Northampton

The rainbow flag being flown outside Northampton's Guildhall in 2009

Northampton is a town in Northamptonshire in the East Midlands region of England that lies between Birmingham and London. Northampton is one of the largest towns in the United Kingdom with a population of 212,100 (2011 census). Since the Second World War, the history of LGBT people in and around the town has been recorded and documented in local and national media. The town now has a notably large LGBT community.

The Boston is the town's only gay bar, but there are various forums, social groups and support groups and youth groups in the town. Northampton first held a Pride event in 2004. Although there had been no Pride event, the LGBT community continued to hold events to celebrate the local community, and in co-ordination with Northampton Borough Council, the LGBTQ and Allies Forum have helped to create a number of social events for the community, including the revival of Pride in 2018. An event to celebrate Pride has been held each year since. A Pride event is planned for 2020, subject to change due to the coronavirus outbreak. From 2012 until 2015, Northampton also held BooQfest, an annual gay and lesbian literary festival. In 2019, a new Northampton Queer Literary Festival was revived by different organisers, Q Story Northampton.

LGBT history

The Black Boy Hotel, a historic gay venue in Northampton

During the Second World War (and until 1999), there was an official ban on LGBT people serving in the armed forces in the UK. Homosexuality was also grounds for dismissal from the forces and for harsh imprisonment. In the years following that war, a bar upstairs at the Black Boy Hotel on Wood Hill (now where the Prezzo restaurant stands) became popular with the local LGBT community, even before the prominence of gay rights and setting up of gay villages in the 1960s. The open space of Midsummer Meadow had also been a popular social networking location for gay and bisexual men since the 1950s, and remained that way for more than 50 years until its recent marinal regeneration. Northampton has since had at least one gay venue. By the late 1970s, the Princess Royal (now Jeckyll & Hyde) on the Wellingborough Road became a popular standard with Northampton's gay and lesbian community. Even a pub in Clopton, a small village in the Northamptonshire countryside, hosted a gay disco on Saturday nights in the early 1980s.

The Boston is currently Northampton's only gay bar

Political and public support for the LGBT community took some time to grow in Northampton. In Feburary 1972, the Northampton CHE Group was founded to campaign for equality for homosexual people. Support for LGBT community began to increase in the town following the establishment of the Northampton Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Alliance (NLGBA) was set up in 1993, which offered information, support, advocacy and training on LGB issues, established social groups and helplines as well as being a general resource centre for the local community. By 2003, Northampton had a thriving LGBT scene consisting of clubs The Boston on College Street, K2 on Sheep Street, and The Jolly Anker (now Coren Pho Bar Grill), on Gas Street, in the town's centre. However, The Boston remains the reigning champion of Northampton's LGBT scene after its many years of existence and currently exists as the town's only LGBT bar. Roadmender, a popular nightclub and live music venue in Northampton, used to host a popular Friday gay night called Club Gaze in 2006. The Edge of Town is a gay-friendly pub which opened in 2010.

Northampton Borough Council was one of the first councils in the country to recognise the needs of its LGB community by setting up Northampton's LGB People's Forum; this was later renamed Northampton's LGBT and Q People's Forum in recogntion of the entire LGBT community. The Forum continue to meet several times each year to recognise the needs of Northampton's LGBT community and to have a safe space in which to express their needs and views on services provided by the Council and future plans for the town. Northampton Borough Council became a Stonewall Diversity Champion in 2010 and has continually improved its ranking in Stonewall's Workplace Equality Index.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the NGLBA in 2004, the Forgotten Fairytales project was hosted at the Northampton Museum and Art Gallery, which attempted to record the history and culture of the LGBT community in Northamptonshire. The exhibition ran from March to April 2004. The Northampton Museum and Art Gallery has since hosted a number of LGBT-related exhibitions, including Gaze and Wonder featuring local LGBT artists in 2012, and Stamp Out Hate Crime's exhibition recognising Holocaust Memorial Day and LGBT History Month in 2012. In previous years, the annual Holocaust Memorial Day exhibitions at the Guildhall included some specific LGB community content highlighting the suffering of LGB people in the Nazi Holocaust.

Northamptonshire held its first and only LGBT Pride in September 2004, which consisted of a programme of LGBT-related arts, cinema, entertainment, literature as well as a public event in Abington Park. Various attempts have been made to revive a Pride event in Northampton; none have been successful.

