Unheard Voices: Recovering Wales’ lost LGBT+ history

Dr Jesse Schwenk, Senior Lecturer in Drama at the University of South Wales, specialises in Scriptwriting, with a research focus on the LGBT+ experience. To mark LGBT+ History Month, he tells us about his latest research project, Unheard Voices.

South Wales Friend (SWF) was an LGBT support organisation formed in Cardiff in the 1970s and active until the early 2000s. The papers of SWF are a small, uncatalogued collection of nine boxes held at the Glamorgan Archives. The bulk of the papers consists of log books, which are the detailed records of the telephone helpline run by SWF. These log books are handwritten records, completed by the operators, of each call received by the helpline, and form a rich source of real-world stories.

As a social document, the log books form an important portrait of the LGBT+ community in Wales in the last decades of the 20th century. They are a hidden history, a living heritage, and have the potential to make an important contribution to the documentation and understanding of LGBT+ social heritage in Wales today. The aim of the Unheard Voices research project therefore is to recover this lost LGBT+ history of Wales, and make it accessible to the public. This will be achieved primarily by means of creating a podcast series – including audio interviews and dramas based on research into the archive – and also a website, which will make this culture and history accessible in audio form.

The stories recorded in the log books unfold in real time: a detailed reading of them track individuals who contacted the helpline with a wide array of personal issues, some of which are specific to their time (eg. up to date knowledge of HIV and AIDS) and some of which might still resonate today (eg. a grandmother who calls to discuss her grandson, who has come out to his mother – her daughter – and is now at risk of domestic abuse).

Many of the call logs record individuals who called the helpline a number of times, and so the log books form a rich source of ongoing real-world stories unfolding over time, some of which are resolved, some left open. Another notable aspect of the log books is the 'voices' of the volunteer operators who manned the helpline and recorded the calls. Their hand-written entries gives us first-hand knowledge of issues facing the gay community as it developed structures and working practices to support and promote itself.

The primary aim of this research project is to make this LGBT+ history and culture accessible to the public, to bring it from the margins of society into the mainstream of culture. However, the work will also be of benefit to specialists, such as researchers into society and culture, or social historians, as well as to teachers and students of LGBT+ culture and history.