NEWS
FROM REGARDSUMMER 2006
NEWS
FROM REGARD
SUMMER 2006
Europride 2006
On 1 July, the traditional national Pride parade and rally
in London becomes Europride. Below are the access details that we have so far.
If you have any questions, please email access@pridelondon.org or ring 020 7494
2225. For all other Europride details, see the Pride website at www.pridelondon.org
or the LGBT press.
1. BSL interpreters
There will be BSL interpreters:
1. at the front of the Parade in the safe space for disabled people
2. on the stage in Trafalgar Square
3. on the stage at Leicester Square
4. in the Women’s space.
If you need a BSL interpreter for an emergency during Pride, please ask an access steward.
2. Blue Badge parking
Near to Trafalgar Square, site to be confirmed. There will be accessible shuttle buses to take disabled people and friends from the parking area to the start of the Parade.
3. Parade
There will be a stewarded safe space at the front of the parade, just behind the big Rainbow flag. Look for the Regard banner at the assembly point in Baker Street (at the top end nearest Oxford Street) from 12noon. Parade starts at 1pm. Nearest Underground: Marble Arch (250m away).
There will also be access stewards in the Youth space half way along the parade.
There will be an accessible toilet in the assembly area at the start of Parade. 10 manual wheelchairs will also be available, please bring someone with you to push you if at all possible.
There will be barriers along Oxford Street, so it is best to join us at the beginning of the parade.
The Parade ends at the Embankment, but if you want to do a shorter route you can come off at Trafalgar Square – just ask an access steward to let you through.
4. Trafalgar Square.
The safe space and viewing platform for disabled people and friends is next to Nelson’s column.
Accessible toilets are available next to the safe space, in the National Gallery, at Macdonalds in Leicester Square and many more — for details, see the Pride website, or ask an access steward.
There will be a large screen at Trafalgar Square so the Sign language interpreters can be easily seen.
5. Women’s space
(In Romilly street, Soho.) Facilities include a safe space, accessible toilet and BSL interpreters.
6. Leicester Square
Safe space. Accessible toilet in McDonalds. BSL interpreters on stage.
7. Access stewards will be available at all the main venues, in Soho and on the parade. Please ask if you have any questions about access.
8. Accessible places to stay - see the Pride website.
If you have any other questions about access, please email access@pridelondon.org and Pride will do its best to answer your questions.
We hope you enjoy Pride! Come and meet Regard
members in the safe space in Trafalgar Square. Tell us about your experience
of Pride – e-mail us or write to us.
Regard Online
This month Regard is launching our online community, Regard Online. All you will need to join our virtual community is access to email.
By sending an email to Regard Online, it will automatically be distributed to the rest of the members. If you don’t have regular access to email, you can opt for the weekly ‘digest’ version, where one email will be sent to you each week containing all of that week’s emails.
Our Executive Committee already uses emails to carry out much of its business and this has been very successful. Regard Online will include the news-based emails that have previously only been distributed amongst committee members, as well as regular committee reports.
The main function of Regard Online, though, is social. As the community develops, it is likely that other groups will grow from it, and that we will also set up a live chat room. For the moment, though, it is over to you!
The Regard Online egroup is only open to current members of Regard. To join the egroup, please contact the Secretary by email at secretary@regard.org.uk or by post to BM Regard, London WC1N 3XX. Please include your membership number and/or your address for identification.
Annual General Meeting Report
The 2005 Regard AGM was held on Sunday 4th December at the Vicarage Lane Community Centre in Stratford. The turnout was a bit disappointing — the weather was very poor — and the planned talk on transgender issues couldn't go ahead as planned because of a late cancellation by the speaker.
However a useful roundtable discussion replaced the talk, and gave the Executive Committee some helpful guidance on how Regard should include disabled transgender people in its work. The formal business of the meeting was then considered and a new Committee elected. The following people are the elected Officers for 2006:
Phil Reynolds and Karen Shook/Ju Gosling (Co-Chairs)
Phil Gosling (Secretary)
Judy Wilkinson (Treasurer)
Brenda Ellis (Membership Secretary – resigned but still on Committee)
The remaining Committee members and their responsibilities are:
Steven Devote (Electronic Penfriends Scheme Co-ordinator)
Chris Killick (Archive and Photo Publicity Co-ordinator)
Phil Reynolds/David Tyler (Database Co-ordinator)
Lee Elliot (Fundraising and Sponsorship Co-ordinator)
Julie Newman (Liaison with Disability Communities)
Kirsten Hearn (Liaison with LGBT Communities)
James Haskings (Liaison with HIV Communities)
Lindsay River (Liaison with Older Communities)
Charlie Hasted (Liaison with Youth Communities)
Ruth Bashall (Co-ordinator for Pride events)
Richard Jones has since been co-opted to jobshare the Liaison with HIV Communities role with James Haskings. Matthew Emile has been co-opted as Liaison with Learning Disability Communities and Afro-Caribbean/Ethnic Minority Communities).
