This thesis charts the early history of London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard (1974-1987),
a British institution at the heart of a network of community helplines that rose out of the
early 1970s gay liberation movement and provided frontline support through the early
years of the AIDS crisis. From cramped accommodation in King’s Cross, north London,
Switchboard grew from an informal, community-funded evening helpline run on a
shoestring budget, to a round-the-clock service staffed by carefully selected and highly
trained volunteers, with charitable status and public funding. Switchboard volunteers in
London fielded hundreds of thousands of calls per year from a broad section of British
society. They documented their encounters with callers in handwritten log books and
replied to letters from queer and questioning people at the margins of the community;
together these form a rich and vast ‘archive of feelings.’ Through a granular study of the log
books, correspondence, meeting minutes, training materials, and press cuttings in the
Switchboard archive, alongside original oral history interviews with fourteen former
Switchboard volunteers and callers, this thesis provides an entangled account of the
emotions of the gay men and lesbians in the Switchboard collective in London, the
emotions reported by the broad section of British society that reached out to them by
telephone and letter, and the emotions that bubbled up in the encounters between these
two groups of strangers through the 1970s and 1980s.