SAYiT’s annual series of events to celebrate LGBTQ+ History Month is back this February (and March!) including a lunchtime talk, panel discussions, and a theatre performance.
19/02/2025 My Mind on Paper - LGBTQ+ readers and writers panel
25/02/2025 Visual Tour of Sheffield’s Queer History - lunchtime talk
27/02/2025 Quentin Crisp: Naked Hope by Mark Farrelly - theatre performance
12/03/2025 All Together, One at a Time - LGBTQ+ activism panel
Save the dates! Ticket details to follow.
My Mind on Paper
LGBTQ+ readers and writers panel for LGBTQ+ History Month 2025
Sheffield Central Library
Wednesday 19th February
18:00-19:30
Join our panel of LGBTQ+ readers and writers, as we talk about LGBTQ+ writing across many genres from diaries through novels and scripts, poetry and fan fiction. We will be looking at the need to create LGBTQ+ content, and how this DIY approach is received by those who rush to read it. The panel is hosted by SAYiT's Fiona Moorcroft, and we will end the discussion with a Q&A.
Visual Tour of Sheffield’s Queer History
Lunchtime talk
Weston Park Museum
Tuesday 25th February
13:00-13:45
Have you ever wanted to be taken on a tour of Sheffield's LGBTQ+ history, but would prefer to do it sitting down, surrounded by friends in the warm and dry? Then this is for you!
Join SAYiT for a whistlestop visual tour of LGBTQ+ Sheffield through history, showing you the theatres and the bars beloved of Sheffield's LGBTQ+ community over the centuries, the spaces where Queer women met and organised, the church which saw a Queer wedding in the early 1800s, and the places where the LGBTQ+ community fought for the rights we enjoy today. We have 45 minutes, so find a chair and settle in for a irreverent talk, with an opportunity to ask more questions.
Quentin Crisp:
Naked Hope
Performance by Mark Farrelly
The Foundry
(Sheffield University)
Thursday 27th February
19:00-20:15 (doors 18:00)
“Ask yourself this. If there were no praise or blame – who would I be?”
Naked Hope depicts the legendary Quentin Crisp at two distinct phases of his extraordinary life. Firstly, in the late 1960s in his filthy Chelsea flat (“Don’t lose your nerve: after the first four years the dirt won’t get any worse”). Here Quentin surveys a lifetime of degradation and rejection. Repeatedly beaten for being flamboyantly gay as early as the 1930s, but also ostracised simply for daring to live life on his own terms.
The second part of the play transitions the audience to New York in the 1990s. Here a much older Quentin, finally embraced by society, regales the audience with his sharply-observed, hard-earned philosophy on how to have a lifestyle: “Life will be more difficult if you try to become yourself. But avoiding this difficulty renders life meaningless. So discover who you are. And be it. Like mad!”.
Having debuted at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2014, Naked Hope has toured around the country ever since. The play is a glorious, truthful and uplifting celebration of a genuinely unique human being, and of the urgent necessity to be yourself. Written and performed by Mark Farrelly - 75 minutes, with no interval.
All Together,
One at a Time
Panel discussion about LGBTQ+ activism
Sheffield Central Library
Wednesday 12th March
18:00-19:30
Please join us to meet our panel of LGBTQ+ activists, who have fought individually and collectively for the rights that we all now enjoy, and where they feel energy needs to be placed to push forwards for our equity and equality. We shall release details about who will be joining us, and what their focus was, in the next few weeks. You're going to hear incredible stories from some passionate and brave people.
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