LGBTQ

Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual rights

older

Rediscovering Dorothy Arzner

Dorothy Arzner is someone I had never heard of before, and maybe you haven’t either. Arzner was the only director of films in Hollywood under the studio system of the 1930s and 1940s and she made some pretty remarkable films in those years. Her work is currently being celebrated at the BFI in London and this week I got to see her last film, First comes courage . Here is how BFI described her: “Her films were multifaceted revisions of Hollywood norms, paying sharp attention to the intersection of women’s working and romantic lives. Her protagonists were snappy and headstrong, subverting...

Backlash after unions’ trans-rights vote

On 18 February Scottish Labour Party conference voted down a motion submitted via the Scottish Labour women’s conference which had urged it to “acknowledge the principle of women’s sex-based rights” (established code words for trans exclusion). The large unions used their votes to block policy seeking to push Labour further from trans inclusion. On a card vote , 69.3% of Constituency Labour Party (CLP) delegates’ votes were for the motion. Votes are weighted equally between CLP delegates and party affiliates. The motion fell because 77% of affiliate votes were against it. The motion had urged...

LGBT+ conference is largest-ever

On 2-4 February, 350 lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and other non-straight education workers gathered in Birmingham for the National Education Union’s largest-ever LGBT+ Educators’ Conference. Most of the conference was a series of workshops run by rank-and-file activists — which covered issues including industrial action, history of protest, behaviour, union organising, neurodiversity and many more — and caucuses, which enabled different sections and identities to meet and discuss their issues and concerns. Executive representative Kacey de Groot and new general Secretary Daniel Kebede both...

Gays and miners: the enemy within

Clive Bradley is a socialist and a screenwriter ( Trapped, Castlevania: Nocturne ). In the 1980s he was a member of Socialist Organiser (the forerunner of Workers’ Liberty) and an activist in Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM), a campaign group which supported the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) during the year-long strike of 1984–5. LGSM is depicted in the film Pride (2014) which brought the story to a wide audience. Clive spoke to Ruth Cashman. The idea for LGSM came from Mike Jackson and Mark Ashton at the end of June, at the London Pride march. I found out about the meetings...

Champion of outcasts: Lisetta Carmi

• Lisetta Carmi: Identities 20 September to 17 December 2023. Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art Lisetta Carmi (1924-2022) said that she “took photographs in order to understand”, and it is this humanism and empathy that Identities , exhibited by the Estorick Collection in London, sought to capture. The exhibition was split into two rooms, both featuring her work from the 1960s. The first contained her study of two working-class communities: the dockers in the port of Genoa and women in a cork factory in Sardinia. As Carmi’s friend Giovanni Battista Martini wrote: “Wherever there was an...

Word4Word: cis and trans

Continuing our occasional series on words or phrases of interest to the left

Bristol Trans Pride

Almost 1,000 protested in Bristol Trans Pride on 25 November. Protesters ranged from trans and nonbinary people to their families to other LGBTIQ people to wider supporters. We demanded better trans healthcare, and protecting trans kids from transphobic parents, schools and the government. We denounced the vile right-wing culture war against trans people, migrants, and climate action — and Labour accommodation to that. We celebrated trans people and some vogued. Shamefully, unions had little visible presence. A prison doctor working for Practice Plus Group is refusing, against specialist...

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