GFEST - Gaywise FESTival, the premier annual lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) arts festival in London is looking for submissions for this year’s festival.

‘Queer Art queries..’ is the theme of this year’s festival which will take place in November in venues across London.

Niranjan Kamatkar, artistic director of GFEST said ‘This year we want to address and question the issues and challenges that our community faces on a daily basis. We hope to encourage artists to work together on exciting, thought provoking and innovative work. We want to query what happens in the queer arts world.’

We are looking for submissions from artists and organisations, with a particular focus on collaboration across art form, age and cultural backgrounds. The festival accepts submissions in three categories: films, visual arts and performance.

The Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) is the oldest LBGT organisation in the UK, and will be celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2014.  It will be going back to its roots for its quarterly meeting on Sunday, 22nd April, with two talks which celebrate key events and figures of the 1950s and 60s.

Brian Robinson of the British Film Institute will be talking about Victim, the 1961 film starring Dirk Bogarde and directed by Basil Dearden.  This iconic tale of a bisexual barrister being blackmailed did more to change attitudes towards the law on homosexuality than any polemic, and still retains the power to shock in places.  It also provides a unique insight into thelife of gay men when gay sex was still illegal.

Dyke March London, London’s first dyke march since the 1980s, will happening less one week from now; meeting on the 31st March 2012, 5pm in Soho Square for speakers, and then marching through Central London.

Dyke March London is inspired by the 19 years of history of Dyke Marches in the U.S. and Canada, and takes lessons from the UK’s Lesbian Strength marches of the 1980s.

Dyke March London speakers have been announced:

·         Lady Phyll Opoku-Gyimah is co-founder and Managing Director of UK Black Pride.

·         Kirsten Hearn is a prominent disability rights campaigner; she is the chair of Inclusion London, the Deaf and Disabled People’s organisations community interest company, a non executive member of the Office for Disability Issues Disability Delivery board and provides disability equality advice to the very heart of government as a member of Equality 2025, the UK Advisory Network on Disability Equality.

·         Paris Lees is founding editor of META magazine, a digital magazine by, about and for trans and genderqueer people. She is Project Manager of TransMediaWatch and writes for the BBC, Guardian, DIVA, Gaytimes and Attitude.

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HIV and sexual health charity Terrence Higgins Trust has partnered with GaydarRadio to create a series of spoof public transport announcements, encouraging gay and bisexual men in London to ‘mind the gap’ between their HIV tests.

The announcements, which can be found at Terrence Higgins Trust’s YouTube channel (www.youtube.com/thtcommunity), have been launched to promote the charity’s new campaign Mind the Gap. Voiced by GaydarRadio’s breakfast show presenters Neil Sexton and Debbie Ryan, they contain cheeky references to London’s gay scenes in Soho and Vauxhall, and advice on where men can find their nearest testing clinic.

Gay and bisexual men remain the group most at risk of contracting HIV in the UK, with one in seven men on the London gay scene living with the condition. Current guidelines recommend that men test for the virus at least once every twelve months, with more frequent testing recommended for anyone who has had unprotected sex or experiences symptoms of sero-conversion illness.

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Four leading women campaigners for LGBT rights spoke of the challenges faced by women in the struggle for basic human rights for all at the House of Commons this week. The meeting, hosted by the Kaleidoscope Trust, heard a passionate call for women to play a leading role in changing attitudes towards lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

The speakers described different ways in which women could use example, language and education to encourage understanding of the reality of being LGBT in society.

Phyll Opuku-Gyimah, the executive director of UK Black Pride, said although the meeting was marking International Women’s Day it was important for everybody to embrace each other in the battle for LGBT rights, so that “one day my grandchildren don’t have to fight any more.” She said she had been called a racist but insisted Black Pride was not a separatist organisation. While some people didn’t believe in the concept it was important to “empower and create a safe space for us to celebrate our achievements.”

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