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This season, QUEERCIRCLE launches the Queer Community Library — a space dedicated to preserving, sharing and creating queer knowledge in all its forms. Throughout autumn and winter, the library will be open as a warm, welcoming space to gather, read, listen, share and connect with others.
Together, we’ll explore how libraries can become living infrastructures for memory, access, political education, community and resistance — spaces that do more than hold knowledge, but actively respond to, advocate for and are shaped by the communities they serve.
As attacks on access to information grow, the Queer Community Library stands as an antidote to erasure. Recent incidents in Essex libraries, alongside restrictions on advertising Pride and Black History Month, highlight the growing threats to diverse stories, histories and perspectives. Our collection will include books censored or restricted under Section 28, drawing attention to the queer stories and knowledge that legislation sought to silence.
Libraries and archives are not neutral. What is collected, funded, catalogued and made accessible shapes whose histories are remembered — and whose are allowed to disappear. For marginalised communities, erasure happens not only through destruction, but through what is never collected, cared for or considered worth preserving.
At a moment when queer and trans histories, marginalised knowledge and access to information are increasingly contested, preserving collective memory becomes an act of continuity, care and resistance. A queer library is not simply a collection of books and objects; it is a way of carrying knowledge, memory, stories and possibility between generations, while creating new knowledge in the present.
The collection will be shaped by the people it is for — bringing together knowledge in all its forms, alongside the many ways of being, living and knowing that make up our communities. Throughout the season, we’ll be accepting book donations so that the collection and archive can continue to grow alongside our community.
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This season, we’re responding to feedback from our community and advisory committee by distributing curation and programming, and rethinking how our community accesses opportunities at QUEERCIRCLE. Rather than a programme of one-off events, we’ll centre the season around four public Open Days.
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Our first Open Day launches the library season, introducing its ideas through panel discussions, workshops and collective exchange. Predominantly new collaborators will co-host the day, bringing different ways of knowing and imagining what a library can be.
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Our second Open Day will focus on Community Knowledge, bringing together past collaborators in research and political education. Join us for tea and cake in the library to share stories, zines, publications and projects with fellow queer knowledge holders.
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Our third Open Day, in November, will be curated by our Young Artists cohort, following a six-month programme developed with and led by young people. The day will be entirely shaped, facilitated and delivered by young people for our younger community.
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Our fourth and final Open Day will be led by our Catalyst groups, Queercircles current residents, to develop their community projects. Through paid opportunities and support from our team, each group will shape and deliver its own public programme, embedding their work more deeply within QUEERCIRCLE.
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Lama Rod Owens Event
6 Oct | 18:00-21:00/Queercircle is excited to be hosting an evening with Lama Rod Owens, immersing yourself in an intimate evening of embodied practice devoted to mindfulness as a radical force for liberation and joy. Drawing inspiration from our beloved community and monthly online gathering space, Free Radicals, practitioners are warmly invited to deepen their relationship with the werk of mindfulness as a timeless capacity for freedom and healing. We will turn toward presence, community, and the body as sites of refuge and resistance — weaving practice, inquiry, and rest into the unfolding evening. Open to all backgrounds and levels of meditation experience.
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Mama Look Ah Mas: Carnival History & Who Gets to Play Mas?
29 Oct | 18:00-21:00/Bare Radicals in collaboration with Queercircle presents an illustrated talk with Ray Mahabir tracing the journey of Carnival through African masquerade, music and performance traditions, their transformation across the Caribbean, and their journey to the UK through Caribbean migration and Black British community life. Through traditions and characters including Dame Lorraine, Vagabond Soldiers and playing mas, the talk connects African, Caribbean and Black British histories, and looks at how Carnival traditions are preserved, adapted and passed on.
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