Before Stonewall Summary: Charlotte Cooper Clip 1 of 4

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Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton collects, preserves, catalogues and provides public access to its collection of films and magic lantern slides. The collection charts the rise of screen culture in the region and the nation and captures many aspects of life, work and creativity in the South East from the late 19th century to the present day. It is available for research, screenings, creative re-use and commercial access.

Before Stonewall Summary: Charlotte Cooper Clip 1 of 4

Screen Archive South East at the University of Brighton
2003-07-31
Sound

Journalist Charlotte Cooper joins GLAM's 'Before Stonewall' project - with a very hectic schedule - but the first job is to find some participants.

In this extract, Charlotte Cooper describes how she became involved in GLAM's 'Before Stonewall' oral history project after responding to an advert in the gay press. Taking up the post on her birthday, she relates how the job involved organising and training team of volunteers as well as contacting members of the older gay community across the UK, who might like to participate in the project.

Given only two days per week to work on 'Before Stonewall', Charlotte describes a chaotic work schedule which involved creating press releases and information packs aimed at would-be interviewees and volunteers; organising a workable schedule for visiting all the participants and recording their interviews; and co-ordinating and writing up the results.

Always constrained by the lack of adequate preparation time, Charlotte comes out with some surprising observations, one of which is that there were far fewer responses from potential participants than she'd hoped and that there were many more volunteers available to conduct interviews than there were interviewees.

She also describes how nerve-wracking the interviewing experience was for the interviewer and how the pressure to achieve a successful interview in the allotted time of one hour was often relieved by having a volunteer on hand to take notes and assist when necessary.

Charlotte also reflects that the heavy workload and lack of resources meant that the initial aims of the project were largely unfulfilled - a situation which also proved a disappointment to the teams of volunteers.

GLAM: Before Stonewall (2003-2004) was an oral history project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund to document the life experiences of older gay men and women from all regions of the UK.

The project was organised and run by the Gay and Lesbian Arts and Media, or GLAM, who hired and trained a team of volunteers to record over one hundred interviews with participants aged 55 and older.

The aim of the project was to create a visual and oral record of the experiences of gay men and women – moving gradually from the days of oppression, criminalisation and punishment towards the liberalisation enjoyed today.

GLAM was a Brighton-based arts and media organisation that offered a wide range of services, classes and activities to the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender communities until its closure in 2004 due to funding issues.

GLAM Before Stonewall: LGBT Oral History Project

This fascinating and important collection, recorded onto videotape, contains the testimonies, in the form of interviews, from individuals of varying ages, backgrounds and ethnicities from across the LGBT community.

‘Before Stonewall: An Oral History of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Community’ was a Heritage Lottery Funded project organised in 2003 by a Brighton-based organisation 'Gay and Lesbian Arts and Media', otherwise known as GLAM. The project sought to record for posterity the first-hand recollections of gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people from across the United Kingdom and beyond, of a time before the events in New York’s Greenwich Village which culminated in the Stonewall Riots of 1969. This was a time which was very different, and in many respects more oppressive for homosexual and transgender people, than the one we’re familiar with today. This fascinating and important collection, recorded onto videotape, contains the testimonies, in the form of interviews, of over one-hundred individuals of varying ages, backgrounds and ethnicities from across the LGBT community. With recollections that reach back as far as the 1920s, what all of the interviews describe and reveal is the whole gamut of human experience, from the deeply tragic to the exhilaratingly joyous - all from the perspectives of a section of society that has often been considered to be ‘different from the others’. Journalist Charlotte Cooper, who worked for the gay press at the time, co-ordinated the project’s video-recording with volunteers and conducted many of the interviews herself. Charlotte describes her time on the project as both a revelatory and profoundly moving experience. Screen Archive South East has made available from across this collection a total of eighty four extracts from thirty individual interviews. Together they give an insightful and first-hand account of what life was like for LGBT people, both in the United Kingdom and abroad, and in both the years before Stonewall and after.

75 videos in this collection