with Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans History Month UK coming to the end for this year, we are happy to say together we have raised £723 for HIV Scotland thank you for buying and sharing the posts LGBT History Month Scotland LGBT Scotland LGBT Youth Scotland Pride Edinburgh Pink Saltire #pride #pridemonth #LGBTHM21 #lgbthistorymonth

  Claud - Super Monster ⅘ It's a show of confidence that this is the first release on Phoebe Bridger’s new label Saddest Factory Records but it's a justified gamble. Claud Mintz has produced a solid, sure-footed debut full of charm and youth. Even though there’s a pleasant seam of naivety running through the core of the album it is offset by an assured vibe. The songs themselves are fully formed bedroom, folk/indie pop. There’s a gentle touch of shoegaze to ‘Soft Spot’ while ‘Our In-Between’ sidles up to where Ariana Grande hangs out to share a milkshake, metaphorically of course Ms. Grande herself isn’t actually on the track. A hazy, lazy comfortable hammock of an album, it never veers away too much from the blueprint which is the record’s biggest flaw. A little variation in tempo and texture would benefit the album greatly, but that’s just a grumble seeing as there much promise in these grooves and more than enough time for experimentation on future recordings. Easy on the e...

Virginia Wing - Private Life 4/5   With the eternal, ever streaming cacophony of noise that is the almost un-sailable sea of new music in the 21st century it's more and more difficult to navigate towards music that’s a good fit for your ears. The previous model of music press, tv and record shops filtered a lot of stuff out, and of course left great music out by the margins of the popular but got you to where you needed to be. It feels like Virginia Wing would be stuck in-between these two worlds. On one hand they have the oddly left field touches that perk the ears up of any music lover and on the other there’s an frosty indifference to commerciality.  The liberal use of saxophone, an instrument that seemed to have been time-locked into the 1980’s, is folded in (“What does that mean ‘Fold in’?”) creating additional jazz angles to the electronic beats presided over by Alice Marida Richard’s cool, detached electro persona. Pop sensibilities haven’t been completely ignored, they...

  Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe Hall (12 August 1880 – 7 October 1943) was an English poet and author, best known for the novel The Well of Loneliness, a groundbreaking work in lesbian literature. The publishing of which leads to one of the most famous trials in London during the interwar years. Radclyffe Hall, shocked conventional society with the lesbian theme of the novel “The Well of Loneliness.” Viciously attacked by the editor of the Sunday Express—“I would rather give . . . [a child] a phial of prussic acid than this novel”—the work was eventually judged obscene and all copies of the book ordered to be destroyed. Devastating as this was, the case gave Hall, or “John,” as she was known among her friends, a celebrity she relished. Wealthy, arrogant and notoriously short-tempered, Hall dressed as a man, in a suit and tie, with her hair cropped short, cigar usually in hand. Diana Souhami describes with perspicacity and wit the life Hall led with her devoted lover, Una Troubridg...

  Statement from Pride Edinburgh Dear Edinburgh, it is with sadness and heavy hearts that we must announce the cancellation of the Pride Edinburgh's physical event in 2021. Discussions with the City Council, Scottish Government and event partners have concluded that the restrictions created by COVID-19 would make it impossible for us to run a safe event, especially when it draws over 15,000 people to the city every year. While there will be no physical event, we are now working on a virtual event to celebrate Pride in the Capital, more information on our plans will be released soon. We are also opening the doors and recruiting new members to join our team, keep an eye on our website for updates on this. We thank all our partners and sponsors and most of all the LGBTQI+ community of Edinburgh, Scotland and beyond, we know the Rainbow will always shine in our capital city.

  today as part of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans History Month UK Jackie Forster (née Jacqueline Moir Mackenzie; 6 November 1926 – 10 October 1998 was an English news reporter, actress and lesbian rights activist. Broadcaster, editor and gay rights activist. In the 1950s, under her maiden name, Jackie Mackenzie became a television personality, appearing in programmes such as Highlight, Newsnight and Late Night Extra. Following her divorce in 1962, Jackie Forster travelled to Canada where, she met the actress Barbara Mary Todd, who remained her partner until 1975. With Todd, Forster founded the organization Sappho and its magazine, which she edited for ten years (1971-81) Forster's father was a colonel in the Royal Army Medical Corps and she spent her early years in British India. When she was six, she was sent to boarding school in Britain at Wycombe Abbey and then to St Leonards School in Fife. During the Second World War, she played lacrosse and field hockey for Scotland. Forste...

