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Switchboard stickers in the medical books

1980

Betty: “I was on ; 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 ; 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 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 . 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 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 , but I don’t remember what they were stickers for, to be quite honest. They were either lesbian and gay or women’s stuff, .”

Contributed by: Gill Coffin, 63, Betty Hagglund, 50

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