Episode 1 Prejudice and Pride: The People's History of LGBTQ Britain

The laws of the land are wrong. It shouldn't be allowed on the streets.

I think it's disgusting, to be quite frank with you.

I think man ought to go with a woman and woman ought to go with a man.

Every so often the world changes beyond our wildest dreams.

The past 50 years has been an incredible journey for lesbian, gay,

bisexual, transgender and queer people in Britain.

We've gone from being thrown in jail

for loving someone for a single night...

..to walking down the aisle with that very same person.

They told us that it would take 200 years

before we could get to that point

and we thought, "No! We want it now and we're going to have it now."

In this series, ordinary people from across the country

have been digging out and sharing with us

the mementos that marked this transformation

and have changed their lives.

From the street to the park,

the camera went everywhere with me.

Yes. Me with a pussy bow.

"We're lesbians, we're oppressed, we're angry."

I'm going to get a tattoo of that.

My passport to gay life.

Not many people had one.

To my knowledge, Freddie Mercury.

The result is a crowd-sourced collection of some of the rarest,

most personal, most heartbreaking and inspiring artefacts

in our history.

I was formally recognised as me, as being female.

I don't know why it was called Jeremy.

It's a bit camp, isn't it? It's like a camp boy's name.

Together, they tell the story of an extraordinary 50 years.

We were like volcanoes.

No-one in history had ever done what we were doing.

What you did meant that I could have a better time being a gay woman.

It's a story of all of us,

the people we loved and the people we sometimes hated.

There were three policemen outside

and I saw a pair of eyes peering down at me.

-It's the story of my life.

-And mine.

In this episode, we see how we went from being isolated and alone

to coming together as a community.

And then being tested to the limit.

So unfurl a Pride banner...

..wedge open that closet door...

..and settle in for The People's History Of LGBTQ Britain.

Welcome to the '60s.

Out on the streets things are changing,

and they aren't slowing down for anyone.

SIREN WAILS

Evening. Do you realise you went through a red light back there?

Oh, I'm terribly sorry, Officer. I'm rushing to get to work.

I'm so late.

In July 1967, there was a quiet revolution.

Homosexuality was partially decriminalised,

and for many gay men, it meant the chance to begin to live openly.

Hi! Come on in.

You're right on time.

Hidden away in this house in Wiltshire

are some of the rarest artefacts in British gay history.

A time capsule from that historic moment

when the '60s finally swung in our direction.

It might be a bit dusty.

You know, it's nearly 47 years ago since these came out.

In the heady days of 1969,

Tim found himself writing for a young upstart magazine.

It would become a landmark,

proudly announcing its gayness on the front cover for the first time.

Its name was Jeremy.

The term "gay power" was not in general use at that time.

I think this is probably the first time it appeared in England

on the front of any magazine or newspaper.

For some, they were a key part of the Swinging '60s,

written in an office on Carnaby Street

and offering gay men a breath of the heady optimism

blowing through Britain at the time.

It was an attempt to provide the gay world with a magazine of their own.

There was nothing quite like it.

Before that, there were physique magazines,

which were pictures of people in gymnasiums doing muscle exercises,

but they weren't gay magazines.

There's all kinds of stuff here.

There's a thing called The Hollow Crown,

a round-up of all the queer kings of England.

This is a gay horoscope.

Stargaze.

It had the gay skinheads in it.

People used to brush a little bit of bleach over certain areas

to emphasise certain contours in their body.

I never did that.

Newsagents wouldn't stock Jeremy.

It was subscription only and money was always tight.

See, we invented this, it's called Jeremy Fundies.

Jeremy Fundies were just briefs.

Now, men didn't wear briefs, it was very much a Y-front world.

People had never thought about being able to wear things like that.

We bought them in bulk from Vince, this underwear shop,

and then we'd sell them under our own name.

It was one way of making money for the magazine.

The sudden death of a Hollywood icon in the summer of 1969

secured a place in music history for Jeremy magazine.

One day, we got this phone call from the manager of a young singer

who'd been very affected by the way the gay community had turned out

a few months before this at Judy Garland's death.

The manager wanted to promote this person to the gay community,

so we spent two weeks with him, covering everything he did.

The photographs are awful,

and although he gave us some interesting stuff to talk about...

"Bowie For A Song" - what an awful title that is.

I didn't do that one.

"It's a bitterly cold December afternoon.

"David is rehearsing a Save the Children charity show

"at the Palladium.

"Isolated in a single spot

"against mammoth projections of the Apollo space shot,

"David performs Space Oddity."

# Ground Control to Major Tom... #

"I'm a loner, I don't feel the need for conventional relationships.

"From the Purcell Rooms to Palladium,

"from Zen Buddhism to Art Nouveau,

"Tim Hughes, a breakdown of the prismatic personality

"of Britain's pop phenomena, David Bowie."

# ..This is Ground Control to Major Tom

# You've really made the grade... #

This was the first article, I think,

where he intimated that he might be bisexual.

He still owes me for an Indian meal.

I remember we took him for an Indian meal and he said,

"I don't have any money."

I don't know why it was called Jeremy.

It's a bit camp, isn't it? It's like a camp boy's name.

For the generation reading Jeremy magazine,

a new life was just beginning.

Two years before, things felt very different.

Being gay before 1967 meant living in fear -

fear of yourself and who you were,

fear of being found out and sent to jail

and fear of having your name printed in the papers for everyone to see.

