***ILLUSTRATION REQUEST*** GAVIN MCGREGOR: LGBT TREASURES FOUND IN LOFT
(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

Earlier this year, I went to help clear my friend Louise’s attic as she prepared to move with her young son. But I was also eager to take a look at the discovery she had been meaning to show me.

After much banging heads on dusty rafters, we found two carrier bags. I plunged in my hand and pulled out a fistful of pin badges.

‘16 OK – Lower the age of consent’, said one. ‘Behind every great woman is a man who tried to stop her’, the next one quipped. ‘Gays Against Fascism’ and ‘Ireland – England’s Vietnam’, proclaimed others.

It became clear that we were looking at someone’s personal artefacts from a crucial period in the LGBTQ movement – an archive that ended in the mid-1980s and had been gathering dust for years.

There was a powerful sense of a moment in time put on pause, and a life abruptly interrupted.

The 130 pin badges covered everything from 1970s and 80s Gay Pride emblems, feminist slogans, Save the Greater London Council campaign, Ireland, to anti-fascism, atheism, anarchism and more – a spectrum of radical left causes, irreverent humour and slogans and symbols that were a mystery to me.

After Louise entrusted the archive to me, I set out to find the identity of its owner.

The manuscript of the first draft of a novel was my best clue.

An internet search revealed that the novel had been published, and the author, Bill Albert, had a website with his contact details.

I fired off an email asking who, in South London, he thought might have had a copy of his manuscript. He had a ready answer: Paud Hegarty. Paud had set up a short-lived publishing company to which Bill had sent his novel.

Paud Hegarty, I soon discovered, had been manager of the Gay’s The Word bookshop in Bloomsbury during the 1980s and 1990s.

By all accounts he was a well-loved, clever, politically minded man with a dry wit. He played an important role at a pivotal time for LGBTQ campaigning and broader radical politics, not only by virtue of his position running the important community hub that is Gay’s The Word, but also because of the personal courage, sacrifice and energy he invested in the role.

Paud continued a tradition of making the bookshop available as a meeting place for gay and lesbian support groups and for political campaigners, including Lesbians & Gays Support the Miners, whose work many now know of from the film Pride.

And he had, along with the shop’s directors, courageously fought a raid by Customs and Excise – a fight eventually won by the shop and by the community that rallied to support it.

Paud was set to channel his intellect and passion into a new career in law (‘Keep your filthy laws off my body!’ demanded one badge), but sadly this promise was cut short by his death in 2000, aged just 45, from Aids-related pneumonia.

It was at this point that his carefully compiled archive of badges, pamphlets and other memorabilia, stored in his south London attic for safekeeping, must have been overlooked.

Since these discoveries, we’ve entrusted the collection to Gay’s The Word bookshop, where manager Jim MacSweeney – a friend and colleague of Paud’s – says the artifacts have ‘come home’.

You can visit, at 66 Marchmont Street, London, and see the entire badge collection on display.

The badges, seen together, create a vivid, evocative portrait of the struggles and concerns of that time.

They have proven to be powerful in bringing to light the stories and memories of people who lived through those times, and help us remember those campaigns – perhaps because they are unignorably personal items, wearable history.

They adorned the lapels, t-shirts and jackets of brave people taking a stand in sometimes dangerous circumstances, and they seem still charged with that energy of love, pride, fear and bravery.

As someone stands in the bookshop and surveys the framed collection, memories and personal recollections often pour forth.

For those unable to visit the shop in person, I’ve put all the images online at the Paud’s Pins website, and there, too, I’ve received beautiful, moving, sad, funny and inspiring stories.

‘My dad had an enamel Gay and Lesbian Switchboard badge pinned to the inside of the car visor,’ Cara commented.

‘My father’s partner died HIV+ in ’84, and he died of HIV/AIDS in ’95, so it’s a badge that connects me with my formative years and the men that raised me.’

Other badges can provide a historical education for those of us too young to have lived through those times and whose schooling has ignored the details of this important civil rights movement.

I had no idea, for example, about the important support work done on a shoestring by the Gay Switchboard, or the pioneers at the London Gay Teenage Group, until the pins started those conversations.

Those who can fill in details have begun to get in touch through the website, telling the dramatic story behind a badge reading ‘Support positive images of gays and lesbians in Haringey schools’, or offering anecdotes that explain the mysterious symbolism of a meat cleaver embedded in a pink triangle.

I was even contacted by a veteran of the Stonewall uprising, who has his own astonishing collection of memorabilia.

In what often seems like a time of unprecedented openness and acceptance, it is startling to realise just how recently social attitudes and persecutory laws have changed, and as a result, LGBTQ history remains under-documented, sparsely archived and collated, and largely untaught on curriculums.

Section 28 – the Thatcher era law that banned local government from ‘promoting’ homosexuality – continues to have a chilling effect on schools’ willingness to teach LGBT-relevant sex and relationships education, let alone the history of our struggle for civil rights, and this chill leaves even LGBTQ people ignorant of our own history.

Oral history projects have enormous potential to enable our LGBT elders to have their stories documented and celebrated.

I believe Paud made his collection because he suspected it would one day be of historical interest, so every time a new recollection is offered, it’s thrilling and gratifying.

Each shared memory grows the potential for Paud’s archive to have a positive impact, telling LGBTQ history through a diverse range of voices.

But so far, this project must only have scratched the surface of the stories that could be brought to light if the badges are seen by more people, so I hope people will share the website, Facebook page and Twitter widely, come forward with their contributions and encourage others to build a unique grassroots radical history resource.

MORE : These are the UK’s most powerful LGBT people

MORE : The invisibility of LGBT people on Love Island is problematic and irresponsible

MORE : There’s been a big increase in people saying they’re LGBT