The Log Books

Tash Walker and Adam Zmith

The Log Books is a tapestry of LGBTQ+ life in Britain, from 1974 to the early 2000s, based on thousands of handwritten notes by volunteers at the London helpline Switchboard. Tash and Adam spent years looking through all of their incredibly rich and messy log books, and then interviewing around a hundred people who had stories that were similar to the ones coming up on calls or in the volunteers’ own lives. If you can imagine a question or topic, after more than 4 million calls, someone has called Switchboard about it—from coming out, to how to have sex, to gay men dodging pretty police officers in the park, to homelessness, to pub recommendations, to legal processes for trans people, to how two lesbians can make a baby. But on top of this exploration of queer life, they’ve also layered their own stories as authors. As they researched others’ stories, Tash and Adam realised that these other queer stories had been kept from them by society, the state, maybe even loved ones—and they weren’t alone in that. So the book is also an unravelling of what they thought they knew about themselves, as queer people raised in the 80s and 90s, and therefore a reclamation of their own queer ancestry.

NOTCHES: How did you research the book? What sources did you use?

A+T: The primary research for the book was reading through all the log books written by Switchboard volunteers from 1974 to 2003, held at the Bishopsgate Institute. By the time we came to write the book, we’d done that already because we’d made three seasons of a documentary podcast using them. We think this also helped convince the publisher that there was something incredible in all those scrappy notebooks! So when we came to plan and write the book, we knew we’d go back to that primary archive, but we also had the scope to go beyond. We found ourselves in other collections held at the Bishopsgate, for example the lawyer Peter Ashman’s papers. And we also used state papers held by The National Archives at Kew, from Tony Blair’s memos to citizens’ letters sent to ministers about LGBTQ+ rights (for AND against!).

NOTCHES: The log books were written to pass information between shifts, not for posterity. How does the unintentional nature of this archive shape what it can and cannot tell us about queer life in Britain—what does it capture with unusual intimacy, and what does it systematically leave out?

A+T: Great question! Honestly we think one of the greatest strengths of the log books, as an ‘archive’, is that they’re just an immediate snapshot of a moment. A volunteer answers the phone, speaks to the caller, notes down something about what the conversation was about, and then moves on to the next call—or ends their shift. There’s very little reflection, no analysis. This is how the log books are like a diary, and why they’re so honest, unfiltered, real. On the other hand, they only contain what the volunteer chose to write down about the call and caller (they had their own biases, their own interests), and even what the volunteer knows is limited to what the caller has told them. So there’s so much about the callers’ experiences that we don’t know. Our experience of reading log book entries, time after time, was to be left with the question, ‘How did they feel?’ or ‘What happened next?’ If you’re writing a book, those questions are a useful motor for the work.

NOTCHES: This book engages with histories of sex and sexuality, but what other themes does it speak to?

A+T: Housing and the home, care, gender identity and transgender rights, technology, police persecution of gay and bi men, nightlife and spaces where queer people can be themselves, lesbian mothers’ fights, and more. Those are some of the themes, which are broadly covered in individual chapters. But overall the book also covers friendship between queer people, the collaboration and the chaos of running a community support service, and the power of listening, especially across the generations.

NOTCHES: Whose stories or what topics were left out of your book and why? What would you include had you been able to?

A+T: It can be really hard to make choices about what to leave out. But we didn’t want to write a 900-page book, and no one wants to read a 900-page book, do they!? In the podcast, we covered more about sexual and physical violence, including between LGTBQ+ people such as domestic violence within a relationship. As we wrote the book, it felt hard to know how this topic could fit into our scope, and even harder to do such a big topic justice when we were moving relatively quickly from one theme to another. But there’s still the podcast episodes about that topic, using the same archive, for people who want to explore that. We also decided not to tell much of the story of other Switchboards, such as the ones in Bradford, Brighton and Preston (they were all over, honestly!). We think that’s another book that someone should definitely write. We’re also sad that we didn’t get to speak to more co-founders of Switchboard. Tash did interview one of them, John Lindsay; but others had already passed away, and one was too poorly to speak to us. This only stresses the importance of collecting stories from people while we can.

NOTCHES: The log books record a moment of contact, but almost never what happened next. How did you sit with that incompleteness? And did it change how you think about what a historical source — or a helpline — can actually do for the people who turn to it?

A+T: This is a great question, and a very specific one that our primary source set us. The first stage of our project was a documentary podcast series, made between 2019 and 2022. As we developed that podcast we knew instinctively that we had to find a way to go deeper into the stories of LGBTQ+ life in Britain than the short log book entries would allow. We both love hearing people tell their own stories, so the answer was obvious: let’s just interview loads of people! In the podcast, we found we could pair the brief log book entries with deeper stories told in their own words by people who’d experienced the same or similar things. We carried that method through to the book too. We think that the historical record is always incomplete. That’s the nature of archives: they only capture certain things, by certain people, at a certain time, for a certain reason. It’s the job of the historian, or writer, or artist, to bring the context, and add shape so that public audiences can ‘experience’ the historical record, or an archival holding, that they otherwise wouldn’t.

