Kit Heyam: Full Interview

TRANSCRIPT

Kit Heyam

Interviewed by Yvonne Lewis

9th October 2018

YL: OK, Umm. My name’s Yvonne Lewis and it’s the 9th of October 2018 and it’s the West Yorkshire Queer Stories project, um…

KH: And I am Kit Heyam and, um, I’m not sure what else you want me to say at this point.

YL: [laughs] OK...OK, um... so... what would you like to talk about first?

KH: Um, remind me what’s on your list of particular topics, kind of thing.

YL: The DIY Rainbow Plaque project and, Trans Pride Leeds.

KH: Cool, I guess Rainbow Plaques chronologically came first so maybe it’s worth talking about that.

YL: OK.

KH: Um, so yeah OK I guess I will talk a bit about how it came about and stuff and you can chime in and ask any questions if you want to. So, yeah, Rainbow Plaques started when I was in my first year of being involved with a charity called York LGBT History Month - so I was living in York at the time, this will have been February 2015 when I started – and it came about because, so I was newly involved with this charity who, what they do is they co-ordinate a programme of events for LGBT History Month, fairly obviously. I say co-ordinate quite deliberately because they don’t organise all the events, it’s more like poking various, you know, institutions and organisations around York and saying ‘are you doing anything for LGBT History Month? If you are, can we put it in our programme? If you’re not, why not? Can we help?’ that kind of thing.

So they co-ordinate this programme and I as a new person was keen to find, like, new organisations to participate in this programme, and I decided to email an organisation called York’s Alternative History, and I knew about them because I had been on a walk that they’d led around York. It’s basically an organisation that’s, tries to kinda raise awareness of the fact that York’s history is not just monarchy and Vikings and Romans, so [laughs] particularly kinda radical and working class and queer and, you know, marginalised history slant, I guess. So the person I emailed was a guy who sang in my choir called Gary Craig and he put me in touch with the woman who actually ran the organisation whose name is Helen Graham – who’s now a good friend of mine. So I met up with Helen and I said ‘you do alternative history, do you want to do anything as part of the LGBT History Month programme? Sounds up your street’ and she suggested doing a queer version of something she’d done with York’s Alternative History earlier in, I think it was May 2014 it will have been when this, um when she did this first event, and they’d called that Guerilla Blue Plaques which was basically people were invited to make cardboard blue plaques commemorating stuff they thought should be... commemorated in York and she suggested we do a queer version of this, we do a rainbow plaque version as supposed to a guerilla blue plaque version. So it should be on record that rainbow plaques were Helen’s idea really because, you know, I’ve kinda become more associated with them now, I guess, cause I, you know, sorta taken it forward and done it in different places but it was Helen Graham’s idea [laughs] originally.

So, yeah, so we decided to run this Rainbow Plaques event and Helen, so it got put in the LGBT History Month programme, and then February 2015 came round. Helen had reached out to various people who she knew who, had lived in York for a long time which included a mutual friend of ours Laura Potts who’s been quite important in the project as well, and... and we got some great suggestions. So it was a brilliant [unclear] – what we really wanted it to be about, Rainbow Plaques, was not just kinda ‘this person was famous and queer and from York, and isn’t commemorated and we should commemorate them’ or ‘this important thing that is kinda universally recognised as important and queer happened here’. It was partly that but it was also partly kinda...challenging the idea that certain things were worthy of commemoration and certain things weren’t, so for example I put a plaque up on New Look in York because it was the first place that I tried on men’s clothes in the changing room just after I come out as trans, so it was about, like, elevating personal histories, I guess, just as much as it was about, um... commemorating more traditionally significant stuff.

