08/09/2020
Bristol's LGBTQ communities are in mourning this week but thankful for the life and activism of Dale Wakefield who has passed on at the age of seventy eight. She died on Saturday 5th September surrounded by her family and friends. Dale founded Bristol's Gay Switchboard in 1975. A Bishopston person, Dale was married in younger life, but her marriage ended and she moved to London where she worked as a Prison Officer. It was here that she realised she was gay although did not have a relationship at that point in time. In the early seventies, Dale moved back to her home city where the radicalism of the Women's Movement and Gay Liberation Movement was shaking things up in the West Country. Along with the great artist and painter, Monica Sjoo, Dale helped establish a women's magazine called Move, which lived the principles of the women's liberation movement and was published collectively. As Dale told Mary Milton and Terry Starr in an interview for “ShoutOut” in 2012, she found that many of the calls to the Women's Liberation Group came from lesbians, gay men and bisexual people. Quietly and with little fuss, she established Bristol's Gay Switchboard from her own living room in Hill Street, in the Totterdown area of the city, which went live on 1st February 1975. This was only one year after the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard went online in 1974 and shows how ahead of the times Dale and the other gay liberationists in Bristol were. Volunteers would take calls from Dale's house during advertised hours, but at other times, Dale herself would get out of bed to speak to people who needed advice, support, signposting and reassurance. In an age of the internet and multiple LGBTQ charities, it is essential to usall that we remember just how important the local gay switchboards were, along with fanzines, small scale magazines, alternative bookstores and the commercial scene in forging a gay identity. In 1978, the Gay Switchboard Bristol moved over to the much missed Lesbian and Gay Centre on Gasferry Road, in itself a crucial institution that would continue into the early 1980's. Dale helped the continued work of the Switchboard and also became involved in a more specialist service for gay women, Bristol Lesbian Line. In addition, in 1977 Dale helped organise the very first Avon Gay Pride event. Mary Whitehouse and other religious campaigners were trying their utmost to close down the radical press in the seventies, and focussed their attentions on Gay News, for its temerity to publish a homoerotic work involving Jesus of Nazareth. For LGBTQ people and allies in the atheist, humanist and secular movments, the Gay News blasphemy trial became a cause celebre and many regional Prides were organised to raise funds for the newspaper's defence fund. Dale, like many people from our communities, was drawn to help people, and worked as a nurse and a teacher during her varied career. She moved back to South Bristol in 2002 and spent her later years only a mile or so from the Hill Street house where the Gay Switchboard had been born. Dale’s dining table on which had sat that first telephone receiver, was exhibited in M-Shed as part of Out Stories Bristol’s ‘Revealing Stories’ Exhibition in 2013. Today's Pride Committee said “We know she helped so many people and we as a community owe her so much, for fighting the fight, paving the way and just being a friendly ear. Thank you. As we head into the final week of Pride 2020 we stand tall because of you”. Mary Milton, the co-founder of the LGBT Magazine programme “ShoutOut”, said “She was very modest about her links with switchboard and it was always really hard to get her to talk about it. “The LGBT community in Bristol owes much to her.”. This article was written thanks to research by Andy Hole from ShoutOut and Outstories, Andy Foyle from Outstories, and Mary Milton, correspondent for B247.