At 5.50am on 3rd July 1967, for gay men, life changed for ever.

The Sexual Offences Act limped through Parliament

after an all-night sitting and many, many years of arguments.

It contained many restrictions that almost look funny to us now.

You could only have sex in a private house and behind a locked door.

So if your flatmates were in, that was illegal.

If you swapped phone numbers with a man and there was a potential

you might have sex, then that was illegal, too.

And you both had to be over 21 or face a long jail sentence.

The heterosexual age of consent was 16.

Many battles lay ahead, but in a very important way,

for huge numbers of people forced to live secret lives,

their world changed overnight.

But for all the promise of the 1967 Act, there was one big omission -

women.

We lesbians were never included in the anti-homosexuality laws.

We fell outside the definition of what sex could be.

Instead, lesbians were virtually invisible.

On top of that, the new law only applied in England and Wales.

Homosexuality was only decriminalised here in Scotland

in 1980, and in Northern Ireland two years later.

There was a very long way to go.

This is Delmonicas.

I was 14 when I first came into this pub,

and it was the only gay pub in Glasgow that I knew of

that women could come into, and so this is where you came.

So when I had my first ever date, by way of seduction,

she read me passages from...

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit.

It has a special place in my history.

Now, if you know about this book,

you'll know it's not a romantic book.

Part of it is about kind of casting out the devil from a gay child.

So it's things like... I mean, it's torturous.

"I think we cried each other to sleep,

"but somewhere in the night I stretched out to her

"and kissed her and kissed her until we were both sweating and crying

"with mixed-up bodies and swollen faces."

Now, of course it works.

Books can make incredible things happen,

even more important than my first kiss.

For lesbians in the 1960s there were whispers of one novel in particular.

If you could get your hands on it, it might just change your world.

In 1928, a novel by Radclyffe Hall caused an almighty scandal.

It simply depicted a lesbian relationship,

an unhappy one at that, but just by saying that we exist,

it was dragged through the courts and banned as obscene.

The editor of the Sunday Express wrote,

"I would rather give a child a phial of prussic acid than this novel.

"Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul."

It virtually disappeared from Britain for nearly 40 years

and was only becoming widely available again in the late '60s,

which is when Gill found it.

So tell me about this book. The Well Of Loneliness.

Why is it so important to you?

It was one of the first novels I read that contained...

..a story about lesbians.

And she comes across as being a bit of a tomboy.

Well, that was similar to myself

because I was very sporty when I was a child, so that resonated with me.

Here was somebody else that had, like, these same...

kind of similar characteristics.

Of course, the French have always been more laissez faire

when it comes to love, and the book was never banned there.

In fact, Paris book-sellers did a roaring trade selling it to Brits

trying to sneak a copy home from their holidays.

There's a section where they're all gathering in Paris.

That just totally fascinated me.

Like, here's a whole bunch of women having a gay old time in Paris.

I really, really enjoyed that section of the book.

The hysteria around The Well Of Loneliness eventually subsided,

to the point that, in 1974,

it was even selected as The Book At Bedtime on Radio 4.

It's a hugely powerful book.

And I mean the last sentence, "Acknowledge us, oh, God,

"before the whole world. Give us also the right to our existence."

So we've got one book that was written in 1928, and that was it?

Yeah, that was it.

Being a lesbian was never illegal,

but it didn't mean that life was easy.

You were often just completely invisible

until suddenly you weren't.

My mum came on the phone.

She worked in a hairdresser's.

She said, "I was washing your friend's hair today in the shop."

And I went, "Right, uh-huh."

And she said, "She told me that you were gay. Is this true?"

And I went, "No, it's not true."

-So you denied it?

-I denied it,

and she kept going on and on and on about it on the phone.

Eventually I went, "Right, OK, Mum, it's true.

"And by the way, while we're on the subject,

"I've met somebody and I'm moving up to Aberdeen."

"Dear Gillian, nice to get your letter

"and know that you're all right.

"I respect your feelings in regards to myself not understanding,

"but I thought you would have known me by this time.

"I have a very open mind regarding these situations.

"I wonder if it was something in your childhood that I did wrong

"to make you feel that way.

"I feel a bit sorry for you both, as people still do not

"understand these situations.

"If things don't work out,

"don't do anything silly without coming to your mother.

"It is best you never let Dad know

"as it goes against all his principles.

"I think he would disown you.

"Love to you both, Mum."

That's what a lot of us grew up with, isn't it?

The bit that really got me...

Oh!

Did she do something wrong to make you like that?

Uh-huh. I know.

From Aberdeen to Brighton, by the late '60s,

lesbians and gays were desperate to do the things

their straight mates had taken for granted.

Going out, getting drunk, clubbing, and the other, if you were lucky.

Images of that special moment in LGBTQ history are hard to find.

Nigel has dug his out for us.

Yes.

Oh, my goodness me.

Me with a pussy bow.

There's me dressed in junk shop clothes.

And there I am again with a pussy bow.

1967, the year that the law was changed.

But pubs frequented by gay men were often raided by the police

and if you did find somewhere to dance,

you certainly weren't allowed to touch each other.

As the pubs kicked out,

the race was on to find an underground party

on the wrong side of the tracks,

where you could dance with someone properly and not get arrested.

Nigel Quiney was leading the pack.

Drink-up time at the Coleherne.

"Where are the parties? Where are the parties?"

