Picture
by David Hemm at Nottingham Pride
BRADFORD IDAHO
2009
The International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia (IDAHO) will be
marked in Bradford by a Civic Reception by the Lord Mayor on Monday 18 May, from
6pm to 8pm. The reception is free and all who support the fight against
homophobia are invited.
The free event takes place at the City Training Centre, 41 Chapel Street,
Bradford BD1 5BY in the "Little Germany" quarter of the City.
A variety of speakers will be supporting the Lord Mayor. These speakers
include, Mr Gay International 2009 PC Mark Carter, West Yorkshire Police; Aldene
Woodward from the West Yorkshire Fire Service, Joy Howard, June Hunt and
celebrated author Narvel Annable, together with music from Bradford’s
Lesbian and Gay Youth Group (BLAGY)
This is the first ever Civic Reception for the LGB communities in
Bradford.
The Rainbow Flag will be flying over City Hall and there will be
information stalls and a free buffet.
The venue has level access and a sign language interpreter has
been reserved for the reception but if you have additional access needs or to
confirm you need an interpreter, please contact me on 01274 431560 or the Equity
Partnership on 01274 727779 or by text on 079414921610 or email by Friday
1st May 2009
Places to the IDAHO reception are limited and must be booked via the
Equity Partnership on 01274 727779 or by text on 079414921610.
The event is organized by Bradford Council’s LGB Employee Focus Group,
the Equity Partnership, Mesmac and Unison and is supported by the Big Lottery
Fund.
I look forward to seeing you there!!
Paul Hunt
Chair LGB Employee Focus Group Bradford Council
Bradford Pride
Narvel Annable, ‘our adopted Bradfordian,’ has been invited to be a part
of the Evening of Comedy & Culture which is to be held at Bradford’s Colour
Museum on Thursday, May 28th 2009 hosted by Paul Hunt, Chief Feature
writer for SHOUT! Narvel will be reading extracts from his
new book Secret Summer.
For more information on the full programme of Bradford Pride which starts
on May 23rd to June 5th - visit
www.equitypartnership.org.uk or contact
rachel@equitypartnership.org.uk or
phone 01 274 72 77 59 / 79
Author to be Key Speaker at City’s Gay Celebrations
Society must still fight prejudices, writer Narvel will tell his audience
This was the main
heading and sub-heading of a sensitive and very well written feature by
Chris
Jones of the Derby Evening Telegraph printed on Friday, October 24th
2008.
Narvel Annable
wishes it to be known that he is grateful to Mr Jones and his editor
Steve Hall
for this splendid support for the LGBT community. Also to be commended is
Telegraph photographer Mike Inman who skilfully composed and captured an
eye-catching image of the author joyfully and proudly waving the Rainbow Flag
which is now the international symbol of Gay Pride.
A DERBYSHIRE
author has been invited to speak in front of hundreds of people at a major event
organised by the gay community.
Narvel Annable
will be making an address on the steps of Bradford Town Hall for the
International Day Against Homophobia.
The event, on May
17th next year, marks the anniversary of the day the World Health
Organisation removed homosexuality from the list of mental illnesses in 1990.
Please note that
the actual IDAHO date falls on a Sunday, therefore the Bradford City Hall Civic
Reception event is planned for Monday, May 18th 2009.
IDAHO Day has been
running in the UK since 1993 and aims to improve attitudes towards
homosexuality.
Mr Annable, 63,
has written three novels dealing with his experiences growing up in Heanor and
discovering his sexuality. It is the success of his books that led him to
be invited to address the event. He said –
“It is a great
honour for me to be able to talk about these issues to so many people. When I was growing up, I was badly bullied by children and older people who
just didn’t understand the person I was. It got to the point where I
nearly killed myself. When I give my speech in Bradford, I
will be focusing on those experiences. I’ll try to make sure people in the
gay community and people outside of it know how important it is to admit and
understand the truth.
"Over the years, things have improved. Gay people are more accepted because the
profile of the community is now much higher. But there is still a long way
to go. I feel gay people in Britain are still as persecuted as African
Americans were in the 1950s.”
Mr Annable of
44 Dovedale Crescent, Belper, Derby DE56
1HJ has also been asked to speak at
Chesterfield’s Our Lady and All Saints’ Church for World AIDS Day on December 1st.
He will talk about homophobia
and the dangers of the disease still facing members of the gay community.
