The Aesop Queer Library UK, 2026

This edition’s featured title, The Log Books, brings a selection of the lives Switchboard has impacted to the page. Accounts taken from dozens of call logs found in a crawlspace in their offices have been brought together by Tash Walker and Adam Zmith in a compelling collection, spanning four decades. Together, they form ‘a living, breathing diary of queer life, across the country, across time.’

Ahead of the launch, Tash Walker and Adam Zmith shared their reflections on writing The Log Books.

You open the book describing the way queer history was silenced in the UK, by political and cultural forces, and especially by Section 28. What was the impact on you when you discovered this treasure trove of queer history that had been hidden for so long?

Finding the log books felt like finding a portal. Tash had spent their whole life searching for evidence that people like us had existed—that they'd survived, found love, found community, found ways through. Growing up under Section 28, that evidence had been deliberately withheld, that silence wasn't accidental, it was engineered. So when sixty-three notebooks fell into Tash's lap in a crawlspace above Switchboard's common room, spines broken, pages covered in handwriting, they weren't just reading history. They were receiving signals they'd been waiting for their whole life. The impact was euphoric and then, slowly, overwhelming. These were the stories that should have been ours to know. And for Adam reading the log books made him reckon with the fact that he had suppressed his own gay stories and experiences during his adolescence and 20s. The grief of understanding what had been kept from us arrived alongside the joy of finally finding it.

You describe the Log Books project as bringing together a ‘living archive’ of queer life—could literature also help form a part of this important history? Are there any books that have formed a part of your own archives?

Absolutely—literature has always been part of how queer history survives. So much of our history was never permitted to be written down officially, which means it travelled through other forms: gossip, photographs, fiction, poetry. The novel that lets you recognise yourself. The poem that names something you had no word for. These are living archives too—they carry affect and politics, joy and grief across time in ways that institutional records can't. Books that have formed part of our own archives include: Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown and What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell. More recently we both loved An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail by Hélène Giannecchini, for what it does with queer photographic archives and the image as survival. As well as Joelle Taylor's poetry, for her conviction that collectivity is the antidote to cultural fascism. And the log books themselves of course! They weren't written as literature but became it. The volunteers who wrote them were just recording their shifts, and in doing so they made something extraordinary.

The Log Books shows how important it is to learn our history from our queer elders, and the value of passing down these important stories. Looking forward—in the age of social media and the internet, and the many fresh challenges we are currently facing—how might we preserve and share our stories for the future?

The most important thing we can do is listen to our elders and each other, while we still can. The log books showed us how much is lost when the people who carry stories in their bodies are gone. John Lindsay, one of Switchboard's founders, died just as the charity celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. We interviewed him a year before he died and that conversation is now irreplaceable. So the first answer is urgency: go and sit with your queer elders, with each other, and listen.

The second answer is form. Social media creates the illusion of permanence but it's actually extremely fragile—platforms disappear, accounts get deleted, algorithms bury things. The stories that survive tend to be the ones that exist in multiple forms: recorded, written, embodied, passed on. Our job is to keep transmitting, in as many frequencies as possible, so that someone in the future has the antenna to receive us.

There are so many stories that you must have come across when you unearthed the log books, but are there any particular ones that have stayed with you?

So many, but one that never leaves us: a log book entry from October 2002, just over a year before Section 28 was repealed. A fifteen year old boy. His school had found out he was gay and told his parents, who were fundamentalist Christians and were verbally abusing him and making him feel suicidal. The volunteer noted that the school had cited Section 28 as a barrier to tackling the abuse. The law wasn't prosecuting anyone by then but it was still being used as a weapon against a child who needed help. We are living in a complicated time where history feels like it is repeating itself, a new wave of Section 28 targeted at our beautiful trans siblings. If you don't know how the history happens in the first instance it is impossible to say it is repeating, but now we know, and we are sharing these histories, these stories, we have to do everything we can to prevent this harm being inflicted again.

And then there's John Lindsay himself, hearing him describe answering the phone for the first time at 5:05pm on 4 March 1974, in a room above a bookshop in King's Cross. The first call ever taken by Switchboard. He was seventy-six when we interviewed him, and died a year later. Tash went to his funeral and realised that no one in the room had mentioned Switchboard so stood up and told everyone there that by the time John died, the helpline had taken its four millionth call. What a legacy to carry quietly, without knowing it was being carried.