Trans life, experiences and bodies raise important challenges for the constitution of queer memories. Working from archive sources and a conversation between the author and writer Roz Kaveney, this chapter approaches problems in (re)constituting queer memories of trans lesbian lives, political organising and desires in 1970s Britain. Studying materials and memories from the London Gay Liberation Front’s Transsexual, Transvestite and Drag Queen Group (GLF TS/TV Group) and the publication Lesbians Come Together, I consider the desires and politics articulated by trans lesbians, and the intersection of trans and lesbian sociality in the early ‘70s.

The GLF TS/TV group provide a glimpse into the possibilities for trans liberation at the time, articulating a counter-narrative to psychiatry and individual narratives of trans people from the period that have tended to focus on surgery and social transition. The counter-narrative of trans lesbians provides the opportunity to address the effects of legal and illegal drugs, healthcare, and trauma on the memory of trans lives and experiences.

I detail how accounts and oral histories of the London GLF have framed and denounced the role of trans people in gay liberation. These accounts eschew the social and material conditions of trans lives, encoding cis-normative readings of the gay liberation movement that have lasting implications for trans lives and bodies. The essay considers how trans activists and scholars – including Carol Riddell and the journal Radical Deviance – worked to document and unearth the lives of trans people during the 1970s. I attend to the deeply affective forms of labour demanded in processes of remembering and forgetting, inscribing, un-archiving, and imagining across separations in the archive.