Culture And Memory

Dear Friend: Preserving and Celebrating LGBTQIA+ Heritage in Northern Ireland

Recent interest in Northern Ireland’s LGBTQIA+ heritage has resulted in projects that connect LGBTQIA+ stories to Northern Ireland’s heritage. Our project expands this rich tradition by highlighting (and preserving) the lesser-heard stories of everyday LGBTQIA+ people in and from Northern Ireland, connecting their narratives to larger themes of community heritage. This project benefits from the historical documents and collective knowledge of people currently and previously connected with Cara-Friend, the oldest LGBTQIA+ charitable organisations on the island of Ireland. We will gather, protect and celebrate this heritage through three strands: archival history, oral history, and creative practice. This involves recording new audio-visual interviews with previously overlooked, everyday members of Northern Ireland’s LGBTQIA+ community, connecting with leading archives to both digitise the wealth of material in Cara-Friend’s archive increase donations of documents and material culture, and designing a touring exhibition that connects to live performance and creative practice, including poetry.