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Timeline
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...a history of the Queer Youth Network and the Gay Rights Movement in Britain
Part One 1999 - 2000
After several failed attempts to get official support the UK's first college Gay Straight Alliance (GSA) at Shena Simon College (in Manchester's Gay Village), David Henry and Catherine Warner were approached by Julia Grant (trans-rights activist, author, founder of Manchester GayFest, and star of the award-winning BBC TV Series 'a change of sex') on behalf of Manchester's Gay Business community to offer support to the city's queer youth community. Julia Grant had argued the case for fully-inclusive services for all young people, moving away from the stereotyped gay youth group offering different facilities based on gender which often excluded trans young people.
Julia had given birth to a great many trans support groups and felt Queer Youth Manchester was founded as a weekly social support group on a Thursday night and later became Queer Youth North West after merging with it's sibling group in Liverpool. In the same year, David and Catherine met Charlotte Lester (who had recently started the UK's first school Gay Straight Alliance at Putney High School for Girls in South West London) and Chris Morris, (founder of the former campaign group YouthSpeak and OutCast Magazine) at an OutRage age-of-consent protest in London where "16 - Equality for All" was famously projected onto Big Ben.
The departure of Chris Morris from the gay rights scene to pursue other interests, basic ideological disagreements and a generalised lack of support from the gay community in London after the age of consent was equalised soon led to the demise of YouthSpeak, it's loss left a large scar in the queer rights landscape that many other groups such as the NUS and Stonewall unsuccessfully tried to replicate. Eager to continue where YouthSpeak had left off and content with the growing provision of gay youth support groups being established by local health authorities, youth services, and the Voluntary Sector (at the time the Terrance Higgins Trust has received funding to start many more gay youth groups, and local independent support charities including the now defunct Peer Support Project were gaining ground in offering better support to LGBT Young People through groups, helplines and the first homophobic bullying initiatives ).
Part Two 2001 - 2003
The Queer Youth Collective became increasing politicised and impassioned about focussed on campaigning, calling for more groups and better sexual health and mental health services for LGBT Young People. The call was echoed by several renowned advocates of LGBT young people, including Sue Sanders of the lesbian and gay teachers group Schools Out! felt there was a distinct lack of any kind of supported involvement from actual young people themselves despite so many campaigns at the time being fought on their behalf.
Youth workers such as Jan Bridget, a founder of Gay and Lesbian Youth in Calderdale, a flagship project that she had fought to establish for many years and continues to do so at the time this was written had long echoed calls for a national infrastructure for supporting the needs of LGBT Youth, and went on to be an integral part of the National Network (of organisations working with LGBT Young People) which eventually was absorbed into an official project the Consortium (of LGB(T) Organisations). Inga Rhodes of FFLAG (Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) gained support from a large collective of parents groups also spoke in support of the formation. David Allison, caretaker and dedicated OutRage! activist along with Peter Tatchell, veteran Human Rights Campaigner who David Henry sought guidance from during some of Queer Youth's more turbulent times gave his public support and a great deal of his personal time during the lengthy establishment of what was to become, at long last the first nationwide body representing the needs and desires of Britain's, until then rather silenced LGBT Youth.
Until this pivotal time the only influential channels for the voices of younger queers to be heard was through the occasional column in the gay press or as a token spokesperson scripted by Stonewall. Chris Morris was recruited by Stonewall to challenge the Age of Consent Law (at the time it was illegal for two men to have sexual intercourse unless the were over the age of 21) at the European Court of Human Rights. Not long after Chris Began meeting senior gay rights movers-and-shakers at Stonewall he came to the conclusion that Stonewall was guilty of creating "a gay rights industry" and functioned by taking financial "back-handers" from business people in order for a place on it's board of directors. He publicly departed the gay rights scene but not without launching a final slam against Stonewall in an article published in The New Statesman brandishing them as obsessed with corporate fund-raising deals and exposed many of their former donors are current decision-makers, a view that caused many in the gay rights movement including long-term supporters of Queer Youth Overground such as OutRage! and the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association to distance themselves from Stonewall entirely.
The Queer Youth collective group established an internet presence to bring together as many LGBT and queer young people as possible. If the at the time, a media frenzy and paranoia had caused many educational institutions to censor and in many cases completely sensor legitimate online access to information on any Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender related websites, On the ground, the collective launched a national peer-led outreach project named "Safe on the Scene" that toured colleges, universities, bars, clubs and youth groups all over the country to distribute literature banned from schools and youth groups, and many libraries by Section 28. During the Safe on the Scene project, a member of the group who wished not to be named but we shall call Gary for now was approached by a photographer touting a new 'gay youth magazine' and asked if he would like to be involved.
During what he thought was a standard photo-shoot after giving an interview about his view of the gay scene and coming out he was asked if he would be willing to provide nude photographs for the magazine's actual cover. Other young men at the shoot had already agreed and were of a similar age to Gary. Several weeks later Sally Carr, a respected youth worker and founder at Manchester's Lesbian and Gay Youth group approached Queer Youth with a copy of a new magazine that had been delivered to the gay centre along with a letter from the publishers urging venues to 'drop' the Pink Paper and Boyz Magazine in favour of this new publication - 'SXT'. The magazine contained an arary of falsified gay news stories along with adverts for hardcore sex lines and premium-rate subscription websites that would today contravene trading standards. Queer Youth Overground quickly aunched a boycott of SXT and it's exploitative practices. After a week, David Henry received a writ from SXT's Lawyers asking for a webpage containing a scan of the magazine's cover and a petition to be removed from QYO's website, a demand that David refused to abide to.
