One Saturday afternoon back in 2014, in the London office of a queer helpline called Switchboard, a volunteer named Tash Walker climbed into a storage area and found something extraordinary secreted inside. In amidst piles of dust-covered papers and photographs were stacks of notepads, each one marked with the same label: Log Book. Soon they realised that this was a record of every call made to the UK’s first queer helpline from 1975, one year after its founding, until Switchboard began keeping records digitally in 2003.
That finding, in time, gave rise to an award-winning podcast, The Log Books, created and presented by Tash Walker and Adam Zmith. First launched in 2019 and now in its fourth season, the series explores Britain’s late 20th century queer history through the voices and experiences of people who lived through it, including one-time Switchboard volunteers who offered a listening ear and sometimes a lifeline to people in need. For Tash and Adam, who grew up under the UK’s Section 28 banning councils and schools from “promoting homosexuality”, making the series became its own kind of lifeline: an exercise in recovering and documenting a history that had been withheld from them. Most recently they have turned that experience into a book titled The Log Books: Voices of Queer Britain and the Helpline that Listened.
In this episode Tash and Adam talk about the challenge of making the series, which meant creating an audio archive out of the fragmentary glimpses the original log books provided. Along the way we discussed the ethical choices they had to make in documenting the history of a confidential helpline, what it was like to make episodes about HIV AIDS in the midst of a global pandemic, and why they felt the need to take a step back from the podcast to write such a very personal book.