Gay men sometimes found themselves coming together with other outsiders

in '60s Britain.

For a very small sum, half a crown,

you could go to a flat of a black family,

usually sort of hosted by an elderly woman,

and we always called them "the aunties", because somehow

it was George's auntie, or... whoever's party.

And the auntie was around as a host.

A lovely, big, smiley, welcoming black lady,

who would hug you and give you a kiss if you were a bit upset.

"Oh, come on, darling. You'll be all right."

Picture the scene. You've got a sitting room,

furniture would've been pushed all the way round the walls.

Some of us would have brought our own gramophone records.

Men danced together.

They weren't having sex, but they were dancing together

as a normal couple would.

But unlike any normal couple, after the party,

the question "Your place or mine?" was fraught with difficulty.

Even after decriminalisation, the search for human contact

often drove men down underground.

John Lindsay, why?

Well, very frequently, because there's nowhere else.

The vast majority of gay people live in either houses or council flats,

frequently with their parents, frequently with their wives,

frequently with their children.

It's simply very frequently a matter, there is nowhere else to go.

Meeting up in public toilets, or cottaging,

had for decades been the only way many gay men could find sex.

After decriminalisation,

it was assumed the practice would quickly die out.

Instead, it continued,

providing quick release for men in a still hostile world,

and easy arrests for the police.

There was something about it that got the adrenaline rushing.

The very act of going downstairs into a gloomy subterranean place,

even with a rather frightful aroma,

there was a sexual frisson.

It started off just like many other nights.

I dressed in my usual outfit of blue jeans and sneakers,

got into my Ford Cortina,

and I started a circuit of toilets in north London

that I had discovered over the years.

There we go.

Now, where was this damned cottage?

Oh, here you are - Ducketts. It was here.

Some of them complain that the police are overzealous

and go to absurd lengths to apprehend them.

Constable, how many men have you arrested for gross indecency?

Er, this would run into hundreds.

I wouldn't like to say how many over that period.

And were they obviously homosexual?

-Um... Yes.

-All of them?

Um, to me, yes.

The place was deserted, and lo and behold, a young man comes in.

Now, does he go to take a pee?

No, he comes and stands next door to me.

The pleasure of seeing each other became, shall we say, evident.

The two of us separate...

..so that things can be seen, obviously, from separate angles.

And above the stalls were those glass-brick vents

to let a certain amount of light in,

but several of them had been broken and removed, and what did I see?

I saw a pair of eyes peering down at me.

And the poor guy, I heard him talking to the police.

"I live at home with my parents.

"My father has a heart condition.

"I'm terribly concerned that this doesn't get into the local rag,

"into the local press."

And the police said, "Well, we can't guarantee anything,

"but we'll do the best we can."

And you can imagine my considerable discomfort a week later

when the phone went at home.

"Oh, Nigel. I read you've been a very naughty boy."

The press had written about it,

they had put in my name and they had put in this young man's name.

It could have ruined his life.

While many gay men found a new confidence,

the police also became more assertive.

In the first seven years after the law changed,

arrests for related offences were up by 66%.

For all the promise that surrounded the 1967 Act,

by the early '70s, gay people were still being treated as easy targets

for arrests, cheap jokes, violence and discrimination.

Increasingly, there was a sense of betrayal.

Anger was brewing.

It was still a Victorian morality,

and people believed a lot more in what the authorities said we were -

degenerate, criminal, not to be trusted,

everything you can think of.

Stephen, Julian and Stuart all lived together with 12 other men

in the Gay Liberation Front commune in Notting Hill in 1971.

They wanted to build a new and fairer society,

and to do that, they needed to unite.

This is the first time they've all met up in 40 years.

The first requirement of GLF was coming out.

So you put this badge on and you'd be on the Tube and people would say,

"Oh, what's the Gay Liberation Front?"

And you would say, "Well, it's a group of homosexuals

"who are coming together to fight for our rights."

It was something which you believed in the principles of

and tried to live out. So that's a social movement.

Ideas of gay liberation began to spread around the country,

carried by the GLF's very own home-made newspaper.

It's a vital piece of LGBTQ history and very few copies remain.

On the back is a photograph of all of us,

all in our finest drag, all with our knees up,

so it's like a knees-up in the commune.

This is me. This is Stuart.

And Julian doesn't appear

because he wasn't available that day for photography.

I think the frock that I wanted to wear was not available,

so I decided I was not going to be in it!

The commune was a refuge from the straight world outside,

a place where gay people could be together,

live freely and make plans for a better future.

You'd step through the gate and you would kind of leave that behind

and you stepped... And then you'd...

There'd be like a short path

and then there was the kitchen window there.

The commune was my first real sense of home.

It was a sort of refuge, like a safe house.

This little diddy house behind all these mansion blocks.

We didn't have a bathroom as such, but we had a toilet

and we had a room next to it that had a sink in it.

The room with all the make-up and the wash basin - that was up there.

And, in fact, the window that I'm looking through faced this way.

On Saturday night, we'd go to my old boyfriend Rose's.

We'd spend Saturday afternoons having a bath there

and then coming home to our private night for tripping with acid,

-which was on a Saturday night.

-Yeah.

The GLF manifesto outlined the ways in which gay people were oppressed

and how this should be brought to an end.

They didn't just want to make life better for gay people, though.

They aimed to create a better world for everyone.

