A unique screening of the award-winning documentary BEYOND ‘There’s always a black issue Dear’ plus an audience with its director and leading LGBT+ Voices
About this Event
This unique event features a one-off screening of the new, award-winning documentary film from Claire Lawrie, BEYOND ‘There’s always a black issue Dear’ (italic) followed by an audience with the director and influential voices including:
Glamrou, Sanah Ahsan and Lady Phyll
With only 70 tickets available, a live Q&A and an informal drinks reception afterwards, this intimate event is a must for anyone wanting to get insights into our shared history through a different lens and hear from some of the people shaping it.
The event is curated by Sarah Gregory, founder of A Revolution of Our Own.
The evening begins at 6.30pm. Refreshments will be provided.
7.00pm - Screening of BEYOND ‘There’s always a black issue Dear’.
7:45pm - Panel discussion and Q&A with
8:30-9pm - Drinks reception
About the film:
WINNER of both the Queer Vision film festival & The Iris prize ‘Best of British’ awards.
BEYOND ‘There’s always a black issue Dear’, directed by first-time filmmaker, Claire Lawrie, tells the unheard story of black, gay/trans drivers of London’s youth and club culture revolution in the 1980s.
Well documented as a period of great creativity and cross- pollination, this was a time that in spite of harsh political realities and the onset of HIV, the capital’s creative and nightclub kids expressed a myriad of identities. Although crucial to the history of this period, recognition of the era’s black LGBTQ community has been less well-documented. Growing up in Thatcher’s Britain, these were the children of the Windrush generation and the first generation to grow up after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality. The cast vividly recall a time when to be out black and gay was ‘just not done’.
Ballet dancing boys, and make-up wearing, gender-fluid school days are recounted with humour. Looking back on family and ‘found family’, Beyond ‘There’s always a black issue Dear’ addresses the omission of these voices to explore the stories of nine interwoven lives, where soul and disco meet punk and blitz kids, and a queer black London begins to emerge. From underground clubs like The Four Aces in Dalston and Crackers in Soho, to the explosion of queer culture at Taboo, their experiences shed new light on the UK in the 1970s and 80s as this generation came to terms with both multiculturalism and sexual freedom.
Forging their own identities against the stereotype that ‘if you were black, you were either reggae or soul’, the film is a celebration of those daring to be different and of the particular influence that black LGBT culture has had upon fashion, fine arts, dance, music and language - much of which has since been appropriated by the cultural mainstream.
Phyll Opoku-Gyimah is the nucleus of the award-winning celebration and protest that is UK Black Pride.
Better known as Lady Phyll – partly due to her decision to reject an MBE in the New Year’s Honours' list to protest at Britain’s role in formulating anti-LGBTQI penal codes across its former empire – Opoku-Gyimah is also the executive director of Kaleidoscope Trust, an organisation working towards the liberation of LGBTQ people around the world. She is also a community builder and organiser; an Albert Kennedy Trust patron and public speaker focusing on race, gender, sexuality and class. She's regularly called upon to advise nascent LGBTQ organisations around the world to help leaders create cogent organising strategies, establish robust partnership networks and work effectively in service of the LGBTQ community."
Glamrou’s debut memoir, Unicorn, a personal study of intersectional identity, will be published with 4th Estate Harper Collins in October 2019. A television series is currently in development with Channel 4 Comedy, Glamrou is also working on projects with BBC Drama, Film 4, the BFI and BBC Films. His television series, Nefertiti, will explore an Arab drag queen living with a Muslim mother, offering insights into the parallel of drag and Arab femininity. Meanwhile, Glamrou’s feature with Film 4 will tell of the love story between a non-binary Sikh drag queen and a white cisgender gay man, and in doing so tackle the knotty racial and gender politics of desire amongst queer people.
Sanah Ahsan is a queer Pakistani Muslim woman, trainee clinical psychologist, spoken word artist and poet. She is also an activist on social justice and community spaces. She recently presented Channel 4’s Dispatches - ‘Young, British and Depressed’ as part of ‘4in4’ which is a campaign to challenge that only one in four people suffer from mental health issues in Britain. Her performance journey began with BBC Words First, and has taken her to the stage at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. She recently won the Outspoken Prize 2019 in the Performance Poetry category for her piece ‘My Dua is Love’.
Claire Lawrie is a freelance filmmaker based in London. She has a BA in photography from The London College of Communication. She has won Bartur, Life Framer and Portrait of Britain awards and her artwork has been featured in Photoworks Annual & the Brighton Biennial, Claremont Arts Project and the Birth Rites Collection at King’s College London. Her first film Beyond 'There's always a black issue Dear' is the winner of The Queer Vision Film Festival & Iris Prize ‘Best of British’ 2018.
Emmanuel Balogun is a British-Nigerian writer and researcher. He is an expert on the discourses concerning Sub-Saharan Africa and its diaspora. His passion is to drive a dialectic between international development, art and anthropology. He is concerned with employing artistic practice as a tool for realising positive change. Balogun is also co-founder of the Association of Queer Ethnic Minorities | AQEM.