Estimates show that more than 80,000 people are now living with HIV in the
United Kingdom and nearly 800 people were diagnosed with the disease in 2007
alone. He said –
“Make no mistake; AIDS is still a killer
and an awful terrible illness. In Africa it kills one in three people and
is reaching the scale of an epidemic.
“Just because you
hear less about it these days doesn’t mean it’s any less severe.
“Great steps have
been made to control it but, as with all homosexual issues, the key is in
education.”
Paul Hunt,
Chairman of Bradford’s Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Focus Group,
which organised the city’s IDAHO
Day, said Mr Annable was chosen to speak in Bradford because of his age and
experience. He said –
“All Narvel’s books are successful in Yorkshire. He has seen a lot of changes
in attitude towards gay people as he has grown up.
“We felt he would give an excellent speech and connect really strongly to the
hundreds of people who will be there on the day.”
In a formal
invitation to Narvel Annable, Paul Hunt wrote –
“You will recall attending the Yorkshire Cross Council LGBT Meeting in September
2007 as our Guest Speaker. Your talk was felt to have been a resounding
success and feedback from participants about your work was extremely positive.
“We have recently begun planning an event to commemorate The International Day
against Homophobia 2009 and have selected a small number of people we believe
would best represent the thoughts and feelings of the LGBT Community on this
very special day. I am therefore pleased to extend a formal invitation to
you to join us as one of our Principal Speakers.”
Secret Summer
Update
As of January
2009, Secret Summer,
currently at approximately 75,000 words is about 65% complete. At font 11
/ A5, this ‘organic’ novel is now over 200 pages in extent and still evolving
from all parts, not just from the end.
The working title
of each chapter could still change. However, the following will give the
reader a flavour of the content and tone of this autobiographic whodunit which
is subtitled – ‘A Mystery set in Derbyshire 1966’.
Chapter 1 – Dreams
of Derbyshire
Chapter 2 – The
Windsor Bath House
Chapter 3 – Ugly
Old Trolls
Chapter 4 – Butch
as a Brick
Chapter 5 – Menace
and Magic
Chapter 6 – The
Sultan’s Palace
Chapter 7 – Hate,
Anger and Burning Injustice
Chapter 8 – Love’s
First Kiss
Chapter 9 – A Lad
from Huddersfield
Chapter 10 – A
Good Boy
Chapter 11 – A
Party of Chickens
Chapter 12 –
Chains of Enchantment
Chapter 13 – Plan
of Escape
Chapter 14 –
Naughty Boys up a Tree
Chapter 15 – Hung
Up on Morals
Chapter 16 –
Manhattan – An Isle of Joy
Chapter 17 –
Monsters from the Id
Chapter 18 –
Excitement of Adventure
Chapter 19 – The
Movie Changes to Colour
Chapter 20 –
Sneering Snobs
Chapter 21 – The
Wolfenden Report
Chapter 22 –
Martin Harcourt QC
Chapter 23 – Hades
Under High Tor
Chapter 24 – A
Horror of Great Darkness Came Upon Me
Chapter 25 – Lost
in a Labyrinth
Chapter 26 –
Secret Silence of Sodom
Chapter 27 –
Wealthy Hedgehogs
Chapter 28 –
Narrations of a Naughty Gnome
Chapter 29 – Old
Nottingham
Chapter 30 – Thou
Shalt Not Lie With Mankind
Here is the
proposed blurb for the back cover of Secret Summer followed by the first
chapter. As with the rest of the work, it is continually subject to change.
Secret Summer
A Mystery set in Derbyshire 1966
Why secret?
Because when you are young, when you are in love and if you are gay in 1966 - it
must be secret. You must love in secret, lust in secret, hunt in
secret, meet in secret and play in secret. The alternative would be
unthinkable. And, in 1966 - if things go wrong, horribly wrong,
dangerously wrong, criminally wrong - you can't tell your heterosexual friends,
you can't tell your parents and you certainly can't tell the police!
Homosexual friends
must be kept apart from parents, family and regular friends. Nineteen
hundred and sixty six was the summer of secret love for Simeon Hogg. See
Simeon in love; a rollercoaster, a frantic mixture of agony and ecstasy spanning
the Atlantic Ocean. He has no support save for that which was available
from the secretive and frequently unreliable world of gay men who were riddled
with all their own personal problems, repressions and hang-ups.
Here is a world
which could be very miserable indeed, a world which existed long before the
advent of the Rainbow Flag, Peter Tatchell and Stonewall. It was a world
without annual Gay Pride events, Gay History Months and a world devoid of
support services for homosexuals which would be available in every city and
every large town in Britain 40 years later.