So, yeah, we got loads of stuff, we got things like ‘this was where we used to have discos to raise money for the Lesbian Line in the 80s’, that was one of Laura’s, uh, we had my plaque on New Look, we had one for where Anne Lister, who was a late 18th early 19th century lesbian, she effectively got married to her female partner, or celebrated her commitment to her female partner in a church in York, the Holy Trinity... and, it somehow, you know, it was just one of many events in the LGBT History Month programme that year but somehow it really captured people’s imaginations, it had quite a few...Inder [ph], Jas, who is, who was at the time the lead co-ordinator of York LGBT History Month called it ‘ripples’, it had quite a few ripples spreading from the month outwards, and in particular the one that marked Anne Lister’s commitment to her partner Ann Walker, that was...that was up at Holy Trinity Church Goodramgate and sparked quite a lot of discussion, not all of it positive, not related to the lesbian more recent controversy about Anne Lister’s permanent plaque, but not related to that, more controversy then about the fact ‘it’s a religious organisation, and it has this plaque up saying two women got married and the world will end’, um, so and I was rung up by a guy from BBC Radio York wanting to talk about it. Weirdly I got put in the faith slot, I guess because it was at a church, so I had to kinda talk about Anne Lister and her relationship to Christianity. [laughs] But, yeah, this was all as a relate, as a result of these...of the plaques, and they became, yeah, really, one of the most, I think it’s fair to say, iconic things that we did in York LGBT History Month, if anything were iconic I guess it was the plaques.

So we’ve done it in subsequent years in York, then I stepped down from York LGBT History Month when I moved to Leeds in, um, March 2017, and I accidentially sort-of became involved in...a...scheme that Leeds Civic Trust were doing where they were putting up their own rainbow plaques, and they’d actually never heard of ours in York, so like I got an email – I was working at Leeds Beckett University at the time – I had an email from the, one of the chairs of the LGBT Staff Network Ian Lamond saying ‘oh by the way Leeds Civic Trust are doing these plaques, isn’t that cool, send them any ideas’ and I emailed back like ‘you know I do plaques too, right?’ [laughs] when they invited me to come to this meeting that they were having, so I got involved with that, um, and Ian...like, their scheme was great because they were prepared to put money into creating kinda semi-permanent perspex plaques and they were prepared to kinda crowdsource the things that people thought should be commemorated, but it was, the thing that distinguised it from our cardboard plaques was that they weren’t personal histories, it was kind of ‘this has to be properly significant as historians can understand it’, and so I was having a moan about this to a friend of mine Luna Morgana who runs a queer art collective called Queerology in Leeds and they suggested that we could run the DIY cardboard rainbow plaques as a Queerology project, and that was the first time anyone had called rainbow plaques art to me, right, because I had seen rainbow plaques as activism... particularly because, um, well yeah mainly – and this is the reason that LGBT history at all is important to me - because feeling a sense of connection and community and continuity with the past is really, really emotionally important to me, um, some of the first ways really in which I understood or articulated or felt my queer identity was through idenification with historical, particularly gay men, so I’m, yeah, I’m really, really passionate about making queer history visible so that other people can have that experience, there’s a – this is really cheesy, I’m going to say it anyway [laughs] – there’s a line in Alan Bennett’s The History Boys which is one of my favourite plays partly because it has got some queer content which I enjoyed as an angsty teenager, but there’s a line where, I think, yeah, it will be Hector the English teacher [sic] is talking about the experience of reading a book and finding a kind of thought or an experience that you thought was just yours but you found it there on the page and it said ‘it was as if a hand has come out and taken yours’ or something like that and, and yeah that in terms of history does really resonate with me, so I was really... keen that... LGBT history continues to be commemorated, and that... I guess that everyone had a stake in it as well, because you know there’s, it’s one thing to walk down a street in Leeds and see a plaque like the Leeds Civic Trust are putting up, like the, for example, they’ve got a plaque up to the first openly trans person to be nominated for an Academy Award, she lived in Kirkstall, Angela Morley – good fact – it’s one thing to see a plaque to a trans person being nominated for an Academy Award, but it’s another thing I think to see a plaque like the DIY ones we did in Leeds, we put one on the House Of Fraser where a trans woman had written ‘this is the first place I tried on a dress’ and that is a different kind of identification I think somehow to like, just see this hidden community kinda rising out from the streets all around you. So it was important to me that it was democratic, I guess, and so it – oh, and so the point of me actually saying that, that was why Rainbow Plaques had been activism for me originally rather than art. Luna saw it as art, so that was interesting, so we did it as an art thing, put some photos of it up, and then I... on the strength of that Jess who works at Live Art Bistro, the queer art performance venue, saw a Rainbow Plaque that we’d stuck on that venue and really liked it, and again saw it as art, and this is so interesting, and so invited me on the strength of that to do, to try and bring the Rainbow Plaques to Bradford as part of what is a very kinda stupidly complicated thing, but basically as part of a publicity campaign for a play that’s, or a performance night that’s happening in Bradford, and she for the first time offered me money for them, which I - this is what I discovered is the difference between art and activism [laughs] is that you get paid for art, or people at least expect that they should have to pay you for art. I never ever thought that Rainbow Plaques would be something I would be paid for, so that’s been quite interesting.