GLF did see that there was a link with capitalism

that was causing all these divisions within society,

and that our liberation was really tied up

with the liberation of everybody in the world.

Often, the only weapon available to the GLF was their wit,

which they deployed mercilessly whenever they saw oppression.

In 1971,

a national rally was organised by Christian groups

opposed to what they saw as the moral degeneration of Britain.

This is the light of our Festival of Light.

Praise the Lord.

Some wanted the repeal of homosexual rights, abortion and prostitution.

The GLF saw their chance.

It started with slow hand-clapping when the applause died down.

And we released a battalion of mice.

We had nuns who solemnly processed to the dais,

where the notables were sitting

and then they turned round and can-canned all the way back.

-Give me a J...

-ALL: J!

And there were all these people shouting, "Jesus saves, Jesus saves,

"Jesus saves," and it was like they all had this tunnel vision.

At the end of the evening,

the action group managed to get into the basement

and switch half the lights out.

As the message of gay liberation

seeped into the national conversation,

women and men up and down the land

were inspired to change their worlds.

Angela was a student in Manchester.

That's all very well, it's all happening down there,

but I need something happening here.

I was full of energy, full of the coming-out energy.

It spread by word of mouth and by friendship networks.

Gay liberation was accessible.

Anyone could put on a badge and be part of the gay liberation movement.

One night, as she discussed gay liberation in a pub,

Angela was approached by a stranger.

It was like music to my ears.

It was like a real wake-up call.

I said, "Do you mind if I join you?"

And they said, "No, scoot up, scoot up".

I didn't know who the bloody hell they were.

The GLF newspaper also travelled north.

But something important got lost in translation.

We'd get copies and we'd be, like, trying to find, where are we,

sort of thing, and then eventually they did this issue.

Those women there who were very active

in the women's and lesbian movement at the time.

This says, "We share the experiences of our gay brothers

"but, as women, we've endured them differently.

"We're women, we're lesbians, we're oppressed, we're angry."

I'm going to get a tattoo of that!

1970s feminism was inspiring women.

Angela and friends decided to get creative.

We had to shock people, because how else were they going to see us?

And we decided, maybe what we should do is get a big pot of yellow paint

and put "lesbians are everywhere" all around the town

and all around the bridges on the outskirts of the city,

so as that everyone coming in on Monday morning would see it,

and that's what we did.

To me, it's one of the best things I've ever heard,

is to just spray paint in bright yellow "lesbians are everywhere".

It wasn't even spraying. It was a big can of paint and a brush.

It got tipped up in my mother's car, so that was another story.

What did you say to your mother?

-Well, we had to clean it up.

-We had to clean it up.

For all the audacious stunts,

the work of the GLF was sometimes a matter of life and death.

When you stepped outside this pub in the night,

there was a good chance that the police was either there

to beat you up or the public.

One night, this police officer ran at this young transgender person

and was really pounding on him, and I jumped on the policeman's back.

I was only a kid, but I just wanted to stop him beating up Benny.

And I got arrested and I was thrown in the cells.

At the time, Luchia was homeless and living on the streets.

There, she saw many other young LGBTQ people,

disowned by their families,

facing violence, mental health issues and suicide.

The thing that pissed me off about the whole thing was the young people

that died, and I always felt very strongly about that and I thought,

"If I ever get a voice, I'm going to speak for them."

I'm going to cry now, cos I can see all their little faces,

you know what I mean? Beautiful people,

just died because no-one would fucking speak up for us, you know?

And that drove me on. It just drove me on.

-That's why I didn't give a shit.

-What you did meant that I...

..could have a better time...

..of being a gay woman.

And that was the thing about liberation.

When it comes along, you've got to grab it

and you've got to make it your own.

If you don't, then the chance will never come again.

The wave will have gone on without you.

By the middle of the 1970s,

people across Britain were beginning to understand

that love didn't just happen between a man and a woman.

But the thought that you might not feel happy in your gender at all

still needed a lot more explanation.

-TV REPORT:

-Mary from Mansfield is a man in all respects save one -

he feels he is a woman trapped in a man's body.

In Britain, there are estimated to be 750 men like Mary,

and 250 women who feel they should be men.

They're known as transsexuals.

As a young child in the 1950s,

Carol had always felt more like a girl than a boy.

One day, she heard her dad read out a story

about a transgender person in the newspaper.

I was lying on the floor reading a comic and my ears pricked up.

There's somebody else like me out there.

And then, at the end of this story,

my father turned to my mum and said,

"Perverts like that should be locked away in a loony bin

"and the key thrown away."

-TV REPORT:

-Transsexuals live in a twilight world

of fear, loneliness and ignorance.

In the already fractious British workplace of the 1970s,

many transgender people were finding that

their employers valued their skills far less than their appearance.

I'd already started on the pathway.

I was being prescribed hormones and my body was changing.

After years of hard work,

Carol had landed her dream job as a research scientist.

But the dreaded company medical soon came up,

which was quickly followed by a summons to see the boss.

He had a face like thunder.

He said, "We've heard back from the medical report and we will not allow

"anything like that to happen in this company."

After the meeting, Carol returned to the empty lab

with her dreams in tatters.

I thought everyone had gone home, and I was looking round the lab

and I just burst out into tears.

The cleaner walked in and she said to me, "What's the matter?"

I said, "You wouldn't understand, because it's so different."

And she said, "You'd be surprised what we know."

And I thought, "Oh, my God! She knows!"

