Dan Snow's History Hit - LGBTQ+ History: With the team from the Logbooks Podcast

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Tash Walker and Adam Zmith join me to talk about The Log Books Podcast, a history of LGBTQ+ life in the UK.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've got such a cool podcast for you today.

history here. I've got such a cool podcast for you today. In 1974, a service was set up called Switchboard, which allowed people to call up if they thought they might identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, now trans or queer. They could call up and they could ask questions, a helpline, a way of talking to someone who would listen, understand and perhaps advise. For that 45-year history, Switchboard volunteers kept a logbook of the calls, which means we now have got a brilliant archive of oral history written down by these wonderful volunteers that describe what life was like, the range of issues that faced people, LGBTQ plus people in Britain in the 70s, 80s, 90s, and beyond. We got the whole of humankind is on here, people.

It's absolutely brilliant. We've got Adam Smith and Tash Walker, who's currently a trustee of Switchboard. They started a podcast called The Logbook. It has been fantastically popular. It's award winning. And they came on History Hit to talk about the stories that they'd uncovered and what it tells us about our recent history. The moment I heard about Logbook, I thought that is a stroke of genius.

What a wonderful archive to be able to go through and to bring to wider notice. Very, very cool indeed. And the thing I like about Logbook is it's both historically funny and deadly serious. It's about the police entrapping men in public toilets. It's about gay people being beaten up. And season two of the podcast deals with the HIV-AIDS crisis

that fell so heavily, particularly on those communities. It's great to get Adam and Tash on the podcast, and I wish them all the very best with theirs. You're going to love it. Go and check it out wherever you get your pods. It's called The Logbooks. If you want to go and listen to our podcast, but without the adverts on the front,

or you want to get History Hit TV, it's like Netflix for history, go to historyhit.tv. A lot of people signing up for homeschooling. I hope it's proving a useful resource. If you use the code POD1, P-O-D-1, you get a month for free, and then your second month for just one pound, euro, or dollar. It's pretty cheap.

And apart from everything else, don't forget to come on the live tour. History.com slash tour. It's going to be awesome. We're going to be meeting in the flesh later this year. You're going to love it. In the meantime, everybody enjoy enjoy learning about the logbooks tash and adam thank you for coming on the podcast thank you for having us thanks for having us do you know i heard your trailer on the podcast advert thing and I just thought that is stone cold genius

you know when someone has a creative idea that like everyone's had all the ideas but you guys just had an idea and it's just amazing you tell everyone what it is yeah thanks um sure it's it's called the log books and um we describe it as untold stories from Britain's LGBTQ plus history and conversations about being queer today. That's the sort of tagline of it. Adam, do you want to get more into the nitty gritty? Yeah, we use the archive at a charity called Switchboard, the LGBT helpline, which has been running since 1974. and it's a helpline. Volunteers take calls advising people, counselling people, listening to people who are calling about their gender identity and sexuality and so since 1974 volunteers have kept notes and for several decades these were handwritten notes in physical logbooks in what are now very tatty pages and all of those pages are collected together in

an archive and we are using those logbook entries confidentially to tell the stories that Tash talked about. It's just did you always know about this extraordinary archive or did you stumble across it tell me that story? Yeah so I came across the archive I'm a volunteer at Switchboard and I was rifling around the attic one day as you do and came across these books like Adam described they're physical books they are falling apart the pages are falling apart as these stories and notes all fall out of them they're the you know it's the best book that either of us have ever read and we worked to move the archive and lots of other archival material from from the charity to Bishopsgate Institute in

London and I was I just completely fell in love with them and fell in love with Bishopsgate Institute and the amazing history that's hidden in the archives there and I started reading them so I went in for a couple of years and read through these logbooks read these pages laughing one minute crying the next and just became completely mesmerized by them, in part because they are literally, as a LGBTQ plus person, they're my history. And I'd never heard any of this before. I'd never had access to any of this before. And it was just incredible. It was amazing to delve into like this insight from the past that's just not spoken about. And so I started collating the work that I've been doing and I and I did some presentations as part of LGBT History Month and at one of those

presentations was where I met Adam. So yes I was just listening to this presentation on a you know on a Tuesday night I think it was and I guess I had the same reaction to you, Dan, about the idea, which was just like hearing Tash talk about these stories from this archive, from these amazing pages. I could just hear it as a podcast. You know, I was like, okay, these are notes by volunteers about all sorts of people from all over Britain

