Switchboard by Astro-Zenica

An LGBTQ History Month Special at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery

Tuesday 14th February 2023

Throat parched: hand trembling: choice made. They reach for the phone: a piercing ring: the wait unending. Deep inhale: a silent breath: the whole world pauses just for a moment.

“Hello? Is anybody there...? Are you a

....are you a gay person? I've never spoken to someone who's gay before….”

Welcome to Switchboard, an LGBTQ history month show by radical performance artist Astro-Zenica at The Bristol Museum & Art Gallery on Tuesday 14th February 2023. Drawing on archival research, call logs from The Bristol Lesbian and Gay Switchboard (1975 - 2012), and oral histories about queer nightlife and protest in the 70s and 80s, Astro explores the myriad codes and languages developed by queer people to reach out, hook- up, find community, make friends and fight back in a world often violent and harsh to the emergence of the queer spirit: naive in its beginnings; longing for acceptance; searching for connection.

There's something in this being held, in the call that answers, before the phone connection dies and the next choice is made....

This is a show about class, violence, access, visibility, hedonism, sexual freedom and community. Written as a Valentine's Day love letter to the radical queers, the club promoters, the party starters, the drag artists, the volunteers at the switchboard, and most of all to Dale Wakefield, who opened the switchboard at her home in Totterdown in 1975. Here, Dale and the team received thousands of calls in the Switchboard's opening years, listening to the fears, signposting to the club, offering rescue missions to those attacked on the street, and becoming a beacon of support during the AIDS crisis, all because of a belief in and commitment to the power of community.

For those who are living and for the many more who have died, this one's for you.

Written by Astro-Zenica

Set design by Emily Diamond @e_diamond_sculpture 

This event is in association with Outstories & Bristol Museums.

Tickets here.

Astro-Zenica will also be publishing a zine Re-Complicating Class: A Radical Queer Perspective in 2023, available for order on the night

Poster design @danieldewolfe

See more photos below