So that’s the story of, yeah, where the DIY ones are up to now, and in the, yeah, along the way I’ve had people contact me from other places saying ‘I’ve seen your plaques, can I do the plaques?’ and I’ve always been like ‘yes you can do the plaques’. There’s not, you know, a copyrighted idea, it was just something I want to spread and be everywhere, so I always send them the template for free and stuff.

What else should I like to say? I suppose I should say how we display the plaques actually, which I haven’t really said, and maybe one story actually relating to that – I realise I've talked quite a lot - but... yeah, they get displayed, so people make them, people write whatever they want on them, or they send in their stories and we write them for them, that's most of the Leeds plaques were done by people communicating their stories to us rather than them coming and making them physically themselves. Make the plaques, and then they get stuck up with double-sided duct tape on the relevant buildings, because like Blue Plaques they are related to sites, they are supposed to evoke the LGBT history of a particular place and to make that kind of sense of belonging in a community and in a place - I guess place is very important to me, to me it felt very concrete - so yeah, they get stuck on these buildings with double-sided duct tape and they are supposed to be, you know, completely ephemeral, they disappear. The ones in York never last 24 hours. Interestingly the ones in Leeds have lasted ages, like some of them have gone, the ones in more public places, but on LGBT buildings, they're like, if people haven't actively taken them down, they're like still there! [laughs] It's been, we did it, this, in August and it's like October now so this is com... I feel quite impressive. But we don't typically, unless there's someone literally watching us who owns the building, we typically don't ask for permission because the idea is that it's just something that they can take down if they want to, it's [unclear], it's ephemeral. What I did really enjoy in Leeds was I stuck one on the statue of Queen Victoria in Hyde Park [laughs] That looked really good! The, uh, yeah, I guess the upshot or one effect of that is that sometimes people see them on their building or on a building near them and they don't really know what they're for and why they're there and that can be a bit of a destabilising experience for some people, I think. The first lot we did, we literally just put them up, we didn't provide any context. Subsequently, we've always written #RainbowPlaques on the bottom of them, and that means people can go on Twitter or Instagram and they can find the- they can look at the hashtag and they can find other examples and they can find out what the point of them is. But the first ones we didn't provide any context and that led to one of the plaques we'd put up - I won't name the person who put this up - but they'd experienced a homophobic attack at York St John University and we put up a plaque marking that and York St John were really unhappy with that [laughs] because we'd, because they saw themselves as a very... well, a reasonably, you know, they are an extremely queer-friendly university now, but that was, yeah, this was in the '80s that this had happened so I think it wasn't the same then, but they were, they were unhappy that people might think it was, they were a...un, un-queer-friendly institution, and what was very interesting about their response, we had this whole meeting and this email exchange, and I was writing a blog post about the Rainbow Plaques at the time, and they wanted to put in this enormously long statement which was really interesting because it was all focussed on the present, it was like 'York St John's has an equality policy, we're committed to the NUS' Out In Sports campaign', and because it was the rugby club who'd perpetrated this homophobic attack on a group of... women listening to a queer women's band, yeah, 'we were very interested into the NUS' Out In Sports campaign and we support X, Y and Z, and we do this and we do that' and nothing about, like, 'we acknowledge that things happened in the past'. In fact the first line of the statement was 'We were disappointed to hear of this alleged event' which the person who had, um... said, you know, who'd experienced the attack, was obviously not happy with the word 'alleged' [laughs]. So it was quite interesting that they saw the Rainbow Plaques' relevance as something entirely contemporary and not really about history and they wanted to present this linear narrative of like 'things used to be terrible and homophobic and now they are wonderful'. And, yeah, Helen and I as people with, I guess, an academic interest in history, did find that quite interesting.