who have called for help, who have called with their stories. And it just felt to me like this is really, really important heritage, really, from lesbians, gay men, gay women, bisexual people, transgender people, queer people, like since 1974, asking all sorts of questions. And that just felt like a really important heritage to get out. and because it was about calls phone calls where it's one person speaking to another person directly into the ear it sounded like a podcast to me because I think that's the best kind of experience when you're listening to a podcast is you feel like you're in a private conversation with the people on the other end

and so um we just you know I just went up to Tash and, you know, started like gabbing on about how great this could be if it was a podcast, if we could, if we could do it and, you know, make sure that we held that confidentiality of the callers and the sensitivity around all the issues and everything that we could, you know, make a go of it. remarkable is there are really funny bits obviously uh because anything involving us trying to have sex with each other is funny but obviously that then it's like monumental tragedy because obviously you know examples of physical assault on on gay men in the in the 80s on transgender people or and then and then aids like uh, it's suicide rates. So it's, well, it's laugh and cry stuff, isn't it? I mean, can we start with the silly, funny bits? I mean, just like brilliantly men just ringing up going, oh my God, I've had sex with a man. I'm meant to be straight.

Like, there's quite a lot of that. Yeah, totally. There's so much laughter. There's also so much laughter between the volunteers themselves. You know, this isn't just a story about the people who called Switchboard. It's about the volunteers who are Switchboard and they are all from the community for the community. And they bitch and they moan and they argue.

And it's this wonderful living diary of the organisation switchboard like a personality itself and you sort of see the parallels that um of what's happening in wider society throughout the 70s and 80s with like feminist sexism racism and loads of political arguments that sort of invade and permeate these logbooks but yeah there's so much laughter and we've a season two we've focused specifically an episode on the laughter because and you know, this is something Adam will speak to as well. These stories are really, really harrowing and they are really, they're really, really upsetting to hear. But there's something about the people who live them, the way that they tell those stories. And there's this lightness in it. There's this laughter. There's this survival mechanism that kicks in. And if you can't laugh you you cry and the reason that they're still here being able to share those stories um and that we

are here you know adam and i as lgbtq plus people is because of them because of their strength and because of that laughter of the community that combines everyone together and one of my favorite stories from the latest laugh out loud episode is of of a kid ringing up who was so obsessed with Erasure, the band, that he was contacting Switchboard to find out how he could become gay, like the lead singer of Erasure as well. And it's just amazing. It's just amazing. It's brilliant. favorite funny bits from uh the season one period which is 74 to 82 is a debate in the logbooks between volunteers about uh poppers the drug that you sniff which um makes you feel extra warm inside when you're having sex and um there there's a debate about where gay men can get poppers and which you could get from pharmacists if you said that you had a heart problem. And the volunteers are talking to each other in the pages of the logbook about callers

ringing to ask where they can get poppers and what advice the volunteer could give about that. And then there's a debate about whether you should need an extra kick when you're having sex. So there's one volunteer who says, oh, no, no, it's only for people who don't get any emotional satisfaction from sex. And then another volunteer writes a note, oh, you sanctimonious tie wearer. And then, you know, it descends into this. And this is all going on in the phone room at Switchboard, you know, above a bookshop, you know, in King's Cross or below a bookshop then, I think it was in the basement at that point. But below this bookshop in King's Cross uh trying to figure out them themselves like okay well what advice should we give and and how do we treat callers with

respect and how do we kind of get our own house in order so that we can help callers you're listening to dan snow's history i've got the team from the logbooks podcast on more after this You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I've got the team from the Logbooks podcast on. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed.

We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series, Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week. Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,

was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. Is it possible to track ideas, attitudes across this podcast series? Like initially, is it a lot of people feeling very, very scared at what the community is going to make?

I'm definitely not claiming that the world is a safe place for these communities today, but it is obviously better in that you guys now have a podcast. We're all having a good old laugh about it, right? So, but are you able to track that through these conversations? What are some of the big seismic shifts that you've seen? The easiest way to put it into a sentence to start with is that the milestones of the LGBTQ plus communities can be traced in the calls that Switchboard has taken. And that starts right back in 1974. you had the partial decriminalization of

homosexuality in 67 and that is exactly why switchboard started because this very much underground unseen community was starting to come up because of this change in the law and actually it shone this light on that community that the police then had to react to so you saw all of these things that you talked about you mentioned slightly earlier dan the the pretty policemen the police raids the arrests of gay men for being gay or having sex with other men and and it it threw this spotlight on them and switchboard was born out of that spotlight so in the 70s you have them reacting helping people to know what to do when they get arrested or if a policeman comes into a bar what their rights were directing them you know straight to the people to contact solicitors who could who could and would

support the lgbt plus communities and then you have the custody battles that many lesbians experienced in the 70s as well moving on into the 80s these still things still carried on through but then you had the hiv and AIDS pandemic which just overthrew the community and wider society and that permeates everything within that period of the logbooks going all the way through to the 90s you had section 28 which again we see in the in the logbooks um which is the law that was brought in under Thatcher's government almost as a direct reaction to HIV and AIDS um which which effectively said that you could not promote family pretended relationships. So it was not OK to be LGBT plus and it definitely wasn't OK to support children or tell children about it in schools.

