#MyJourneyToPride - Here's what happened!
Back in July we partnered up with museum freelancer Sacha Coward and invited people to use the #MyJourneyToPride hashtag to document and share their stories of travelling to Pride in London and UK Black Pride on social media. We also asked some people to record video diaries of their journeys in order to create a picture of the lived experience of a group of people from the LGBT+ community in London in 2019.
This film is a glimpse into the experiences our diarists had over the weekend. How did they feel about their journeys? Did they feel safe travelling to the events? Did they ‘de-rainbow’ for the journey home?
When we asked people to record their stories we sought a full picture, not just the positive, and were thankful to be entrusted with accounts than included good and bad. Alongside the moments of celebration and connection there are incidents of abuse and examples of people feeling unsafe or uncomfortable. One of the clips towards the end of the film shows how walking home alone in the dark can feel unsafe. It’s all part of the story that we wanted to record.
We didn’t know whether trying to collect these stories via a hashtag would work, but we were pleased to see that over the weekend the hashtag was pretty active, being shared around 500 times. We’re now in the process of approaching people to ask permission for rights to preserve their content within the Museum’s collection.
These stories will enrich our collection and give these experiences a place in the history of transport in London. They will sit alongside physical objects that we collected in recent years which you can learn about on our website, including posters, badges, oyster wallets and the first rainbow crossing. We hope to preserve the poster series that TfL installed at Green Park station as well. We will continue to work to build our LGBT+ collections in the future, and hope to do more to learn about the history of LGBT+ communities and their transport experiences.
We want to thank everyone who supported this collecting project. We are very grateful to be entrusted with caring for these stories, objects and experiences. We are currently working on ways to display and interpret this material in the Museum itself, and we’ll be sure to keep you updated!
If you shared material but have not heard from us yet or if you have material from Pride weekend which you haven’t shared yet but would like to tell us about, please get in touch by emailing [email protected].
