Credit: Image by Pam Isherwood and Brenda Prince, Bishopsgate Institute
History as we know it today is written in an environment that often times marginalises the experience of women, people of colour, poor people, and the queer community.
Lesbian London, Past and Present encourages you to create and share knowledge about your own community with your community. The project takes the approach of a ‘history from below’, where history is understood as a ‘social form of knowledge’ and where authority and ownership are shared by the community.[1]
What can you do?
Mini Blogs on Layers of London
You can research a person, an event, or share a memory of a place/party/pub on Layers of London, and link it to the collection Lesbian London, Past and Present.
Make a zine!
Zines are small hand-made booklets or magazines, that can ‘do the work of consciousness -raising’ in your community. Zines can help you share coping strategies and experiences that are relevant to you and your community.[2] You are the creator and you determine the content! You can either draw the zine, make a collage, or create a zine digitally. What is great about zines, is that you can easily share them with others, and reproduce them at a low cost (just photocopy and fold them).
Make your own zine:
Collect!
What is your everyday life will one day become history.
Collect flyers of events or for parties, take pictures of marches, collect newspaper clippings.
Write a diary
Diaries are a great way to help you (and maybe one day others), to remember what exactly happened at that Pride Party in 1976. Who did you meet, which bars or pubs were the places to be, and which events changed history?
[1] Samuel, p.15.
[2] Helen Hester and Caroline Walters, Fat Sex: New Directions in Theory and Activism (Routledge, 2016).