Lady Phyll marks Lesbian Visibility Week by acknowledging the contributions to the LGBTQIA community made by this incredible list of change makers
BY PHYLL OPOKU-GYIMAH, IMAGE BY ZOE LAW LONDON
As I watched people stream into Queen Elizabeth Park last summer for UK Black Pride it seemed like everyone had a smile on their face. I may be biased, but I’m not sure you get such a chilled and friendly vibe at any other big Pride event. And UK Black Pride is now a BIG Pride! With over 25,000 attendees we are Europe’s largest LGBTQIA event for people of African, Asian, Caribbean, Latin American and Middle Eastern-descent.
I’m immensely proud that, although Black Pride is by and for LGBTQIA people of colour, everyone is welcome and we have plenty of folk celebrating with us who are not Black or LGBTQIA. Those allies get to experience the power of queer Black joy and get to see the awesomeness and diversity of the Black queer community.
We’ve come a long, long way since I was one of a small group of lesbian and bisexual women who organised the first UK Black Pride 19 years ago: a bus trip to Southend-on-Sea. Back then, we wouldn’t have dreamed that our community celebration would one day be covered by the BBC!
Although we still have a long way to go before Black LGBTQIA people are fully seen and celebrated in all their diversity, when I experience moments like being featured in British Vogue, speaking to Christiane Amanpour on CNN or appearing in Hello! Magazine I know that this Black lesbian has a level of mainstream visibility which couldn’t have been imagined just a few years ago.
As we head towards Lesbian Visibility Week, I’ve been reflecting on all the amazing lesbian, bisexual and queer women and non-binary people without whom there never would have been a UK Black Pride. These incredible folk were creating community and building a legacy for years before even that small first Black Pride event and too often the impact they made and the organisations they formed has been forgotten.
These folk might never grace the pages of Vogue (though I hope they do!) but their contribution to our community and to the global LGBTQIA rights movement is inestimable. To mark Lesbian Visibility Week, I want to highlight just a few of these incredible people, who continue to inspire me every day.
Femi Otitoju
Femi has been an amazing LGBTQIA rights campaigner for nearly 50 years! After coming out as a lesbian in the late seventies she soon became a powerhouse of what was then called the lesbian and gay rights movement. As well as volunteering for many years on London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard (now Switchboard LGBT+ Helpline), Femi helped to form the UK’s first Black Lesbian Group and later was instrumental in the foundation of the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre, which for a few short but glorious years was Europe’s first permanent space dedicated to the Black LGBTQIA community. Femi continues to work for equality to this day through her equality and diversity consultancy Challenge which she launched in 1988 and still runs.
Valerie Mason-John
The book Lesbians Talk: Making Black Waves which Valerie Mason-John co-authored with Ann Khambatta in 1993 genuinely changed my life. On its pages, for the first time I read the voices of my community in all their diversity. Valerie and their co-author shared the words of Black lesbians celebrating their herstory, debating issues, talking about the struggles they faced… it was printed thirty years ago and still many of the topics covered feel relevant today. But of course, Valerie is much more than this one book. They are an author of multiple volumes, a public speaker, an expert in recovery from addiction and trauma, a playwright and an all-around inspiration.
Moud Goba
I first met Moud soon after she arrived in the UK, an asylum seeker from Zimbabwe. Even as she was trying to claim asylum and find her footing in a brand new country she was already getting involved in creating queer community. She was one of the amazing Black lesbians who formed BLUK, the pre-cursor to UK Black Pride, and she has been involved with UK Black Pride from the very beginning. Today she serves as Chair of our Board. She has also been an amazing advocate for LGBTQIA refugees, helping numerous people navigate the UK’s increasing torturous asylum system.
Olivette Cole-Wilson
There’s a photo of taking during the founding of Stonewall: Michael Cashman and Sir Ian McKellen surrounded by a small group of activists. There’s just one Black face in that photo: Olivette Cole-Wilson. During the dark years of the AIDS pandemic and Section 28 Olivette volunteered at London Friend, helping numerous LGBTQIA people to navigate a world which sometimes seemed overwhelmingly homophobic. Now an actor, activist, counsellor and much else besides… Olivette continues to be a creative force to be reckoned with.
Bev Ditsie
Although I’ve mostly highlighted folk from the UK, there’s one incredible South African activist whose name I couldn’t miss mentioning. As the racist apartheid regime in South Africa started to crumble, Bev Ditsie was one of the activists on the front line, working for a new South Africa where equality for LGBTQIA people was included from the start. She helped to organise South Africa’s first Pride march, in Johannesburg in 1990, and her activism helped to ensure that discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation was explicitly outlawed in South Africa’s new constitution. In 1995 she spoke at the United Nations Conference of Women, becoming the first person to address gay and lesbian rights there. Bev is also an amazing actor and film-maker – if you can check out her documentaries, especially Lesbians Free Everywhere, which tells the story of that momentous United Nations conference.
These five people are just a few of the Black lesbian activists who have inspired me. I’d love to hear about the Black lesbians who inspire you – complete our survey to let us know who you want to shine a light on this Lesbian Visibility Week.
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