Glasgow Women’s Library (GWL) celebrated its 30th anniversary in September 2021. As we now enter our fourth decade we ‘look back to move forward’ through our 30 Years of Changing Minds Blog Series by staff and volunteers.
This blog was researched and written by Catherine who is doing a six month placement at GWL as part of her PhD.
In the last blog, I discussed how LIPS emerged in response to the need for resources and community support for lesbian and bisexual women and girls. The group provided a rare opportunity for queer women between the ages of 14 and 25 to come together, share their experiences, learn from each other, explore GWL’s vast archives of lesbian history, and relax in a space where they didn’t have to hide or feel ashamed of who they were. In this blog, I’ll share a little bit of what the LIPS archive tells us about what they got up to over the first couple of years.
Meeting diaries and other materials in the LIPS archive document the wide range of activities that took place during the group’s Thursday evening and Saturday afternoon meetings, including discussion of serious issues – domestic violence, self-harm, eating disorders – light-hearted games, film screenings of 1990s lesbian classics like Bound and Show Me Love and opportunities to learn practical and creative skills, including a drag king workshop led by artist and drag performer Diane Torr.
One activity was a longer-term project on self-esteem and queer representation, which the group called ‘Putting Ourselves in the Picture’. Run by GWL co-founder Adele Patrick, this project aimed to help LIPS members to think critically about the images – or lack of images – of lesbian and bisexual women in the media, and the affect of these images on their senses of self as young queer people. Adele drew from her own experiences as a student at Glasgow School of Art in the 1980s, where few women – let alone lesbians – made it into the historical record. With Adele’s help, the LIPS lassies talked about cinematic and artistic depictions of lesbian life, and put together a “Lesbian wall”, collecting the sometimes funny, sometimes painful words and phrases they associated with lesbian identity. Over the next few meetings, the group drew, painted and collaged their own sharp and colourful depictions of themselves. ‘Putting Ourselves in the Picture’ culminated in an exhibition of this artwork at in December 2000. These self-portraits are now a beautiful addition to the LIPS archive, where they document the joy and hard work of building self-love as a queer young woman in the early 2000s.
By 2001, the group was in full swing and some of its members took part in trips to Manchester and to the Camas Centre on the Isle of Mull. In Manchester, LIPS met up with a local queer women’s youth group, where youth worker Sally Carr invited them to participate in a drama workshop on “any subject, e.g. love, family, having babies, growing up, looking your best, whatever!!” Photos in the collection give a glimpse of the performance that followed this workshop – including a memorable rewrite of the S Club 7 hit ‘Reach for the Stars’ (LIPS edition: “Reach for the Bras”). Staff diaries and photos from the first of two trips to the Isle of Mull, in August 2001, show a very different experience – a full week of kayaking, abseiling, swimming and camping. Each evening at the centre ended with a reflection, where LIPS members shared stories, songs and poems with one another. In a diary from the Camas trip, a LIPS youth worker writes that the final evening was “punctuated with cups of tea and so much noise and laughter […] the closeness of the group is so touching.” The Camas Centre had been founded as a Christian organisation, and welcoming a group of young queer people was a new experience for some of the staff members. But by the end of the trip, a LIPS staff member writes, it was “so apparent that we have made such an impact on their lives and they were really moved and sad to see us go.”
At the end of 2001, the LIPS lassies put together one of their biggest group projects: a series of short films called ‘Dykes in the City’. In collaboration with GMAC, the Glasgow Media Access Centre, LIPS members took on almost every role – as scriptwriters, editors, actors, directors and cinematographers. The films they produced are mostly light-hearted depictions of lesbian and bisexual teenage life – coming out, school, crushes, safe sex. They capture a specific moment in Glasgow’s queer history, where the shadow of the AIDS crisis and tentative openness of a new post-Section 28 era merge.
The difficulties that queer young people experienced in this era are explored in another LIPS project, Something to Tell You: A Health Needs Assessment of Young Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual People in Glasgow. Run in partnership with the NHS Greater Glasgow Health Board, this 2002 report gathered and analysed the experiences of young gay, lesbian and bisexual people in Glasgow and West Scotland. The project combined dozens of detailed interviews with young people as well as more than a hundred surveys. Although Something to Tell You focused on mental and physical health needs, it also provided a space for young people to speak openly and confidentially about coming out, school friendships and family relationships. Some of the young people interviewed were LIPS members, some were involved with other LGBTQ youth groups like the Stonewall Youth Project and Bi-g-les, others were just looking for an opportunity to speak about their lives and struggles. Something To Tell You shows that LIPS was not just about personal development and community building for the group’s members, it also had a wider aim to document and improve the lives of young queer people in Glasgow. In my next LIPS blog post (read it here), I’ll share some material from the last three years of the group, as it took on a more peer-led approach.
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