And then in the 90s, moving more into like the late 90s, you had the Admiral Duncan bombings, the Soho bombings, the Soho nail bomb that happened in central London. And it's really interesting. That's something we'll cover in season three. But that shows a shift in the relationship between the police and the community where they came together and worked together rather than against each other. So you have these amazing milestones. And this was kind of what formed the part of the presentation that Adam came to that I was trying to show, that these are all within these calls but maybe Adam you could speak to the other types of calls that that we've seen yeah because although you can track these changes in British history British culture society like Tash is talking about specifically for the LGBT community but obviously like having a broader implication um you can also see calls in like

that are consistently throughout um from people who are calling because they're lonely they're calling because they're isolated they feel like they're the only person who feels this way about themselves or they feel like uh they know that there are other people out there like them but they don't dare to reach them um or that they don't, that they're not able to. And so those themes of loneliness and isolation come up consistently through the decades that we cover in the podcast. And also, as Tash will say, as a current volunteer at Switchboard are still very present today. So there's two tracks there in parallel. One is the changes that have happened and the developments and everything. And then the other thing is this consistent uh loneliness and isolation uh that all sorts of different uh lgbtq plus people have endured and

continued to just to dwell on aids and hiv that that must be really powerful tracking that in these logs from like like a lot of there's a lot of like sickness around you know like that was an early those logs must be like an early warning system for that. It's really, it's really, really kind of chilling when you read those logbook entries from the very early 80s. Saying things like, you know, this person called his lover just died of this illness and he doesn't really know what it is. And the doctors didn't seem to know. And he now worries whether he's going to be sick too. You know, really things like that. People calling to say that they had seen reports on TV

about this or read certain things in the press and you just get the sense from the volunteers' notes in the logbook entries that something serious is happening and it's going to get really, really big. And it's a sort of weird, perverse coincidence that Tash and me and Shivani, our other producer, were working on this season covering those years of our history this year in 2020, at the same time as this huge pandemic has happened. And so that's kind of added an extra layer to our experience of it. And it's, you know, made it more difficult

in some ways, I mean, practically and emotionally. Yeah, it's really, it's really interesting. If you look back in the logbook entries, as Adam said, because the what HIV and AIDS happened, but it was the community who collated the information to support them, you know, the what was happening in the medical world was so far behind that if you if you had HIV, and you know, then was happening in the medical world was so far behind that if you had HIV and, you know, then AIDS, you became the expert in it. And so Switchboard started collecting the most up-to-date information from the people that they spoke to and the callers and the volunteers themselves. And what that then became was the National AIDS Manual, which is a really massive charity and organisation that was a direct splinter off from this period of time

at Switchboard. And what's really hard when you read these logbook entries, and indeed, when we've interviewed our contributors, because we speak to people who have lived memories of this period of time, because it's their, it's their stories, and we want to hear it from them in their words. And, and, and it's, it's, it's everyone within Switchboard, you know, picking up these phones, speaking to people, supporting people in the ways that Adam said, but also trying to support each other and trying to deal with it themselves. And there's logbook entries telling the volunteers internally when they hear about volunteers who have died as well. So it's a really complicated,

heart-wrenching period of time. One of the things that we wanted to make sure that we did when we were covering this, I mean, it's, I don't think we've said it that explicitly yet to you, Dan, but the podcast is, as well as those logbook entries, we've got dozens and dozens of interviews of people who have lived these memories and lived these experiences um who who tell us their stories on the podcast that's that's you know at least one third probably a half of the podcast is is is our contributors and um and one of the things that we wanted to make sure that we did was really like honor those people who had um who had lived through that and but also be aware

that we had lost so many and so that was a sort of very difficult balance to get right in in how we covered HIV and AIDS which we spread over three episodes in our in our in our season two just because there are so many stories and there are so many people lost and so many memories to honor when you mentioned earlier about they had to sort of work out a line on things I mean the other as well as the callers having different concerns, reflecting different realities in the time which they lived. Have you noticed that the call, the volunteers, like, has their advice changed? Like, you know, has their view on the world and, like, for example, overcoming, loan like the issues you talked about for example

