The queer archive in fragments: Sunil Gupta's 'London Gay Switchboard'

Glyn Davis

doi:10.1215/10642684-8776904

The queer archive in fragments: Sunil Gupta's 'London Gay Switchboard'

Glyn Davis

Film Studies

Research output: Contribution to journal › Review article › peer-review

Abstract

Sunil Gupta's 'London Gay Switchboard' (1980) was a forty-minute tape-slide work made whilst Gupta was a student at Farnham. The work was only staged once, and has survived in pieces: individual photographs have been shown, and a short edit of the work was made from surviving fragments. This essay attempts, for the first time, to reconstruct the work from elements in Gupta's archive. It also interrogates the value of the archival fragment for queer history and practice, proposing that the fragment's connotations of loss can be set against its political utility and affective force.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	121-140
Number of pages	20
Journal	GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies
Volume	27
Issue number	1
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8776904
Publication status	Published - 1 Jan 2021

Keywords

Queer history
Sunil Gupta
Photography
London Gay Switchboard
British queer history

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10.1215/10642684-8776904

Davis_GLQ_essay_Sunil_Gupta_AAM
Copyright © 2021 Duke University Press. This work has been made available online in accordance with publisher policies or with permission. Permission for further reuse of this content should be sought from the publisher or the rights holder. This is the author created accepted manuscript following peer review and may differ slightly from the final published version. The final published version of this work is available at https://doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8776904
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Cite this

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The queer archive in fragments: Sunil Gupta's 'London Gay Switchboard'

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Keywords

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