Pride: Eight eloquent LGBTQ+ stories available on BBC Sounds

3 June 2021

While Covid-19 restrictions have caused the cancellation or rescheduling of some Pride 2021 events, there's still lots of celebrate - including these powerful works from New Creatives artists available now on BBC Sounds. Let these amazingly talented emerging audio makers guide you through a range of reflections on the LGBTQ+ experience.

Touchdown features the voice of an anonymous former flight attendant looking back on his career in the 1980s and 90s, a time of boom in the airline industry.

This was a profession that attracted many gay men, the airlines offering a workplace relatively free of discrimination.

But this freedom was soon disrupted by the emergence of the HIV virus and its spread.

As a gay man living and working in constant transit, he fought to maintain relationships in the face of overwhelming loss and societal injustice.

• Listen to Touchdown now on BBC Sounds

Inspired by real life conversations between 1990s Chris and four other queer people about their experiences, Erasure Island tells the story of bisexual, pansexual and queer erasure over a minimal abstract soundscape.

His poetry focuses on themes brought up in the interviews, exploring the queer experience of having your identity erased by those around you, your relationship, and yourself, as well as how they manifest in real life scenarios: work, the pub, the club, at the kebab shop, and your mum and dad’s front room.

• Listen to Erasure Island now on BBC Sounds

With the help of four members of Birmingham’s LGBTQ+ community, Lost Time explores the impact of self-acceptance and stigmatisation.

Creator Hugh Sheehan said: "Many LGBTQ+ people’s view around the progress we’ve made as a society towards queer acceptance has a bittersweet tinge.

"Whilst of course being very happy about this progress, many wish that they’d grown up in a time when they could’ve been themselves sooner.

"There is an optimism about the future, but also a sense of sadness and loss. Usually, LGBTQ+ people don’t begin their lives living as the person they truly are; instead trying to blend in, for fear of reprisal or admonishment."

• Listen to Lost Time now on BBC Sounds

Ruari Paterson-Achenbach's Lesbian Families Sound Archive draws on their personal experience of being raised by lesbian parents, before same-sex adoption even became legal in this country.

Ruari said: "We grew up in a world which was not created for us, where families were never depicted or described as ours was, where every form and certificate filled-in had to be changed to acknowledge the very existence of my parents."

• Listen to Lesbian Families Sound Archive now on BBC Sounds

In these two pieces of poetry - Decolonisation of a queer carcass & Stew - Tanaka Fuego unfleshes the body of a trans masculine individual.

In the first poem he is demanding and celebrating liberation from all that’s around him, from society, from past lovers, from family relations, explicitly with mother and father, exploring the hope he has for a healthy and mended relationship. Part two goes into the harsh reality of what being trans masculine can also look like on the other extreme side of the spectrum.

• Listen now to Decolonisation of a queer carcass & Stew on BBC Sounds

Living With the Light On: Switchboard in the 70s tells the story of Switchboard, the UK’s leading LGBT+ helpline, providing information and lending a reassuring ear to anyone who calls.

Combining interviews with original music and archive material, the piece attempts to challenge the linear perception of LGBT+ history by exploring the revolutionary mood of the period before the HIV/AIDS epidemic came to dominate Switchboard’s work.

• Listen to Living With the Light On: Switchboard in the 70s now on BBC Sounds

An Ode to Women Who Love Women is Jane Hearst's sound explosion celebrating the women we love and the strong female leaders we love to admire.

She was inspired to create this audio piece after reflecting on a memory from her youth: "I remember talking to my best friend about women and self-confidence. When I told her that I had never struggled with how I looked or how I led people, she was visibly angry. This really stuck with me.”

“I began to wonder whether my sexuality had something to do with it. Whilst my friends measured themselves against a perceived standard of femininity, deemed to be attractive to men, I knew – as a bisexual woman – that if I was to fall in love with a woman, she would have many of the same characteristics as me. Knowing that I could love somebody like me, made me know that others would be able to do the same."

• Listen to An Ode to Women Who Love Women now on BBC Sounds

Voice Notes to my Child Self is a collaboration between poet-vocalist Ellena Woolf and composer-producer Reuben Kyriakides, who seek to balance musical beauty and unflinching prosaical honesty.

The piece makes use of poetry and personal utterance, illuminated and elaborated upon by music, field recordings, interweaving voice notes, verse and complex harmonies; these elements combine to create a dreamlike soundscape reverberating with meaning and symbol, always playing with the central conceit of a voice note recording from the trans adult to the primordial child self.

• Listen to Voice Notes to my Child Self now on BBC Sounds