What Carol also didn't know was that

the cleaner was a steward in the union

and wanted to take the matter further.

They thought it was so unjust.

She said to me, "They are quite prepared to go out on strike."

The sympathy shown by the cleaners wasn't reflected in the wider world.

The few transgender people in the public eye

were seen as fair game for anybody.

I mean, I had people coming up and poking me in the breasts

and saying, "Are they real?"

And pulling my hair and saying, "Is that real?" You know?

In the end, you wondered who was the freak - was it you or was it them?

Years after overhearing her father,

Carol faced the prospect of becoming one of those transgender people

in the newspapers herself.

The strike would have caused a national sensation.

Carol decided to pack her things, leave and begin a new life.

I didn't want to be a celebrity

and I didn't want to be sort of

recognised and sort of...

..ill-treated on the streets,

and so, in the end, I had to say,

"Thank you so much but, no,

"I'm going to actually disappear and start my new life."

The ability to change a birth certificate after transitioning

didn't come until 2004, but Carol was allowed to change her passport.

This is taken on the beach at Biarritz in France.

As you can see, I was a lot slimmer then.

Having this in my new name was so important.

I was formally recognised as me, as being female.

And I took it out of the envelope and I burst into tears.

By the mid-'70s, lesbian, gay, bisexual,

transgender and queer people were increasingly out and proud,

on television and on the streets

but, for many, the sense of shame and confusion was crippling.

For an innocent young lad growing up in a quiet seaside town,

the only way out was to be anything but gay.

It just felt so wrong.

I was just playing this game of being a heterosexual.

You've read in the paper that maybe it could be fixed.

That's the sort of route I gravitated towards,

so I thought, "Well, maybe I could hypnotise myself."

I got a book out on self-hypnosis, read it, tried it.

Of course that didn't work.

As the decade progressed, public attitudes towards gays,

lesbians and bisexual people were shifting.

It's a personal matter, doesn't concern anybody else.

There's no harm in them. It's not their fault.

They want medicine, definitely. They wouldn't go on like that.

Many no longer saw them as evil or wrong.

Instead, they were objects of pity

who could be helped by science and cured.

But in order to see a psychiatrist,

doctors sometimes required your parents' permission,

which was awkward at best,

especially if they didn't even know you were gay.

He took me into the surgery, grabbed me by the arm,

sat me down between them and said, "Your son has come to see me.

"He's confessed to masturbation."

I thought, "What?!"

He said, "He has homosexual inclinations

"and I've told him that this is a sinful practice

"and that he must cut his hair and behave more manly."

Mum, she thought it was all her fault, the way she brought me up,

and I said, "Don't be silly. I just am this way."

Dad said he'd known some blokes in the RAF who were that way.

This wasn't the way I wanted it to happen,

but it was the only way, if I was going to get to see a psychiatrist

who I thought would make me into a heterosexual.

Brian wrote down his thoughts

after his consultation with the psychiatrist.

"He told me, as I was 21 and it was all legal now,

"and you can go and bugger whoever you like.

"I told him I was profoundly unhappy and extremely lonely.

"I tried telling him about

"my completely impotent experiences with girlfriends

"but he dismissed these as nerves and told me all I had to do

"was to find a decent girl.

"He then said that if that didn't work and I was still worried about

"indulging in homosexual acts, then he could arrange for an operation,

"thereby incapacitating any sexual acts."

Until 1973, homosexuality was officially categorised

as a mental illness.

Thousands of men and women undertook treatment to be cured

and live what they saw as a normal life.

Their bodies were subjected to electric shocks,

brain surgery and chemical injections, all on the NHS.

Facing the possibility of chemical castration,

Brian nervously awaited the expert diagnosis.

"He assured me I wasn't a homosexual.

" 'I can always tell a homosexual when I see one.' "

And I left the psychiatrist's that day feeling,

well, I can't be a homosexual, can I, after all,

because he's told me, he's an expert.

By the mid-1970s,

the role of psychiatry and imposing cures on LGBT people

was increasingly coming in for criticism.

Do you want aversion therapy?

-ALL: No!

-Do you want psychiatric aid?

I didn't want to live a secret life.

I didn't want to hide who I was away any more.

So I stuck a gay lib badge on and walked round the town,

and if people were shocked, well, that's their problem.

They can deal with it.

With so many in the LGBTQ community,

being honest about who you are has meant having to pack your bags,

leave your home and your family

and move to somewhere else to start a new life again.

I'm off to see an extraordinary person,

someone who knows the pain of separation only too well.

Sandi is in her 70s and grew up in a children's home just after the war.

You left school,

you worked for a couple of years and then you got married,

cos that's the way it was back then.

I used to read a little magazine that was called True Romance,

and it was about a man and a woman falling in love,

living happily ever after, so I was looking for that kind of lifestyle.

I met a guy from Liverpool

and he was the first person who said he loved me.

-So I married him, yeah.

-Wow!

I had four children in five years.

I had them all at home for a year.

Their father was away at sea, so I was like a single parent.

But I loved it. I had a family of my own for the first time.

After six years, he came out the Navy and came and lived with me.

Even though I had four children to him, I loved my kids,

I was really aware of not being happy after a year.

Something had to be done.

Something needed to change.

Like so many women in the 1970s and '80s,

Sandi was faced with an agonising choice -

spend the rest of her life with a man she didn't love

or somehow try to live true to herself as a lesbian.