In the meantime, a massive boycott of the publication spread to bars, clubs, gay saunas, gay support groups and bookshops angry at SXT's attempts to extinguish the alreay small number other gay and lesbian newspapers and magazines. Many venue owners binned SXT as soon as it was delivered on a Thursday causing their expected advertising and chat-line revues to plummet. After the third issue it appeared concept had received the final nail in it's coffin and the magazine folded. Catherine Warner had been involved with the National Union of Students (NUS), in particular their Lesbian and Gay Campaign and she argued the case for the campaign to be re-named Lesbian, Gay AND Bisexual, but after failing to win support of motions to include the term Transgender faced with fierce opposition (a battle that was strongly over-turned not for another five years in 2004) Catherine felt the support of the NUS in Queer Youth's formation at least could not be assured. Ben Turner, leader of the now radicalised Queer Youth Manchester branch of the collective later organised a 'sting' on the NUS LGB National conference with David Henry and Catherine Warner in tow.
Catherine had long argued for representation of FE (Further Education) students in the 'old-school' dominated NUS LGB campaign and was nominated to stand for an open place on the committee. Despite being formally invited as guests to the event, and all qualifying members of the NUS at affiliated institutions and which was being hosted in their hometown (turf), the Queer Youth delegation were branded as gate-crashers and controversy ensued when David Henry deemed the entire conference as a 'Puppet Show'. Convinced that the LGB wing of the NUS had suffered the same fate as many of it's counterparts, the collective left the conference disillusioned by the obvious unmistakable hijacking of the promising, (somewhat) influential student body by a small but powerful group of political string-pullers, careerists and agenda-benders, a view shared by Alex Lambert, another outspoken yet instrumental founding member of the Queer Youth collective who left Manchester to study in York, re-established their none-existent LGB Society, reformed it's remit to include Transgendered people and enabled the entire York Students Union to became completely disaffiliated from the NUS.
Lambert's legacy to the organisation was an installed belief that party political meddling had little place if any at all in the struggle for human rights. An outlook that was aggressively defended through bitter exchanges in letters page of the Pink Paper in 2002 and 2003 between Lambert and James Davenport, former leader of TORCHE (Tory Campaign for Homosexual Equality - now 'Gay Conservatives') who branded QYA as 'Militant' and 'Tatchellite', a view the entire collective denied. Unknown to Davenport, David Henry and Greg Justice (at the time President and Vice Presidents of QYA's now dissolved Board) had been invited to meet with Conservative Party Chairman and Sussex MP Charles Hendry at the gay centre in Manchester, who left impressed with the work the organisation had been pioneering to support LGBT Young People. After several venomous outbursts against Alex Lambert personally and the youth organisation (at the time Alex had been appointed as Campaigns Officer) Davenport was silenced by those higher up in the party after David Henry and Greg Justice complained about Davenport's conduct.
Charles Hendry distanced himself and the entire Conservative Party from TORCHE and made it clear that it was not a recognised group. Davenport soon resigned and it emerged TORCHE was soon disbanded. Having postponed her family 'coming out' dramas and coming to terms with her own gender identity, several years beyond the time she began establishing the country's first Gay Straight Alliance and the Queer Youth collective, Charlotte Lester made a sudden but sincere departure from the collective (although still returns to Queer Youth Overground had it's official launch at Gay Youth Pride in Manchester where it launched a website. Queer Youth Overground was featured in a number of press articles, NOW UK (now named "Bent"), Gay Times and The Pink Paper all ran stories hailing the launch. Meanwhile, online, bold, striking imagery of queer young people holding hands and kissing welcomed users of Nick Duz's 'Gay Youth UK' website and the newly launched Queer Youth Overground site began to draw attention.
Gay Youth UK had been running initially as an IRC Chat Channel with a handful of younger gay people, at the time the only service of it's time. Eventually Gay Youth UK became an outlet for support on coming-out with an E-group which was eventually taken over by Yahoo and became Yahoo Groups. With a minor sponsorship deal signed from Gay.com to provide them with youth content, David and Nick geared the Queer Youth Overground site into a resource site for challenging homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and a membership fringe of youth groups that existed as a bulletin board which was led by Damian Griffiths, Mark Leach, Lauren Clift, and Michael Bundock. Gay Youth UK was loosing it's membersip base as people had begun to see emailing groups as somewhat old-fashioned, so a joint effort to transfer the e-group over to the message boards begun but some members resisted and did not want to be connected to the collective's more politicised wing. At the time Nick and David were in a relationsip together and both sites were hosted from their flat.
As David moved out after a few months and Nick turned 25 and felt Gay Youth UK should always be in the hands of young people and put an appeal out for someone to take it over. At the time websites were expensive to run and the Gay.com sponsorship deal soon came to an end. After discussions at a joint gathering of GYUK and QYO members at London Mardi Gras in July 2001, the collective decided they could not extinguish the core support group that existing on the e-group so Nick handed over responsibility of Gay Youth UK to Tim McGrath in 2002 later after the sponsorship deal from the gay internet-giant came to an end. Despite a rocky road to it's birth, the original QYO web community, regional groups, combined with it's strong links to Gay Youth UK and the Safe of the Scene outreach projects that later evolved into more Queer Youth regional groups involving young people in their own communities begun to inspire an ever growing number of LGBT Young People to join and the organisation began to grow...
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Last updated
by: David on 29th June 2009
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