ShoutOut LGBT+ Radio

This week the team is joined by a founder who has spent three decades building places for LGBTQ+ people to find each other.Eric Crespin talks about Among Our People, his new platform for LGBTQ+ homestays, flatshares, co-housing and travel — somewhere to find a room, a flatmate, a local friend or a community to move to, anywhere in the world. He explains how the idea grew out of years of living and traveling across countries, and why being able to say exactly who you are matters so much: including a filter that lets trans people see only the homes where they will be welcomed. He also looks back to the 1990s and the first European Gay Ski Week.Also this week, the team catches up with Iris Prize patron Heather Small, who talks about why the Cardiff festival's short films matter, what it takes for a film to say something real in just a few minutes, and what it means to her to be part of something that celebrates difference rather than merely tolerating it.

It's a Halloween special this week, with the studio dressed for the season.The team is joined by Jordan Chan, the man behind the Red Ribbon Calendar, who explains why he has brought the Brit Boys back for another red-ribbon edition. Twelve men, one for every month, photographed in black and white with the red ribbon as the only colour in each shot, all in support of Terrence Higgins Trust and The Sussex Beacon around World AIDS Day. Jordan talks about last year's £3,400 raised and 400-odd calendars sold, the new target of 500, the launch parties spreading across London, Brighton, Kent and Hastings, and why the whole thing is a tasteful, work-safe stocking filler at a tenner — ordering through the Red Ribbon Calendar socials.Order online: https://payhip.com/b/nTIoFGo fund me: https://gofund.me/1c40d7fccRed ribbon insta: https://www.instagram.com/redribbon2027?exln=MTVtZHhhbTQyaTRuNQ%3D%3D&utm_source=qrLater, Elle Vosque — fresh off RuPaul's Drag Race UK series seven — joins the team to talk about stepping into panto as Peggy the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella: An Immersive Pantomime Experience at National Trust East Riddlesden Hall in Keighley. Elle describes a show that walks the audience through the hall and out into the courtyard for the ball rather than seating them in a theatre, and invites everyone to dress for the occasion. The conversation takes in a Northern Irish childhood spent in school plays and church choir, the lockdown experiment that properly started the drag, and how close the cast became on set.

The team marks the festival's 20th edition with a show built around this year's Iris Prize, and goes behind the scenes of how the world's biggest LGBTQ+ short film prize is actually decided.Sara Peacock, chair of this year's international jury, takes the team inside the judging process — ten jurors spread from California to Cardiff, 35 films from 22 countries and around nine and a half hours of viewing to get through — and explains how a room full of strong disagreements still lands on a consensus. She talks about the film that ended up in five of the ten jurors' top threes, and why the jury went back to ask for special permission for a third honourable mention rather than let a film they all cared about disappear unmentioned.Welsh artist DONT MAKE THIS WEIRD joins the team to talk about a career that arrived sideways: acting first, then songs that made more sense than scripts ever did. They explain the joke behind the name, the discomfort that tends to start a song, and how a chance meeting at the festival might turn into a music video.And Luís Hindman talks to the team straight after winning the £40,000 Iris Prize for Magid / Zafar, his propulsive short about a British Pakistani takeaway, a secret relationship, and the moment one of the pair has to say he is marrying a woman. He reflects on a year on the festival circuit, on the Best Lead Performance award his actor took the day before, on what the prize does for getting shorts in front of people who never go near a festival programme, and on the co-writer who missed the whole thing because he was on a book tour.

