The Sculpture:- The Three Graces
Cornwall Lesbian Line Closes after 20yrs
Cornwall Lesbian Line
It seems strange for me, a gay man, to be writing about Cornwall Lesbian Line, but I feel the passing of this piece of landmark Cornish GLBT history must be recorded.
Cornwall Lesbian Line was a genuine real volunteer project. The Cornwall Lesbian Helpline started in 1989 back when the Cornish Authorities hardly bothered to hide their homophobia & contempt for gay persons.
Today, the laughable Cornwall Council Equality & Diversity Committee, LGBT PACT & Healthy Gay Cornwall all PRETEND to be gay friendly in their ‘spin’ & ‘mirrors’ but they still actively exclude gay persons who are not STR8 compliant & those with experience of the abuses carried out both in the past & the present in Cornwall by the authorities against gay persons!
The Cornwall Lesbian Line WAS genuinely a REAL gay support project, and strangely NOT just for women. Some of the callers were transsexuals & gay men who felt more confident speaking to a lesbian where there was no sexual conflict.
Bless the supporters of CLL & the Acorn Women’s Group in Penzance, who rallied to support my own dear partner Andy Smith, when he was diagnosed terminally ill with AIDS in 1994.
The Lesbian Line supporters (unlike some of the people involved in the loathsome Cornwall Health Authority, Probation Service run Gay Men’s Health project) really gave support, even holding an evening for Andy of panto, music & talent. The Women’s local rock group. ‘Out of the Blue’, playing some of Andy’s favourite songs, but that was back in the 90’s when Cornwall had a real sense of Gay & Lesbian community.
In the 1990’s I had run & published the ICT, a local Cornwall Lesbian & Gay newsletter, with a GLBT subscription base which rose to 1,000. Sue B (aka often known as Sue Books) was my women’s editor. I had to give up the ICT to care for Andy, who was by then blind & extremely ill. Sue B went on to help create along with Kate & other women, the lesbian newsletter OUTBACK.
OUTBACK newsletter worked hand in hand with CLL and ran as a women’s newsletter from 1996 to 2008.
But with the theoretical advances in Gay & Lesbian equality & the impact of the internet, times changed. The perception being, things were ‘supposed’? to be getting better for gay people. (The painful reality? Read the STONEWALL report on Homophobic Hate Crime in the UK and police reports of a 60% increase in violent hate crime carried out against GLBT persons last year).
The need & perception for an independent, genuinely Lesbian run helpline in Cornwall for lesbians (& other GLBT persons as it happens) changed. The closets, who had sat quietly saying & doing nothing through the difficult years of HIV/AIDS impact & the Conservative party section 28, started to crawl from beneath their stones. Many through having kept quiet were now in a position (thanks to the courage of those who had been out & campaigning) to get involved in running authority run & controlled GLBT projects.
With equality legislation & authorities no longer (in theory) able to discriminate against gay persons, these new GLBT projects started & rapidly diluted the effectiveness of former solely gay run projects.
These new projects run, controlled & influenced…not by the GLBT persons who had been battling away for decades, in support of gay people, but by pseudo ‘newbies’ in so-called gay equality & diversity’, who have very efficiently & effectively dismissed the work carried out by genuine, often unfunded & financially unsupported gay persons like Kate, Sue & Jo of CLL, Acorns Women’s group & OUTBACK.
The STR8 sanctioned newbies even re-writing history, like the ridiculous claim made last year that the Pride event in Cornwall 2008 was the 1st gay Pride in Cornwall…IT WAS NOT!
The Cornwall Lesbian Line, Women’s Acorn Group, ICT, Cornwall AIDS Council all helped in Cornwall GLBT Pride events in Cornwall way back in the 1990’s, even featuring in Gay Times. But when have the facts ever been of interest to Cornwall’s Police & Authorities when it comes to gay people.
Organisations like the loathsome “Intercom Trust” bulldozed over the history & experiences of gay people & gay groups with knowledge of abusive police & other authorities in Cornwall, so great was Intercom’s desperate haste to get into bed with these previously (and still) homophobic organisations & Cornish authorities.
Watching the Intercom Trust sell out local gay people in Cornwall & Cornish gay history has been a little like watching a Jewish Rabbi desperate to appease the former SS Nazi.
Intercom Trust have ISOLATED, OSTRACISED & EXCLUDED any GLBT person who does not comply or cowl to Intercom’s fawning mantra of how wonderful Devon & Cornwall police are too gay people
…Get it in your heads ‘Intercom’, the Devon & Cornwall police have NOT changed their leopard spots and are EVERY bit as bloody homophobic in their practises & attitudes towards & against gay persons today, as police have ALWAYS been in Cornwall!
The decision to close CLL & OUTBACK I know was a very difficult one by the women concerned. Cornwall Lesbian Line & OUTBACK organised over many years such diverse activities for women in Cornwall as Pantomimes, live bands, discos, cabarets, line dancing, belly dancing, quizzes, treasure hunts, walks, football, soft ball, rounders, b-b-q’s, etc. as well as being the essential support at the end of the CLL phone.
It made me feel better knowing that there was an Independent gay community run organisation, which had NOT succumbed to selling out GLBT persons in return for funding. So we are now seeing the death of probably the last truly gay community project in Cornwall & rise of commercial & authority led interests only over those of GLBT persons
…a sad, sad day!
I want to say thank you to Jo, Kate & Sue & others who have participated in CLL over the Twenty years.
I want to say thank you, in memory of my deceased Andy & for support, the Lesbian community of Cornwall gave us, when all the gay mens at the Op’s Room did was spat & harassed Andy when he was blind, for his daring to be seen in public when living with HIV/AIDS.
I want to say thank you, because I don’t want 20years of genuine GLBT history, campaigning & support by the women of CLL for gay people by gay people to simply slide unmarked into obscurity, over shadowed by the newbie STR8 run & dictated GLBT organisations in Cornwall.
It leaves me feeling very sad that with the demise of CLL & OUTBACK GLBT people in Cornwall are effectively being assimilated yet another step into the STR8 run hive collective Borg.
OUTBACK WEBSITE http://www.outback.org.uk/cornwall.htm
Useful Women’s Links http://www.outback.org.uk/links.htm
OUTBACK YAHOO Group http://groups.yahoo.com/group/outback_cornwall/summary
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