THE LOG BOOKS
Season 3 Episode 1 - “Multiple paradox net files”
Date: 08.11.2021
Season: 3
Episode: 1
Presenters: Tash Walker, Adam Zmith
Contributors: Harry F. Rey, Steph, Clare Truscott, Anne Howard, Fisch, Derek Cohen, Jake Edwards
Producers: Shivani Dave, Tash Walker, Adam Zmith
Music: Tom Foskett-Barnes
Artwork: Natalie Doto
[telephone dial tone, music]
Log book reader 1: This is a log book entry from June 10th, 1995. ‘Guy phoned wanting info about gay interest things on the internet. I know nothing about this high-tech stuff, but are there any basic bits of info we can give to callers? I know that a friend of mine fixed up a date and had a holiday romance in Chicago via the internet, so it must be good.’
Log book reader 2: This is log book entry for June the 11th, 1995. ‘I’ve been asked a number of times for gay email addresses, databases on the internet. If there are any volunteers who understand or know about such things, could they put the details in ‘New Info’ and could Info Group either start or incorporate a file?’
AZ: Tash, you and me are the MSN generation, lol. [laughter] I loved Yahoo groups as well.
TW: Yeah, I came out to my parents whilst on MSN.
AZ: OMG, brb!
[theme music]
AZ: You're listening to The Log Books—stories from Britain's LGBTQ+ history, and conversations about being queer today—in partnership with Switchboard, the LGBT+ helpline.
TW: In this season, we're reading through the notes made by the volunteers who took calls between 1992 and 2003. I'm Tash Walker…
AZ: And I'm Adam Zmith.
[music fades out]
TW: Episode 1, 'Multiple paradox net files'.
AZ: This episode is full of memories about getting online and getting off…
TW: Dialling up to download your desires…
AZ: And navigating the World-
TW: Wide-
AZ: Web.
[laughter]
HFR: I remember when the internet first came into my house 'cause I was 12, and I badgered my, er, dad for a computer, for a long time. I'm Harry F. Rey, I'm 35, and in the 90s and early noughties the internet was a huge deal for me. It helped me discover my sexuality. So, er, we couldn't just go to computer shop, we had to go to some guy he knew, who was selling them out of a truck or something like that, erm, and he was like 'Oh, what's this internet thing you want to get? How do I-how am I meant to do that?' And he sent away and your internet came in the post those days, because you had to get a AOL CD-ROM [laughing]. Wasn't just a case of, you know, having internet installed in the house. So—and I got the computer installed in my bedroom, because they didn't—my parents had no interest, the rest of my family had no interest in, in the computer, something as weird and as new-fangled as that. And I said 'I'm using it for games, I'm using it for schoolwork, end of story.' So I got the computer in my room, I got the internet, er, plugged-in, and I really think that was the birth of my sexual awakening having the internet. It was, it was all of a sudden, this, this… Everything. You know, there was like, you, you suddenly felt, I suddenly felt not alone, that there was other things, other people.
[music]
Steph: Hello, AOL [laughter]. You know, in AOL chat and all the rest of it, and then forums started to emerge.
Hi I'm Steph, I'm 51, I live in London. I'm originally from Kent, but I've lived in London for most of my adult life. And I think the arrival of forums were really key, because that's when you started—when I started to find out about all these other places. And then of course you go to one and you can pick up a publication which told you about other things, and people were printing off little leaflets for like places you could go all over the country. Suddenly I started to realise that actually there's quite a network of people that feel like I do, but we're entirely underground. So I think that was a big moment as well, so you know, the arrival of the internet was very significant, because pre-then, life was incredibly difficult, trying to find other people.
[music]
HFR: One of my user's names was CyberSpy27, from a long, long, long time ago, so if you ever cyber-sexed with CyberSpy27, then, you know, hello, it was me!
Definitely went through a thing of making up usernames, you know, and making up characters. Obviously I'm, I'm an author now, that's, that's what I'm doing, I'm, er, I've a whole number of books that are out in the world, and it really began by making up characters, making up people, men, gay men, and having tons of cyber sex with other men. You know, before I was going out to Bennets, it was, it was all night spent on the internet in this, in this whole world that you had access to, and talking to people, talking to, to other gay people, talking to other people around the world, like having information and message, er, the message boards, er, the chat rooms, the, the Yahoo groups. There, there wasn't Google then, but the GeoCities that used to be there, there was one, erm, er, Faceparty, if you remember from a long time ago, and, er, Faceparty's agony aunt, I wish I could remember her name, but you know giving advice to, to other young people, to real people.
