Hi my name is Ruth and this month I'm gonna be vlogging about LGBT History
Month. So as I'm sure you can tell from the flags in the background, I am a
member of the lgbtq+ community, I am Pansexual. I've got my little pan pride
flag right there, so Pansexual means that when it means that you experience
attraction regardless of gender so when I meet someone the very last thing
on my mind is are you male, are you female, are you trans, are you non-binary. None of that
even pops into my head and I'm aware that it's a very like un very
misunderstood sexuality but that's that's what it means to me. So I wanted
to talk about LGBT History Month because the university is putting on some great
events for LGBT History Month but also there is like some quite local history that
is very important to the Swansea area. So the film Pride is set in 1984 during
the Miners Strike and that is something that greatly affected the community in South
Wales. A lot of the mines in this area we're on strike and a group of LGBT
activists in London decided that due to the marginalization that both, that they
experienced from being gay that they would support the miners who were
experiencing similar marginalization. So essentially a group of them got
together and started raising money to support the miners
and if you've watched the film, it's an absolute brilliant film, incredibly
moving and it is based on real life events.
These group of people came to South Wales to the Dulais Valley. So basically
to summarize, there was this great reciprocal relationship between this
one specific village which I'm not going to offend anyone by trying to pronounce
the name of and LGSM which were based out of Gays The Word which is a bookshop in
London and is a bit of a pilgrimage for anyone in the LGBTQ community
because there's so much history there and they put on this concert that was
dubbed by the Daily Mail as "Pits and Perverts" which they adopted and they
raised £20,000 for the miners fund. So you can actually still buy the posters
and t-shirts from the pits and perverts concert as I have one right here, we got
this at Gays The Word but there are plenty around as well. So one of the
connections to Swansea which is why I really wanted to talk about it, is that one
of the characters in the film and she was also a real person, is also I
should add, she's still alive. Was quite young at the time, in 1984 when all
this was happening and she was someone who spoke out and and wanted the LGBTQ
community to be involved in the village, supported their ideas of supporting the
miners. She attended Swansea University, she studied Welsh language and in 2005
she was elected to be the first woman to represent Swansea East as a
Labour MP. So a lot of the events happened during the same week and some
of them weren't quite directly related but JC's had rainbow flags up the
whole week, so when we went to the Open Mic Night they were there.
The official LGBT History Month Open Mic Night, I went to that as well and I performed a
song there and then on the Friday there was SUSU Pride which was an event
with panels and some comedians and it was just a really nice day, very chill
and a chance to ask some questions so yeah. So I'm actually performing tonight at
the LGBT History Month open mic night, I'm performing a song from a musical
called Everybody's Talking about Jamie so I'm really nervous but here's hoping
it goes well.
So that's all from me this month, I hope you've enjoyed it and I'll see you next month