We Have Always Been Here: Celebrating The Black Lesbian & Gay Centre

About

For the LGBTQ+ month MOCA London is hosting the event:

We Have Always Been Here: Celebrating The Black Lesbian & Gay Centre

Curated by Veronica McKenzie

28 February, 2022, 11am – 6pm.

MOCA London, 113 Bellenden Road, London SE15 4QY

This exhibition highlights some of the material held in the Haringey Vanguard collection which specifically relates to The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre. The first exhibition at Bruce Castle Museum took place in February 2021 and focused on the Haringey connection. We now come to Peckham where the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre opened in 1992.

The exhibition explores and celebrates the various support networks, campaigns and activism cultivated by the BAME LGBTQ+ community through the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre. It provides an important record of that time, and most definitely showed ‘We Have Always Been Here’. 

Background info for the exhibition: 

Haringey Vanguard has been an important flagship heritage project - all about community. Collecting oral histories, ephemera, photographs and documents, this special archive project has set about making visible the histories of our BAME LGBTQ+ communities and their activism in the 1970s-1990s in Haringey.

Running from 2018 to 2021, Haringey Vanguard was the brainchild of local filmmaker Veronica McKenzie. The project was funded by National Lottery Heritage Fund and led by London Metropolitan Archives with Haringey Archive and Museum Service at Bruce Castle. 

The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre Project (BLGC), was established in 1985. Funded by Greater London Council in 1985, it was based in an annex of Tottenham Town Hall where the small but dedicated team of part-time staff and volunteers coordinated advice and counselling services, a helpline, a library and other resources. The BLGC organised social events, campaigns and protests, and worked with groups such as Stonewall Housing Association, and Haringey Lesbian and Gay Unit to provide wholistic support to their community. The project moved several times during the 80’s until they finally located a space in Peckham in 1992. The Centre remained active into the 1990s, but eventually closed due to a lack of funding.