work I'm doing beyond London in this latest project is this search for authenticity so a lot of the interviews I was doing in Manchester and Brighton were very critical of what they saw as the generic sterile gay scene the gay village in Manchester for example and searching for the authentic working class real queen bars or drag bars or whatever from the 50s and 60s and it really raised for me what this question of authenticity actually means because you could talk about the gay village in Manchester being quintessentially Mancunian and very much being about a Manchester history but there's these kind of waves or generations of what feels resonant authentic and so on and so there's now this new scene with a new generation of people bypassing the village they say well the village is just for tourists and for older gays now the real where it's really at the authentic scene is in these old bars and stuff where they're starting to do kind of reinvent Manchester drag and so on so there's something very interesting I think about these waves of authenticity and what it means and when you reach back to so it's almost like the late 90s early 2000s wasn't the authentic period of queerness it was the 50s and 60s that people are harking back to and when we had drag performances in working men's clubs and so on so there's something very interesting about when we look to at particular moments in time and also just anecdotally boy between Ankit and Nigeria the Brits really did a great job with the colonialization I'm so proud they did apologize though they just apologized they did right yes Ken are they keeping this up is this becoming part of the general interpretation at the national trust sites what's happened so you touch on a debate that I didn't touch on but it's exactly this I mean what these anniversaries and what these monks do is they provide an obvious platform so 2017 you couldn't go to you couldn't go to any heritage site in the country it felt like without having something about this this 50 year anniversary but they're and the same with February you know most local authorities will have something going on about LGBT history month and on the one hand that platform is fantastic and on the other hand it's a bit like this is where we can take that box and move on so it can result in these kind of siloed histories if you like where on the one hand you know you get this flourishing and then it dies back down again and that's very much I think what's happened with 2017 so some of the houses I think that did particularly successful events have kind of woven some sort of commentary into their guidebooks and into their presentation but most haven't so I think there is a there is a sense sometimes of kind of we've done that we're moving on it's black history this year it's feminism this year and I think there's a danger of what happens to those threats and the need to kind of keep tugging them through you know we talked earlier just about history ground up versus sort of the national trust sort of corporate to taste and or professionalization of it and I think I mean this isn't the catch all but through Instagram I'm always fascinated about the stories that are being told by individuals such as what you mentioned but also by grassroots advocates enthusiasts such as you know her story or the AIDS Memorial which is an amazing resource on Instagram or the LGBT underscore history project or Facebook pages that with people who are running them in this audience so you know that I think is an opportunity to at least seed additional interest and sustain it to a certain degree yes and then Michael I remember reading reports about American fundamentalists members of fundamentalist churches going to Africa to countries like Uganda and influencing politicians to implement these drastic anti-gay laws you know anything about that yeah you know we have uh so I I'm going to speak for myself I have a thing about that I think that part of our history is just on the side really and I think a lot of us sometimes we feel that you know there's always these tendencies of Western world come to tell the stories and come to be part of our story and I think the African LGBT stories one that is really in Africa and by Africans and I think those fundamentalists they come they're just on the side track of the story and they don't get to define how our story has been told they don't get to define what is changing in our in our continent they're just on the side track yes they have some effects on how you know the continent is structuring the laws but I think at the end of the day our government is inheritally homophobic right and they are trying to like criminalize LGBT people so fundamentalists coming from the U.S. coming from Europe trying to change our stories that is just on the side track and they don't really matter so much to the story yes gentlemen I have a question for each of you one is is like the young man in Mumbai are there no artistic artifacts or places since we're talking about historic preservation that um represent the pervasiveness of same sex sexuality in African culture before the introduction of Islam or Christianity by imperialism and uh don't if if there are or even if there aren't even if there are only those stories that you set refer to from your families aren't people convinced that this is some sort of imposition this hatred of of LGBT people imposed by the west and imposed by Islam that has nothing to do with African heritage you know that's an interesting perspective and I think for us the way I've seen it is that a lot of Africans historian will tell you differently they will tell you yes those things