Join us for an evening with writer/comedienne Dr Clare Summerskill to discuss Gateway to Heaven: Fifty Years of Gay and Lesbian Oral History

About Gateway to Heaven:

In 2006, Clare Summerskill wrote and produced a play called Gateway to Heaven based entirely on older LGBT people's memories which, with Arts Council funding, toured twice to theatres around the UK. It was then made into a film version for Age Concern (now Age UK). After The London Metropolitan Police saw the film, they commissioned Clare to make another film made in the same way from interviews, about the relationship over the last 70 years or so between the police and older LGBT people in London. This film was called Queens' Evidence and is still used by The Met as a training resource. Clare has since worked on several other theatre projects with older LGBT people including a production, Staying Out Late, which was created from a series of drama workshops resulting in a performance, addressing the issues of older people being gay and in care. In her talk, Clare will be speaking about these projects, all based on interviews with older LGBT people, and she will also present deeply moving and occasionally hilarious extracts from interviewees' oral histories.

About Clare Summerskill:

Clare attained her doctorate in verbatim theatre at Royal Holloway University of London. Over recent years, she has worked for the London Metropolitan Archives, collecting fifty LGBTQ oral histories and she co-founded the LGBTQ Special Interest Group in the UK Oral History Society. Her publications include: Fifty Years of Lesbian and Gay Oral History (Tollington Press, 2012); Creating Verbatim Theatre from Oral Histories (Routledge, 2020); the plays: Gateway to Heaven, Hearing Voices, and Rights of Passage (all published by Tollington Press); and she is the co-editor of New Directions in Queer Oral History – Archives of Disruption (Routledge, 2022). She is also a lesbian comedian and songwriter, performing her stage shows to theatres in the UK and the US.

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