Meet the old
quirky characters and a few new ones in this heartrending tale of young love in
which, yet again, Narvel Annable reaches down into the joys and sorrows of his
past and produces an autobiographic account of laughs, adventure, secret passion
and pain. All the usual ingredients are here for another cracking
whodunit; a missing person, suspected murder - all set against a backdrop of
beautiful Derbyshire hills and the ugly unforgiving criminal underworld of
Detroit.
Chapter 1
Dreams of Derbyshire
As usual, Simeon
Hogg was homesick for England. As usual, to ease this chronic misery, he
indulged himself by 'playing back' a pleasant memory of cycling along leafy
Derbyshire lanes. He selected a recollection from his early teens, a ride
from Belper to Wirksworth, a cool bright day in late September. The boy
stood hard on pedals. Slowly, very slowly in low gear he pumped up a
steep, pretty little lane, up, up to those windswept heights, up into the scent
of fern and browning bracken.
This trip was
memorable for its beauty, but also for its challenge. Simeon was often
stopping to study his precious, cloth-bound, 'one inch' Ordnance Survey map in
an effort to carefully navigate through a confusing myriad of many narrow,
winding country lanes, all going everywhere. There were lots of
cross-roads with intriguing signs pointing to odd sounding places - Gorseybank,
Shottle, Alderwasley, Alport Height, Idridgehay - all so very strange - all so
very Derbyshire.
Illuminated by
dazzling autumnal sunshine, brilliant white clouds were chased by the wind
across a heavenly vault of deep blue. This same wind roared through a
battle-scared ash tree, danced the bracken, flattened the open meadow but
appeared to have no power over a stubborn craggy old hawthorn at the edge of his
pretty lane. Tirelessly, it speeded Simeon and moved a million different
weeds, weeds mature after a long summer, weeds deep green and weeds beautifully
brown flashing by as, alternatively, the lane sank into a ravine and then
suddenly ascended to reveal magnificent views to the west.
The physical
exertion, the physical pleasure, the rhythm of waving trees was consistent with
Simeon's own body rhythms, breaths of sweet fresh air, panting, his increased
heart-beat born of ecstatic exercise which could never be achieved in a vast
ugly conurbation called Detroit.
Here, in his head,
he was home. Here, over a swath of impenetrable prickly gorse he could see
forever. Here, on his bicycle, he was on top of the world, could see a
view of the whole world endlessly stretching out until it dissolved into a misty
distant ... and, as the reverie weakened ... the scene dissolved and resolved
back into the present reality ... a grim reality.
These were not the
sunlit green hills of Derbyshire in late September 1959; these were the hideous,
blighted, flat expanses of an endless, benighted conurbation in early January
1966 when a sadder Simeon, barely out of his teens, navigated his car off the
I94 Edsel Ford Freeway to join the John Lodge Freeway which would speed him into
Downtown Detroit.
Even though his
destination was sex, he was still sad owing to a massive complexity of problems,
of which, homesickness for England was just a part. At this moment, on the
Lodge Freeway, this unhappy 20 year old, trapped in an alien land, was
overwhelmed by a multitude of vague miseries. He was incapable of
analysing, unable to untangle the convoluted complications of his present
circumstances. No professional gay-friendly counsellors were available -
would not be available - for another four decades. Simeon was repressed.
Simeon was isolated from friends, family and colleagues by the brick wall of
ignorance, bigotry and prejudice which today we refer to as homophobia.
Emotionally, he was hiding inside of himself. Effectively, he was an
outlaw. He was cut off from all the well established heterosexual social
structures of family support.
Simeon knew that
he was queer. He knew it every time he saw a comely face, every time he
saw nice butch bulges held snug inside of tight fitting sexy jeans. He
also knew that it was wrong to be queer. He accepted received opinion
about a certain 'disgusting disorder' which was sometimes treated with electric
shock aversion therapy. Still imprisoned inside the primitive peasant
values of his working-class family, and, in the absence of educated, enlightened
counsel, Simeon Hogg was falling victim to that most dreaded malaise which often
infected homosexuals in the mid 20th century - self hate.
For as long as he could
remember, the heterosexual majority had, at every opportunity, reinforced their
hard line against queers, perverts, poufs. These ingrained homophobic
attitudes, written in stone, written inside his very being, came down from the
very top of society often referred to as 'the Establishment'.
