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Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard
Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard (LGLS) opened on 2 March 1974, and was the UK’s first gay helpline and Scotland's first gay charity.

It was an activist-run mental and physical health service for LGBT people in the Lothians and beyond.

After 35 years, the Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard passed the running of the resource to the LGBT Centre for Health and Wellbeing in 2010.

Archive
The Lothian Gay and Lesbian Switchboard archives sit within the wider archives of Lothian Health Services Archive (LHSA). LHSA holds unrivalled collections that document Edinburgh’s response to HIV from 1983 to the 21st century, spanning voluntary groups, charities, local authorities, the NHS, and health promotion campaigns. The city’s high HIV transmission rate in the 1980s was mostly due to needle sharing through intravenous drug use, but, by the 1990s, transmission through homosexual sex increased. However, LGBT groups were always deeply involved in HIV prevention, treatment and care in Edinburgh, aware of how the virus had affected gay communities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Some examples of collections include:


 * Issues of Rainbow Trout, an information bulletin for young gay men, lesbians and bisexuals, 1996-1997 (LHB45/1/4/2).
 * HIV Comeback Tour, the award-winning campaign launched in 2006 aimed to raise awareness of HIV amongst gay and bisexual men. It was formulated and evaluated through focus groups, and created by a partnership between voluntary organisations and Lothian Health Board (LHB45/1/3/1/5-11).
 * Material from Scottish AIDS Monitor (SAM). Scotland’s first AIDS charity was founded by gay activists as early as 1982, informing and educating in an age of misunderstanding and misinformation (throughout collections, for example, LHB45/1/2/2/16-22).
 * World AIDS Day falls on 1 December every year since 1988. It is an international day dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection and mourning those who have died (GD1/135/4/3).
 * Issues of Meridian, a monthly bulletin for people involved in HIV/AIDS work. Several publications focusing on the LGBT community can be found in the Take Care Campaign collection, 1968-2000 (for example, GD22/8/1/25,47 and GD22/8/2/9,15).
 * Crusaid Scotland, 1990 - 2013 (GD21/5/9/6)
 * Take Care Campaign, 1968 - 2000 (GD22/8/1-2, GD22/9, GD22/14/1, GD22/14/2)
 * Lothian Regional AIDs Team, 1983 - 1997 (GD24/1/228, GD24/6)
 * Dr Helen Zeally, Director of Public Health, 1964 - 2005 (GD25/3/6/3 )
 * AIDs Awareness Postcards, 1990 (GD1/96/47)
 * Haldane Tait, Principal Medical Officer (GD39/2/18 - ‘Report of the Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution’. Home Office. Pamphlet, Sep 1957).

Despite its pioneering history, the LGLS archives remain largely invisible to researchers in their current, uncatalogued state.

'Speaking Out' - Archive project
'Speaking Out' is a funded archival project run by the Wellcome Trust, which aims to catalogue, rehouse and selectively digitise archives created by LGLS. The project will disseminate its findings to academics and the wider public and address key ethical, visibility and sensitivity issues through collaborative engagement with academic and stakeholder communities.

This project aims to open up this collection to researchers by cataloguing and indexing to comply with archival standards to ensure maximum general research access. They commit to identifying sensitivities/ethical issues and applying appropriate closure periods. They will use anonymised transcription to provide a way in to selected confidential records, encouraging academic researchers to apply for access through established procedures. They will rehouse records in archival-quality storage and digitise selected material (such as locally-specific newsletters unavailable elsewhere in physical or digital form) to aid free remote research. They finally aim to promote the collection to research audiences through targeted activities and record 3–5 oral histories, adding context for researchers.