Divorce proceedings began.

This is the court case for custody

-and it was all built around me being gay.

-So, in essence,

you had the full power of the authorities directed against you?

The judge was female.

She said, "You won't have custody of your daughters,

"cos you're a lesbian and you're unfit to mother them,

"but you can have custody of your son."

I felt a big hot sweat come over me then, because it made me think,

"Wow, I must be really bad if I can't have my daughters."

And I remember thinking right there and then, "How can I separate them?

"How can I take the boy out of a family that he's grown up with?"

Even though I'd never had a family before, I said,

"I want them to stay together like a family."

I knelt down and I was their height and gave them all a hug and that,

and I had this really heavy pain in my heart, in my chest,

which must have been my heart.

I went back to my bedsit

and I realised that I had to start my life again.

Now alone, Sandi began the painful process of getting back on her feet.

One day, she found an object that gave her a reason to live again.

I had a friend who was selling a camera.

I started taking photos then, taking photos of my friend.

Wherever we were, on the street, we'd go to the park,

and I'd take photos of us.

In fact, the camera went everywhere with me.

As time passed,

Sandi was able to form relationships with her children again

and they became part of her photographs, too.

These are my four children, very young.

That's the oldest one, Dawn.

-It's a weird shape, though, the picture. Why is that?

-Well...

SHE LAUGHS

I done the standard thing that when a woman leaves her boyfriend

or husband, you chop them off in the photos.

-Oh, right, so he's gone?

-He's gone, yeah.

This is quite early on after I've been divorced

and had my kids taken off me.

I've reinvented myself and the... Holly was out being gay.

These two aren't.

I was out being gay.

Is that who I think it is?

Yeah, it's Holly. Bezzie mate.

I knew him when he was a young teenager.

# Relax, don't do it

# When you want to go to it... #

But this is where he used to sign on.

There's Chris Bernard, who directed Letter To Brezhnev.

He used to sign on then.

We all used to sign on there.

If you think about it,

this picture actually represents a vision of hope.

Look at these two guys, who've gone on

-to do amazing things.

-Look where they are, yeah.

# The power of love... #

Back in them days, you know,

it wasn't about falling in love and settling down,

happy ever after, or anything like that.

It was about telling each other our stories.

How we came out, who we were, what we expected.

And it was like we were all new and fresh at being gay.

As the 1980s dawned, it felt like a whole new era for many LGBTQ people.

Life certainly wasn't easy but now, if you grew up feeling isolated,

the big cities at least shone with possibility.

Across the land, small-town boys and girls and everyone in between

packed their bags and headed towards the lights.

In Northern Ireland, six-year-old Frankie O'Reilly

turned up for the first day of a new school term

and met his new classmates.

I'd seen all the new class lined up

and in the middle was this boy and I had said, "What's your name?"

He said, "Georgie."

I said, "My name's Frankie.

"Would you like to sit with me?"

He came back to my home for his tea afterwards.

From that day onwards, we've been inseparable.

Look at that. Got some of the albums here

of photographs of Georgie and I.

We grew up during the Troubles, with bombs going off and crossfire.

You would have to just lie on the ground

and let the bullets go over your head.

If you turned the wrong corner and walked into a street gang,

automatically, they would go, "Queer boys!"

We would never run without saying,

"You didn't say that last night when I was fucking the ass off you."

And then we would run for our lives.

By the time we were 16, we knew that Derry was far too small for us,

and it was, "London, here we come."

Around the same time, in Middlesbrough,

Sue Wade was also packing her bags,

with a dream in her head and a song in her heart.

With her partner at the time,

she found a basement just off Oxford Street

and set out to make a new nightclub for a new era.

She hasn't been back in 30 years.

I have to get the number right. Is it the... This one, was it?

That's the one. Yeah, it looks different.

It's exciting!

Wow!

If you'd have come in the '80s,

this is what I would have looked like on the door, sitting,

waiting and beckoning you in for a good time.

One night, a mysterious American arrived at the club.

Years later, Sue found out that

it was the renowned author Armistead Maupin

and he had immortalised the place in one of the best-loved novels

in modern American literature.

"London's most fashionable dyke nightclub

"was a place in Mayfair called Heds.

"Four or five lesbian couples

"were slow-dancing to Anne Murray beneath a jerky mirror ball."

I'm sorry about that!

"Michael sat down at one of the couches

"and motioned Wilfred to join him."

I'm sort of getting a bit excited.

-She wants to come back!

-My heart's going a little bit.

Sue's club is now, sadly, an unrented, empty office.

Sue's was part of a new generation of clubs

which wanted to do away with the narrow stereotypes

of what a lesbian could be, which had defined them for decades.

-TV REPORT:

-The swashbuckling approach, the heartiness,

the thumping stride, the tough man's clothes -

these things are natural to some lesbians

but mostly unacceptable to people outside that world.

This means that for lesbians who want to relax in the kind of clothes

in the kind of way that makes them happy, there are few places to go.

One of them is a club in Chelsea,

a place where there's no longer any need to pretend.

I think we should be allowed to go where we like,

dressed in what we like, and be accepted generally by society.

By the 1980s,

old divisions of butch women and their femme counterparts

were being broadened out.

This was a club for everyone.

I've got some pictures.

It was very mixed.

It wasn't fixed on one particular type of lesbian

or gay or transgender person. That's me.

Everyone sort of banded together, where they didn't fit in.

