Queer Heritage South wants your Dyke Pride memories for its archive

Queer Heritage South^1,2,3,5 is collecting memories of Brighton’s first Dyke Pride for its archive at a free session in Brighton Museum & Art Gallery on Sunday 8 November, from 1pm. Anyone who went can bring photos, objects or stories to be scanned and added.

The first Dyke Pride, held this year in St Ann’s Well Gardens, drew more than 3,000 people, according to the session’s listing. It was free to attend.

The session is one of the archive’s regular Collecting Collective meet-ups, led by its community archivist, Rowan. Flatbed and overhead scanners are set up so you can digitise a flyer or photo yourself and upload it. You can also volunteer to help catalogue the collections, and no archiving experience is needed. There are refreshments, and a tour of “Where are all the Lesbians?”, the museum display of lesbian lives in objects from the city’s collections, made by researcher Lisa Hinkins and her community volunteers.

The archive takes recent history as well as old. One donor gave the story of the Pride uniform they cut up and sewed until 1am the night before Pride 2024, to wear on a lifeguard tower opposite the St James’s Street party.

On Sunday 29 November at 2pm, this month’s History Club looks back at the Sussex Club, a basement bar on Regency Square where you rang a bell and waited to be let in. It ran from 1992 to 1995, and the organisers say it was “pivotal in the lives of many lesbians in Brighton and Hove and further afield”. Shirley, the owner, will be a guest, and Al Start will play the songs from her 1993 gig there. The club is a sober space, with tea and coffee.

Both events are free and for over-18s, but you need to book.

Marlborough Productions runs both programmes. Separately, Phoenix Art Space⁶ has picked the textile and collage artist Luke Rooney for Desire in the Archive, a commission it set up with Queer Heritage South. His show, due in Phoenix’s Main Gallery in summer 2027, will ask where desire might be found in an archive.