The following positions are currently vacant:
- Newsletter and Communications Co-ordinator
- Webmaster
- Liaison with Transgender Communities
- Membership Secretary
- Groups Co-ordinator
- Policy Officer
If you would like to contact any of the Committee about their
work or would like to help in some way, please get in touch! The contact email
address is (see front page for contact details). If you do want to volunteer,
however, please indicate specifically what you would like to get involved with
so I can put you in touch with the relevant Committee member. Phil Gosling (Secretary)
Get involved!
Regard is very much an organisation that is run by the members, for the members. In particular, we encourage members to set up local groups where no groups for disabled LGBT people are already in existence. (We welcome affiliations from existing disabled LGBT groups, and will always do our best to promote membership of these.)
Groups may be formal or informal. For example, members may want to meet once a month in an LGBT venue, and advertise this so that other disabled LGBT people can join them. This particularly benefits people who have been isolated since becoming disabled or who are just coming out, but is fun for everyone concerned.
Alternatively, members may want to set up a formal group, perhaps even an official branch of Regard, and apply for local funding. Either way, we will give you whatever help we can, and will advertise your group to members in the same area. Our contact details are at the end of this article. We also welcome new members of the Executive Committee. The positions that are currently vacant are listed in the AGM report. However, members who want to take up new areas of work are welcome too.
The Executive Committee meets four times a year (currently in London), but we carry out the bulk of our work by using an email group. You do not have to be able to travel to London to join the committee, nor do you have to have access to email as we can make alternative arrangements if necessary.
We are able to co-opt new members without waiting for the Annual
General Meeting. So if you would like to volunteer — or just to find out
more about what committee membership involves — please contact us at BM
Regard, London WC1N 3XX. Email: secretary@regard.org.uk
Website links
We are continuing to develop our website at www.regard.org.uk — although more slowly than if we had our own webmaster (volunteers please see the article Get Involved!). As part of the website development we want to make sure that we are linking to all the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and disability websites that members would find useful. We are particularly keen, of course, to list disabled LGBT sites, as well as to include contact details for disabled LGBT groups.
If you can recommend a website that you think other members would find useful, please email secretary@regard.org.uk. Please also let us know about any disabled LGBT groups that you are in contact with.
Equalities Review
The Equalities Review is being carried out in order to advise the Government on what action is needed to tackle social inequalities, and in particular inequalities based on race, gender, disability, age and sexuality. In March the Panel published their Interim Report, inviting responses from interested organisations and individuals.
Regard was invited by the Greater London Authority to provide a speaker for the London consultation event, held at City Hall in May, and Co-Chair Ju Gosling attended. Ju was also invited to join a panel discussion on the same topic at the State of London annual conference where the Mayor presents his annual report.
The Interim Report was heavily criticised on many grounds. Among other things, Ju pointed out that no disabled people’s organisations had been consulted before producing it, and that the language used in the report was completely inaccessible. To make matters worse, no copies had been produced in alternative formats such as Braille and easy words and pictures.
Following these events, Regard produced a formal response to the
report. A copy of this is available on our website at www.regard.org.uk: if
you would like a print copy, please let us know.
Regard recently participated in a project coordinated by London Metropolitan University on Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Workers: Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the Workplace. Disability liaison officer Julie Newman represented Regard on the steering group managing the project, and spoke at the conference to launch the final report in June.
Julie pointed out that for disabled LGBT workers there are two ‘coming out’ processes: coming out as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered; and coming out as disabled. Coming out as disabled can trigger an enormously negative response, and this may include disabilist stereotyping and prejudice from within the LGBT community itself.
It is critical that workers are able to make positive choices
about disclosure of being disabled as well as their sexuality. If positive steps
are taken to create an accessible workplace the benefits will impact on all.
Both the project and the conference enabled Regard to make valuable connections across the LGBT and employment fields.
Look out for . . . Co-Chair Karen Shook, MC-ing
at the Liberty Disability Rights Festival in Trafalgar Square on 2 September.
A Rough guide to Crete
Phil Gosling writes: Crete is the second largest island of the Eastern Mediterranean, long and thin with a spine of high mountains dominating the centre. Its turbulent history stretches back to the Bronze Age Minoan civilization, passing on through waves of invaders, Mycenaean then the ‘classical’ Greeks, Romans, Saracens, Byzantines, Venetians, Ottoman Turks and most recently the Germans.
I travelled to Maleme in western Crete for two weeks in early October. It turned out to be a good time to visit, off-peak and with comfortably warm temperatures in the high 20’s centigrade.
