Tonic's Pride Stand-Outs (so far!)
Pride Month 2022 has been a wonderful one for everyone at Tonic (with more to come!). It is our first Pride with a community up and thriving at Tonic@Bankhouse. residents are in, are building friendships and are getting stuck in to activities and events. We wanted to take note of a few of our favourite moments from Pride before our final round-up later this month.
Tonic Residents attending the 50th UK Pride March in London!
This year’s Pride March, was a special one as it celebrated 50 years since the Gay Liberation Front’s first Pride March on 1st July 1972, where hundreds of LGBT+ people and their allies marched for their safety and freedom.
Our work today was only made possible thanks to the brave people who marched 50 years ago, and these are the people who we want to be here for in their later life, when being out and proud should never be compromised.
To all those who came before us and who made it possible for us to be who we are – thank you. We are here because you were there.
Above you can see some of our gorgeous Tonic residents at the Pride March. We were delighted that our residents went along and celebrated with our partners One Housing for the very special march, everyone had a wonderful, joyous time!
Hachette Pride’s LGBT+ affirming book donation to our Community Library!
Hachette Pride’s Harry visited the residents and team at Tonic@Bankhouse and donated 25 LGBT+ affirming books to our community library space. Their amazing donation is wonderful as having LGBT+ affirming literature covering topics including gender identity, sexuality, relationships etc is so important and we can't wait for the residents to get stuck in!
Hachette Pride support LGBTQIA+ members of staff at all Hachette UK locations, helping to ensure that their publishing represents and reaches LGBTQIA+ people of all backgrounds in the UK and beyond.
At the end of June, they hosted their Pride in Writing 2022 event at the Apple Tree Pop-Up in Clerkenwell. The event was an evening with LGBTQ+ authors from Hachette Pride, with readings and discussions from some great books from 2021 & 2022. We are very grateful for their choice to raise funds for Tonic on the night, our lovely Sherine also popped along to tell everyone a little bit about the work we do and had a great evening too!
Sherine and Harry
Here is the list of all LGBT+ affirming books donated, we highly recommend them all!
The Book of Non-Binary Joy-Ben Pechey, Tell Me Everything-Laura Kay, Before We Were Trans-Kit Heyam, The Unbroken-C L Clark, First Time For Everything-Henry Fry, Lullaby Beach-Stella Duffy, Winters Orbit-Everina Maxwell, The Oleander Sword-Tasha Suri, The Black Flamingo-Dean Atta, The Vanishing Half-Brit Bennett, Rainbow Milk-Paul Mendez, Home Stretch-Graham Norton, The Colour Purple-Alice Walker, The Magnificent Sons-Justin Myers, Queer Sex-Juno Roche, Freddie Mercury: The Definitive Biography-Lesley-Ann Jones, Mama's Boy-Dustin Lance Black, Young Bloomsbury-Nino Strachey, How To Be Ace-Rebecca Burgess, Growing Older as a Trans and/or Non-Binary Person-Jennie Kermode, Transitioning Later in Life-Jillian Celentano, Fall of Man in Wilslow-David Lagercrantz, The Wicked Cometh-Laura Carlin, The Split-Laura Kay and Witches-Brenda Lozano.
Enter Gallery providing a special Pride piece for our Residents!
This Pride, we wanted to gift our residents a new piece of LGBT+ affirming artwork to join their other choices from LGBT+ History Month in February, in their community spaces. We worked with Enter Gallery, Brighton previously to help us with our project earlier this year to refresh the community spaces with resident chosen artworks that reflected the Tonic@Bankhouse community. We worked together again to find a perfect special piece to gift the residents from Tonic this Pride.
The piece is by Jayson Lilley and is called ‘For the Love of London’. It is just perfect and embodies exactly what we are doing at Tonic@Bankhouse. You can see that our residents are just as in love with the new piece as we are!
In honour of Pride this year, Enter has also kindly decided to donate proceeds of RYCA's new piece - ‘Sofuckinproud’ to us in support of our current work and future plans. You can get this piece via Enter's website, it's sparkly too!