London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard – 40 years and still here and talking about sex

Date

Monday 18th November, 2013

Time

6:00 pm - 8:00 pm

Location

Details

Two of the board of Directors; Richard Desmond and Andy Davis, who have been involved with the London Lesbian & Gay Switchboard for twenty to thirty years apiece, will be talking about the Switchboard’s work, it’s rich history and celebrating turning forty years old in 2014. Q&A afterwards.

Taking nearly two million calls since its formation as a collective, the Switchboard currently receives around twenty thousand calls a year.

The nature of calls has changed over the years, in the seventies and eighties, before the advent of the internet, they were very much along the lines of – where can I find other gay men in my area? With the advent of the internet people tend to call less about information, more if they were in distress. In the eighties and nineties a lot of calls were about HIV. Nowadays there are less phone calls, a proportion of advice is handled through email and Instant Messaging. The nature of informational advice has also changed again, being more about relationships, mental health, domestic violence and drugs, also more parents calling about their children (e.g. I think my son might be gay), bisexual men, and the elderly. They are proudly generalist, so they literally take calls about everything.

Providing free, confidential support  and information to lesbian, gay, bisexual & trans-gendered communities throughout the UK

The helpline; 0300 330 0630 is open daily (10am-11pm)

Calm words when you need them most.