Rev. Matthew Linfoot

Hearing Our Stories: LGBTQ+ Lives and the BBC

A public engagement project to explore how LGBTQ+ communities been viewed and understood by LGBTQ+ audiences themselves, using BBC archive material, as part of the BBC's Centenary and funded by AHRC.

The research engages with two LGBTQ+ community partners, Opening Doors and London Friend, to analyse the impact of the BBC’s portrayal of key events over the past 50 years, including the HIV/AIDs pandemic, Section 28, the gay and lesbian liberation movement and marriage equality.

Audio downloads and a presentation drawing on material from BBC Archives, are two of the outcomes resulting from the project.

Project details:

Workshops with community partners took place on:

29/9/22; 6/10/22; 13/10/22 and involved a two hour discussion based on BBC archival material with 8 participants at each event.

Each event involved approximately 4 days of preparation (research and select archive clips; design and plan workshop discussion arc).

It did not involve the government.