Camp is an aesthetic style and sensibility that regards something as appealing or amusing because of its heightened level of artifice, affectation and exaggeration, especially when there is also a playful or ironic element. Camp is historically associated with LGBTQ+ culture and especially gay men. Camp aesthetics disrupt modernist understandings of high art by inverting traditional aesthetic judgements of beauty, value, and taste, and inviting a different kind of aesthetic engagement.
Simon Phillip Hugh Callow is an English actor. Known as a character actor on stage and screen, he has received numerous accolades including an Olivier Award and Screen Actors Guild Award as well as nominations for two BAFTA Awards. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his services to acting by Queen Elizabeth II in 1999.
Robert Gant is an American actor. He is best known for his role as Ben Bruckner on the Showtime series Queer as Folk.
Stonewall is a 1995 British-American historical comedy-drama film directed by Nigel Finch, his final film before his AIDS-related death shortly after filming ended. Inspired by the memoir of the same title by gay historian Martin Duberman, Stonewall is a fictionalized account of the weeks leading up to the Stonewall riots, a seminal event in the modern American gay rights movement. The film stars Guillermo Díaz, Frederick Weller, Brendan Corbalis, and Duane Boutte.
Gary Beadle is a British actor.
Simon Tseko Nkoli was an anti-apartheid, gay rights and AIDS activist in South Africa. Active in the Congress of South African Students (COSAS), the United Democratic Front, and the Gay Association of South Africa (GASA), he was arrested as part of the Delmas Treason Trial in 1984. After his release in 1988, he founded the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) and organized South Africa's first pride parade. His activism influenced the African National Congress (ANC) to enshrine gay rights in the South African constitution. One of the first South Africans to disclose that he was living with HIV/AIDS, Nkoli founded the Township AIDS Project. After his death from AIDS-related complications, his colleagues established the Treatment Action Campaign.
John R. Gordon is a British writer. His work – novels, plays, screenplays and biography - deals with the intersections of race, sexuality and class. With Rikki Beadle-Blair he founded and runs queer-of-colour-centric indie press Team Angelica. Although he was a "white person from a white suburb", according to Gordon, in the 1980s he became deeply interested in black cultural figures such as James Baldwin, Malcolm X and Frantz Fanon, and they have influenced his work ever since.
Michael Grumley was an American writer and artist.
Paul Keating is an English actor. He has been nominated twice for an Olivier Award for his performances on the West End stage. He began acting at the age of 12, appearing as Gavroche in Les Misérables at The Palace Theatre for 10 months.
Robert Chevara is a British director and writer. He was born in London to a single parent Mother.
Sean Michael O'Connor is an English producer, writer, and director working in theatre, film, television and radio. He was the editor of the long-running BBC radio drama, The Archers from 2013 to 2016 and executive producer of EastEnders from 2016 to 2017.
Gregory Motton is a British playwright and author. Motton is best known for the originality of his formally demanding, largely a-political theatre plays at the Royal Court in the 1980s and 1990s, state of the nation satires in the 1990s, and later for his polemics about working class politics, A Working Class Alternative To Labour and Helping Themselves – The Left Wing Middle Classes In Theatre And The Arts.
Phyllis Akua Opoku-Gyimah, also known as Lady Phyll, is a British political activist known for her work for racial, gender and LGBT+ equality. She is Co-Founder and Chief Executive of UK Black Pride and former executive director of Kaleidoscope Trust.
Michael Bronski is an American academic and writer, best known for his 2011 book A Queer History of the United States. He has been involved with LGBT politics since 1969 as an activist and organizer. He has won numerous awards for LGBTQ activism and scholarship, including the prestigious Publishing Triangle's Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement. Bronski is a Professor of Practice in Media and Activism at Harvard University.
Ashley Campbell is a British actor, dancer and singer. He is known for his portrayal of Ollie in the CBBC children's drama The Mysti Show.
The LGBT community in London is one of the largest within Europe. LGBT culture of London, England, is centred on Old Compton Street in Soho. There are also LGBT pubs and restaurants across London in Haggerston, Dalston and Vauxhall.
Larry Duplechan is an American novelist. He is best known for his novels Blackbird, adapted in 2014 by Patrik-Ian Polk as a film starring Mo'Nique and Isaiah Washington, and Got 'til It's Gone, which won an award in the Gay Romance category at the 21st Lambda Literary Awards.
Fit is a 2010 film written and directed by Rikki Beadle-Blair, and commissioned by the Gay Rights Charity Stonewall. It is adapted from the 2008 play of the same name about the everyday lives of a group of both gay and straight millennial students taking drama and dance class. The original play had been developed in 2008 to address the growing problem of homophobic bullying in British schools, and was especially created for KS3 students, with a specific focus on learning objectives from the National Curriculum including PHSE and Citizenship. The film itself was opened in the form of an introductory chapter, with six interlinking chapters of fifteen minutes, each focusing on one of the main characters in a first-person perspective of their life, views and problems. The DVD release of Fit also contained five video diaries for each of the characters, giving students and other viewers the opportunity to listen to the characters talking more in-depth about their feelings and the situation they are facing.
Strawberry Fields is a theatre play written by Stephen Poliakoff and staged at the Cottesloe, National Theatre in March 1977. Strawberry Fields was the first ever National Theatre production at the Cottesloe, the NT’s ‘black box’ studio theatre.
Iman Qureshi is a London-based writer, awarded the PAPAtango prize for new writing for her play 'The Funeral Director' in 2018. Her work explores themes of race, gender, and sexuality, and she has spoken openly about her identity as a Muslim and her desire to create community and political change through her work.
