Little Gay Brother - An origins story

How the need to make The Secret Garden Party's first and only LGBTQI+ space became a 10-year journey and fight for equality, queer space, and queer safety - touching thousands of people, changing perspectives, and making the festival industry more inclusive. This is the origins of Little Gay Brother. Little Gay Brother was founded in 2012. Back then, having a dedicated place for LGBTQI+ fun in fields was pretty rare, so I set up The Secret Garden Party’s first queer space, "The Coming Out Bar". This bar prioritised queer visibility and culture, letting queer people be their authentic selves in a supportive environment. It was a roaring success and landmark moment for LGBTQ+ culture, as this was the first "official LGBTQI+ bar" at a UK festival. Over the next few years, we grew into a beautiful queer family of dancers and DJs, drawn from all lifestyles and backgrounds. We took on the name Little Gay Brother, the sibling to SGP, and came back annually. We didn't realise at the time but we had embarked on a mission to make queer people more visible and respected, whilst carving out space within the UK music festival scene for the LGBTQ+ community to enjoy and flourish. Our radical approach to inclusion and community, mixed with our queer programming and high-energy dance performances meant we were embraced by festival punteres, high-profiles dance music acts and festivals like Lovebox, Meadows in the Mountains, Riverside, FLY Open Air, and many more. As we spread positive queer vibes on stage, we actually began to change the festival landscape behind the scenes too – by rewriting many festival’s respect policies to make them more inclusive of queer people and finally taking our safety seriously. Many adopted our respect policy word for word, including; Wilderness, Elrow and Boomtown. In 2019, we were nominated for Promoter of the Year at the UK Festival Awards. In 2021, Little Gay Brother founder Clayton Wright launched his own festival with DJ Saoirse Ryan called "Body Movements" – the first Queer Electronic Music Festival in the UK, which sold out in just a few days. Little Gay Brother continues to stand for queer inclusion, community and festival fun.