NOTCHES: Did the book shift significantly from the time you first conceptualized it?

A+T: We wouldn’t say significantly, but it did shift. We had the idea that we’d make more links to LGBTQ+ rights and politics in other countries, but as we were writing that just felt shoe-horned in, so it was better to keep the focus on the UK. Our earlier draft proposals and the first full plan for the book featured our own stories, but as we wrote these became more and more central. Our agent and editor also encouraged this, so we decided to lean in to it. In fact, the book became a more unique proposition thanks to that, because we felt like it was the first time that writers of our generation were really reckoning with what we’d gone through. We experienced the hostility of the 80s and 90s towards queer people, including an actual anti-homosexuality law. This came up in a kind of conversation between generations, as we were looking further back and also reflecting on the era we were actually living through as we wrote, too. This shift to the personal made the project come alive to us in a way that energised us through the writing — and hopefully makes it more intriguing for the reader to read, too!

NOTCHES: How did you become interested in the history of sexuality?

TW: It’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment, but I think it started as survival rather than interest. I was searching for evidence that people like me had existed, had lived, had found ways through. I understood quite young that I didn’t fit into the structures of this world, and that took me into history. But I wasn’t looking for history exactly. I was looking for myself in it. And once you start looking, you realise how much has been deliberately obscured, and how much is still being carried in people’s bodies, in their memories, in stories that were never written down because they weren’t permitted to be. That’s where the real interest took hold. Not in the archive, but in what the archive couldn’t hold.

AZ: I hadn’t thought about it as a topic much until I started having sex myself. I was 29, and I was (am) gay… The sudden shock of doing this thing, which I loved, and had never done before, woke me up to the beauty of it. And the trials of sex and having a sexuality. As a writer, how could I not hear that as a call to action?

NOTCHES: Switchboard has been answering calls since 1974. What does its survival tell us about what queer communities still need—and still aren’t getting—from the state?

A+T: Switchboard started primarily as an information service, answering callers’ questions about where to go out or how to find other LGBTQ+ people. But it also found it was supporting people with their sexuality and gender identities… As society changed and the internet came in, the info service fell away, and the support became really what Switchboard uniquely offered. So today queer people use Google to find friendly pubs, but we still need direct support from other queer people we can talk to. Although the state, in the form of the NHS, says this kind of support is important, it’s under-resourced—the waiting lists for counsellors and therapists and social services are very long, and the services are often inadequate when they are provided. Loneliness and shame are still huge problems, often hitting queer people harder than others. And the state has been actively withdrawing support and even healthcare from trans people specifically. This all means that Switchboard and other LGBTQ+ support charities remain essential.

NOTCHES: Your book is published, what next?

A+T: We’ve been touring it around, so far we’ve done 20 events in bookshops, libraries, and offices. From Glasgow to Newquay, Bradford to Folkestone, it’s been amazing to share the work with so many people in different places up and down the country. At almost every event at least one person has shared their own story of phoning Switchboard for support. Audiences have been mixed in age, too, so it’s been a real pleasure to see queer people in their 20s and their 70s mix with each other—that’s what we’re about! We’re also going to some festivals this summer… and then the paperback will be out in early 2027 so maybe we’ll tour it again. (Adam loves taking trains.) Separately, Tash is working on more and more poetry, including a pamphlet or two, and Adam is trying to start work on another non-fiction book, and maybe a novel and a musical too.

Tash Walker Tash Walker is a writer, poet, audio producer and community organiser who has worked with institutions such as the Barbican, The National Archives, BBC, The Charles Causley Trust and Queer Britain; they were a member of Switchboard’s board for eight years. They are the co-author, along with Adam Zmith, of The Log Books: Voices of Queer Britain and the Helpline that Listened (Faber, 2026). In 2021 they were named one of the top 101 LGBTQ+ Trailblazers by Attitude Magazine, and in 2022 were included in Stonewall and DIVA’s Pride Power List.

Adam Zmith Adam Zmith is a writer and multi-format producer. He is the co-author, along with Tash Walker, of The Log Books: Voices of Queer Britain and the Helpline that Listened (Faber, 2026). He is the author of Solemates: A History of Our Fetish for Feet (404 Ink, 2024) and Deep Sniff: A History of Poppers and Queer Futures (Repeater Books, 2021), which won the Polari First Book Prize 2022. He writes theatre shows, talks and podcasts, including Press Play Turn On which won Podcast of the Year at the British Podcast Awards 2024.