“Aberdeen is an inclusive city”: The progress the North East has made in LGBT rights and how far we are yet to come.

There is something about Aberdeen that personifies ‘traditional Scotland’. Sandwiched between the brooding hills of the Highlands and bitter winds of the North Sea, the region has often been slow to change. As a result, the advance of LGBTQ+ rights have been less visible.

In 2001, accusations that Aberdeen was the most homophobic city in Scotland rallied the city authorities into creating a ‘gay action plan’ to tackle a ‘cultural homophobia’ in the area.

It was suggested that Aberdeen was like a ‘large village’ where stigma made many fearful of living authentically.

Like a village, the city has been known to cling onto conservative institutions like the Kirk. However, even within these bastions of old thought, the winds of change were beginning to be felt.

By 2009, history was made as Scott Rennie was appointed the Kirk’s first openly gay minister at the city’s important Queen’s Cross Church.

With the basic cornerstones of an accepted LGBT community forming, charity groups like FourPillars have been set up and continue to grow.

Tucked away in the Aberdeen Market, the charity set up the FourUnity Hub, becoming one of the city’s first unifying centres for charity, socialising and events.

Walking into the hub, the first thing that struck me was that the space was largely occupied by elderly folk who drank and gossiped like it was any other place to rest after a day of shopping.

As I set up my recorder, Deejay Bullock, who founded FourPillars in 2016, shared the sentiment that despite older folk knowing the hub is LGBT related, they don’t seem to mind. In fact, he told me of one pensioner who visits regularly and even grabbed some colourful Pride lanyards for her friends. This displays how much progress has been made as even the older generations, who are less open to change, are becoming more accustomed to the queer community.

Aberdeen, like on most issues, is ignored in favour of the central belt which carries tender for most LGBT charities. Deejay spoke of one central belt sexual health charity which lost its government funding and so was not able to keep its Aberdeen office open.

“Up here was nothing. That closure meant that no-one was covering gay men’s health, lesbians and any kind of LGBT health” he said. Aberdeen is often forgotten as “the central belt seems to be Scotland, but it really isn’t”, there is more beyond Glasgow and Edinburgh.

Despite seeming isolated and less accepting of gay rights, the city, in recent years, has changed. “Aberdeen is an inclusive city” exclaimed Deejay, despite its “village mentality”.

Almost coinciding with the charity’s launch was the first ever Grampian Pride event in 2018 which “really opened this city up” and made gay “more widely accepted, not just hush-hush accepted”.

Despite the impression that the demand for LGBT services and events is low, there is a huge appetite for them. FourPillars set up the community hub because people wanted it.

The appearance that Aberdeen is not now an open city with a growing queer community is understandable, there is only one ‘gay bar’ in town. However that might be proof of the city’s openness. As Deejay explained, there is almost nothing stopping a gay, lesbian, bi or trans person from entering most clubs in Aberdeen.

One prominent mainstream club in the city, Unit 51, hosts FourPillars’ annual end-of-year party.

A strong sentiment is that a ‘gay club’ is not needed as the LGBT community can (mostly) happily mingle with hetrosexual people on a night out and be accepted. A testament to changing attitudes in the north east.

However, the last few years have been anything but smooth sailing. The recent debate on the Scottish Government’s Gender Recognition Act, aimed at simplifying the process for trans people to legally change their gender, has opened up fresh wounds that were only beginning to heal.

Gender Critical campaign groups called for these measures to be halted, citing fears for the safety of women and children, believing such changes would give predators access to single-sex spaces under the guise of being female. This is despite the 2010 Equality Act already allowing people to use the spaces that coincide with their gender identity.

The debate has seen a rise in hate crimes, not only on trans and non-binary folk, but also on lesbians, gays and bisexuals. In March, 2019, hate crimes based on sexual orientation and gender dysphoria had reached their highest level, rising by 5% to over 1,200 cases.

The push back against trans rights has poisoned discourse and reminded many of the battle over Section 28 which saw LGBT folk bombarded with vicious attacks from powerful lobbies.

This backlash has come as Scotland was beginning to shed its homophobic past, topping equality rankings for the most queer-friendly nations in Europe. Since the debate, Scotland has dropped in these measurements, and is now losing some of the progress it has made in marriage equality, equal adoption, LGBT+ education and in pardoning gay and bi men persecuted by the law.

Non-binary activist, Oceana Maund, said recently, in a Herald article, that much of the vitriol has been egged on and created by the media who have utilised a moral panic. ‘Respected’ papers like the Economist have even bluntly questioned if trans people should be sterilised before being accepted, so this is not just an issue with the ‘red tops’.

The danger posed by these attitudes is easy to spot. What we should have learned from the fight for LGB rights is that backing down to peer pressure from homophobes and transphobes is something that will only ever reinforce hate.

Now that the GRA has been halted in favour of further consultation, many in the community no-longer feel protected by what was once seen as a progressive parliament while those against LGBT rights feel emboldened.

“There are many people in the trans community that struggle with the way the government rejected the GRA” according to Deejay.

