DR JEFF EVANS – OUTING THE PAST: THE FESTIVAL OF LESBIAN, GAY, BISEXUAL & TRANS HISTORY 2019
WHEN: 13:00, Saturday the 13/10-2018.
WHERE: Novascenen, NOVA, Lunagallerian
The talk will be held in English!
The Festival of Lesbian Gay Bisexual & Trans History is one of Jeff’s responses to help ‘redress the narrow crude imbalance in our reading of the past’. Since it’s small beginnings in 2015 the OUTing the Past Festival has grown rapidly and in 2019 will be celebrated in twenty cities in six countries. That it is a wholly voluntary project suggests that the celebration of the previously ignored or even a denied past LGBT+ experience is important to many. As Jeff notes, “The OTP Festival enriches our collective history by promoting and generating readings of the past that include rather than exclude. The important role of history in validating our present can never be underestimated.”
Jeff Evans has been a campaigner for Human/LGBT+ Rights since the 1970s working as a volunteer for many organisation including his respective trade unions including UCATT (construction industry union) and the NUT (UK’s largest Teachers Union). As a member of the NUT LGBT Advisory Committee he coordinated the largest survey of classroom teachers’ assessment of the homophobic environment in their schools. “The Prevalence of Homophobia Survey” was published in 2013 with Prof. Ian Rivers (Strathclyde University).
Jeff’s promotion of the “The Prevalence of Homophobia Survey” project directly contributed to him being forced out of fulltime secondary state school teaching; his employers pursued a three-year long dispute to stop this effective child/staff protection campaign. His forced retirement in part caused by ill-health led Jeff back into the university sector, he also joined the Committee of Schools OUT(UK). During Jeff’s doctorial studies into the English criminal prosecution of ‘inter-male sex’ [1950-1970] he became increasingly and painfully aware of the extend that our current history is often so narrow as to exclude far, far more than it includes.
Jeff was married to the love of his life Dan for over 21 years during which time they travelled extensively and lived in the UK and Germany, much to the disbelief of their students, without ever having a television or mobile phones! Jeff now lives in Manchester and works at Liverpool John Moores University where is as Research Fellow. He is currently working with Dr Emma Vickers on a paper with regard to the ‘Prosecution of WW2 service personal for consensual sex crimes in the City of Liverpool’ and Prof Ken Valente (Colgate Uni, NYS) on ‘Mapping the terrain of inter-male sexual prosecutions’ (i..e three longitudinal statistical surveys of inter-male sex crimes based on his research data). In his spare time he climbs mountains, cycles, swimming and annoys his younger friends and family members by encouraging them to exercise more and eat healthier.
QUEERMOVE 2018 will take place at Södertälje konsthall (NOVA) and Estrad Bio in Sweden from Saturday 13 to Sunday 14, October 2018.