LGBT community of Brighton and Hove
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Brighton and Hove has long had a large gay and lesbian community, estimated to include around 35,000 people, or 13% of the total population, slightly above the 10% that is usually taken as an average LGBT population percentage.[citation needed]
[edit] Events and organisations
Brighton Pride aims to promote awareness of LGBT issues by staging events during the year including an annual summer festival held in the first week of August.[1]. The 2005 summer event attracted 120,000 visitors.[2]
The Brighton Gay and Lesbian Switchboard is a telephone helpline and one of the oldest in the UK. The town also has one of the few gay and lesbian youth projects in the UK in the Allsorts Youth Project.
Both Brighton and Sussex universities have their own LGBT organisations, sometimes working together, to cater to the needs of the ever increasing number of LGBT students. Widely regarded as one of the best LGBT groups in the country, LGBrighTon is for Brighton University students and The Sussex Uni LGBT has members from Sussex University.
The Brighton Our Story Project aims to record the history of the LGBT community in the area.[3]
In 2000 the award-winning and largescale LGBT community survey, Count Me In, led to the development of a LGBT Community Strategy 2001-06 for Brighton & Hove. Spectrum developed from this process to work with local services and planners in implementing the strategy, and to provide infrastructure and community development support for the LGBT community. Its aim is to act as an independent voice, negotiating the rights of LGBT people locally with specific focus on the needs of marginalised sections of the LGBT community.
Count Me In Too! is a second study which will shortly be conducted as in partnership between the University of Brighton and Spectrum aiming to identify gaps in the original research and update the strategy.
Two free LGBT magazines are distributed in the city: Gscene and 3sixty.
[edit] Historical stories
An early recording of gays and lesbians in Brighton was in August 1822, when George Wilson, a servant from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, was accused by a guardsman he had met in the Duke of Wellington public house in Pool Valley of having offered him a sovereign and two shillings to go with him onto the beach to "commit an unnatural crime".[citation needed]
Another early story of the LGBT community in the area is that of philanthropist Angela Burdett-Coutts (1814-1906), a friend of both Charles Dickens and the Duke of Wellington, who spent part of each year at the Royal Albion Hotel with her companion Hannah. The couple were devoted to each other, socially recognized as a pair, and even sent joint Christmas cards. When Hannah died in 1878, Baroness Burdett-Coutts said she was utterly crushed by the loss of "my poor darling, the companion and sunshine of my life for 52 years".[citation needed]
