Coming Out in the Archives: the Hall-Carpenter Archives at the London School of Economics

Campaigning badges from the Hall-Carpenter Archives.

The archive and journal collections of the Hall-Carpenter Archives (HCA) have been housed since 1988 in the Archives and Rare Books Division of the Library at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Founded in 1982 to document the development of gay activism in the UK since the publication of the 1958 Wolfenden Report, HCA is now a rich resource of archives, ephemera and printed materials documenting the development of gay activism and community in the United Kingdom since the 1950s.

The origins of the HCA lie in the campaigning work of the Campaign for Homosexual Equality (CHE) during the 1970s and early 1980s. From the 1960s and 1970s there had been a developing interest in the study of the lesbian and gay movement, and the British Sociology Association's Sex and Gender Group and Gay Research Group had called for the establishment of a national gay archive in the mid 1970s. These groups stressed that the impetus for the formation of a gay archive should be driven by the gay community, but suggested that a university library might be an appropriate repository for it.

In fact in its earliest years HCA was an entirely community-based and focused organization, reliant on volunteers and housed within the community. In 1980 CHE established the Gay Monitoring and Archive Project as part of its Discrimination Commission, set up in 1978 under the chairmanship of Barry Jackson to monitor cases of discrimination against homosexuals in all areas of life. In order to gather evidence of discrimination and police arrests a media monitoring service was established, which included a subscription to a press-cuttings service. In addition many CHE members began to send press cuttings and related materials on discrimination. Ultimately CHE found itself inheriting and storing the records of other gay organizations.

In 1982 the Gay Monitoring and Archive Project split from CHE and one of its founders, Julian Meldrum, transferred the contents of the archive into his flat. At the same time a limited company was formed, the Hall-Carpenter Memorial Archives; the organization gained charitable status in 1983. Soon after this HCA received its first major donation, the papers of the Albany Trust and the Homosexual Law Reform Society, two organizations which played a key role between 1958 and 1967 in the campaign for the decriminalization of male homosexuality. The self-professed aim of the archive was to maintain a 'storehouse of our past'. Its name was intended to celebrate two early twentieth-century gay pioneers, Radclyffe Hall and Edward Carpenter. Radclyffe Hall (1880–1943) was a writer whose novel The Well of Loneliness was banned in Britain and was the subject of a famous court case in 1928. Edward Carpenter (1844–1929) was a campaigner for homosexual equality and a socialist writer. In 1894–5 Carpenter wrote four pamphlets on sexuality and freedom including Homogenic Love and Its Place in a Free Society, later republished as Love's Coming of Age in 1896. The Intermediate Sex was published in 1908 and had a wide readership. Sadly the Hall-Carpenter Archives have no original material from either writer.

The first accommodation for the archive was at Mount Pleasant in Camden in 1984; the following year it moved to the London Lesbian and Gay Centre in Cowcross Street, Farringdon, which remained its home until 1989. Funding, foreseen as a particular problem for a gay archive by the British Sociological Association, came from a variety of sources. In 1982 grants were received from the Manpower Services Commission, the National Council for Civil Liberties and the Lyndhurst Settlement. In 1984 the Greater London Council (GLC) provided the largest grant of £32,000. This allowed HCA to employ some part-time staff to develop a number of projects. The Media Monitoring service employed two people to work on several publishing projects including The Gay News Index (1982); 'Declaring an Interest' - a projected catalogue of gay images on television in Britain (1982– 83); and AIDS through the Media...