The early morning flight from Gatwick to Hania (the regional capital) took just over four hours (including the obligatory delay waiting for a take-off slot!). Coming into land at Hania, views of a shimmering blue sea gave way to the dry, dusty and barren landscape of the Akrotiri peninsula. The airport shares its site with a military base, so there was plenty of scope for fighter jet spotting whilst we taxied to a halt!
Being a wheelchair user meant that me and my Polish PA Lukasz had to wait last to disembark via a special ambi-lift vehicle. It’s an opportunity for the discerning disabled traveller to experience at first hand the re-supplying and refitting of a jet aircraft between flights, complete with up-close engine noise and the mingled aromas of fuel and chemical toilet wastes … in compensation, you do get to jump the queue through passport control!
The hotel’s accessible minivan took us on the forty minute ride west along the coast to Maleme, a town that played a crucial role in the German invasion of Crete in 1941. The Germans had launched a near-disastrous airborne assault along the north coast of the island. Most of their paratroopers and gliders were shot out of the air but crucially at Maleme they captured the airstrip and were allowed time to reinforce the bridgehead. Then the tide of battle turned, Allied forces were driven out and the Cretans faced four years of often brutal occupation.
Today though, memories of this appear to have been put to one side. Germans and British make-up probably the majority of the tourists visiting Crete and the German war cemetery overlooking Maleme is beautifully tended and preserved.
We stayed at the Eria Resort Hotel, which is rather unique, the whole place being designed for disabled users of every variety. There are fourteen rooms, an outside pool with a ramp for getting in/out of the water, a gym and a sauna. The hotel offers excursions in its minivan to some of the local sights and these were a good opportunity to suss out the whole area as well as to mix with the other holidaymakers.
I’d hired an accessible van for the second week of the holiday and on a couple of days we shared the trip with an ex-army officer (a veteran of the first Gulf war who’d suffered a stroke) and his young wife, both of whom now worked for the M.O.D. Once I took the opportunity to ask him what the UK got out of “the special relationship” with the USA. “Yes, we often discuss that” was the reply, delivered in the best Sir Humphrey Appleby fashion!
I particularly enjoyed the unspoilt scenery. The mountains and all around the coast are easily accessible on day trips. Indeed because the island is relatively narrow it is possible to do a north to south coast drive in just a couple of hours.
Once you are away from all the new-build villas and apartments of the narrow coastal strip, you find yourself in a fertile lowland farming country covered with olive groves and orange trees. Then after a few miles you begin the climb into the mountains.
The roads remain of pretty good quality but they wind up and up with precipitous drops to the one side. Little hamlets and churches cling to the hill-sides along the way. The mountain landscape is really wild and dramatic: hairpin bends in the roads, gorges and a crazy jumble of valleys; real bandit country! Surely none of Crete’s many invaders could ever have ruled the mountain peoples by force alone?
As you get higher still the olive groves finally give way to barren scrub populated by the goats. Every so often you come across a lonely, tethered dog wagging its tail rather pathetically as the car approaches - they’re not sentimental about animals in Crete, obviously! Then you descend again.
The village-resort of Paleohora, on the south coast, was my favourite place of all. It’s situated on a narrow headland beneath the ruins of a Venetian castle sacked by the pirate Barbarossa in 1539. There’s a harbour on one side, a long sandy beach on the other and in between lots of cafes and little shops, a club and a wonderful, laid-back, bohemian atmosphere. In the evening the High Street is closed to traffic and taken over by the cafes for outdoor dining!
It was a great holiday and I can’t wait to return!
Notes
Full Membership of Regard is open to disabled lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgendered people. Friends, supporters and allies are welcome to become Associate Members. Organisations and groups who support Regard's campaigning and other work can become Organisational Members.
Full membership and associate membership costs £5 and organisational membership costs £10. However, we don’t want anyone to be excluded from membership because they are unable to afford it, so we offer free membership in cases of need. If you are able to pay MORE for your membership, or make a donation at any other time of the year, then please do. Regard does not receive any regular grant funding, and all of our income goes to support voluntary work by the membership.
A membership form is available to print out and post on the Regard website at www.regard.org.uk. You can also write to us for a form at BM Regard, London, WC1N 3XX, or email us at secretary@regard.org.uk.
Alternatively you can email us your contact details and tell us what type of membership you are applying for. Regard can send you a completed form with your information filled in and a return addressed envelope. You can then send your form and subscription by post.
Later in 2006 we will be launching a new campaign to open up ‘the scene’ to disabled members of the LGBT community. We will initially be campaigning in London, in conjunction with the disability organisation Artsline and their Attitude is Everything campaign. Later we will be broadening this to cover the country as a whole. If you would like to get involved, perhaps as a ‘mystery shopper’ to report back on how accessible your local LGBT venue is, contact Regard.