loneliness or has there been quite a lot of consistency in in the period that you've studied i think that's a good question i think when it comes to themes such as loneliness and isolation themes that are still very present in the calls that we take today you know two of our most common calls are around those things effectively what we're talking about is shame shame around coming out and understanding yourself and I think that the way that switchboard supports those people hasn't changed throughout the period of time but switchboard as an organization's attitude towards things like you know when switchboard started it was gay switchboard then it became lesbian and gay switch. Biphobia and transphobia was very present because switchboard was a reflection of the wider LGBTQ plus community. So things like that have really changed,

along with sexism and racism, as we're all learning and evolving. And that's what the organisation has done. It's learnt and it's evolved. But I think that's what's always really fantastic about the organisation is that it's not just one person. You have, you know, at the moment, there's 250 volunteers, and it's had varying numbers throughout its lifetime, throughout its 46 years. But those multiple opinions and voices give this stronger, unified voice. And what it really is there for is it's a safe space, it's a listening, confidential, non-directive place to let

the caller have room to talk talk to talk about how they feel so that they can work out what is right for them and yeah you have stronger lines around as a direct result of HIV and AIDS in the 80s we started raising safer sex on every call and so it's little things like that that yeah those things have changed throughout time but that really the actual ethos of the organization I don't think it has. Do the logbooks go up to the present day? So the logbooks go up to 2003 which ironically is when section 28 was repealed so there's a sort of nice synergy in that so 1974 to 2003 so we think we've got one more season left on the actual logbooks in the format that it is at the moment. Although we've got many an idea of how we could continue after that.

Because there's a lot of issues around confidentiality and sensitivity around the issues, that would be another reason why we wouldn't want to come right up to the present day, because we are handling information about people who have phoned a confidential service. So, you know, we're very, very sensitive. We change information, we change details, all of those things anyway, but it wouldn't seem quite right to bring it right up to the present day. And that's just another reason. What is the strangest call you've ever seen logged? There's a hedgehog in my kitchen. you help yeah that is a good one the volunteer wrote i don't know i forgot to ask whether it was a gay hedgehog or not um adam what about the

logbook entries which are talking about this um dog was it dog or cat breeding oh yes yes well they when they use it they were breeding dogs to then murder them and put drugs inside them and smuggle them and smuggle them and smuggle them across borders and so the volunteer who made who wrote this very very long detailed account of this call in the logbook was not sure whether this was like true or completely made up and a hoax call and because there's tons of hoax calls you know logged in in the logbooks um and so uh but that was that was a pretty that was a pretty funny one yeah i just i just remembered my absolute favorite one and i know

adam loves this too um at like 4 30 a.m because switchboard was 24 hours throughout the 80s and 90s um at 4 30 a.m a monk rang up he was running away from his fascist bishop. And he rang up to speak to Switchboard. A gay monk. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Amazing. I love that. I mean, I must say,

joining the... I'm actually going to say something extremely naughty but blasphemous about the Catholic Church so I might stop myself there. It's your show, Dan. Do it. I mean, yeah, true.

I mean, come on, Mr. Mike. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Anyway. Anyway, so... yeah, true. I mean, yeah, come on, Mr. Michael. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, so great, guys. Well, that's so cool. How can people listen to this podcast? Yeah, I mean, it's called The Logbooks. You can listen wherever you get your podcasts, Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, all of those things. And you can find out more about the podcast and about us on our website, which is thelogbooks.org. Thank you very much, Tash and Adam. Go and listen to that podcast, everyone. It's an absolute

classic. Thanks very much. Hi, everybody. Just a quick message at the end of this podcast. I'm currently sheltering in a small windswept building on a piece of rock in the Bristol Channel called Lundy. I'm here to make a podcast. I'm here enduring weather that frankly is apocalyptic because I want to get some great podcast material for you guys. In return, I've got a little tiny favour to ask. If you could go to wherever you get your podcasts, if you could give it a five-star rating, if you could share it, if you could give it a review, I'd really appreciate that. Then from the comfort of your own homes, you'll be doing me a massive favour. Then more people will listen to the podcast, we can do more and more ambitious things and I can spend more of my time getting pummeled. Thank you.

Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, was a master satirist who cloaked a sharp political edge beneath his absurdist wit. Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth explores the ideas of the man who foresaw the dangers of the digital age and our failing politics with astounding clarity. Hear the recordings that inspired a generation of futurists, entrepreneurs and politicians. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks

or wherever audiobooks are sold. you