Bristol Lesbian and Gay Switchboard: almost 40 years of LGBTQ+ community

For almost 40 years, Bristol had its own switchboard for the LGBTQ+ community.

Bristol Lesbian and Gay Switchboard (BLAGS) was set up on February 1, 1975, and took its first phone call on Valentine’s Day.

BLAGS was founded by Dale Wakefield at her home on Hill Street in Totterdown in response to a clear need for information and a listening ear.

While attending a Gay Women’s Group meeting at a lesbian house in Clifton, which also accommodated the Women’s Centre and the first Bristol refuge, the premises received constant phone calls from gay men and lesbians alike.

“We started getting some calls from (gay) men,” Dale told the OutStories oral history project in 2012.

“Being a reasonable sort of person, I would deal with them as they were obviously genuine. London Switchboard had just started and I started to think that is what we needed in Bristol.”

The phone line operated initially from the spare bedroom of Dale’s home and was run by herself and a group of volunteers. It was one of the first LGBTQ+ switchboards in the country – London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard had started 11 months earlier in March 1974.

“Homosexuality was only partially legal for men,” says Tim Manning a fellow founder of BLAGS and then-student at Bristol Polytechnic, of the 1970s.

“It was very much a taboo. Setting up the switchboard was really quite a radical thing to do. It felt empowering to be part of an out gay group at that time.”

Dale around the time Switchboard started. Photo used with the permission of Shaun Wakefield

Calls were received by volunteers, mostly gay men, during its opening hours (this was 7.30pm to 10.30pm in the late 1980s but reduced the two days a week by 2012) but LGBTQ+ people phoned throughout the day and night.

Dale dealt with out-of-hours calls with Annie Smith, who was the one who went to phone box to phone an ambulance or turned out in the night to drive both to any local suicides, with Tim saying: “Because of her (Dale), lives were saved, closets opened, and she helped us change our world for the better.”

When the switchboard first started almost 50 years ago, LGBTQ+ people simply didn’t have the same rights and equalities as queer people do in 2021.

London’s first Pride had been held just three years earlier, in 1972, with just 2,000 participants (Bristol held its first Pride in 1977). The year that the Bristol switchboard started only one party, the Liberal Party, now the Lib Dems, openly supported LGBTQ+ rights.

In fact, in 1977, a bill to reduce the age of consent to 18 was defeated in the UK House of Lords and, just six years after the creation of BLAGS, the first UK case of AIDS was recorded when a 49-year-old man was admitted to Brompton Hospital in London. He died ten days later.

As well as being a place of queer safety throughout a challenging few decades, BLAGS provided a service and community for 37 years that hadn’t existed in the city before.

“When you went to volunteer, quite often because you would have to wait for the phone to ring, you would sit downstairs with (Dale’s) mum and kids, read a story to the kids and have a cup of tea,” says Tim.

There was a common pattern to many of the calls: “There’d be a pause, then the caller would say, ‘are you gay?’ and I’d reply, ‘yes, are you?’,” says Tim.

“There would be a long silence and they’d say, ‘I’ve never spoken to someone who’s gay before,’ and then quite often they would cry.”

This portrait of Dale is one of three portraits from Bath artist Malcolm Ashman for donation to the M Shed. Image: Bristol Museum & Art Gallery/Malcolm Ashman, RWA, RBA

The switchboard moved to the Bristol Gay Centre in 1978, where it operated until the centre’s closure in 1983. Dale remained involved until the early 1980s and later helped to organise the Bristol Lesbian Line.

The switchboard continued operation through the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s. This time continued to be difficult for LGBTQ+ people and to have a safe phone line to call saved many lives.

Margaret Thatcher, UK prime minister at the time, introduced Section 28 in 1988 – an act that would not be repealed until 2003, and the AIDS crisis continued into the 90s. The World Health Organisation only declassified same-sex attraction as a mental illness in 1992 and the age of consent for same-sex relations between men was lowered to 16 only in 2000.

As LGBTQ+ people were recognised as equal more in law, and society became more accepting, calls to the switchboard declined.

The Civil Partnership Act was passed in 2004, let all couples have a civil partnership in the United Kingdom (the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Act was passed in England and Wales in 2013) and the Gender Recognition Act was passed in 2004, giving transgender people full legal recognition of their appropriate gender.

The Adoption and Children Act came into force in 2004, allowing unmarried couples, including same-sex couples, to apply for joint adoption and the Equality Act comes into force in 2010, offering queer and other marginalised people increased protection in law.

BLAGS closed at the end of February 2012. Volunteers decided to hand over the service to the London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard, so that LGBTQ+ people would have a phone line to call despite its closure.

“It’s very sad that, after almost 40 years, we feel that the time has come to close the Bristol L&G Switchboard down, but we’re all absolutely adamant that local LGBT people, their friends and families, should still have access to help if they need it,” said a Switchboard volunteer at the time.

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Read more: The Radnor Hotel: Bristol’s gay safe haven of the 20th century

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Darryl Bullock, another volunteer,  said in 2012: “It’s a success story in a way. Things are much easier for gay people today than they were when the Bristol Gay Switchboard was originally set up back in 1974.

“Gay people now have much more access to information; they have more freedom about where they live, work and socialise and, thanks to the many changes in legislation over the last few decades, being gay no longer has such a huge stigma attached to it.”

As well as fewer people ringing, there were fewer volunteers able to help, and BLAGS was running for just two days each week by its closure in 2012.

“It seemed like the obvious solution,” said Darryl. “We’re getting fewer calls than ever; it’s become harder and harder to find volunteers able to offer time to answer phones.”

BLAGS donated all of its funds to community groups and LGBTQ+ services following its closure. £1,000 was donated to the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard and the remaining £2,000 was placed in a community fund.

“There is no doubt that Switchboard changed lives,” says Tim. “It stopped people killing themselves, it opened closets and it made life better for everyone.”

Main photo: Bristol Design

Read more: ‘They’d say “I’ve never spoken to anyone gay before” and often they would cry’