A Very Brief History of LGBTQ+ Youth and the Telephone
The telephone is an everyday object which serves a practical purpose: enabling communication at a distance. Having spoken to hundreds of people at a range of events, for many, the everydayness made the telephone into something of a mundane object—it was ‘just there’, in the hallway, living room, or street corner (if a public call box). However, the very utility of the telephone—something which, by the 1980s was ‘just there’ for a majority in the UK, nearly always to hand—made it especially important for LGBTQ+ youth growing up during an exciting, liberating, and traumatic time. While phones played a variety of roles in LGBTQ+ youth culture in the 1980s and 1990s—and we’ll turn to that later—its use as a source of information and support, through organisations like (what is now called) Switchboard LGBT+ Helpline, made the telephone indispensable.
The London Gay Switchboard was established on 4 March 1974 to provide information, advice, and support to gay people. The service grew out of the short-lived Gay Liberation Front (1970-73) and way in part a response to the high number of calls being received by Gay News (1972-1983).[1] London Gay Switchboard was not the only such service—one was also established in Brighton in April 1975 and by 1979, there were similar services in Bristol, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Leicester.[2] It wasn’t even the first, being pipped to the post by the Edinburgh Briefing Service—which served LGBTQ+ people in Scotland where homosexuality was still illegal—by two days. However, it was the largest, has since grown to become a national service, and its work is extraordinarily well documented.
Calls made to the switchboard are confidential, but records of calls now held at the Bishopsgate Institute in London provide an insight into the role of the telephone and dedicated telephone services in the lives of gay people. These stories have been thoroughly explored in a Heritage Lottery Funded project and podcast, the Log Books. As the podcast explores, Switchboard provided a range of vital services. London Gay Switchboard also worked with the National Council of Civil Liberties and Gay Legal Advice (GLAD) to provide legal advice to callers. Given that the Sexual Offences Act (1967) had only partially decriminalised homosexuality, legal advice was crucial in many areas of people’s lives, including their interactions with the police.[3]
The kinds of calls that Switchboard, and other services like it, received were wide-ranging and provide a rich insight into what it was like growing up as an LGBTQ+ person in late twentieth-century Britain. But telephone support services were particularly important, especially to young gay men, during the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s. Before much was known about HIV; before there were preventative treatments; before it was conceivable that undetectable could mean untransmissible, many young LGBTQ+ people called Switchboard. In fact, Switchboard organised the first symposium on AIDS in Britain.[4]
Short video of singer-songwriter Tom Robinson volunteering for London Gay Switchboard. Tom Robinson, ‘London Gay Switchboard in 1979’, YouTube (2018).
London has a long queer history and is a place where many young LGBTQ+ people have moved to find and create communities. For those newly arriving in the 1970s, London Gay Switchboard provided advice on LGBTQ+ friendly housing—and warned against potential exploitation—as well as social spaces where people might make new friends. This role was particularly important for one young man when he began going to London, from his family home in Surrey, in the early 1980s. In an oral history interview with historian Sebastian Buckle, he remembered, ‘if you were new to London and gay you’d phone up the switchboard and they’d put you in contact with um the befriending group. Sounds a bit, yeah, but the idea was it was run by a group of volunteers and every Friday night it met so it alternated in different parts of London’.[5] The befriending group’s association with Switchboard lent this potentially hazardous practice of turning up at a stranger’s house an air of safety: ‘it was all above board it doesn’t sound like it was but it was all above board. The fact that it was run. The switchboard knew about it’.
The London Gay Switchboard, a voluntary telephone information and support service, clearly played a vital role in the lives of young gay men in the capital in the late twentieth century. But it wasn’t the only way that young gay men used the phone to connect to one another. As the oral history interviewee recalled: ‘[b]ecause there was no, obviously in the 80s there was no internet or Grindr (laugh). So it was, it was just when you were going out you socialised’. If you met people while you were out, ‘you’d probably swap numbers but again back in the 80s there was no mobile phones so it was really if you were home and the landline rang otherwise it was actually quite… so you could just miss people I suppose if you weren’t there to answer the phone’.
Changing telephonic technology has also shaped the experience of, among other things, gay dating, as chatlines became available: ‘Some of them were free and some of them you had to pay. I suppose you phoned and you put a description and you just talked to people. So I suppose it is, if you imagined now a Grindr but with no pictures or anything and you just talked to people’.
This very brief history of LGBTQ+ youth and the telephone is far from comprehensive. We’re still collecting memories for our online interactive map. You can share your own memories, completely anonymously.
[1] Lucy Robinson, Gay Men and the Left in Post-War Britain: How the personal got political (Manchester, 2007), p. 87.
[2] Clifford Williams, Courage To Be: Organised gay youth in England, 1967-1990 (Kibworth, 2021), p. 47.
[3] Kate Bradley, Lawyers for the Poor: Legal advice, voluntary action and citizenship in England, 1890-1990 (Manchester, 2019), p. 138.
[4] Robinson, Gay Men and the Left, p. 174.
[5] Southampton City Archives: D/OH/SHP 6, Southampton’s Hidden Past and Present: An Oral History of the Gay Community, Interview by Sebastian Buckle, 2013.
Main image: London Gay Pride 1991, featuring a banner for Bristol Lesbian and Gay Switchboard. Photograph by Fae, March 1991. Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-SA-3.0. <https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gay_Pride_London_1991_2_March.jpg>