OK, yeah, I've talked a lot about that but that's your DIY Rainbow Plaques story [laughs].

YL: [laughs] [pause] There were a couple of things I wanted to ask, but you've already sort of answered them already [laughs].

KH: [laughs] That's alright!

YL: [laughs].

KH: Is there anything you need more detail on?

YL: No.

KH: Cool. [pause]

YL: [unclear].

KH: What was the other things you wanted to talk about?

YL: Um... just about, just about the, um, Trans Pride Leeds.
KH: Oh yeah... um, yeah, OK. I mean, I can talk about that. So yeah, 2018 first Trans Pride Leeds happened. I believe - I could be wrong - I think it's the North's first Trans Pride, I think it only happened in Brighton before that in the UK.

I wasn't an organiser of Trans Pride Leeds, so I can mainly talk about my experience of participating, you know, in it. I [laughs] part of the reason I wasn't an organiser is I tried very hard to be an organiser, but the actual organisers [laughs] were not particularly receptive which, you know, is their choice, but I think, like after moving from York where I'd had a very kinda... big organisational role in the queer community, like - because I ended up, I started as outreach co-ordinator of York LGBT History Month but I ended up leading the charity - moving from York, yeah, where people knew who I was to Leeds where I didn't, you know, have any kind of role or stake in anything really, that was quite, I didn't realise how destabilising that would be, and so I did sort of try and get involved in organising Trans Pride Leeds on the basis that I had organised kinda big queer events before, but the organisers were keen to do it, and anyway. So I did, I did sign up as a volunteer and I did do some kinda sitting on the door of the film afternoon that they had.

But I will talk about the experience of it, because that was really meaningful actually. So, yeah, I made a placard. I decided to, um, I'd been... this was influenced by the fact that I'd been researching an article about how to curate trans possibility in history, so how to represent... things, pictures, events in history, in museums, where you could interpret things in a way that led you to believe the people in them were trans but you could also not, so how to kinda represent them in a museum display that would keep both those possibilities alive and not, like, erase one or the other. So I'd been writing an article about that. As part of that I had to, and in order to kind of justify my argument as to why I thought it was a good idea to validate the existence of trans people in history, I had to do research on... awful newspaper articles which said that trans people are a new invention, like [unclear], the one that has stuck in my mind just because of its sheer kind of laugh-out-loud ridiculousness...I can't remember which newspaper this was from - I think it was the Sunday Times, maybe - but the headline was 'Transgender Fetish Is A Truly Shameful Modern Invention'. So I had to look at a lot of this crap, and I was quite keen to, and I guess I felt like the reason that Trans Pride was so needed in 2018 was because of the appalling, appalling media transphobia that just ramped up and up and up over the past year really as a result of the proposals to reform the Gender Recognition Act. So I was quite keen to kinda directly challenge that kind of stuff in my placard so I printed out some of these newspaper headlines and, yeah, made a sort of montage of them, and then wrote 'You're on the wrong side of history (source: I'm a fucking historian)' which I was quite pleased with [laughs].

Like, I don't know, a lot of... - I have a complicated relationship with a lot of Leeds' trans community in that I feel it's quite cliquey and a lot of people just kind of looked at the placard and were, they looked away and didn't say anything to me so I was a bit worried they didn't like it or thought that it was problematic in some way that I didn't quite understand, but some people did like it and I was quite pleased with it [laughs]. So I made this placard and I travelled down with that on the bus and even like sitting on the bus with my trans flag and the placard felt kind of radical and worrying. I wasn't sure what reaction we were gonna get... nothing happened, but I felt vulnerable.

