Professor Pippa Catterall and Dr Kate M Graham presented at London’s inaugural Queer Minds festival, which hosts a series of conversations on issues affecting the lives of the LGBTQ+ community. The festival’s focus this year was on history, politics and literature.
Queer Minds took place on 16 September 2023 in partnership with the organisation Gay’s The Word. It was held in the historic Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the first LGBTQ+ site in the UK to receive a heritage listing.
The festival featured University of Westminster academics Professor Pippa Catterall and Dr Kate M Graham talking on a panel alongside activist and author Dan Glass about London’s queer history. Together, they covered the queer history of London from the city’s foundations in Roman times right through to the present day.
Dr Graham said: “It was a great joy to be involved in the inaugural Queer Minds Festival, which featured a wonderful range of speakers and topics. Professor Catterall and I discussed the queer histories of our city. As part of the conversation, we covered a broad range of topics from eighteenth century Molly Houses to twenty first century activism, as well as reflected on our own personal queer journeys through London.”
Professor Catterall said: “It’s important that people grasp that LGBTQ+ people have always existed. Too often that history is only traced through the waxing and waning of exclusion and oppression, without understanding that attitudes towards sexuality and gender identities have by no means remained constant over time. Yet at the same time there is a story of resilience and creativity by LGBTQ+ people in response to social pressure.”
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