Funding secured for Birmingham Queer Archive

SHOUT Festival have announced that funding from The National Lottery Heritage Fund has been secured to support the Birmingham Queer Archive project.

Gay Birmingham Remembered currently features stories and memories from the community

The project will work to repurpose, catalogue and refresh a previous LGBTQ+ local histories project 'Gay Birmingham Remembered', improving accessibility, inclusion and navigability with a new iteration of the website. It will also collect new oral histories, transcribing them to be made available condensed on a new iteration of the Gay Birmingham Remembered website, and in full at Birmingham Library's Archives, along with community photographs, flyers and images.

An oral histories team will be trained to capture more LGBTQ+ stories of Birmingham; focussing in particular on women, people of colour, trans people, and "those outside the dominant white paternalistic narratives of LGBTQIA+ history."

Through the project, SHOUT will also create: an exhibition at Birmingham LGBT Centre co-curated by a steering group, and develop a Birmingham LGBTQIA+ heritage talks programme for activists, academics, artists and historians.

SHOUT is calling on the community to help shape and contribute to the project, which can be done via the ‘Expression of Interest Form’.

Sharing the news in a post on Instagram, the team behind Birmingham Queer Archive explained: “LGBTQIA+ culture in Birmingham faces new threats, from loss of venues, to pushback on trans rights, bringing sharply into focus a need to better document and celebrate our heritage.”