Sometimes the music would stop for a show.

The most fondly remembered was the androgynous

French underground sensation Ronny.

# To have and have not

# To have and have not... #

We got a big image of her on canvas,

where one side she was, like, very masculine and on the other side,

she was quite... with a feminine dress on.

And what she did, from behind it, when the music come up...

..she took a knife and split it and come through it and start singing,

you know, so it was absolutely... It was fantastic.

It was one of the most nerve-racking moments of my life.

I had finally plucked up the courage to come to the West End

and go to my first ever gay bar.

Trafalgar Square just over there, the heart of Theatreland,

and yes, folks, it was here.

It was called Brief Encounter.

The door was right here on the corner.

I walked up to the door.

It was there, my heart was pumping.

But did I go in? No, I kept walking.

Walked all the way round this block at least ten, 15, 20 times, scared,

full of fear. What was I afraid of?

People seeing me?

My aunt?

My aunt never came to the West End.

While I was walking around in circles, full of fear and shame,

just over there, a minute away, the most famous gay club in the world.

They were out, they were proud, they were loud, they were brash.

Their doors opened and they would say, "Guys, we're gay.

"Come on in!"

-TV REPORT:

-This is Heaven, one of London's newest and smartest discos.

It's situated in the West End and on some nights,

more than 2,000 people come here.

But there's one rather surprising aspect about these people -

almost all of them are men,

and that's because Heaven is a gay disco,

a nightspot for homosexual men.

And someone who attended Heaven religiously was Martyn Butler.

Welcome to Heaven.

Martyn was one of the lucky few.

He was the proud owner of the most coveted item in gay clubland -

the Heaven gold card.

Not many people had one of those.

To my knowledge, Freddie Mercury, Kenny Everett.

Almost every star that was anything in the pop music era played here.

A cavernous super club was built in a former munitions store,

deep under London's Charing Cross.

I was a young gay boy, 16, in South Wales.

I was only really happy

when I suddenly found myself in amongst 2,000 people.

I think it's possibly due to the fact that I'm deaf.

Coming into a nightclub, everybody is equal.

The sound is so loud that you have to shout.

But Martyn was no ordinary punter.

Martyn was Heaven's head of lasers, and his light shows were legendary.

Pull one out. There we are.

And this is my crew T-shirt from all those years ago.

There we go. And you can see the original Heaven logo on that.

Very proud to be a member of the crew for Heaven.

My God, I've put weight on since then, but there we go.

Terry Higgins would be sat there,

there would be members of Hot Gossip,

Floyd and Mark Tyme.

Kenny Everett would be there.

And Grace Jones would be in the coffee bar.

Mr Hardware from Heaven, London.

As Heaven's fame spread across the globe,

the club even hosted the first gay beauty contest

in typically larger-than-life style.

It was a theatre, it was a social centre.

It is your church, the place you go to have a funeral, maybe.

The place to go to be sad.

The place to escape the tyranny of work,

or places to stop that terrible loneliness of living in

one of the greatest cities on Earth and being totally alone.

Come in here and you realise that there is a community.

There's more than one. It's not just a little group

here, there and everywhere, and pretending you don't exist.

People were out and proud. I always felt that I'd come home.

The boys from Northern Ireland were having the time of their lives

in early '80s London and eventually,

after a lifetime of being the very best of friends,

Georgie plucked up the courage to say what was blindingly obvious.

Well, obvious to everyone except Frankie.

The Black Cap used to have cabaret.

We would have our one night as friends out a week.

Georgie declared to me on this night that he loved me.

And he says, "Well, I think we should be together."

The stars collided and the very next week they went out,

found a flat and settled down to life as a couple.

We'd come from a very, very dark period.

Don't tell anybody, and be afraid of the police.

And by 1982, we had Heaven, we had our own music.

There was already a sense that we were taking back

and we were taking control.

Just as we were becoming free and being able to say, yes,

I can do this and I can talk about it openly and whatever, suddenly...

The past weekend should have been a time of outright celebration

for Britain's homosexual community,

as a march through London ended Gay Pride Week,

seven days in which they commemorated

the start of the gay liberation movement.

However, the festivities were overshadowed by fear,

fear of a mysterious new disease

that has hit the homosexual community in America

and has now come here.

The funeral of Terry Higgins took place here

at Golders Green crematorium in north London.

Higgins, a 37-year-old computer programmer,

died after collapsing on the floor of a gay disco called Heaven.

Across the country, worried men approached their doctors

for an AIDS test.

We had our tests done together.

The doctor sat us down.

He said, "The two of you should go home, put your affairs in order,

"and enjoy whatever time you have left.

"You've both got the AIDS virus."

We were 25 years old.

As the full extent of the AIDS crisis became apparent,

the Government launched a public information campaign.

A leaflet dropped through every door in the land, and on television,

a hard-hitting advertising campaign.

As a young gay man growing up then, it was more than frightening.

-VOICEOVER:

-There is now a danger that has become a threat to us all.

It is a deadly disease and there is no known cure.

The first time I'd seen it on TV, it scared the bejesus out of me.

-VOICEOVER:

-Anyone can get it. Man or woman.

As far as we knew at that point,

there was never going to be a cure.

-VOICEOVER:

-..spreading...

Then people started dying...

ahead of us that were diagnosed after us.

The fear set in.

I came home one day and Georgie was in a very aggressive mood,

which was very unusual for Georgie, cos he was such a placid person.