Civil partnerships were granted for homosexual couples in the UK in late 2005 and Northamptonshire registered 37 civil partnerships around the county within the first 5 weeks of its legislation. The first civil partnership registered in Northamptonshire was between Lesley Carroll and Lorraine Warwick, a lesbian couple from Kingsthorpe, on 5 December 2005 at The Guildhall. In 2006, Northampton LGB People's Forum held one of the first Civil Partnerships and Weddings Fairs in the UK at the town's Guildhall in partnership with the NLGBA, helping to develop the first Northamptonshire directory of LGB-friendly providers and prompting some local businesses to proactively reach out to LGB customers soon after the introduction of civil partnerships. Previously, from 2003, Northamptonshire County Council had granted "commitment ceremonies" for gay and lesbian couples in Northamptonshire who were prevented by law of taking the the official route of marriage to cement their relationship. These ceremonies could be held in register offices, civic buildings and approved venues such as stately homes and hotels, and each couple was allowed their own personal programme at their ceremony, which cultimated in the signing of a souvenir certificate. At the 2011 census, 284 people in Northampton were registered in a civil partnership.

2005 also saw the release of the popular Golden Globe-nominated film Kinky Boots, which celebrates Northampton's famous shoe industry alongside the LGBT community by telling the true story of one man's revival of his failing family shoe firm by finding inspiration in an exotic drag queen. A musical theatre adaptation of the film, maintaining its Northampton backdrop, premiered on Broadway in 2013 and was nominated for 13 Tony Awards. In 2005, Northampton was also one of the stops for the 19th London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival on Tour, which brought a number of various LGBT-related films to the Forum Cinema.

In 2006, Northampton's LGBT community stood in shock after the death of Michael Fardon in a homophobic attack where he was hit in the head and then thrown down a concrete stairwell. He was found dead on College Street on 14 July 2006, a week after last being seen alive socialising at The Boston. The bar held a tribute evening two weeks after Fardon was last seen alive, where friends lit candles in his memory and a held a two-minute silence at midnight. His attacker, James Hyland, who had attacked another man in the bar two weeks prior to this incident, was jailed for life. Between 2006 and 2007, the Northamptonshire Police Hate Crimes Unit investigated 150 homophobic incidents. NLGBA said the actual number of offences could have been higher as many offences go unreported. In 2007, there was another raised alert when three vicious homophobic attacks were reported: two in Midsummer Meadow and one outside The Boston. In memory of Fardon, The Boston installed an Infobox in 2007, a computer information point connected to the police, which allowed people to report homophobic attacks anonymously and to check on the progress of any crime of which they are a victim. In 2009, Northamptonshire Police was ranked as the 84th best employer of gay people in Stonewall's top 100 employers of gay people.

Since 2007, Northampton has annually recognised the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) with a ceremony at the Guildhall for councillors and the community that includes a minute's noise on behalf of LGBT people around the world and speeches from local groups, the Northampton LGBTQ People's Forum and rainbow-flag raising. In 2012, rugby player Ben Cohen MBE attended, giving a personal speech about the death of his father in Northampton and how this led him to set up his Stand Up Foundation. The same year, the Northampton Youth Forum received a National Diversity Award, recognising a range of work including their help and support to the LGBT community in Northampton. The Youth Forum has continued its work with Ben Cohen and his Stand Up Foundation to develop its new national anti-bullying programme (which includes tackling homophobia) with the musical Wicked. Schools and colleges in Northampton had the opportunity to pilot it in the 2013 summer term before going nationwide with the new school year in September 2013.

Northamptonshire County Council also launched a pioneering approach to tackling homophobic bullying in schools in 2007. The Tackling Diversity and Sexuality resource was an approach with all the practical steps schools needed to take to reduce homophobic bullying for both adults and pupils and is being run in conjunction with the NLGBA and the Healthy Schools Programme. The launch of the pack – developed by the county council inspection and advisory service, NIAS – coincided with National Anti-Bullying Week and followed a major piece of research completed in Northamptonshire in 2004 that found a majority had witnessed other pupils being homophobically bullied and a large minority said that they themselves had been homophobically bullied.

The Big Gay Bus at the 2012 Northampton Carnival

Despite the collapse of the NLGBA in 2009, a number of Northampton-based LGBT-friendly organisations have appeared in recent years to empower LGBT people all over Northamptonshire. Northampton is now home to several LGBT-friendly organisations and groups including LGBT social events organiser FAN Northants and the Northampton Gay Book Group. Elsewhere in Northamptonshire, Kettering's Steps Cabaret Bar was a popular gay bar in 2009 whilst Bar Sun (also in Kettering) and Corby's Lodge Park Bar hosted special gay nights in 2008 and 2012 respectively.

In 2009, a gay couple from Northampton were featured in the ground-breaking Channel 4 Dispatches documentary series about adoptive parents, showing their 18-month attempt to be approved as adoptive parents. In 2010, a same-sex couple from Northampton joined Peter Tatchell's Equal Love campaign, which sought to overturn the twin prohibitions on same-sex marriages and opposite-sex civil partnerships in the UK. The pair started a legal fight after their application for a civil marriage licence at the Northampton Register Officer was rejected. This motion challenged the UK's legal ban on same-sex marriage as only same-sex couples can apply for civil partnerships. The couple were among eight taking their case to the courts, arguing that UK law discriminates against gay people.

