Wildblood and Queenie: The Candy Bar, 129 St James Street 2004-2008

The Candy Bar at Brighton Pride. On the Pride Parade, on Preston Park, on point.

The Queen's Head pub in Steine Street, with its Freddie Mercury pub sign

Winnie Byanyima, Executive Director of UNAIDS and an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations visited Brighton on the 9th September 2021. She is a passionate and longstanding champion of social justice and gender equality, and leads the United Nations’ efforts to end the AIDS epidemic by 2030. Ms Byanyima believes that health care is a human right and was an early champion of a People’s Vaccine against the coronavirus that is available and free of charge to everyone, everywhere.

World AIDS Day 1996 – Brighton You can still see a World AIDS Day memorial in Brighthelm Gardens. It’s positioned at the base of a silver birch tree adjacent to the entrance doors on the North Road side. The plaque was unveiled on the 01 December 1996, in the presence of people with and affected by HIV, and representatives from local community groups and charities.

How do we tell and record our stories and our secrets? Nu McAdam (he/they) & Suchi Chatterjee (she/they) present to you ‘Your Lavender Life Part II: Secrets in the Woodwork’ with special guest Jane Traies. Jane Traies (she/her) local writer, researcher, storyteller, film maker, and oral historian has been recording the lives of queer people, uncovering and documenting untold stories. In this session Jane taught us about the fundamentals of Oral History, how to record it, asking the questions, getting consent, and how to navigate conversations about lives that may have remained secret for a long time. Jane then interviews Suchi Chatterjee and talks about her own Lavender Life, collected histories, archiving and the secrets that Brighton and Suchi has yet to reveal! 23 July 2026 at The Ledward Centre, Brighton Filmed by Lucy Lebrocq

Nu McAdam (he/they) & Suchi Chatterjee (she/they) presented ‘Your Lavender Life: Disability History, Activism & Intersectionality' at Daltons, Brighton on 23 March 2026. Featuring guest speaker Isaac Samuels OBE. At this event we talked about how important it is to archive personal queer and disabled histories in the local area. Recent years have taught us how much of our rights and autonomy is being taken away. In order to reverse this, a small step we can take is to keep our queer history safe. Filmed by Lucy Le Brocq