From our Community Champions: Nu

14th January 2025

Nu McAdam

To wrap up 2024, our community champions share why they got involved with Queer Heritage South, what has happened with the project so far, and the things they have planned next! Now we can hear from Nu, our Disability community champion:

Working with queer in Brighton has been a tremendous experience of locating minority voices in an unspoken community - The queer disabled community.

When I first had a meeting with Roni Guetta, I was excited about the proposal and the opportunity to bring together voices that were not often heard. I had so many ideas and a number of different ways to initiate conversation about disability history. It was after that we started discussing how to start the first initial workshops that would enable the community to talk about their individual histories and what it meant to the legacy of Queer History in Sussex.

I wanted to make sure that the community felt that the workshop was as accessible as possible, whilst also being fun, enticing and educational. We began this by making sure we made some introductory online workshops with people that I brought together from my community that I knew well.

There were many questions and many opportunities to challenge what we knew about consent and protecting the data that we would collect. It was from taking these challenging questions that we decided to dedicate a portion of the first in person session to the subject of data, how that would be displayed and in what way we can make sure that it was secure.

When it came to the session at The Ironworks Studios, there was an energy that I had only experienced in pre-pandemic times when I was working in local community groups as a volunteer - an air of anticipation and a longing for progressive change. When it came to the show and tell part of the session, I knew that that was when we were getting into the collaborative vibe that I missed from groups - an opportunity to tell stories and feel that sense of belonging. My friend Suchi Chatterjee was explaining about their heritage and had also brought along an item to be displayed on the online archive Queer in Brighton were managing. It was beautiful to see different members of the community coming together to give a small part of themselves in order for future generations to see themselves in history.