In 2012, Northampton's LGBT community proudly participated in Northampton Carnival's procession and at the annual Umbrella Fair. The town also hosted its first LGBT literary festival, booQfest, in addition to enjoying the success of many other FAN-endorsed events at popular venues and the setting up of Out There, a new service catering for LGBT youth. The town also established its very own gay-friendly rugby team Northampton Outlaws RFC the same year, making it the 9th gay-friendly rugby team in the UK and one of 40 internationally.

In 2013, the Northampton-based St Andrew's Healthcare was the only charity to take part in Stonewall's Healthcare Equality Index, coming 4th nationally and helping to develop baseline standards that organisations across the UK have to follow. St Andrew's Healthcare is a Stonewall Diversity Champion and in the past few years has continually improved its ranking in Stonewall's Healthcare Equality Index. St Andrew's placed at number 3 on the 2014 Index, before claiming the top spot at number 1 in 2015. St Andrew's also placed at 34 on the 2015 Workplace Equality Index. In 2013, Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust (NHFT) was also one of twenty health service organisations to become a Stonewall Health Champion. The same year, both Northampton College and the University of Northampton celebrating LGBT History Month; it was the college's first celebration of the month. There were also LGBT celebrations at Northampton Carnival and the Umbrella Fair in 2013, in addition to the second outing of booQfest, Northampton's LGBT Literary Festival, and a visit from Peter Tatchell to give a talk at the town's Guildhall on human rights.

In 2014, following the legalisation of same-sex marriage, many same-sex couples from Northampton were wed on the first day the law came into effect on 29 March. BooQfest was celebrated for the third time, hosted by Q Word (previously Northampton Gay Book Group), in association with FAN Northants, the LGBTQ Forum, Royal & Derngate and coincided with International Coming Out Day. Q Film, the town's LGBT film group, also started in 2014, who meet once a month to watch LGBT-related films at the Errol Flynn Filmhouse. A new LGBT network in Corby was also established in 2014 who also meet monthly. The same year, Northampton LGBT and Q People's Forum also launched the Straight Allies campaign at the annual Umbrella Fair.

In 2015, tackling homophobic, biphobic and transphobic bullying in Northamptonshire schools was the focus of the "I'm Still Me!" Conference in Northampton, which was organised by the Northamptonshire LGBT Partnership (Voluntary Impact Northamptonshire, NBC, FAN LGBT Community Network, Youth Works Kettering, The Lowdown, NHFT, Northampton School for Boys, Northampton College and NCC) and Stonewall. It was attended by 80 delegates and workshops explored issues for LGBT youth in general as well as good practice for both primary and secondary schools. Northampton School for Boys was also visited by Ian McKellen, who discussed LGBT rights and praised the school for its efforts to tackle homophobia and bullying. The students of school's LGBTQ Drama Group also gave a performance of their Theatre in Education piece titled "I'm Still Me", which they later took to the national Stonewall conference in London.

LGBT community

Social groups

• Corby LGBT Network
• FAN Northants
• Northampton LGBTQ Coffee Posse
• Northampton Outlaws RFC
• Q Film
• Q Word

Support groups

• Lesbian Line
• Northamptonshire's Deaf LGBT Group
• Q:alliance
• Solar Northamptonshire
• St Andrew's Healthcare LGBTQ and Straight People's Alliance

Staff networks

• Northamptonshire Healthcare Foundation Trust (NHFT) LGBT Staff and Allies network
• Spectrum, Northants Police
• St Andrew's Healthcare staff LGBT group

Forums

• Northampton Gender Equality Forum
• Northampton LGBT and Q People's Forum

Youth support

• My Big Gay Family
• Northampton College's LGBTQ Alliance
• Northampton University's LGBTQ Society
• Out There
• Stamp Out Hate Crime

Nightlife

• The Boston (Northampton's only gay bar)
• The Edge of Town (gay-friendly pub)
• Pink Punters (near Milton Keynes, just south of the Northamptonshire border)

Notable LGBT residents

• Errol Flynn (bisexual actor; worked for several months at Northampton's Royal Theatre)
• Maureen Colquhoun (lesbian politician; UK's first outed MP; represented Northampton North 1974–79)
• Ray Gosling (gay journalist, broadcaster, and gay rights activist; born in Weston Favell and grew up in Northampton)
• Alan Moore (straight LGBT-friendly writer who published AARGH! in response to Section 28 and the Thatcher government; born and resides in Northampton)
• Richard Coles (gay musician, journalist and Church of England priest; born in Northampton)
• Alan Carr (gay comedian; grew up in Northampton)
• Ben Cohen (straight LGBT-friendly rugby player and gay icon who set up the anti-bullying StandUp Foundation; born and played professionally in Northampton)

External links

• The Rainbow Map of Northampton (Google Maps)