  Keith Haring was an American artist whose pop art and graffiti-like work grew out of the New York City street culture of the 1980s. Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism. He achieved this by using sexual images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. Haring's work grew to popularity from his spontaneous drawings in New York City subways—chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylized images on blank black advertising-space backgrounds. He also painted his figures on the lower part of the subway walls sitting on the floor. After public recognition he created larger scale works, such as colorful murals, many of them commissioned. His imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". His later work often addressed political and societal themes—especially homosexuality and AIDS—through his own iconography. Haring died on February 16, 1990, of AIDS-related complications. In 2014 Haring was one of the inaugural honorees ...

  Rodney Wilson was a graduate student at the University of Missouri–St. Louis when he proposed an idea that has since grown into an annual celebration in schools and cities across the country. The founder of what is now known as  Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender History Month  each fall, Wilson was also a history and government teacher at Mehlville High School in south St. Louis County at the time. “I’m happy to say that UMSL was among the very first colleges and universities in the United States to hold a function, doing so that first October in 1994,” said Wilson, who earned his master’s degree in  history  from UMSL in 1995. “Professor Gerda Ray, other graduate students in the history department and I  organized a film festival  on the UMSL campus ­every Monday night that month.” On a broader level, Wilson and a close friend took the lead on writing and sending a proposal to advocacy groups, movers and shakers, historians and a wide range of ...

  today as part of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans History Month UK we look over to Germany and Ralf König (born 8 August 1960) who is one of the best known and most commercially successful German comic book creators. His books have been translated into many languages. In 1979, he came out as a gay man, and about this time he created short comics stories that appeared in the Munich underground magazine Zomix and the gay periodical Rosa Flieder.[1] He returned to school from 1981 to 1986, attending the public Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and pursuing a major in free art (Freie Kunst). Also in 1981, his early collected comics were published by the gay publishing house Verlag rosa Winkel as SchwulComix (GayComix). In 1987, he wrote The Killer Condom (Kondom des Grauens), his first comic with a continuous story, which was later produced as a film. In the German-speaking world, König's comics have a vast homosexual fan base. Despite initial skepticism about the prospect of a broader audienc...

Click here to read >  Feb 2021 Issue   SceneAlba Blog: New issue #LGBTHistoryMonth , a chat with @chattyman Alan Carr, #itsasin @callumshowells @nathancurtis90 , from CBHC @TomReadWilson , the pick of @glasgowfilmfest plus lots more @PinkSaltire @ILoveGayLGBT @LGBTHistoryScot @HIVScotland

  When I look back upon my life, it's always with a sense of shame.” Pet Shop Boys - It's a Sin By now you’ve probably binged all of the new Russell T Davies drama ‘It's A Sin’ and whilst feeling entertained, elated, devastated and possibly angry you have also been treated to an array of marvellous pop music from that era. Arguably pop’s most magnificent decade, the 80’s had such a massive impact that it's not commonplace to still hear those hits wherever you go even in the 21st century, but who were some of the key acts and how did they get there? Though many regards the 70’s as the emergence of queer pop and the 80’s as the decade that politicised it there’s much more to the story which can have no exact birthdate but why not start with a look back a hundred years. The previous 20’s, the 1920’s. It's obviously impossible to pinpoint any starting point but as with so many things it probably started in Black history.  In the smoky blues nightclubs of Harlem in New Y...