Brighton & Hove is well known for its LGBTQ+ population, and has a long established LGBTQ+ cultural heritage that dates right back to Brighton’s origins as a pleasure resort in the 1800’s. Brighton has also played a key role in the country’s LGBTQ+ history more widely. The First political Gay Pride march in Brighton took place in 1973, organised by the Sussex Gay Liberation Front. Brighton Pride ‘Pride in the Park’ first took place in 1992, and Brighton Pride is now the UK’s biggest Pride Festival.
There are a number of significant LGBTQ+ archive collections held at the Keep, a world class centre for archives, and across the city that chart this history.
National Lesbian and Gay Survey
In 1986, Kenneth Barrow, inspired by his membership of the Mass Observation Project, launched a Mass Observation-style project to collect autobiographical reports from gay men and women. The Survey's aim was to gather material that would enable researchers to understand what it meant to be a homosexual in the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first century. Two books...
Brighton Ourstory
Brighton Ourstory Project was established in 1989. Its primary aim was to collect the archives of local gay and lesbian people and organisations in order to counter the death of similar material in local libraries, museums and archives. It became simply Brighton Ourstory in 2003 when the organisation became a registered charity. The archive contains documents dating from...
Queer in Brighton
Queer in Brighton is a heritage learning project celebrating and promoting the rich cultural life of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community in Brighton & Hove. Through themes of place, family, politics and language, this inspiring intergenerational heritage learning project uses oral histories, photography, performance and creative writing as tools to explore, uncover and share real life stories...