He basically smashed the place up, and I let him do it.

I said to him, "Georgie, if you think by acting like that

"I'm going to pack my bags and leave you,

"you've another think coming."

I says, "Because no matter how angry you get, or no matter

"how much you destroy our home, I hope you do realise,

"I'm not going anywhere."

With the epidemic breathing down their necks, and fear everywhere,

people tried to get on with normal life.

One day, Georgie and I left here to go up to IKEA.

And Georgie had walked off to look at blinds,

and out of the side of my eye, all I could see from where I was standing

was that Georgie was having some kind of seizure.

I'd never seen it before in my life.

I'd known Georgie since he was a kid.

He's never had a seizure.

And for the next six months,

he was probably having 40 to 50 seizures a day.

Just before he died,

Georgie was filmed for a television documentary about living with AIDS.

But the interview was never used.

And this is the first time it has been seen.

You can make yourself a prisoner within yourself.

That's what I think I've done sometimes, you know?

All my fears, I was keeping them to myself,

and I should have been talking to other people.

And people... Everybody's in the same boat, you know?

There's nothing to be frightened of.

I think the only way to deal with fear is to face it.

When I go to bed at night with Georgie,

the last thing he does is give me a kiss.

And he says to me...

"..Maybe tomorrow, Frankie, I'll be a bit better."

And I swore that nobody, nobody...

..would ever take that hope away from him.

So I say to everybody,

we all know Georgie's dying when he tells us...

..he's dying.

And he told me the night before he died.

AIDS left a huge chasm in the lives of thousands of people.

There was little sympathy on offer,

and those that were left were often isolated,

grieving their loved ones alone.

Over in America,

a simple but brilliant idea caught hold as a way to remember the dead.

People would take a piece of fabric and sew a memorial

for those they had lost.

Some were happy, some were sad, some subtle,

some joyous and flamboyant.

This panel would then be added to other panels

to form a huge patchwork quilt of memories, loss and love.

It is treated as a national memorial,

travelling the country and displayed in Washington, DC.

The surprise is that in the UK

we have our own AIDS memorial quilt, too.

However, its fate has been very different.

The quilt was packed up

and a brilliant volunteer offered to house the quilt

in her garage in the north-east,

and this brilliant volunteer kept the quilt safe for ten years.

And thank God she did.

She had some kind of house fire, everyone was OK.

Gosh, you know, what would have happened

if the UK AIDS Memorial Quilt had gone up in flames?

In 1994,

the 384 panels of the UK quilt were laid out in Hyde Park in London.

They covered nearly 7,000 square feet.

It was a moment for people across the country to come together

and take in the magnitude of what AIDS had done.

The quilt has a really powerful message about resilience

and about hope,

and about the fact that we will overcome

some of the worst times of our lives.

And some of us will survive.

We'll lose people along the way, but actually...

..humans survive.

Michelle was working for an HIV charity which took in the quilt

when it was homeless ten years ago.

They wanted it to live again

and arranged an exhibition in Manchester in 2007.

One day during the show, a woman approached Michelle

searching for a panel she had made for a beloved friend.

She took my hand and she put these little bells in my hand

and I kind of closed my hand over it and she said, "I haven't...

"I meant to sew these on to the panel.

"I never got time to do it before it got sent off.

"So I just want to reunite them with Paul's panel."

The show in Manchester ten years ago was the last time

the entire UK AIDS Memorial Quilt was out on display.

After that, the quilt was boxed up and, for the last few years,

has been locked in a storage unit in the south-east of England.

Familiar bags.

To mark World AIDS Day,

a few of the panels are going on display at St Paul's Cathedral

and have been brought up to London.

Michelle is hoping to see the stranger's court jester panel

for the first time in ten years.

I used to haul these around with lots of volunteers and staff.

I wonder where it is.

Let's see.

Is it you?

So, let's see.

They're very heavy, you know, they're kind of weighty objects.

I... I've just heard a bell.

Have to be very careful.

There's our court jester.

How are you doing?

-Paul.

-BELLS JINGLE

And there's the bells on his shoes.

Wow.

People from across the country are coming together

to remember those they have lost,

or to see this precious piece of our history at first hand

before it goes back into storage and an uncertain future.

When I think of a quilt, I think of something that is warming,

that you go under for protection, for cover,

Mum tucks you in bed at night.

First time seeing these panels up close and personal,

it's weird. Quite goosebump-y at the moment, to be honest.

From bells and photographs to fabric and words,

it's a fragile artefact from an extraordinary time.

It's hard to believe that AIDS came

barely 20 years after the optimism of 1967,

when in that time LGBT people

had gone from living isolated and fearful lives

and building a community that came together when it mattered most.

To me, the quilt says it all.

People's memories stitched together to tell one story.

Fragile, diverse, extraordinary.

A bit like LGBT history itself.

You can make yourself a prisoner within yourself.

All my fears, I was keeping them to myself

and I should have been talking to other people.

And people... Everybody's in the same boat, you know.

There's nothing to be frightened of.

There are people out there that care, you know?

You've got to look for them.

Next week, how two kisses on our screens rocked the world.

Explore more about Britain's LGBT history and how things have changed.

Go to the website on screen

and follow the links to the Open University.

# No need to run and hide

# It's a wonderful, wonderful life

# No need to laugh and cry

# It's a wonderful, wonderful life

# The sun's in your eyes... #