Switchboard stickers in the medical books
1980
Betty: “I was on Switchboard; Switchboard had some women on, more men,
including Helen Rose, Anna, Anne Bromwich, and a couple of others; we
managed to keep West Midlands Switchboard fairly balanced for a while
and we used to quite often have a woman and a man on in the evenings,
that was the ideal”.
B: “We used to regularly put stickers up for Switchboard; some of us
used to walk home quite often after the discos, ‘cos I don’t think
there was much in the way of night buses, or they were expensive. I can
remember walking home with other Switchboard operators putting Switchboard stickers on all the lamp posts. But the better one was
Central Library, because of course, at that point, there weren’t very
many books on gay subjects, and therefore people who were just coming
out generally went to the medical books and looked up homosexuality,
and we used to go fortnightly to Central Library. One of us would stand
guard, and the other would take a bunch of Switchboard leaflets, go to
the medical section, look up in every book homosexuality, put a
Switchboard leaflet in and put the book on the shelf. And they were
almost always gone a fortnight later when we went back. And we never
got caught.”
Gill: “I can remember putting stickers on the back of the loo doors in the
Central Library, but I don’t remember what they were stickers for, to
be quite honest. They were either lesbian and gay or women’s stuff,
Rape Crisis.”
Contributed by: Gill Coffin, 63, Betty Hagglund, 50