[beeps and static of dial-up modem]
CT: Had the dial-up modem. I was using the internet for work. I mean, back then, in the early 90s, there was the internet, but there was no good browsers. So, I used to liken using the internet as wandering round a library in the dark. Er, yeah no, you'd be all out there, but unless you knew the actual address of it, you couldn't find it.
I remember once, with a friend, on our dial-up modem at home, saying 'OK, what shall we look for?' and she said 'Er, a naked picture of Catherine Deneuve.' It took us 20 minutes to find a rather rubbish picture of Catherine Deneuve in a bikini [laughter].
AZ: Catherine Deneuve in a bikini.
TW: [laughter] Have you googled that pic?
AZ: Well I guess you have!
TW: I, yeah, it took me about 20 seconds. Not 20 minutes, but still, that feels like a little too long.
AZ: Thank you to the internet for our sex education. The internet is great!
TW: Yeah, but it is also a platform for people who are gonna be shit, to be shit.
[pages turning]
Log book reader 3: This is a log book entry from April the 6th, 2002. ‘Caller is looking for a gay internet watchdog, because someone’s sending him anonymous emails, telling him he’s being slagged off in various chatrooms. What can he do about it? Surely they monitor these chatrooms? I’ve given him GLAD’s number, the gay and lesbian legal advice line, but do they still exist? I suggested he contact the internet providers.’ Another volunteer writes: ‘Abusive emails. If you send an email to ‘abuse@’ whichever IP the emails are coming from, they will, should be able to help, eg ‘abuse@hotmail.com’. It’s an offence to send an abusive email.’
AZ: It sounds so innocent and sweet, listening to that log book entry, the idea that you can just write to the email providers, and they’ll stop that kind of abuse. It’s so naive, you know, now, from where we are sitting, looking back, knowing what we know about the experience of LGBTQI+ people online experiencing hate crime, essentially, abuse. It’s been there right from the start of the internet.
[quiet music, pages turning]
Log book reader 4: This is a log book entry from April the 29th, 1999. ‘Took a call from a woman who had gone on the internet to a site called allexperts.com for advice on sexual problems. She received an email from a woman who apparently had been on the National Gay and Lesbian Taskforce, who suggested that if the caller visited her church or synagogue and prayed, she could change, as it was only through the miracle of God that you could change your ways.’
AZ: The internet was changing everything.
TW: And we have this log book entry, about QX, the gay scene magazine, that’s from the 17th of July, 1995. ‘Internet, exclamation mark! QX on the Net!’ I love the abbreviation of that already. And it’s got the email qxmag@dircon.co.uk and then the web address. And they’ve written out ‘http://www.dircon.co.uk/qxmag’ and then in brackets underneath: ‘If this means anything, I’m amazed!’
[laughter]
AZ: Well that might not have meant anything to that volunteer, but other Switchboard volunteers in the period were early adopters, as Anne Howard tells us.
AH: Boo Armstrong was the first co-chair, and she was a very dynamic presence, and I was completely shocked by her, because she was such an unusual woman. And such a clever and driven woman. And I always remembered my first meeting with her, group meeting that we had to discuss a particular issue. And she burst in late, and it was a—she wanted to get a handbook written for the volunteers. And I found that after my first meeting, when I’d been in the organisation no more than a month, erm, because of Boo’s presence, I’d volunteered to write the handbook, which actually took about a year of my life! [laughter]
I can see her bursting through the door now, and she, you know, we’re all sitting there quietly, and she was late, and she just ‘zoomph’, and she needed all these people to volunteer, and everyone ended up volunteering for things [laughter], which was brilliant.
One of the things that Boo Armstrong was very active in was that she was an early adopter, herself. And she was determined that we would raise sufficient money through various sources to be able to have an internet service and online access. And that actually came in, I’m not sure of the exact date, but it would’ve been probably the late 1990s, that we got our first, erm, screens with databases and information on it. And that was such a move forward. It was incredible. The systems were nothing like we would use now—they were so clunky, it was unbelievable. And a lot of people still relied on paper-based systems, er, to back them up, because one of the problems was the internet service, which was going down, probably 2 or 3 times a day, erm, and that made life very difficult for volunteers who were trying to find information or log their calls, or any of the other things that was required at the time. It seems almost unbelievable now, but, yes, we had a lot of paper-based systems as a back-up to the internet, which was very, very rudimentary, in, probably right up to mid-2000s.
