LGBT+ History Month: The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre, London
In this blog for LGBT+ History Month, we hear from Hannah Ismail, an Architectural Assistant and student at the University of Westminster on their research highlighting the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre as an important architectural piece of LGBTQIA+ history with its role in fostering community and intellectual exchange.
Hannah Ismail is a Part 1 Architectural Assistant currently completing her Part 2 thesis year at the University of Westminster. In the past, she has worked as a freelance research assistant, having been a member of the cross-disciplinary research network FAME Collective.
Hannah has worked across a number of sectors, from heritage retrofit schemes to public realm and masterplan proposals. She is dedicated to a research driven design approach, that focuses on social value and regenerative design solutions.
In addition to her professional role, she is particularly interested in exploring and researching history across disciplines to influence our understanding of architecture and space today, crucially expanding our understanding of how one's lived experiences play a vital role in shaping architecture and the built environment.
Archival methodologies
My dissertation explored the archival newsletters of the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre (BLGC) to examine how they became a platform for Black lesbian feminist discourse in the UK. It analysed the intersection of race, sexuality, and gender within these newsletters, drawing connections between feminist historiography, queer methodologies, and the marginalisation of voices in institutionalised archives.
By constructing thematic timelines and contextualising key conferences, texts, and movements, the project sought to illuminate the BLGC’s role in fostering community and intellectual exchange. Its overall aim was to contribute to ongoing feminist scholarship while challenging traditional archival practices and amplifying erased histories.
It serves as a commemoration of the work and legacy of the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre as an important part of LGBTQIA+ history.
Find out more about the BLGC and their Rainbow Plaque unveiling.
The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre (1985 to 1992)
The Black Lesbian and Gay Centre, or ‘Project’ as it was known when it first started in 1985, offered vital support for the Black Lesbian and Gay community in London; offering support by answering calls for advice and counselling on healthcare, immigration, and even housing and serving as a lifeline for the community during the height of the HIV and AIDS epidemic.
Like other organisations at the time – such as the Brixton Black Women’s Group – they reached people using a bi-monthly newsletter that compiled their support services into informational news sheets distributed to local libraries and town centres across London. This digital newsletter archive became the basis for my dissertation.
The 1980s
Twentieth-century Britain saw 1980s black women collaborating to strive to protect their rights, freedoms, and livelihoods against British politicians spewing racist and fascist assaults. Almost a decade later, 1988 saw the passing of Section 28, criminalising the promotion of homosexuality. This directly affected how businesses, charities, and organisations supporting the LGBT community - including the BLGC - could operate. These were the decades that the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre were combating and responding to.
Knowing this context, I aimed to answer the question: “How can a rearrangement of the BLGC Archive tell us why it became a ‘place’ for Black Lesbian Feminist discourse between 1980 and 1995?”
Methodology and influences for this project
Sara Ahmed’s text Towards a Queer Phenomenology influenced my dissertation, and heavily steered my approach to the archive semantically. Audre Lorde influenced what it meant to approach the archive thematically, and Jane Rendell influenced what it meant to rearrange the archive spatially. As a critique, Ahmed speaks of her queer methodology in theory but not in practice, at least not in the visual or spatial terms that would be representative of an architectural practice.
I worked with the BLGC archive held by the Bishopsgate Institute as a free, accessible online resource, developing a method of working with periodicals that converted literary knowledge into spatial and temporal storytelling. I had to discover a digital mode of analysis that pieced together conversations and discourse, to form relationships between the individual or combined erasures of race, sexuality, and gender across feminist historiography and the BLGC newsletters.
“The position of black lesbian feminism was not as clear as the position of black feminism and was an allusion in the text.” Allida Mae Black
Individual vs. collective
It is a type of feminism that has morphed into ‘The ideology of ‘competitive, atomistic liberal individualism.’ bell hooks
The first argument I make was the erasure taking place during the early Second wave of feminism that created an individual vs collective mindset towards tackling feminist issues, resulting in the silencing of black feminist voices.
As stated in BLGC newsletter issue Oct/Nov 1990, page 5, Democracy, ‘...it was clear that black people need more time to discuss the urgent problems the community faces, and how to respond to them; and to carry on exploring ways of sharing information, debating issues and organising which are broadly base and democratic.’
The conferences and events provided a space for a variety of issues to take place – but as expressed in the African and Asian conference of 1990, the issues became far too broad that it was too far removed from the ‘urgent problems the community faces’.
Where members focused on expressing their ideas, thoughts, and grievances without bringing forth a method for collating these discourses to strive for a collective resolution.
Race, sexuality, and gender as a measure of Black Lesbian Feminist discourse
BLGC Newsletter issue 24, page 14 refers to the quote, ‘We fail to show acceptance and solidarity towards one another, we are less able to defend ourselves against those outside forces which threaten our rights and very existence…’
There was a timeline of feminism that progressed and can be tracked as individual oppressions broken down into race, sexuality, and gender. Now knowing these two arguments I was able to formulate a methodology that demonstrated this erasure through comparison with the first-hand accounts of the BLGC archival newsletters.
In addition, an erasure of Race in conjunction with sexuality takes place, demonstrated through an analysis of Adrienne Rich’s renowned text Compulsory Heterosexuality. I argue that Rich does not mention the structural or, in other words, societal overt forms of discrimination that those who were LGB and who were black women would have experienced.
By this, I mean the forms of discrimination that would be present subtly through Zora Neale Hurston's statement referring to ‘symbols, language and modes of expression.’ Hurston makes numerous references to the black experience being crucially tied to the lesbian experience, yet it is subtly ignored by Rich. This erasure is highlighted also by bell hooks in her book Feminist Theory from Margin to Center.
A spatial localisation
I review the work of Jane Rendell who speaks of the radical act of positioning oneself precisely in the margins of radical feminism. It is a question of how one positions themselves when one's identity already positions them at society's ‘margins’, 'fringes’, and/or at the ‘edge’.
These provocative terms imply a spatial localisation of identity; they place the ‘Black Lesbian Woman’ within a metaphorical geographical position where one is to assume one's place in society. My methodology or spatial practice is merely another lens for which I can gauge how to respond to the archive. And therefore, tell a story of erasure through time in a new way.
But there is a thread that links the work of Sara Ahmed, Jane Rendall, and Audre Lorde; all three speak of spatialisation and an erasure of marginalised communities. In some of these arguments I put forward, the pure abstractness to which women are spoken of, particularly black women, enhances their erasure.
This is why the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre Archive became a place for Black Lesbian Feminist discourse and why it is a site of value. Instead reclaiming grassroots marginalised archives as spaces, not as sites of exclusion, but as sites of resistance.
See RIBA’s other LGBT+ History Month 2025 blogs, initiatives and resources.