However, much of the anti-trans trend is based, like all forms of discrimination, on “ignorance” and misunderstanding according to Deejay. When groups begin pitting themselves against one another and denying each other’s rights, then no-one’s rights are truly safe.

Despite GRA discourse proving to have a damaging real-world impact, as seen last June when a woman hurled insults and publicly attacked a trans man, FourPillars will continue in its mission to support the community, overcoming COVID-19 and the closure of the Aberdeen Market.

Could the Real Living Wage do a lot to Solve Aberdeen’s Wealth Disparity?

Aberdeen is on the up and up. When strolling through its granite closes and narrow winding streets, a city pioneering the future is splashed into our consciousness through colourful murals and a heap of development across the city centre.

Ever since the extraction of oil, Aberdeen has shifted from a sleepy fishing outpost to a driver in economic thought at home and abroad, its position as the ‘oil capital of Europe’ well established.

One way Aberdeen’s business mentality is shifting is in how it treats wages and living conditions.

Events like the oil crash have forced a rethinking of how the city approaches the local economy. Just recently, it was ranked sixth in the UK as a city to live and work which local councilor, Michael Hutchison, pinned down to changes in earnings, living costs and vectors like equality: “you used to have a huge disparity in wealth in town with people earning £100,000’s and those living in deprivation but there is move away from that now”.

The city is also seeing a huge growth in local businesses taking up the Real Living Wage pledge and paying its workers £9.30 an hour.

On Belmont Street, a night live epicenter, the independently run Belmont Filmhouse is one third sector business which has committed itself to the national initiative.

Colin Farquar, the cinema’s events manager, says that despite the challenging financial situation for business’ in the arts, “we had to make a decision about our priorities”.

It is argued that the introduction of the salary which accounts for living costs and day to day necessities would propel society in dealing with the long brewing social problem of wealth inequality as low wage workers could be more protected from a cycle of debt and opt more freely for financial stability; build businesses and contribute to the market.

“Workers are obviously happy to get paid more” but in a deeper sense, paying workers more isn’t just about what will boost morale or economic output, it’s about “doing right by workers” according to Mr Farquar.

However, throughout this debate, the government’s ‘national’ living wage has caused endless confusion in discourse, competing for the same purpose while being more limited, reaching a mere £8.21 for those aged over 25.

This fear in messaging was echoed by Mr Farquar but he still agrees that if the government continues to move in the direction of higher wages “then that can only be a good thing” and “could go a long way in tackling the city’s long standing issues of inequality.”

It is clear that this movement is being led by the third sector and minor business’ rather than corporations and major enterprises.

Although such groups are small, their ability to demonstrate a sustainable model for a RLW is important.

It has always been the case that economic realities are the biggest drivers for change, especially, if such businesses are “so visible in the city centre”. So if a policy designed to alleviate inequality has economic advantages it will surely come to pass everywhere.

Taking Behavioural Science from the B.S to the Forefront of Serial-Murder Investigation.

The F.B.I we know from classic fiction like The Silence of the Lambs and zeitgeist Netflix shows like Mindunter, which portray agents engaging in a psychological battle to find America’s worst killers, is actually a rather new phenomena which was popularized in the 1980s and 90s with the publishing of such books as Mindhunter: Inside the F.B.I Elite Serial Crime Unit.

The growth of public fascination with serial killers in pop culture can trace its roots back to the late-70s when the fledgling Behavioural Science Unit began to shift to the forefront of the bureau despite being located in the windowless depths of Quantico’s basement.

John Douglas found himself in a skeleton task force which was derided as the B.S department due to its initials and the way it was perceived by the rest of the F.B.I and local police.

Douglas, who is portrayed as Holden Ford in the Netflix adaptation of the book, Mindhunter, used his past experiences as a bouncer, college misfit and draftee to try and read the people he was profiling. He even attended college part-time to study psychology to become more adept at helping police arrest serial killers (a term his department coined).

He and others expanded the taskforce from a basic road school for local cops into a fully-fledged department that would be the first-call in assisting in cases all across the country. Soon, to gain a full insight and make the psychology used more practical, Douglas and co-worker, Robert Ressler (Bill Tench in the Netflix show) began to interview convicted serial killers in prison.

In his book, Douglas described his reluctance after being asked to hand over his gun and sign a waiver forfeiting the government’s responsibility in the event that he was taken hostage. Despite his anxiety he interviewed his first serial killer, the notorious Ed Kemper or ‘Co-ed killer’.

The beans that the six foot nine Kemper would spill was surprising as he would go into great detail about his mindset, how he ‘hunted’ and why.  Armed with this and the ‘insights’ of other killers, their team began to finally start profiling.

Just by looking at the crime scenes, Douglas could paint a picture of the suspect from their age, job, appearance, and even right down to if they had a speech impediment. The killer’s ‘M.O’, ‘modus operandi’ (how they kill) and their ‘signature’ (what they do to fulfil their sexual impulses) helped greatly with this.

The unit would not gain full recognition until 1982 when they made headlines by helping convict Wayne Williams, the perpetrator of the Atlanta child murders of 1979-1981.

