Despite this, representations of BLGBT lives are rarely seen in the mainstream media or even in the LGBT arena. A new display at Museum in Docklands, aptly named Outside Edge, gives vital space to fascinating narratives from this BLGBT world.

Outside Edge runs from 7th February until 4 April, in conjunction with a study day on Saturday 23rd February.

The exhibition is an interactive multi-media look at over thirty years of BLGBT history, exploring some of the issues the community has faced and continues to face, and celebrating its achievements.

Albums on vinyl and CD, badges from events, posters and scripts of plays, flyers from the music club scene and excerpts from press and television work together to build up a complex and multifaceted account of BLGBT life in the metropolis.

The display is co-curated by Ajamu of the rukus! Federation, from whose archives over a hundred items are on loan. The Federation’s BLGBT archive is the only one of its kind in Europe, preserving for posterity thousands of objects collected by activists, DJs, club promoters, writers, artists, and magazine publishers.

The collection has material relating to all sections of the BLGBT community, though the Outside Edge exhibition will concentrate on London’s African-Caribbean LGBT histories. The archive records make it harder for sections of the black and LGBT communities to ignore or deny BLGBT experiences.

Using flyers, pamphlets, programs and leaflets, Outside Edge commemorates club nights, meetings, conferences and other events that sprang up in London from the early eighties, when there was a proliferation of LGBT events. You can see the flyer for the first national Black lesbian conference, Zami, here.

Held in London in October 1985 and attended by over 200 women, this seminal event was named after Black American lesbian writer and poet Audre Lorde’s book, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name.

Dating from the same year as the Zami conference, there’s a striking poster of Black Scottish lesbian writer Jackie Kay’s play Chiaroscuro, composed with the help of the Gay Sweatshop in London. Available to read nearby is text from the first British black male gay identified play Where to Now? by Martin Patrick, first performed in 1987.

From 1986, there’s a copy of the first edition of the black gay publication, Black Out found, like many of the items, in a London charity shop. Examples of BLGBT intellectual lives like these continue to be powerful challenges to stereotypes about what it means to be gay or black.

The wealth of memorabilia from music and the club scene reflect their importance. From 1971 (one year before the first UK Gay Pride march) there’s a copy of out London-born singer Labi Siffre’s solo hit It Must Be Love, a song later made famous by Madness.

The flyers, including the first ever BLGBT London club night, The Lift, span three decades and range from rough and ready hand stenciled photocopies to the scanned and cropped minor art pieces found on the scene today. The flyers bring the to those who don’t know it and induce nostalgia for those that do.

Ajamu remembers being a “National Express queen”, traveling to London in the eighties for The Lift club nights on a cheap return coach ticket from his home town of Huddersfield. For Ajamu, archiving these rare material, is a way to record and pay tribute to a scene which continues to give BLGBT people a space in which to meet, feel inspired and empowered, to talk about their experiences of racism within the LGBT scene, celebrate and to realize that they’re not alone.

Screening on a loop is a clip of the legendary confrontation of homophobia from the nineties, the episode of The Word television show, in which presenter Mark Lemmar challenges Buju Banton.

There’s a listening post, where you can hear songs like the one that Banton became infamous for, in which he sang that lesbians and gay men should be shot. Powerful incitements to violence against LGBT individuals ultimately led to the establishment of movements such as the Stop Murder Music campaign in the UK, led by the Black Gay Men’s Advisory Group.

The display demonstrates BGLTB pressure group’s contribution to this fight against homophobia. The Stop Murder Music campaign has certainly had its successes: the Reggae Compassionate Act was signed in 2007 by previously anti-gay artists Beenie Man, Sizzla and Capleton.

However, it’s salient to remember 2008 is the ten year anniversary of the tragic death of black gay footballer, Justin Fashanu. Even while demonstrating how far the BLGBT community has come this display reminds us that there is still a long way to go. Whilst it’s certainly more acceptable for LGBT men and women to be out now, it’s also true that coming out stories continue to be overwhelmingly white. By its very existence Outside Edge begins to readdresses this imbalance.

The study day on 23rd February is open to all interested in delving deeper into London’s BLGBT history through discussion and debate with Ajamu from the rukus! Federation, historian Lynette Goddard and Steven G Fullwood of the Black, Gay and Lesbian Archive in New York, Sara Wajid editor of UntoldLondon and others.