Contributor 2: Didn’t use it for kind of social purposes, it never occurred to me to kinda like hook up with people over the internet, or join internet chatboards, or socialise with people over the internet. It was still a kind of business thing for emails for me. I mean although I was using, er, ISDN telephone lines to send my designs as files down, down the phone, er, to send them to like repro houses on the opposite side of the world, erm, I wasn’t really using the internet in the way that people use the internet today, the way I use the internet today. Erm, and certainly my tech skills are very much 20th century and not 21st century [laughter]. I don’t know how to do the most basic of internet things now! If you asked me to take a photograph and send it to you, I wouldn’t be able to!
[music]
Log book reader 5: This is a log book entry from July 7th, 1995, entitled ‘More computer news’. ‘The menu system is in place and ready to be used. We seem to have solved the multiple paradox net files error, except for on the accommodation services section. We’ll get that bit fixed now. 4 machines are on in the phone room; the fifth should be ready next week. There is a basic guide to using the system in all of the clipboards and pinned to the walls in the phone room. There’s a proper users’ manual under production. Cheers.’
TW: [laughing] Multiple paradox net files?
AZ: I don’t know what that means, but it’s obviously a disaster. I remember getting those error dialogue boxes on our Windows 95 computer that we had at home, and it used to say, erm, ‘Your computer has committed an illegal operation and will be shut down immediately.’
TW: What were you doing, Adam?
AZ: [laughter] I don’t know, I just remember it filled me with absolute terror. And I was convinced that police would abseil into the house from a helicopter, and like, I don’t know, seize the computer and me. Erm, it was just terrifying.
TW: Have you ever heard of Gaydar Girls?
AZ: Ooh no. I’ve heard of gaydar, so I can imagine.
TW: Yeah, well, yeah [laughter]. I used to go on Gaydar Girls—it’s like an online chatroom, platform—to meet other ‘Gaydar Girls’ [laughter].
AZ: There was an early one for men called ‘Manhunt’.
TW: Oh really?
AZ: Yes [laughter].
TW: Amazing. I actually met up with some people from it.
AZ: Oh wow.
TW: Mm.
AZ: The internet was great for sex, and I remember having cyber-sex, on MSN, and Yahoo Chat, A/S/L…
TW: What’s A/S/L?
AZ: It means ‘age, sex, location’. It’s when you started chatting to someone on Yahoo Chat and they would say ‘A/S/L?’ And you had to put in your age, sex, and location, and I guess everyone lied?
HFR: I used my uncle’s credit card, er, or debit card or whatever it was, to get myself a Gaydar XTRA, Gaydar Plus whatever membership, because I wanted unlimited messages, I didn’t want to, you know, have 5 messages a night and that’d be it. I wanted to be, you know, on the whole thing, so I just told him it was, I can’t remember what, I told him it was something nonsense, and I’ll give him the cash, and use his credit card, no problem. I had my, I guess, I think it was, I was, I guess 14 or 15 when I started with my, with my Gaydar advanced membership. But it was amazing, because there was all these chatrooms, from different locations, you could speak to people in Glasgow, who were on Gaydar, you could speak to people in a different city, you could speak to people who were younger, who were older, who were into like, all these different kinks that, that no idea what it was even about. But you could communicate with them, and, you know, and realise that, not only you’re not alone, there’s other people just like you, around the corner even.
[music]
Fisch: I do, I remember, I remember actually doing it myself on the ‘Ginger Beer’ website, they had a forum. Ginger Beer was women-only, it was prior Gaydar Girls, and erm, yeah, it had a chatroom, and you went in there. [laughter] I think I was a bit much for them, really [laughter]. I went in there just looking for casual sex. D’you know what, I got the weirdest responses! But yeah, it was, it was—I think they were more your, more your woolly jumper kind of, you know, lentil-eating lesbians.
Hi, hello, my name is Fisch, also known as King Frankie Sinatra, and I was running club nights for lesbians and dykes in the 90s, thank you very much.
I just said ‘Does anybody fancy some casual sex?’ And, erm, and erm [laughter] and, yeah, er, yeah, I don’t think that was what it was designed for. But, um, it was my first and only foray. I did get some, some responses, and I did meet up with a couple of people. And I had no casual sex, in case you’re interested, but, um, it kind of, yeah, that was my first and only, really, really put my toe into the water of internet meeting. I just, I’m old-school, I’d rather see what someone smells like [laughter].
[music]
DC: I actually started using the internet for cruising, probably about, well it wasn’t the internet, but about 1978, something like that.