When the World Health
Organisation was established in 1948, homosexuality was officially regarded,
classified as a 'severe mental sickness' and remained so until May 13th 1990.
This was one of the most important events in Gay History, an event now
celebrated annually on May 13th by Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual people as the
International Day Against Homophobia [IDAHO]
But Rainbow Flags, Gay Pride
Events and publicly funded support groups like Derbyshire Friend were still
unthinkable, still decades away from the current reality of this sad young
Englishman who was trying to survive, trying to make sense of, trying to engage
with the illegal, seedy, secret homosexual underworld of North America on this
bleak mid-winter evening, January 8th, 1966.
Gay History Month 2009
Narvel Annable
will be this year’s Guest of Honour at the evening launch of
‘View from the Top’ Gay Exhibition. This event will take
place on the top floor of Waterstone’s, Bridlesmith Gate in Nottingham on
Tuesday, February 17th from 7.00 to 9.00 pm with free food and free
drink. David Edgley and his conscientious team are building on last year’s
excellent work to stage what will be the biggest LGBT exhibition in the United
Kingdom which will be open every day during shop hours until Sunday, February 22nd.
It is a valuable
collection of photographs, books, pictures, diagrams, newspaper cuttings and a
wide range of LGBT memorabilia going back many years. Had it not been for
the brave efforts of people like David, Scruffy Chicken would have never
seen the light of day. For more information visit Nottinghamshire's
Rainbow Heritage website -
www.nottsrainbowheritage.org.uk
On Wednesday,
March 25th from 4 to 6.30 pm at the Spot Conference Centre, 73
Sacheveral Street in Derby,
Derby City Council is holding a Tri-Network Event which will include
refreshments.
Narvel Annable
has been invited to address the gathering about his life and his work. The
author will be available to talk about his books to visitors on an individual
basis. Copies on display can be personally signed for any interested
buyers.
If you would like
to attend this event or need further information, please contact Susan Sanghera
on 01 332 25 56 95 [minicom 2558247] - or – email
LGBT.support@derby.gov.uk
before March 15th
International Day Against Homophobia (IDAHO) 2009
Paul Hunt of
SHOUT! Magazine and Bradford Metropolitan City Council has invited Narvel
Annable to be one of the key speakers and give an address on the subject of
homophobia on IDAHO Day.
Under the Rainbow Flag with Paul, Narvel will appear at Bradford
Town Hall on Monday, May 18th 2009.
This LGBT event is
held every year to commemorate the day in 1990 when homosexuality was removed
from the World Health Organisation’s list of mental illnesses.
IDAHO is now marked internationally as a celebration of the
human rights of lesbian, gay and bisexual people throughout the world, and to
draw attention to the 77 countries which still punish gay people with
imprisonment or execution.
World AIDS Day
Reading in Saint Mary’s and All Saints Church [Crooked Spire] Chesterfield at
7.00pm on December 1st 2008.
When Kevin Guthrie
asked me to speak today, my mind went back 27 years to December 1981 when we
first heard about an illness which appeared to destroy the body’s immune system.
Some four years later, that illness had become known as ‘the gay plague’ and the
World Health Organization said that AIDS had reached epidemic proportions.
The stigma of HIV and the stigma of simply being gay had also reached
epidemic proportions. In the public mind, one had been firmly equated with
the other.
In 1985, AIDS
claimed one of its most famous victims. Millions of his fans were shocked
to discover that such an enduring image of heterosexual beauty and masculinity
was, in fact, a homosexual.
I heard about the
death of Rock Hudson with mixed feelings. If I’m honest, a tiny part of me
was actually pleased - obviously not pleased about the poor man’s pain and
suffering.
I can explain better by
reading this short extract from Scruffy Chicken. The character
called Simeon is actually myself as a teenager.
After being
entrapped by the CID, a famous actor called Wilfrid Brambell was arrested in the
November of 1962 on a charge of intending to commit a lewd act of gross
indecency.
The teenage Simeon
read about this. He was fascinated by the idea of one man wishing to have
sex with another man, but, in the macho, coalmining coalfields of Derbyshire, he
wisely kept that fascination closely to himself.
The Brambell
incident was splashed over the front pages of the popular Press. It
reinforced the generally held prejudice that a 'homosexual' looked and acted
just like the shambling, dirty, decrepit, toothless, unshaven old man, who was
better known to the nation as Albert Steptoe.
