Performing LGBT Pride in Plymouth, 1950-2000

This collaborative doctoral project involves three partners: Plymouth Pride Forum (PPF); Plymouth & West Devon Record Office (PWDRO), a service run by Plymouth City Council; and the Theatre & Performance department at the University of Plymouth, which is located within its research centre for Humanities, Music and Performing Arts (HuMPA). The primary aim is to investigate how and why the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) communities of Plymouth performed and celebrated their cultures and identities between 1950 and 2000. These performances are particularly inflected by Plymouth's maritime location, its status as a port, and the severe bombing during WWII which destroyed most of its centre. It is a small city still dominated by its dockyards and the Royal Navy, often characterised as being 'on the periphery'. The project embraces a performance studies perspective - in particular, it will adopt a 'broad spectrum' approach to what it analyses 'as' performance. This includes aesthetic performances like theatre and dance, popular entertainment like cabaret, sporting events, rallies, public speeches, protests and parades. It also includes social performance, or the everyday performativity of gendered dress, gesture and behaviour in bars and on the street. The project will specifically address the interrelationships between these different types of performance practices in Plymouth's LGBT communities, as is demonstrated in the following story: Paul Pollard was a chef and Ted Spring was in the Navy when they met in 1960 and they have now been together for fifty years. They met in the Lockyer Hotel, one of Plymouth's two gay bars at the time, which features in the paintings of Beryl Cook. In the mid-1960s they owned and ran a guesthouse called Scheherazade for theatre people; they also performed a cabaret act and ran the Pussycat Club in the Old Palace Theatre. According to Mr Pollard, 'We have not had any trouble at all in the time we have been together but I think acceptance of gay relationships is less tolerant today than it was years ago' (Plymouth Herald, 25 September 2010). As Jill Dolan has recently noted in 'Theatre & Sexuality' (2010), 'sexual identity provides a crucial perspective from which to consider how performance is created and received, as well as how sexuality is performed by actors and by people in their everyday lives.'

This project focuses on living memory; oral histories and mementoes shared by members of the LGBT community are key to its research methodology. These will be collected and recorded both by the student and volunteer members of PPF, resulting in an exhibition at the Plymouth City Museum & Art Gallery. They will also be archived at PWDRO (materially and digitally) and then supplemented and contextualised by the student through cross-referencing to additional material in: the collections of Record Office (including its Theatre History archive); other local photographic and film archives (such as South West Film & Television Archive and South West Image Bank); and relevant national collections (such as, for example, that of the Imperial War Museum, which curated an exhibition entitled Military Pride in 2008, also based on personal testimonies). The chronological range of the project ends with a moment of transformation in the ways Plymouth's LGBT communities began to constitute and present themselves, due both to the new social prevalence of the internet and the lifting of the ban on lesbians and gay men in the armed forces. It is also only a few years after Plymouth Pride Forum was constituted as a response to hate crimes in the city. By 2000, Plymouth's LGBT communities were demanding visibility and the right to be openly proud of the city's sexual diversity. In addition to exploring how lesbian, gay male, bisexual and trans communities worked together, this doctoral project will also in

Perhaps the best way to sum up the potential impact of this project is by quoting the LGBT History Month motto: 'Claiming our history, celebrating our present, creating our future.' The impact on LGBT communities in Plymouth, and beyond, will primarily be achieved through the student's involvement in the creation of the Plymouth LGBT Archive which will, like many similar community projects throughout the UK (e.g. in Brighton, Manchester, Wales, London and West Yorkshire) and around the world, ensure that the experiences and memories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people of Plymouth are recorded and preserved for their own benefit, heritage and empowerment, and as a tool of education and engagement for the wider community. The student and PPF volunteers will collect and catalogue the papers, documents, photographs, oral history interviews, and memorabilia of LGBT individuals, organizations, institutions, and businesses in Plymouth. Audio recordings of interviews made for the project will be available as mp3 files in the first instance and the student will prepare transcript summaries. These materials will be accessible by researchers and members of the general public at PWDRO and via its website. Details of the archive will be made available on the Out There portal of The National Archives website, which lists archive resources for the study of LGBT history, and the Community Archives & Heritage Group's Gender & LGBT webpage. It is anticipated that this project will alert LGBT community groups and their archivists to the potentials of using performance, in its widest sense, to demonstrate and understand how history continues to be lived through the interaction of social activism and cultural expression.

As noted in the National Archives' introductory guide to researching gay and lesbian history, this is often a difficult and time-consuming task because 'It is often impossible to know whether or not files contain evidence of gay and lesbian experiences from their catalogue titles and descriptions.' This studentship will thus greatly benefit those interested in Plymouth's LGBT theatre and performance history, now and in the future, by cross-referencing the material collated for the Archive Project with additional source material for his/her PhD thesis which is held in PWDRO collections and other local film and photographic archives. A guide to these cross-referenced sources will be produced (essentially a catalogue of material related to 20th century LGBT Theatre & Performance History held in Plymouth collections), allowing others to easily access the doctoral project's primary sources.

The exhibition of the archive materials at the Plymouth City Museum offers opportunities for Plymouth's wider communities to participate in the project and experience the findings to date. The exhibition plan includes a school and youth engagement strategy. Key stakeholders in Plymouth like the Royal Navy will also be invited. When the activist Peter Tatchell opened the 2009 Plymouth Pride event, he criticised the Royal Navy for attending that year's London Pride but not supporting the event in Plymouth: 'The gay rights movement isn't as strong in the South West as it is in the rest of the country,' he said. 'Plymouth has a long, historic naval tradition and is one of the main ports of the Royal Navy. It is not the most tolerant city in Britain. Parts of the city are quite rough and homophobic. Given the sometimes less enlightened local attitudes, it is much more important that the navy has a presence at Plymouth Pride than at London Pride.' Tatchell expresses the paradox of LGBT experience in Plymouth; as long as it remained 'hidden', it could be vibrant, silently accepted and relatively safe. By reminding Plymouth and teaching its children how much the city's LGBT history has contributed to what makes it culturally unique, it might be