Hello, I’m Derek Cohen, I’m fairly ancient. This is a time when there was something called Prestel, which was a sort of text-only information system, that also had various social things. And there were chatrooms and things. And a group of people set up an area called the CUG, ‘Closed User Group’, which was a, basically a live chat for gay men. And, for some reason, SMers tend to be more techies, I dunno if it’s because we play with all this gear and stuff, so, and obviously early adopters getting on this were people who were quite techy, because you had to have a thing that you plugged your phone handset into, and it made lots of noise, and you needed a computer and stuff, when most people didn’t. And in fact, quite a few of the men who I went on to have SM sex with, I met on this thing. And again, when people say ‘Where did you meet so-and-so?’ I met him on the CUG. The CUG is a gay men’s live chat system run by the British Government, BT, British Telecom. ‘Cause it was a British Telecom thing. And it’s again like, ‘Wow.’ And that’s because there were a group of people who had the leeway within their department to set this up. So that’s my first experiences, and it was just text, you typed, and everyone had a little nickname, and stuff, and you chatted about sex, and I’m still friends with some of the men I met on the CUG. And it was like the first taste of being able to chat to people live who weren’t in your town, and that sort of thing. Because before that, if you wanted to meet people, and I did it, if you wanted to meet someone for sex, or SM sex, which was in a sense harder to find, there were adverts in Gay Times, sometimes rather cryptically worded, it depended on their policy. And you write a letter, and put two first-class stamps in the envelope, and wait for a reply, and it was all, you know, waiting 5 days to make a date when you can do it in 3 seconds now on WhatsApp or Messenger or something. I have a nice active SM sex life, and it’s always nice to have new ideas and things to tease your boyfriend with and things like that, so the internet’s been an enabler like that. It’s also exposed people to a much wider variety of practices. There’s a lot of stereotyping about, in any pornography, of, of you know, body shape and this sort of stuff, and it’s nice I think that these days, there’s an appreciation of older men, of bigger men, of men who are either hairless or very hairy. The diversity’s grown because there’s so many more places you can look for it, and that’s been a good thing.
[music]
HFR: My first sexual experience was, er, in an Asda toilets, so it’s not [laughing] not really the stuff that great romances are made of, but it was, it was someone from Gaydar, who, someone who was, was my age, erm, you know probably underage as we both were. I think I went in 3 times to buy things that I didn’t want or didn’t need because I was waiting for this person. Erm, you know so, went into the bathroom with an Asda bag full of like chocolates and drinks and stuff because… And he said to me ‘Do you wanna, do you wanna hang your shopping, hang your messages on top of the door? So it doesn’t get like on, on the nasty tiles, like the wet tiles?’ And we went into a cubicle, and I, I really don’t think he was much older than I was, I think he must have been 15, 16, and… I just remember we, we, we didn’t even take each others’ clothes off, we just took our trousers down as if we were both gonna pee in the same bowl. And it kinda just went from there, like you know, we’d talked a great talk, er, in the weeks before we’d come to meet, and whatever we did, I think it was over in about 5 minutes, but it was something real. And I remember walking out of it, I’d not done much, but I’d done something, and it was like, on the way to becoming a newer person, like a, like a, like a gay man, like I wasn’t just a kid any more, a boy, a child, I was like taking, I was owning my sexuality, which I didn’t even, I guess think of it as a concept at the time, but having like the internet and Gaydar facilitating that was, for me, great, it was amazing. There was no downside.
[music]
TW: I love what Harry says about experiencing something real, especially because people, well we all, curate our online personas.
AZ: Completely. That’s such a big part of our lives today. So we spoke to someone who’s been very online, for most of their life: Jake Edwards, a YouTuber.
They’re known as jakeftmagic on Instagram and Twitter—and Tash, are you ready for this—they’ve got a combined following of more than 92 000 followers.
TW: Just a couple less than me, then.
AZ: On YouTube their videos have been seen 2 and a half million times, and they’ve amassed this big following by connecting with, and helping thousands—maybe millions—of people when he shared live stories and experiences when he identified as a trans man.
[music]
JE: So I’ve done something pretty catastrophic. At the time of filming this video, I’ve told maybe one of my friends that this has happened. And that feels kind of weird because I tell my friends everything. This is so hard for me to talk about.
It’s pushed me to the edge, really. I’ve been on the fucking edge. But now, I’m almost there. And just one little push and I will be there. For anyone who has been waiting a long time and feels like it’s hopeless, it’s not. You will get there and it feels like you’re gonna have to wait another 2 years, but it’ll happen so quickly. Something will give and you’ll be there. So hang on to that last little bit of hope.
