We’re thrilled to be heading over to Dublin next weekend for Various Voices 2014, a fantastic festival bringing together LGBT choirs from across Europe and beyond. We’ll be sharing our experiences as we go, too. Having just celebrated our thirtieth anniversary last year, we couldn’t help but feel nostalgic. We’re returning to the Hackney Empire on Saturday 19th July to celebrate the best of British performers and composers – and it will be 25 years since we hosted there the 5th European Lesbian and Gay Festival of Song, now known as Various Voices. Fourteen LGBT choirs came to London for four nights from 11 – 14 May 1989 to support the British gay movement in its fight against Section 28, a law which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality (just like Russia in 2014). As the law was championed by the Thatcher Government we called the Festival Singing The Blues Away. The event was jointly organised by the Pink Singers and the Pre-Madonnas, a feminist choir so called because “we were famous before SHE was and we like to have our own way”! We received no government or local authority support but were sponsored by MPs Chris Smith and Linda Bellos along with Sir Michael Tippett, Sir Ian McKellen, and Miriam Margolyes. Around 500 singers came to Hackney from Sweden, France, Holland and Germany. The local Wimpy staff wondered why so many people kept singing in the restaurant and asking for “weggie-burgers”. We finished each evening with all the choirs singing Dame Vera Lynn’s famous song “We’ll Meet Again”. And we have! The Various Voices Festival returned to London at the South Bank Centre in 2009 and will be in Dublin from 13-16 June with 80 choirs from around the world. We can’t wait!
Plan your visit now to Singing The Changes, our free exhibition about LGBT history in the UK spanning the last thirty years! The exhibition opened last Thursday night to a selection of guests who’d helped the exhibition come into existence (an army of volunteers over 50 strong, plus our academic advisers and the extended Pink Singers family). As part of this project, as well as a ton of factual and image research as mentioned by Hester, the choir has recorded over 16 hours of video footage collected from oral history interviews with choir members past and present.
Jess and Karin
The clips from these personal histories really bring this rich and fast-moving history to life; from stories of secretive liaisons and active persecution back in the 70s and 80s; right through to coming out to close family members over email in more recent years. London’s vibrant cultural mix, reflected in the choir, becomes evident as our video histories take us all over the world, from Singapore to Nottingham, from South Africa to South Wales, from Trinidad to Tooting. Personally, over the last few months I’ve been responsible for co-ordinating the filming, transcribing and editing of these oral histories along with a small army of around 25 volunteers from the choir. I have genuinely laughed and cried (sometimes both at once) whilst watching the stories of those involved. It’s been a very humbling experience. I’m the same age as the choir itself, and my big take-out from the exhibition and the tales of individuals is just how dramatically the landscape of LGBT community has shifted in just a couple of generations, and how different my experiences have been compared to my peers who are just a few years older/younger. You can see a sneak preview of the exhibition below.
Plan your visit now
14 June – 12 July 2013 Thursday & Friday evenings 6–9pm Saturday & Sunday 10am–6pm Audit House, 58 Victoria Embankment Tube: Temple / Blackfriars 15 July – 18 August 2013 Daily 10am-6pm The Guardian, King’s Place Tube: King’s Cross Free admission
Hester has been singing with the Pink Singers for a number of years and is a key member of the team working on our Singing the Changes exhibition, opening this week. In discussion with fellow choir member Ben, Hester explains her involvement in the exhibition and talks about her experiences with the choir.
Singing the Changes contains loads of amazing images from the choir archive, and also from the press archives of LGBT events and protests in the last 30 years. Have you got a favourite?
It’s extremely difficult to pick favourites from such a wealth of fascinating documents and memorabilia. Some of my favourites are the photos of Pink Singers performing in dustbin liners and assorted hats, in 1986. 27 years later, we still have the same willingness to experiment and risk looking silly in the cause of entertaining our audiences.
Image: LSE/HCA/Pink Singers
Perhaps my serious favourite is the press release put out by the European Lesbian and Gay Festival of Song in 1988, stating their support for the Pink Singers, who were facing the ‘anti-homosexual laws of the Thatcher government’: Section 28. It is very heartening to see evidence of the way ten other gay choirs spoke out in solidarity with the UK gay community at a very difficult time.
Could you tell me what the exhibition is about?
It is a celebration of 30 years of the Pink Singers and an exploration of the changing lives of gay people in London from the 1980s and 1990s onwards. Gay history isn’t taught in schools, and has not been passed to children by their parents, so it’s important for organisations like ours to share their stories.
How did the idea for the exhibition come about?
