Jill Longmate (Gardiner) Archive
About this Archive
Administrative/biographical history
Author, poet, teacher, librarian and researcher Jill Gardiner was born Jill Longmate in 1960. Her mother was a teacher, her father an historian, and they encouraged her to aspire to a career. She studied history at Somerville College, Oxford, during which time she discovered feminism and Spare Rib magazine. Her career in journalism started with articles for the student magazine Cherwell.
After university she began teaching, fell in love and discovered Brighton’s lesbian scene. In 1992 she created the pseudonym Gardiner so she could submit a (prize-winning) lesbian love poem to the Cardiff International Poetry Competition; because revealing her sexuality at that time would have got her the sack from her teaching job.
Gardiner taught history to both A Level and Access students, becoming Head of Politics and Equal Opportunities Co-ordinator at her school. She also wrote essays on politics and gender for Causeway Press and for the book Women And Politics: Progress Without Power?. She joined Brighton’s Ourstory oral history Project, eventually becoming one of the editors of the Project’s book Daring Hearts: Lesbian And Gay Lives In 50s And 60s Brighton (QueenSpark, 1992). She also became Chair of Brighton Poets.
Gardiner began researching a social history of lesbian life in the second half of the twentieth century: the result was her book From The Closet To The Screen (Pandora, 2003), drawn from eighty interviews with Gateways Club members and extensive research. The book has never been out of print.
Her collection of poetry With Some Wild Woman: Poems 1989-2019 was published by Tollington Press. At the time of her death she was working on a biography of the author Maureen Duffy.
Scope and content
Papers of Jill Longmate (who published under the pseudonym Gardiner) regarding the Gateways lesbian club and her book, ‘From the Closet to the Screen: Women at the Gateways Club, 1945-1985’, tracing, through interviews with women who went to the club, lesbian life in London. The Club also was the setting for scenes from the 1968 film of the play 'The Killing of Sister George'. Includes background research papers, correspondence, information on contributors, transcripts of interviews used in the book, drafts of the chapters, chronologies, press cuttings, photographs, images and draft and final versions of the manuscript and finished book, [1945-2002]
Quantity
10 boxes.