exist but they can they wouldn't say specifically those homosexuality or some homosexual act right they will tell you yes those women who were male other women they were just marrying them for protection they were not necessarily engaging in homosexual act so this those historians would try to change it and switch it up for you for us a lot of the time but we know like a woman male and a woman as like as a queen as our wife obviously there's some tendency of some act going on in there but they would you know redefine it for us so those those stories exist but the way they've been they've been written or rewritten again by African historians is different from what we know that our parents come to tell us or what it portrayed us and then I just wanted to ask or to underscore so you mean to say that if one goes to Kingston Lacy or to Watson Manor that there's nothing in their narrative that they relate to people about the crucial role that homosexuality played in terms of these places being built and enriched there is now there's more and I think there's there's there's there's two levels for this so at Kingston Lacy I think there was before 2017 I think you could kind of kind of read between various lines around interior design and some of these stereotypes and ideas it was brought to the four in 2017 and one of the key things that the Trust talks about is what happened to the volunteer body during 2017 so in the houses which engaged in that memorial year they did a lot of work with volunteers who who do the interpretative work for visitors explaining you know the what was going on in the house and so on so at Kingston Lacy now it's quite common for volunteer guides to include something of what they learned from that 2017 year I think the work that needs doing that might be more tangible is on the house guidebook which I'm hoping that when those get revisited and rewritten you'll get some of these threads drawn through more decisively than they are at the moment so I think there's kind of different levels there's the kind of I suppose tangible markers in guides book books and display boards and then it's also about the way in which guides are incorporating what they learned from that year in what they deliver to guests and visitors to the house but not about Baron Der Rothschild say again but nothing about Baron Ferdinand Der Rothschild at Wadston not at not about Baron Ferdinand Der Rothschild at Wadston Manor I don't know specifically about what they've done with that yes well amazing presentations and testimonies I would like to do very fast three questions that are of dealing with very contemporary issues that the preservation of queer and LGBTQ sites it's we're facing now in regards to these two things the first has to do and with something that you mentioned is the let's say sites that are online and there's a big part of online sites that became crucial in a number of LGBTQ struggles and that are very difficult to preserve or and it's it's very specific how do we deal for instance with Minitel in France that became this platform of gay interaction that was very unique or what is the way for instance in different locations in Africa that the online interaction it's been crucial in the emancipation of a number of LGBTQ people and communities and networks the second question it's about HIV and again it's with the specifics of that history and those sites it's something that very much deals with issues of medical records with governmental policies that are mainly kept secret and the difficulty of doing research even with the HIV records it's something in regards to gay activism or many other things that you've been discussing for instance it's really very specific and the third one it's about something that for instance in London or New York it's huge it's basically the way gayness was turned was moving from let's say queerness to something that became nor kind of even normative and a lifestyle that could become actually force of gentrification and even a force of dequering our societies so these three topics are crucial and it's kind of very difficult to address them from the point of your preservation so because you've been touching them I'd love to know your your take on this well I think they are three topics that probably warrant a whole other kind of conversation the project that Andrew J and I and Amanda are working on are it's a place-based heritage program cultural landscape project that are within the confines of extant locations and we're within the confines of preservation it's wanting the extant building to be there so if for example Greenwich Village is fortuitous because it has a overlay of a historic district those buildings were survived whereas many of the locations that were LGBTQ related in Harlem have been demolished over the years so to the answer the question about HIV I mean there's that's a documentation issue on some level an archival record-keeping issue we're looking at a category of activism one category of locations we're looking at medical discovery so we're including them sort of in the you know the framework of our categorization I don't think that's answering the broader question but we're addressing sort of just medical discovery in that in that role as well as activism I'm probably missing a ton of other answers to the question to the topics that you threw out there but again the fluidity of identity is so broad in New York ranging from Alice Austin in the 19th century who would never identify as a lesbian but had an intimate same-sex relationship to pre and post World War II and so forth so it's it's a big topic that I'm not going to be able to answer here