WHO CAN GO TO L FEST?

Inclusion statement

1. Who can go to L Fest

 We are a Lesbian centric festival.

 We are unapologetically aimed toward serving the needs of the Lesbian community but in doing so we will not exclude other members of society.

 Everyone who supports the Lesbian community is welcome as long as they behave respectfully to other ticket holders.

 We don’t exclude people based on gender or sexuality.

 We don’t judge people & genders based on how they look, we do not police people’s gender.

 We do however reserve the right to exclude anyone from the festival who is disrespectful to other ticket holders or crew members.

2. Why have we made this decision?

 We couldn’t run the festival without our allies.

 A lot of our ticket holders could not attend without their support systems.

In previous years: Local young women have attended with their dad’s for support, women attend with their straight brothers and sons support. If we exclude people who identify as male we would make it impossible for some women to attend.

3. Is L Fest trans-inclusive?

 Yes.

 We welcome people of all genders and we respect trans people’s identities. Trans women are women, trans men are men, and non-binary identities are valid.

 We expect all our ticket holders and crew to respect each other and treat each other with dignity.

4. Are there any women-only spaces at L Fest? 

 We may at times reserve the right to have women only spaces and ask that people identifying as male sit these out (for instance solos meet and greets, where there may be nudity, or the session is about woman to woman sexual or romantic attraction). Trans women are women and are therefore welcome in women-only workshops.

L Fest is the UK's only lesbian music, arts and comedy festival. The festival is unique and extremely important to many. It is a place where women celebrate and come together, feel safe and included, to make new friends or just to feel comfortable walking around holding their partner's hand in a very relaxed and friendly environment.

L Fest welcomes everyone who supports what we stand for and wants to be part of this wonderful community. We welcome and encourage the whole LGBTQI community and our straight allies. Our crew is very diverse and you will find men on site (although they usually add up to less than 1% of the festival goers).

Every festival has to have a target audience, whether it's the genre of music or the audience participating, ours happens to be lesbians. We don't have a music genre, infact we cover as many genres as we can and as much entertainment, as our adult audience is from 18-80 we try to cater for everyone.

The festival is accessible for all and been awarded the Silver Level on the Charter of Best Practice by Attitude is Everything for its commitment to improving access for Deaf and disabled music fans. 

L Fest is family friendly with workshops and games and dedicated childrens programme. 

We will not tolerate ANY discrimination to anybody within the L Fest site. Should this be reported the person will be asked to leave the festival. 

I think this picture below drawn in 2012 sums up our ethos very well.

On one boardroom meeting day, Vanessa from Thinking Visually came and 'drew' our meeting. I had never met Vanessa and she knew nothing about L Fest, she was recommended by Sue & Sal from SpringOut.  We just sat around the boardroom table talking about what L Fest was to us. At the end of the day Vanessa had drawn The World of L Fest.