Shortly after the
arrest, Simeon was watching the rag and bone man on the telly when his ‘ooncle ‘arry’
came in and said – “Ton
that dotty bogga off!”
Simeon could not
conceive of a beautiful young man who was queer. There was simply no
precedent for such a thing in his experience. Images of the butch and the
attractive, the well-known icons of male beauty such as Marty Wilde, Adam Faith,
Billy Fury and the ultra masculine Rock Hudson; all these were very firmly
heterosexual. Wilfrid Brambell might well be queer – but - never, ever in
a thousand years could Rock Hudson be a homosexual!
Fast forward to
October 1985. The terrible scourge of HIV had, at least, destroyed the
myth that a homosexual was always effeminate, odd, twisted and unattractive.
It confirmed that - many gay men - were - like Rock Hudson – very good actors.
I was a good actor. I had to be. During my 17 years as
a history teacher at a tough comprehensive school in Worksop, where homophobia
was virulent and endemic – I kept my head down. I was very careful about
what I said to pupils and colleagues. Even so – they sussed me out – and I
became a target, suffering several painful incidents during the grim HIV decades
of the 1980s and the 1990s.
Of course, I’d had
a good grounding for these trials and tribulations. I had been to ‘boot
camp’.
Rewind to 1957 and
see some savage pupils in Heanor at the Dickensian Mundy Street Boys School
taunting, jeering, screaming and pushing around a 12 year old boy. They
too had sussed me out. Why? Well, because I was different. I
had no interest in football. I would not, could not assert myself
with bare knuckles in the school playground – which, of course, made me a
convenient target.
It had nothing to
do with sex or HIV. It didn’t matter. The culture of cruelty was the
same – a routine of physical and psychological torture. A typical day
started with prayers and hymns and ended with a desire to be dead.
In the autumn of
1957, with the assistance of a sadistic schoolmaster, head bowed and eyes
downcast, I had reached an advanced stage of humility and obedience to the
bullies who had … broken me. It was the end. On Friday, October 4th
1957, the day Russia launched the first ever man-made satellite – I had become
Shaun Dykes.
Shaun Dykes.
Perhaps some of you will recall Shaun. He was only 17 when it happened -
just over a month ago.
Shaun and I have a
few things in common. We are both gay, have both attended school in
Heanor, have both been very unhappy to the brink of jumping from a high place.
Tragically, Shaun fell. As you see - I did not. I went on to write
three autobiographic books which explain the problems of being a homosexual in a
society which is often very homophobic.
There is a line in
a play called Death of a Salesman –
‘A man is worth
nothing dead.’
Had this
vulnerable young man lived, just think what wonderful creative and useful work
he could have done. The books he didn’t write, the support he
didn’t give to the gay community because he fell to his death on the day of
Derby Pride when many of us were celebrating gay culture under a perfect,
autumnal blue sky on the Bass Recreation Ground.
Like Shaun, I was
looking down to a pavement below. Not Derby, this was a Heanor pavement.
I was not on top of a car park; I was looking down at Red Lion Square from our
top bedroom window just under where the bricks spell out 1888. It’s still
there.
Unlike Shaun,
there were no police officers were there to talk me out of it. Unlike Shaun,
there was no baying crowd below taunting, humiliating, calling for blood.
For me, that activity was usually in the school playground.
However, on this
day in 1957, my pain felt like the wording of a medieval torture –
‘As much as you
can bear, and greater’.
HIV was a
convenient stick with which to hit gay men. I recall a devout Christian
who appeared on television in the late 1980s saying –
“These degenerates
- have to face the bitter truth. AIDS is the Lord’s way of cleaning house
– and he aint finished yet. No sir!”
It was bigots like
that who put fire in my belly. It was they who persuaded me to
escape from the Valley Comprehensive School and to do what I was always told to
do at Mundy Street Boys School. They told me to hit back.
And I will.
Three books later – I have.
So … sleep well,
Shaun. I don’t know much about you, or indeed anything about the
circumstances which brought you to the point of suicide. You died on the
day of the best ever Derby Pride. You can be sure that people like me will
keep using their skills to attack homophobia. You can be sure that people
like Kevin Guthrie, organisations like the Derbyshire Sexual Health Promotion
Service; indeed, all gay support groups will continue to work, to help
young gay people – boys and girls - people like you.
Narvel Annable.
