To launch our new season, The Queer Community Library, Queercircle opens our doors for a day of gathering, conversation, workshops and shared food — creating space to learn from one another, exchange knowledge and think together.
As part of our ongoing exploration of what makes a library, we’ll ask: What counts as knowledge? Who gets to decide? And how do we preserve the experiences and knowledge of marginalised people so that future generations can learn from, build upon and be enriched by them?
Programme
14:00–15:00 — Welcome & Food
Gather together, share food and explore the library and the space.
Main Space · All welcome
15:15 –16:15 — Writing Workshop with Harper Walton: Sacred Objects
Explore objects as a way of looking at queerness, as sites of knowledge and as tools for writing. What can an object tell us about gender, sexuality, memory and the ways we come to know ourselves?
Participants are encouraged to bring an object that holds sentimental value connected to their gender or sexuality, though objects will also be available at the venue to work with. The workshop is open to all experience levels, from beginner to expert, with an optional opportunity to share writing and receive feedback.
Upstairs Room · Limited to 15–20 people
15:00–16:00 — Libraries Today: Panel Discussion
Isadore (Book28), Bailey (PRIM Black), Aisha Shaibu-Lenoir (Common Press) and John Vincent a prominent UK public librarian, author, and social justice advocate will discuss what it means to preserve queer knowledge in a moment of censorship, political hostility and institutional neglect.
The panel will consider libraries and archives as living infrastructures for memory, access, political education, community and resistance — and ask what becomes possible when communities build and care for their own spaces of knowledge.
Main Space · All welcome
BSL Interpreter
16:30–17:45 — Herbal Medicine Tea Ritual with Bear
Part of the wider spirit of the Queer Knowledge Commons: knowledge as something embodied, shared, remembered, felt and lived. This session brings that ethos directly into the body, through one of the oldest forms of queer and ancestral knowledge: what a plant can tell you when you sit with it and listen.
We’ll gather for a heart-centred tea ritual using medicinal plants growing in and around London. Rather than being told what we’re drinking, we’ll discover together — tasting slowly, tracking sensation through the body and drawing on collective, felt knowledge to explore the plant and what it offers.
This is gentle healing work. No prior herbal knowledge is needed and there is no “right” answer. It’s an invitation to return to the body as a place of knowing, and to reclaim a form of medicine traditionally passed hand to hand, heart to heart, body to body.
Main Space · All welcome
BSL Interpreter
16:30–18:00 — Zine Workshop with Aaran Cyan: Forbidden Knowledge
Responding to the censorship and erasure of Global Majority and queer histories, the rise of fascist media, growing attacks on trans+ identities and migrants, and the lack of reporting on the multiple genocides we are currently witnessing, this zine-making workshop is about uncovering, sharing and recording the knowledge that lives within queer and trans experience: everyday rituals, survival, resistance, collective liberation, solidarity and mutual aid; fears, grief, euphoria, contradiction, desire and the reclaiming of our own narratives.
Rooted in queer and decolonial approaches to archiving, this workshop explores how zines can be created by and for communities whose histories have so often been excluded, censored or distorted. Zines have long been a tool for self-publishing, knowledge-sharing, activism and protest, creating spaces where lived experience, community knowledge and resistance can be documented and circulated outside mainstream media and institutional gatekeeping.
This will be a relaxed and creative space to reflect, make and connect. You can share as much or as little as feels right. You’ll be gently guided through the process of creating your zine using prompts and visual materials. No previous zine-making or art experience is needed. This workshop is open to all LGBTQ+ people.
This will be a relaxed and creative space to reflect, make and connect. You can share as much or as little as feels right. You will be gently guided to create your zine through prompts and visual materials. No previous zine-making or art experience is needed.
Upstairs Room · Limited to 15–20 people
18:15–19:15 — International Online Panel Discussion
Join Ben Camara (Orange Library, The Gambia), Filip Kijowski (Biblioteka Azyl, Poland) and Keval Harie (Gala Queer Archive, South Africa) for a conversation connecting libraries and archives working in different political and cultural contexts. We’ll explore how each project responds to local pressures, censorship, institutional neglect and changing access to information, while creating spaces for knowledge, memory and community.
The discussion will focus on participation and co-creation: how communities shape these spaces, what risks and challenges emerge, and what small but meaningful changes can develop over time. Together, we’ll consider how libraries can become living infrastructures for memory, political education, collective responsibility and resistance.
Main Space · All welcome
BSL Interpreter
19:15–20:30 — Chill Time & Social Space
Wind down, continue conversations, meet others and spend time together in the library.
Main Space · All welcome