[music]
That’s how I’m feeling today. A big, complicated, cluster-fucky mess of emotions. And I will never stop feeling a complicated, cluster-fucky mess of emotions, ‘cause that’s just what being human is. Hope you enjoyed this video, I will see you next week. Peace.
TW: They built a career on the internet, putting themselves out there, but when we spoke to Jake, they told us that it’s not been without personal costs.
JE: Hi, my name is Jake Edwards, my pronouns are he and they. I’m non-binary, bisexual, erm, and I’ve been on the internet for quite a while. Erm, I mostly use Instagram these days, which was weird because it used to be my least used platform. Erm, I’m a bit of a lurker on TikTok, I don’t really make TikToks, but I spend an ungodly amount of my time on there. I recently got a notification that I’ve been on Twitter for 13 years, and I was like that is literally more than half my life. I’ve spent more than half of my life putting my thoughts into tiny character-limited chunks to push out to the rest of the world, and I try not to think about the amount of time I’ve been staring at a screen, thinking about how to word my thoughts, rather than just thinking them. And I’ve phased Twitter out of my life almost accidentally. I think I once took a break because it was stressing me out, but at the same time I’m sometimes thinking like ‘Am I losing out on like my social capital, like am I dying as an influencer because I didn’t use Twitter any more? Like, is that it now? Am I an internet dinosaur because I don’t tweet like, at least 5 times a day?’ And it’s like a genuine real concern I have, and every time I have that real concern, I’m like that is the most obnoxious thing you could ever think in your life, that you have decreased in value as a human being because you don’t tweet.
Oh I use Instagram Stories pretty much every day, erm, but it’s nice and it feels like the way people used to mock the use of the internet. Like I will take pictures of my food, I will take obnoxious selfies, I will talk about what I’m doing at work that day, I’ll do little polls and little questions, just because I wanna know what people are thinking about, erm, what do they do for a living, what are their favourite crisps. Because I like having that quick and easy interaction with a bunch of strangers that feels very, you know, unique, like ‘oh we’re in this moment together’. My generation of ‘I wanna to be special, I wanna to be noticed, I wanna be internet famous, I want 300 people to like all of my Instagram posts’ and it’s this thing that we are now trying so hard to unpick from people, and saying, ‘Your value is not the amount of engagement you get on the internet’. But that kind of positivity did not really exist, or was only just starting to find its footing, when I was doing that. So I was still like the ‘X Factor generation’ of like ‘I’m gonna go on the X Factor one day and be famous and get a record deal’, and you just get brought up in that kind of fantasy, erm. So I think it was a part of me was like, ‘Ooh yeah, this is my big break, this is me taking centre stage and performing the way I’ve been taught I should, erm, and it feels, weirdly it feels very Bo Burnham. I don’t know if you’ve seen Bo Burnham’s comedy special Inside, erm, but it’s like he draws back the curtain on what that feels like, and you are, like, you can be depressed and having a mental breakdown, but you still want to make it funny and put it on the internet. You still want to make it consumable and palatable and relatable, and you want other people to see that, and it, I think there’s something, there’s kind of a bit of an ego behind that, but then there’s also, it comes back to that core, human thing of wanting other people to relate to you, or wanting to know that you’re not alone in how you feel.
[music]
So, my entire life feels like it's interwoven with the internet. So when I think about growing up, I measure my life against where I was on the internet and what I was doing on the internet at that time. I started to discover that there were trans people on YouTube, and this was when I was going through my big gender awakening, the big scary first gender awakening—erm, the first of, unfortunately, many. Erm, and I just started talking about being trans, er, I started dating somebody who was also trans, and we started talking about our identities—together, separately—and we kind of built up this community together.
I have a lot of conversations with myself in the mirror. And that sounds weird, but it's something I've always done, since I was a child, it's something I still do as an adult. It's kind of like my way of rehearsing social situations that will probably never happen. And also it's kind of like self-therapy, to talk out loud the way I'm feeling to myself, and look myself in the eye when I'm saying those things. And YouTube felt like that, except instead of looking in my eyes in the mirror, I was looking down a camera lens, so it felt incredibly intimate, any time I film a video, it felt just like a conversation with myself, erm, and it felt emotionally important for me to do that. So realising that other people were, you know, sitting in the room with me was strange to, strange to feel like that was real. Erm, it almost felt like some kind of fever dream, or like a nightmare or something, when I'm having those conversations with myself in the mirror, it's like imagining somebody pulls back the curtain and there's an audience of 300 people that have just heard me repeat the same sentence 5 times, because I wanted to get the sound just right whilst I looked myself in the eyes and said 'Yeah, you're OK. You're doing OK.' Erm, it feels like, erm, being exposed, erm, and being vulnerable, and I don't think I was ready at that time to comprehend what that meant.