Events of 2008
It has been a
busy year for Narvel Annable. This explains why his new novel, Secret
Summer, will now be published in 2009. Check out the March 08 edition
of Shout! There is information about his new book in a feature under the
headline – ‘The Best Kept Secret’ by Paul Hunt on page 17.
www.shoutweb.co.uk
The Heanor
Library event of February 27th was organised by Derbyshire County
Council’s LGBT Group as part of the annual Gay History Month. A feature in
the April edition of Nottingham’s QB said –
“It was a full house. Most of the characters in the novels are based on
real people who populated the pre-1967 Nottingham and Derby gay scenes and whose
eccentricities are brought to amusing life by Narvel.”
If you navigate
around the very interesting
Nottinghamshire's Rainbow Heritage website, you will be able to view a slide
show which includes photographs taken during that Heanor Library evening.
Go to
www.nottsrainbowheritage.org.uk
Most of the
pictures concern the Waterstone’s exhibition of February 12th ‘View
at the Top’. David Edgley and his conscientious LGBT team did an excellent job
which was justly rewarded by a very good turn out to see this valuable
collection of photographs, books, pictures, diagrams, newspaper cuttings and a
wide range of LGBT memorabilia going back many years. Had it not been for
the brave efforts of people like David, Scruffy Chicken would have never
seen the light of day.
Return to the
home page and click on ‘Resources’ to see a selection which includes ‘Slide
Shows’. The ‘Civil Partnerships’ show includes a few photographs from July
14th 2006 when Narvel and his partner Terry Durand tied the knot at
Ripley Town Hall. They also appear in the Nottingham Pride slide show.
The Heanor
Library readings also featured on page 19 in the April 08 edition of SHOUT!
in a regular column under the headline – AND ANOTHER THING … which, with
delight, noted the appearance of so many enthusiastic and supportive women in
that Heanor audience.
October 30th
– Narvel will be the guest speaker at Derbyshire Friend’s Reach Out Group on
Friary Street in Derby. This talk will focus on the local gay scene, as it
was, in the 1960s. He has also been invited to give book readings as part
of Derbyshire Friends 25th Birthday Celebrations on a date which has
yet to be arranged.
www.gayderbyshire.co.uk
Following
Narvel’s first successful talk to the Nottingham Lesbian and Gay Christian
Movement on May 11th 2007, they have invited him to speak to them
again on the evening of November 14th. The talk will focus on
readings which relate to ethical issues from his new book Secret Summer.
World AIDS Day December 1st 2008
The Derbyshire Sexual
Health Promotion Service [CASH] has asked Narvel Annable to compose and give a
reading at Saint Mary’s and All Saints Church [Crooked Spire] in
Chesterfield
at 7.00pm. Narvel’s contribution
will be a part of a celebration of remembrance which will be followed by cheese
and wine in the church coffee shop.

Picture
by Paul Hunt at Pink Picnic
Next day, the same activity took
place at Huddersfield's
21st Pink Picnic at Castle Hill Fields. The August edition of SHOUT! Magazine featured several photographs of
Narvel with visitors and leading entertainers at the event. These pictures, taken by Paul Hunt,
include the Fabulous Pride Sisters and PC Mark Carter of West Yorkshire Police,
better known as Mr Gay UK. Please
visit www.shoutweb.co.uk
The author will also play an active
part in the 'Four Days of Fun and Frolic' which is the essence of Bradford Pride. Narvel and his partner Terry Durand will
be staying at the Holiday Inn at the Bradford Leisure Exchange from Thursday,
September 6th to Sunday, September 9th.
Narvel will be a guest speaker at
the West
Yorkshire Inaugural LGB Council Employee Group Meeting -
Thursday, September 6th, 2.00 to 5.00pm at the Equity Centre, 1 Longlands Street,
Bradford. On the same day he will
join authors VG Lee and Linda Innes at the Pride Arts & Enterprise Launch to be
introduced by Paul Hunt at 6.30 in the Conference Suite in Bradford's National Media Museum. Narvel will be reading extracts from Lost Lad and Scruffy Chicken, followed by questions from the audience at 7.30pm.
Fast forward to Saturday, September
8th, 8.00pm at Candy, Sackville
Street, Bradford. Amongst other attractions and events,
Paul Hunt will host a Mr
& Mr / Mrs & Mrs Competition which will include Mr Annable and
Mr Durand.
The Leeds Gay Community have invited Narvel to be their
guest speaker on the Friday evening of September 21st at 60 Upper Basinghall Street, Leeds. HUGG - Huddersfield Gay
Group have also asked him to talk about his work sometime in October at a
date yet to be fixed.