The whole team is back in the studio together this week, and they have brought two very different kinds of story with them.For Black History Month, the team sets two extraordinary lives side by side: Storme DeLarverie and Pauli Murray. Storme DeLarverie was a performer who spent decades walking the streets of Greenwich Village at night as a self-appointed guardian, working the doors of lesbian bars and physically stepping in when women were harassed, robbed or attacked. Locals knew her as the protector of the village's lesbians, and she kept up those patrols well into her eighties. Pauli Murray fought with words instead. Rejected by the University of North Carolina because of race, arrested in Virginia for refusing to move to the back of a bus years before Rosa Parks, they graduated top of their class at Howard Law School as the only woman in it, then were refused postgraduate study at Harvard because it did not admit women. Murray turned every closed door into an argument: they coined the term "Jane Crow" to describe how racism and sexism worked together against Black women, wrote the survey of US segregation law that Thurgood Marshall called the bible of civil rights lawyers, helped shape the legal thinking behind Brown v Board of Education, co-founded the National Organization for Women, and was named by Ruth Bader Ginsburg as a co-author on the brief for Reed v Reed. The feature ends in a Durham pulpit, in 1977, as the first African-American woman ordained in the Episcopal Church.Later the team welcomes Dan Eltringham and Andrés Anwandter, co-owners of East Bristol Books, the small independent shop on Old Market that has quietly become one of the most distinctive in the city. Radical, community-minded and stuffed with small-press poetry, fiction in translation, politics, chapbooks and zines, it grew out of a series of post-lockdown poetry readings and a simple problem — where do you hold live culture that isn't on a screen? They talk about wanting a space where culture happens informally, taking work directly from the people who make it, and why at least half of what they stock simply cannot be bought online or in any digital form. They also chart Bristol's independent bookshop resurgence over the last fifteen years, and the shadow of Hydra, the anarchist bookshop and political discussion space that closed just before they opened and which plenty of locals now read as a continuation. There is plenty to look forward to as well — a pay-what-you-can poetry double-bill, and on 5 November the Argentine sociologist Florencia Montes Páez talking about *To Accompany Is Political: A Transfeminist Essay on Homelessness*.

This week the team is joined in the studio by David Heald, a Quaker, for a conversation that ranges from silent worship to chocolate. Quakers, he explains, grew out of a 17th-century split from the Anglican Church and threw out the trappings most churches are built on — priests, buildings, set services, hierarchy — in favour of meeting in silence and holding peace, equality, simplicity and truth as founding principles. In 1963 they became the first religious group to say publicly that what makes a relationship equal has nothing to do with the sex of the people in it, and David traces that instinct back through an 18th-century Quaker who used they/them pronouns and the 13th-century mystic Julian of Norwich writing that God is neither male nor female. He also explains why the word "homosexual" only dates from 1869, and why the Leviticus passages so often used against LGBT+ people read very differently in the Greek and Aramaic the Bible came from. There's a chocolate connection, too — shut out of the army, Parliament and the priesthood, Quakers built a reputation for honesty that made them the trusted chocolate makers of Bristol and beyond — and David is candid about the harder edges of that history, from persecution after the Restoration to Quakers being arrested today on Palestine Action and climate protests.And this week's Queerstory tells the story of Ewan Forbes — a Scottish doctor, born in 1912 into an old Aberdeenshire family, registered at birth as a girl but understood by everyone who knew him as a boy. In 1952 he had his birth certificate corrected from female to male, married his housekeeper and settled into life as a country doctor. It was only when his brother died in 1965, and the family barony proved able to pass only down the male line, that a cousin challenged his right to inherit, and three years of argument in Scotland's supreme civil court followed. In 1968 Ewan won, the court accepting he was intersex and the Home Secretary confirming him as Sir Ewan Forbes, 11th Baronet. But the case was heard behind closed doors, the press kept out and the judgment never published, so it could never be cited — while an English court's opposite ruling the same year, published in full, shaped UK law for decades. Ewan died in 1991, known outside his community mainly as a well-liked country doctor, until the academic Zoë Playdon pieced the story back together for her 2021 book, The Hidden Case of Ewan Forbes.

This week's Queerstory tells the story of Claude Cahun — born Lucy Schwob in France in 1894 into a Jewish literary family, and a surrealist photographer, writer and, as it turned out, resistance fighter. Decades before words like non-binary or gender-fluid were in common use, she was already writing about gender as something changeable, something that could be put on and taken off like a costume, and she took the name Claude precisely because in French it works equally as a man's or a woman's — refusing to let language decide who she was. In 1930s Paris she worked, and lived, with her partner Suzanne Malherbe, who took the name Marcel Moore; the two had been step-sisters before they were lovers, and out of that unlikely arrangement came one of the great creative partnerships of the twentieth century, so close that it is hard to say where one artist ended and the other began. In 1937 they left Paris for Jersey to escape the rising far right, and when the Nazis occupied the island in 1940 they stayed and ran one of the strangest resistance campaigns of the war — Claude writing messages in fluent German, signed by an invented disillusioned soldier, which the two of them slipped into coat pockets, left in vehicles and dropped at military funerals. They called their weapon the paper bullets, and for four years nobody suspected two ageing, eccentric French women of running a resistance operation from a stone house by the sea. In 1944 they were caught and sentenced to death; they were still awaiting execution when Jersey was liberated in May 1945. Claude never fully recovered, and died in 1954. Her photographs were largely forgotten until the 1990s, and today she is recognised as one of the earliest openly gender-fluid artists in modern history.And with autumn approaching, the team brings their reading list for the season — a top five chosen with the help of queer and independent bookshops in London, Manchester and Bristol, and spanning new fiction, a journey through queer cinema, and a trans-feminist essay on homelessness that lands at a painfully timely moment.