[music]
So I was making videos for me, erm, and by that I mean also people that, that were me, that were young, trans men—at the time I was identifying as a trans man—so I was making it for younger trans men, who were going through the process of either going to their GP or going to the gender clinics. And really it was talking to a mirror in a sense, erm. So when I started to meet the people that watched my videos in real life, it was quite overwhelming at times, to, to see people that, you know, looked like me, that sometimes talked and dressed like me, erm, and that real-time interaction was incredibly overwhelming. I don't think I ever learned how to navigate that situation. I talked to a lot of other YouTubers at the time, and they said, 'Oh yeah, like it just becomes a habit, you just know what to do and how to speak to people.' And I don't think I ever learned that, it was always really difficult, and I'd always have like these little phrases that I'd keep in my back pocket, to try and make it not as awkward, erm. But it was always—I think when you suffer from imposter syndrome, and you have like a 100 people in a line waiting to meet you, and a fair amount of them say, oh, you know, 'This changed my life, your videos have saved me when I was in a really difficult place…' It's hard to really feel that emotion, it's hard to really understand what that actually meant for that person, erm. And I think it was emotionally challenging, I think I felt very disconnected from the reality of what I was doing. Erm, and I think looking back on it now, it's so surreal to be an incredibly mentally unstable teenager, being thrust into the limelight because I'm using the internet as my diary. And it really led to some quite complex situations of then meeting people in real life that knew the internet version of me, and the way people would respond and react to me, erm, I've realised recently in therapy that it caused me some issues in the way that I, erm, now struggle to believe in friendships, erm, and struggle to sometimes socialise and interact because I have this complex of 'oh, what if they only like that one version of me that's from the internet?'
The impact of the internet on trans people is, from what I experience, can be one of two extremes. And I think it's really heightened the panic and fear and shame and pain that trans people feel, because you have quick and easy access to, you know, all forms of transphobia and all forms of people debating your right to exist, and any time a Sunday newspaper will bring up trans people, it will always be negative, and you'll know about it, there'll be debates, it'll hit 'Trending', and you're constantly exposed to the worst opinions.
But also I feel like it's brought on this era of trans liberation, that certainly existed before, but now, because the internet is like this hyper, er, super quickly connected, quickly evolving sphere, you can access that feeling of liberation, you can access that euphoria and our evolution and progress in real time, and that can be really quite beautiful. Erm, but yeah, it's, it's that double-edged thing, it can be quite scary I think, to know all around the world what is happening to trans people.
[music]
AZ: Listening to Jake just makes me think about the state of the internet today, you know. Please people, just be kind!
TW: Yeah, don't get drawn into the bullshit on the internet, and just share trans and queer joy instead, because there is so much of it.
AZ: In our next episode, we're gonna be talking about a landmark fight for equal rights, which was huge in this period, '92 to 2003.
TW: It's all about the age at which you're legally able to consent to sex.
[music]
TW: Calls to Switchboard are confidential, so to bring The Log Books to life we’ve changed callers’ details.
AZ: The Log Books is produced by Shivani Dave, Tash Walker, and Adam Zmith, in partnership with Switchboard, the LGBT+ helpline. And supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund.
TW: If you think other people would like The Log Books, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. These ratings and reviews really help others to discover the show. You can send us your feedback and stories to hello@thelogbooks.org, or join the conversation on social media with the hashtag #TheLogBooks.
AZ: Our music is by Tom Foskett-Barnes, and our artwork is by Natalie Doto.
TW: Thanks to…
AZ: Stef Dickers, and the team at the Bishopsgate Institute. The folks at Acast, Content is Queen, David Pye, the staff and volunteers at Switchboard, and everyone who shared their stories with us.
[music]
TW: Switchboard continues to take phone calls from 10 am to 10 pm, every day. If you’re affected by any of the issues in this podcast, or need to discuss anything to do with gender identity or sexuality, you can call Switchboard on 0300 330 0630, email chris@switchboard.lgbt, or instant message via switchboard.lgbt, where you can also donate money, or time, to help.
[music]