Questions Worth Asking

Queer Women's Action (QWA) was founded in the Blue Moon Café on Edinburgh's Broughton Street one lunchtime late last summer, by three women who had all in different ways become conscious of the widespread ignorance that exists in the health services about the health needs of lesbian, bisexual, and transgender women. They are Kate Joester, Nuala Fahey, and Jane Carnall.

They made the decision to run a weekend event for LBT women only, to talk about "sex, health, the NHS, and queer women". QWA applied for a grant via Awards for All, but the organising committee were uncertain whether they'd get it, and so were planning it all on a shoestring. They booked a youth hostel as the cheapest self-catering accommodation available, set up a tiny website, designed and printed some simple leaflets announcing the event, and distributed them round venues and organisations. The event – Questions Worth Asking, QWA's first residential disccussion weekend – was booked for the first weekend of December.

Awards for All (funded by the National Lottery) came through with the grant. Pitlochry Youth Hostel proved to be perfect for a small event, with two sitting-rooms and a large dining-room with a fantastic view over the hills. (The only major drawback was the lack of downstairs bedrooms and disabled-access toilets or showers. An attendee in a wheelchair stayed in Fisher's Hotel down the road.)

Brother Bimbo of the Order of Perpetual Indulgence offered to organise a World AIDS Day vigil for the Friday evening. It was held outside in a brief gap between rainstorms: women stood in a circle and spoke about friends they'd lost to AIDS and friends living with HIV, and a minute's silence was followed by a minute's noise.

There was space for two workshops at once, and in quick discussion on Saturday morning, the attendees decided to hold twelve half-hour workshops, broken up by a break to let people go out for a walk while it was still daylight. Everyone would take notes on index cards - during and between sessions, people wrote down ideas that occurred to them or good things that were said. The organisers collected and transcribed the index cards on Saturday evening, reporting back on the themes Sunday morning.

The workshops were Alcohol and Addiction, Body Image, Challenging LGBT Communities, Family and Reproductive Health, Hep B and Hep C, Holistic Health, Inclusion and Exclusion, Making Health Services Work, Mental Health, Relationships, Sexual Abuse and Sexual Violence, and Sexual Health.

Comments noted down from conversations outside workshop sessions included "being identified by sexual preference – why call me 'that lesbian downstairs' if I don't call you 'that excessive masturbator upstairs'?" and "Doubt over whether bi people (and partners) are welcome in queer spaces at all times – are you only accepted within LGBT space if you're single or in a same-sex relationship?"

QWA plan to produce a report of the weekend by the end of January: copies will be made available to attendees, to other LGBT health organisations, and on their website.

By the end of the event, as the organisers had hoped, ideas were flowing freely for community projects that QWA could promote for further action, including: more work on addictions with queer women; producing fun safer sex posters, postcards, and leaflets aimed at LBT women – perhaps even a Clit Tales comic book; research into what we can use for safer oral sex that's flavourless and not pleasure-diminishing; a leaflet for GPs on what to say and what not to say to queer patients; posters for GP surgeries and hospitals with positive images of LGBT people; making gloves as readily available as condoms are; and, from the Body Image workshop and other conversations, the point that diets make you put on weight. "Why are diet merchants allowed to sell a product that's bad for your health without a health warning?"

By Sunday morning everyone was both jazzed and exhausted: it felt like much longer than a single weekend. Attendees talked about where they wanted to go next, building a picture of a new organisation that's all about encouraging change: changing other people's attitudes, changing how we feel about ourselves, getting the message across. Questions Worth Asking was QWA's first event, but from the sound of things, it won't be the last.