The team is joined in the studio by returning guests Andy and Jason, who are back to talk about the alarming reversal of LGBTQIA+ rights in Indonesia. They discuss the presidential decree that equates LGBT culture with terrorism, and the wave of violence that has followed — a movement that actively hunts trans and queer people on the streets, undercover police using gay dating apps to target and extort, and universities asking students to sign statements disavowing LGBT+ identities. With official reports of violence climbing and leaders using the community as a scapegoat for wider unrest, they share what it's like to watch their home country turn against them — and close with a heartfelt message of love and solidarity for anyone listening.This week the team also revisits a conversation recorded live at Bristol Pride 2023 with Sarah Jayne, the Dolly Parton tribute artist. Sarah Jayne talks about 29 years performing as Dolly, the moment Dolly herself thanked her on national television, her work with Dolly's children's literacy charity, the Imagination Library, and a very special Pride set alongside her husband, who performs as Kenny Rogers.

We chat to Joelle of the Normal Anomaly based in Houston... What began as a platform for telling stories has grown into an organisation working to change the systems behind them.The Normal Anomaly Initiative began in 2016 as a grassroots movement rooted in digital storytelling. At a time when the experiences of Black LGBTQ+ people were too often overlooked, misunderstood, or told by others, they created space for community members to tell their own stories, challenge harmful narratives, and make visible the realities shaping their lives.In 2018, that movement took its next step when Normal Anomaly became a nonprofit incubated at The Montrose Center in Houston, Texas. As they listened more deeply to the community, their work expanded beyond changing narratives to addressing the barriers those narratives revealed. Storytelling led to services. Services led to navigation. Navigation led to questions about why people were encountering the same barriers again and again.Along the way, their work has reached thousands of people through direct services, capacity building, research, technical assistance, advocacy, and community partnerships. They have supported emerging leaders, helped launch Black and LGBTQ+ businesses, collaborated with academic and public-health institutions, and brought community perspectives into spaces where decisions about our health and futures are made.They recognise that healthier communities cannot be built through isolated programs alone. They require people with the power to lead, pathways that help individuals navigate resources and care, organizations that are connected rather than siloed, and systems that can learn from the communities they are intended to serve. That is the infrastructure they are working to build.They listen to community. right now they are using what they hear not only to change the narrative—but to help change the conditions, connections, and systems that shape people’s lives.

This week the team is joined by Irish actor, producer and presenter Derek Murphy, the creative force behind Mammy's House — a new play coming to Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate from 1st to 13th September. Set in Camden in 1985, it follows a group of Irish friends who build a chosen family together in London after leaving Ireland in search of acceptance, only to be confronted by the AIDS crisis. Derek explains how the play grew out of a talk by Irish historian and LGBT activist Dr Joseph Healy, two years of research and interviews with people who lived through the era — and why the stories of London's Irish LGBTQ+ community during the crisis have been so rarely told.Also in the studio, Sangeeta Dewan shares the story behind her book Hope Beyond Grief. After losing her husband Mahesh to a brain tumour, Sangeeta began a journey through heartbreak, grief and healing that she hopes can guide others through their own. She reads a beautiful poem from the book and talks about the techniques that carried her through — journaling, breathing, grounding — and why she believes pain can be a transformational teacher: "You have to feel it, to heal it."

Andy and the team are joined by Leo Cole, the actor behind Ro — the young trans man whose storyline has been making waves in Hollyoaks. Leo opens up about growing up, coming out at twelve, and the moment he told his mum over lockdown after a TikTok video made everything click. He shares how his family put names in a hat and pulled out "Leo", the reality of navigating the NHS, and why being able to access the right care at the right age quite literally saved his life. It's a warm, honest and hopeful conversation about being seen, being supported, and what it means to play a character that resonates so deeply.