Femi Otitoju
A lesbian activist for over 40 years and one of the founding members of the UK’s first Black Lesbian Group, Femi served on the management committees of The London Lesbian and Gay Centre, The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre and Stonewall Housing Association and was a volunteer for Switchboard for thirteen years. She is currently Chair of Queerwell the LGBTQ+ mental health charity.
Sue Lemos
Sue is an ESRC funded PhD student in History at the University of Warwick. Their doctoral project seeks to illuminate the lives and politics of queer and trans Black people and people of colour in Britain, 1960s – 1990s. They received the inaugural Institute of Historical Research Olivette Otele Prize for their paper Queering Black Politics and the Warwick History MA Dissertation Prize for their research on the London Black Lesbian and Gay Centre (project), 1980s – 1990s. Prior to their PhD studies, they volunteered with the Young Historians Project and Haringey Vanguard Project.
Veronica Mckenzie
Beyond filmmaking, McKenzie is an active advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. She played a crucial role in documenting the history of the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre in London through her film ‘UNDER YOUR NOSE’, cited as a seminal work by the Black Cultural Archives. Evolving from an archiving project into a feature film tracing the history of queer spaces in the black LGBTQ+ community, from the 1970s to late 1990’s, the film has screened at The Tate Modern, the V&A, BFI, and universities worldwide.
Her work spearheading the HARINGEY VANGUARD project, a Black LGBTQ+ National Lottery Funded project (2018-2021), led to the establishment of a new queer archive at Bruce Castle Museum. She has spoken about her research and historical work at numerous institutions including the Houses of Parliament, and conferences in London, Berlin and Glasgow.