On July 28, police received complaints of a foul odour near Niskey Lake Road before discovering that it was the body of thirteen-year-old Alfred Evans who’d been missing for three days. Soon, more murders began to emerge. Eventually, enough similarities were noted for police to assume that one person was responsible.

The F.B.I entered the investigation by order of the Oval Office as the case turned into a national scandal, especially due to the fact all victims were black young-adults and children.

Douglas and his department could derive from the killings that there was a high possibility of the murderer being black as serial killers at this time rarely crossed racial lines. They also could assume that the murderer was single, was 25-29, a police buff, would drive a police-like car, insinuate himself into the investigation and have a German Shepard.

All attempts to find the killer were failing and the death toll was rising. Many blamed the profile which went against popular belief that the Klu Klux Klan was involved. In 1981, the media reported that the investigation was using fibres from the bodies to find the killer which led him to change tact and dump the bodies in the rivers.

All police resources were diverted to monitor the rivers. Near the end of their shift, police caught a car stopping on a bridge and heard a splash in the waters. Police caught Wayne Williams who matched the profile almost verbatim but they had no reason to arrest him as the body was nowhere to be found.

After more killings were reported, the body from the river finally recovered, and a huge media circus whipped up by Williams, one of the bodies had enough fibres for the police to match the murdered to Williams’ home carpet.

In the trial, the prosecution, with the help of Douglas, managed to make Williams lose his collected calm which exposed his darker side to the jury. He was tried and convicted for two murders with the other 26 cases remaining unsolved but as of March 2019 have been reopened for investigation.

This case allowed the unit to expand exponentially. It continues to profile killers and focus law enforcement investigations. Douglas soon became unit chief and his first act was to literally remove the B.S from his unit by changing its name from Behavioural Science to the much dryer but more practical ‘Investigative Support Unit’.

Original RADAR Upload: https://www.rguunion.co.uk/news/article/radar/Taking-Behavioural-Science-from-the-BS-to-the-Forefront-of-Serial-Murder-Investigation/

The Story of the Aberdeen Grave Robbers and “Dirty Clever Dr Andrew Moir” (From Radar).

(Photos by Rolf Blicher Godfrey)

A graveyard watchman pockets a few shillings as a group of medical students scurry past him with a hatchet array of shovels and spades. The headstones stand tilted as the bodies of the recently deceased are unearthed and smuggled away under the dying cloak of night.

The Burkin Hoose, as it became known to locals, had an undying demand for bodies, a need that was never quenched. Existing legislation ensured only a handful of bodies from the gallows could be legally acquired.

Excursions to the graves soon became a common activity for the anatomical theatre, no less from “Dirty Clever Dr Andrew Moir” who
would often accompany his loyal students on raids to the local cemeteries.

The practice remained common among the burgh of Aberdeen, a city which had gained a national reputation for grave robbing.

Moir’s undoing would come in 1831 when “one of his porters wasn’t diligent about burying one of the remains”, according to Dr Fiona-Jane Brown, a local folklorist.

A group of children and their dog discovered “a great big human femur” whilst playing at the old Bleach Greens by which the anatomical theatre stood.

“Their Burkers! Their burkers!” spread around town as a huge mob of “up to 10,000” formed who soon stormed the Hoose to little intervention from the newly established constabulary.

Moir and his class were caught by surprise when the locals stormed his theatre, forcing them to route. The mob then turned its attention to the practice and was “horrified” to find bodies with “all the guts hanging out” and the stench of alcohol, used to preserve the bodies, grimly clutching the room.

Locals chanting “Burn doon the Burkin Hoose!” did just that and burned the theatre to the ground, leaving it and much of Moir’s legacy a smouldering pile of ash.

“The mental image of the riot stayed in people’s minds for years and years” and helped reinforce the locals’ fear of Moir but in all truthfulness Moir wasn’t some Frankenstein-esque professor but rather a “Good Doctor”, Dr Fiona-Jane Brown would remark.

He would treat those who couldn’t afford it and in the end would die from treating one of his patients when he caught typhoid.

He died poor with little to his name. The medical society of Aberdeen, which cherished his work, paid for his funeral.

Moir held knowledge above all else, even his reputation. He had learned multiple languages to understand the works of other anatomists like Vesalius but even now remains sensationalised as sinister even in such modern works like The Anatomist, directed by Robert Gordon University lecturer, Nicci Thompson.

Much of what Moir did could be questionable morally but progressively it must be considered vital. The man was driven but not driven by money or his own advancement, he was driven to help others and advance mankind as a whole.

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-Grab a copy of the Radar Winter edition anywhere on campus if you haven’t (it’s free!).

-Check out Rolf, the co-writer and photographer’s Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/r.b.godfrey/?hl=en

-Also check out Dr Fiona-Jane Brown’s book, ‘Hidden Aberdeen: History on Your Doorstep and Under Your Feet’, and her Twitter: https://twitter.com/BlueToonWriter1?lang=en-gb

-RGU’s Student Union Magazine, Radar: https://www.rguunion.co.uk/media/radar/