‘The Log Books’ by Tash Walker and Adam Zmith review

Growing up in England at the end of the 20th century – in an era when Section 28 forbade local authorities from ‘promoting homosexuality’ and before ubiquitous internet access – Tash Walker and Adam Zmith suffered homophobic bullying, repressive school environments, and family conflict. Only decades later did they discover that queer adults had been working throughout those years, and before, to build community, seek pleasure, and resist state violence. The Log Books uncovers this queer heritage through a unique set of records: the call logs of Switchboard, the UK’s LGBTQ+ helpline.

Switchboard was founded in London in 1974, in the heady days of gay liberation. It took calls from across the country. As its records reveal, those calls covered a variety of subjects including requests for support with coming out to family members, information on local gay bars, and even joyful reports of a first sexual experience. The Log Books, which began as a podcast, contextualises Switchboard’s archive with interviews with the volunteers who ran it as well as other witnesses to late 20th-century British queer history. It centres stories of resilience and survival, exploring how queer people have consistently found pleasure, family, community, and pursued political action in the face of state repression, violence, and the devastation of HIV and AIDS. Walker and Zmith’s sources allow them to bring together two quite different points of view on the queer 1970s-2000s: that of those plugged in to London’s LGBTQ+ community (Switchboard’s staff) and that of those at its furthest margins (its callers). It also allows them to bring the particularities of British queer history out from under the shadow of narratives dominated by the US, highlighting, for example, how the availability of cheap housing in the 1970s created conditions for experiments in communal living that were partially foreclosed by the Right to Buy scheme in the 1980s. The records show how British queer life has always included trans people, people of colour, and disabled people – but also how members of these communities have faced discrimination even within queer spaces, including from Switchboard volunteers.

Walker and Zmith situate themselves as central characters in the book. While their elders were going out dancing, having sex, and answering the phone, Zmith navigated life as a closeted teenager coping with his parents’ hostile reaction to his older sister’s coming out, while Walker angrily confided in their diary about how unseen they felt. There is sometimes a tendency to universalise isolation as the defining experience of the Section 28 generation, but the authors’ evident longing for the queer parental figures they lacked as children does allow for moving encounters with their older interviewees. Zmith meets men who defied the odds to survive 1990s HIV diagnoses only to now, ageing, be left behind by social services. Walker returns to their hometown to confront the former teacher who, then closeted, did not acknowledge them when they came out to her, revealing the pressures that queer adults were under at the time. Both authors meet the volunteers who ran Switchboard for decades, who recall traumatic incidents such as the aftermath of the 1999 Admiral Duncan pub bombing, and defiantly laugh off distressing encounters with the police. Such moments of intergenerational contact are still regrettably rare within organised queer community.

Today, as the British government seeks to limit young trans people’s access to healthcare, a new generation is growing up in need of adults who will show up for them. The Log Books is a timely and moving reminder of the unsung heroes who have long been doing this work.

• The Log Books: Voices of Queer Britain and the Helpline That Listened
  Tash Walker and Adam Zmith
  Faber, 416pp, £20
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Samuel Rutherford is Lecturer in LGBTQ+ History at the University of Glasgow.