We realised what an important milestone our 30th anniversary was going to be: we were the first gay choir in the UK and we are the longest-running mixed gay choir in Europe. A lot has changed for the gay community during the time the Pinkies have been singing and we wanted to mark the occasion appropriately, looking back at how far we’ve come, the fun we’ve had and the difficulties we’ve faced.
Has it been tricky to document the history of the Pink Singers?
It has been a lot of work, by many dedicated choir members, but once you start looking, there are all sorts of ways to record our history. The filmed interviews with choir members were carried out especially for the exhibition and they’re fascinating personal stories, covering all sorts of things not documented elsewhere; they are not just about singing, but about coming out, exploring the gay scene and all aspects of LGBT experience. The choir’s early history was well covered in documents deposited at the LSE’s collection in the Hall Carpenter Archive. They were donated by one of our early conductors, Robert Hugill, and consist of hundreds of items, from concert flyers and programmes, to handwritten lists of members, letters and sheet music for a song adapted to give it a gay theme. Long-serving members of the Pink Singers have also donated artefacts, programmes and other items, then there are press reports, costumes and audio recordings to build up the picture.
Image: LSE/HCA/Pink Singers
Aside from putting together the exhibition, you’re an active member of the choir. Have you worked on projects like this before? How has it felt working on something that forms a part of your own experience?
I’ve never done anything like this before! Some of the work has played to my strengths and some has involved venturing quite a long way out of my comfort zone: I loved pretending to be an academic at the LSE Archive, compiling an inventory of the Pinkie materials held there (I’m a librarian and history graduate), but interviewing one of the choir’s conductors on film was quite scary.
I’m so pleased to have been involved in the whole process though; I have learnt a lot about gay history that I didn’t know and have found it completely fascinating.
Why did you originally join the choir?
I wanted to meet other gay people who loved music – and more people around my own age; previously I had spent a lot of time going to social groups, and a lesbian walking group, where I had tended to meet women who were a lot older than me.
Are you in the choir for the same reasons now?
I still enjoy meeting new members each season, but the choir turned out to offer a huge amount more than I expected. It has transformed my social life, for the better, taken me all over Europe and the UK, and even shown me that I can enjoy dancing! We are in some ways like a huge, supportive, varied family – I’m so lucky to be part of it. We know how to have fun and there’s nothing like the buzz you get from singing with other people. If I’d known about the choreography I’d never have joined, but it’s such a quintessential part of a Pinkie performance, and so entertaining for the audience, that I quite enjoy it now.
Some of the interviews included within the exhibition are strikingly powerful and I’ve been surprised to hear how far LGBT rights have come in the last 30 years. Clearly we’ve still got some way to go and just watching the news in the last few weeks shows that even in mainland Europe, the advancement of LGBT civil rights has the potential to cause dissent. Can exhibitions like this help inform and educate?
Yes, it is so important that our past is not forgotten, so that we don’t take our current situation for granted: the political and social climate can change to our detriment as well as to our benefit, as demonstrated by Section 28 and the hostility provoked in some quarters by the emergence of AIDS. The exhibition is also communicating the message that the gay community is a wonderful, varied, supportive network of amazing individuals who know how to have a good time, whether by singing or just by partying! In this respect, it is playing a similar role to the ‘It Gets Better’ campaign.
The results of Hester and her fellow curators efforts can been seen at ‘Singing the changes’.
‘Tales of the Pinkie’ is our irregular series of articles looking back our history through the eyes of our members. This year we’re presenting a range of great events to celebrate our 30 years of singing together. Find out more about our history and the LGBT rights movement in our brilliant exhibition ‘Singing the Changes’ that runs 13th June – 18th August. Former Pink Singer Tim C chats to our current member Hsien about his memories of singing with the choir, taking part in our European trips and appearing on the set of Gimme, Gimme, Gimme. Continue reading “Tales of the Pinkie – Tim C”
We celebrated our 30th anniversary year in style in so many ways, that it’s taken quite a while for us to distil the enormity into this 4:30 clip.
Huge thanks to all photographers from within (and without!) the choir who worked on documenting the year: Hsien Chew, Liang Wee, Ben Park, Oskar Marchock, Pete Stean, Simon Pearson, James Cronin, Jake Milligan, Boy oh Boy Photography.
Relive our year and listen along to Richard Thomas’ composition ‘Earth, Wind and Choir’ performed by the Pink Singers and 21 other LGBT choirs at our choral festival Hand in Hand in July 2013.
And if this whets your appetite, check our yearbooks from previous years: 2011, 2010.
Fourteen LGBT choirs came to London for four nights from 11 – 14 May 1989 to support the British gay movement in its fight against Section 28, a law which banned the “promotion” of homosexuality (just like Russia in 2014). As the law was championed by the Thatcher Government we called the Festival Singing The Blues Away.
