Re-viewing LGBTQ+ lives through broadcasting in twentieth-century Britain

This project invites a variety of audiences to reassess past and present depictions of LGBTQ+ people in broadcasting through activities ranging from plays, hands-on workshops to roundtables, websites and resources for secondary schools. The project enables participants to discover how television and radio represented and moulded the lives of lesbian, gay and trans people during the twentieth century. It asks them to consider how we can reinterpret these sources in the twenty-first century and repurpose them for use on the stage, in the classroom and in public events like Pride and LGBT+ History Month. Ongoing controversies about LGBTQ+ representation in broadcasts as varied as Doctor Who and news coverage of trans teenagers make the project timely and significant for broadcasters, policy-makers and the general public. The core project team consists of the historian Marcus Collins and the dramatist Stephen Hornby. Dr Collins is an expert on postwar Britain who specialises in the histories of popular culture, sexuality and social change. As AHRC BBC Centenary Fellow in 2022, he collaborated with a dozen schools, three theatre companies, two museums, a library, a subject association, an examination board and the BBC itself to assess whether the BBC experienced a 'cultural revolution' in the 1960s. 'Re-viewing LGBTQ+ Lives' applies this experience of public engagement to the subject-matter of his forthcoming monograph Arrested Development: Queer Broadcasting in Britain from Wolfenden to AIDS to explore how lesbian and gay people fashioned identities, created communities and interacted with wider society in an age of mass communications. Dr Hornby is a multi-award winning author of nine plays who has pioneered the dramatisation of British LGBTQ+ history and whose forthcoming monograph Writing from Archives for Stage and Screen shows other playwrights and screenwriters how to research, narrativise and dramatise historical records. His latest play, The BBC's First Homosexual, is based on research on Dr Collins about the BBC's ill-starred attempt to broadcast a discussion programme about male homosexuality in the 1950s. It interweaves snippets from the original transcript and production files of the programme with a fictional account of a man learning to live with homophobia in fifties Scunthorpe and will tour as a full production across England as part of this project. Other elements of the project will be conducted in partnership with Learning on Screen, OUTing the Past and community venues including the Queer Britain Museum in London and the Proud Place in Manchester. LGBTQ+ communities will be invited to engage with their histories and to develop a shared understanding with straight people of how media representations shape and are shaped by evolving sexual identities. Secondary schoolchildren will learn to analyse texts and comprehend social change, dramatists will discover how to adapt old broadcasts into new art and researchers will be equipped to use audiovisual sources alongside written ones. In this manner, the project will showcase how 're-viewing' LGBTQ+ broadcasting can reconnect academics to non-academic audiences and effect an audiovisual turn which transforms understandings of twentieth-century culture, society and politics for everyone from schoolchildren to scholars.