Yeah, and then we assembled outside the Town Hall, and we didn't know where we were marching, like none of - maybe the organisers knew […] - I didn't know where we were going to march. But, you know, we were gathering outside the Art Gallery, and then suddenly it became apparent that they were closing The Headrow, that we were marching down The Headrow, and this was... that just came as a complete kind of shock to me, like an amazing shock, but I just sorta hadn't, you, know, I thought of Trans Pride as being something where we'd all have to march on the pavement and get in people's way, you know, I didn't think it was going to be something that was powerful enough to shut The Headrow down [laughs]... But, yeah, but they did and we, I ended up at the front because, because I was tall so I was asked to carry, there's a massive Trans Leeds banner that I was asked to carry... so there are a bunch of us quite tall people at the front with this massive banner, and suddenly we were at the front of a whole crowd of, yeah, a smallish crowd, but the crowd of people marching down a closed-off Headrow, and we were chanting, you know, Jamie Fletcher, who was at the time the organiser of Non Binary Leeds - she's not any more - she had a megaphone, I think Sophia Thomas - who was at the time the organiser of Trans Leeds and isn't any more - she had a megaphone too, I think, and we were shout, chanting 'When trans rights are under attack, what do we do? Fight back!' and 'Trans rights are human rights', those were the things that we were mostly, and 'We're here, we're queer, we will not live in fear', all this stuff, and what was, it felt amazingly powerful. It was pouring with rain, it was freezing, it was 31st March, it was Trans Day Of Visibility, we were certainly very fricking visible [laughs], and it felt so unexpectedly powerful because I'd been in, you know, Pride marches before, many Pride marches before - not many - but I had been at Pride marches before, but it was a smaller number of us taking up a bigger space, and I was at the front, and what was most interesting was the reactions, really, from the passers-by, because they were, you know, when you do the general LGBT Pride in August, that, you know, everyone knows that Pride is happening, everything is covered in rainbows, there's like rows and rows and rows of people lined up to watch the parade, so everyone who, like, you're looking at with the exception of maybe, like, the odd random right-wing religious person with a placard, everyone who you're looking at is supportive and knows why you're there. Trans Pride, no-one was prepared and people were turning round and just staring, like, in kind of incomprehension and slight fear of what we were doing and it, there wasn't, it wasn't hostility but it was kind of bafflement at... what exactly this whole thing was. So there wasn't that layer of kind of 'everyone around me is supporting me', it was, it felt genuinely revolutionary, I guess, it felt genuinely disruptive to people's lives, which I guess, you know, is what Pride presumably used to feel like in the '60s, '70s, '80s, is that you were genuinely kind of, your visibility was doing something, I guess, when you do LGBT Pride it doesn't feel so much like your visibility is doing anything apart from reinforcing a general kind of fuzzy supportiveness of people's right to do, be who they want to be, and actually when that comes to trans rights it's not, when it gets less fuzzy [laughs] and people need, you know, concrete interventions to be able to be who they want to be - I don't mean medical, I mean social really - then, you know, then people are less supportive, but, you know, the... at least that kind of fuzzy rhetoric around LGBT Pride is, is that everybody is generally supportive and Trans Pride was so not like that and that made it feel... again, like we were achieving something in a way we weren't before, and I really, really meant the chants, really felt like fighting back when trans rights are under attack, was something that was emphatically necessary in 2018, like when, when the idea of Trans Pride was conceived of, I think it was probably a year before or something, I was at a meeting, it was Evan Mortimer's idea, um, it was a Trans Leeds meeting.

When the idea was conceived of it was... I don't know if everybody knew how bad the media was gonna get and that therefore how necessary a protest like that would feel, yeah, it really, it really was a protest not a celebration.

So yeah, we marched the exact same route as LGBT Pride except that instead of going all the way into Lower Briggate we ended up at Wharf Chambers and everybody kind of crowded into Wharf Chambers and it was, everybody was wet [laughs] and me and Alex my husband ate our packed lunch on the sofa in Wharf Chambers and... it, yeah, it was kind of lovely but vulnerable because I still don't feel like I have, like, close friends in the Leeds trans community, really, and like we went home after a bit because we had other stuff to do, but it was, and yeah, an enormously powerful experience. Actually, I didn't realise I had that much to say about it. [pause] Was that useful? Is that OK?

YL: [pause] [unclear]

KH: OK [pause]

YL: OK... OK, thanks, thanks very much [laughs].

KH: Thank you [laughs].