February each year is LBGT history month in the UK.
Whilst I am not part of the LBGT community, I have had many friends over the years who are and who have faced the stigma and rights abuses that society perpetuates.
Nor could I fully understand those stigma’s and rights abuses from a personal perspective.
Over the last couple of years, I also have gained friends from the community who also have a diagnosis of Dementia and who face the additional stigma and rights abuses of a Dementia diagnosis.
To be human is to be different.
If we were all the same we wouldn’t have known Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Dr Martin Luther King, Sir Ian McKellen, Nelson Mandela, Derek Jarman, Neil Armstrong, William Shakespeare etc.
With our media oriented society, there seems to be a need to pigeon hole people into labels that can have a positive or negative effect on individuals.
Nobody is perfect and therefore have the right to judge others.
English poet Alexander Pope wrote in the poem An Essay on Criticism, Part II , 1711
“Ah ne’er so dire a Thirst of Glory boast,
Nor in the Critick let the Man be lost!
Good-Nature and Good-Sense must ever join;
To err is Humane; to Forgive, Divine.“
LBGT History Month website states
It is now LGBT History Month 2019. This year our theme is Peace, Activism and Reconciliation.
To get involved:
- buy a badge or badges for LGBT History Month 2019. The more you buy the less they cost
- download and print our LGBT History wall-chart and put it on your noticeboard at work
- check out our interactive calendar and go to an event in your area
- check out our resources
- organise an event in your area and put it on our interactive calendar
- look at the OUTing the Past LGBT History Festival and go to at least one of the free events there
- Check out this website and our Facebook and Twitter posts and tweets for updates
There is more. If you:
- are in education or youth work use LGBT History Month to promote LGBT equality
- are in education or youth work put some curriculum posters up on your wall
- are in education or youth work check out the Proud Trust’s LGBT History Month Toolkit for 2019. They’ve planned the work so you don’t have to
- know a lot about an LGBT Place or person check out OUTing the Past and offer a presentation for next year
- want to know a lot more about LGBT history come to the OUTing the Past Festival Conference held over the final weekend in March 2019 in Belfast
LGBT History Month is celebrated in February in the UK. Each year, The Proud Trust teams up with Schools OUT UKand LGBT History Month to write a simple, easy to use, education and resource pack. Free to download on this page, we also have a limited number of printed packs available to buy through our online shop each year.
LGBT History Month 2019
Theme: “Peace, Reconciliation and Activism”
We are absolutely thrilled to bring you the LGBT History Month Resource and Education Pack for 2019, in conjunction with Schools OUT UK. The theme this year is of such great importance, exploring LGBT+ activism in the year marking 50 years since the Stonewall Riots, a pivotal moment in LGBT+ rights and history. It is crucial that the struggles and fights of others, to give us the lives we have today, are recognised. It is also so important that we understand the fights that are still continuing to happen, and still need to happen, to give folk liberation and peace.
Our thanks are extended to Phyll Opoku-Gyimah, founder of UK Black Pride, who has kindly written the thought provoking foreword to this years pack.
This four session pack will help you bring LGBT+ awareness into your youth groups or classrooms, and could be delivered as part of PSHE or history!
LBGT History Month Scotland states
To mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprisings in New York, and the birth of the modern Pride movement, the theme will be CATALYST: 50 years of activism.
We want to look at the people who kick-started change and the events that were the turning points along the way. We also encourage you to look at the activists of today, including the people changing the future for trans people and the intersectional activists who speak to the myriad of LGBT experiences.
As always, if you are planning to hold events, host exhibitions or create digital content, you are welcome to disregard the theme. LGBT History Month is created by the community, and we don’t want to stifle your creativity.
If you do want to embrace CATALYST, we hope you can use it as a… well… catalyst for idea generation and to frame your event. Over the next few weeks we’ll be assembling a resource pack of posters, digital graphics and a guide to how to maximise your audience when February arrives. We will also shortly be opening submissions for our website event listings at www.lgbthistory.org.uk.If you would like to have a chat about your idea in the meantime, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
We can’t wait to see what you come up with. It’s a big year for LGBT history and culture and we know you’ll find exciting ways to celebrate that.
When The Fog Lifts 