Three Decades of Changing Minds
Glasgow Women’s Library (launched in 1991), and Women in Profile (the organisation that GWL grew from), involved LGBTQ+ people right from inception in 1987.
For over three decades we’ve played our role as activists, delivered events, commissioned writers and artists, created life-changing projects and helped to impact on government policies to make Scotland better for LGBTQ+ people.
Part of a two year project, Three Decades of Changing Minds, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, this OUT in the Archive exhibition starts to bring this aspect of GWL’s history and work to the fore.
Over the next two years, we will be cataloguing GWL’s own organisational records, digitising materials and making them more widely accessible.
In the meantime, OUT in the Archive offers a glimpse into some of GWL’s own LGBTQ+ history, from staging lesbian pantos (oh yes, we did!) to setting up a zine for queer feminists; from creating a Glasgow ‘Chapter’ of the Lesbian Avengers to rescuing one of the UK’s most significant LGBTQ+ archive collections.
(Fun)draising
In the absence of any funding, we organised many different activities to try to raise money for Women in Profile and then, later, for Glasgow Women’s Library.
The lesbian pantos, Cinderella in 1992 and then Panto Most Horrid the following year demonstrate how we put the ‘fun’ into fundraising. As this correspondence, published in Harpies and Quines in 1993 shows, we’ve not always been able to please everyone over the past thirty years!
