Hotline Update: First volunteer gathering
The inaugural gathering of The Heritage Hotline volunteers took place last week, and - since we’re into archiving - here’s a historic record of that momentous evening.
It took place at iconic Margate queer venue Camp, and much love to Shanna for all the help, support and biscuit advice and shout out to Jess for fixing the projector, including blocking the windows out using cardboard and gaffa tape. Very Margate drag coded, we j’adore.
Since it was our first session, we had obligatory name and pronoun stickers (not gonna lie, we’re probably going to have them every session) and then I enforced a somewhat cringe icebreaker, asking people to write a fun/interesting/any fact about themselves that they would be happy to share with the rest of the room. I went down the LinkedIn route and put part of my CV on my label. I worked for Gay Times for ten years! And Jen provided credentials explaining her Drag Files project. Some embraced the fun/interesting fact challenge and we discovered we had a fourth place Mr Gay UK entrant in our midsts! Someone had a wind farm named after them! And others indulged us in the real reason behind the warm up, finding out their background, skills and what brought people to the session. It was wonderfully surprising to be in a room full of so many inspirational and talented people. We had a whole bunch of academics and people skilled at organising from all kinds of backgrounds, and what tied us all together was a shared interest in discovering and preserving Thanet’s queer heritage through a healthy love of gossip. And there was pizza, but that came after, a reward for having been subjected to an ice-breaker warm up game.
Having bonded and chatted over food, Jen presented an outline of the project, going through some trusty slides, explaining about our background with the New Rumours project (there’s a cute video here )Then as part of the talk, we held the world premiere of what we are humbling calling our unreleased ‘hit’ single THE HERITAGE HOTLINE.
It sounded so good on the Camp soundsystem, even if we do say so ourselves. The phone number bit got a lot of laughs too, and hopefully the comedy elements won’t stop people calling the line. We are deadly serious about collecting these stories. This song was born out of a performance at Margate Pride’s Teatime Socials, where we decided to write our own lyrics to a song, which then turned into a recording session with Alex Hills who created the backing track and made us sound incredible. The track then turned into a pop video shoot; shot, directed and storyboarded by Kate Maylon (and Em doing literally everything else that needed doing). The idea behind the video is not only to fulfill Shelly Grotto’s and Janet District Council’s considerable delusions of being popstars; it was also an opportunity to document and film a whole bunch of queer spaces across town - and incidental background bits - that will undoubtedly change as time continues its relentless march forward. And it’s going to be very useful for any future podcasting we’ll do, inspired as we were by Queer Heritage South’s walking tour project, Revealing St James. If you’re ever in Brighton and want to listen to some queer history with a catchy jingle, ten out of ten, would recommend.
Finally, having outlined the project and possible directions the volunteers could go in, we had an informal activity pooling our shared knowledge using trusty post-it notes and the UV lit atmospheric walls of Camp. The New Rumours zines contains a time-line which was a useful starting point to see what we could add to, and provoked a few memories from those in the room. We already started making links, with people adding to each other's stories an anecdotes. We tried to capture this by putting our post-it together as thematically as possible.
One volunteer Foxy immediately saw a way of organising our post-it notes, and put them into this incredible diagram of all the things we want to research and find out more about:
