Leeds First
Friday:
Rebuilding the
largest trans social.
The background
Leeds First Friday (LFF) had been running fourteen years when I took it on. Beloved, running on one person's energy, and starting to drift. A Facebook group and not much else. Safety planning that basically relied on hoping for the best.
Nobody gave me a brief. I built the digital presence from scratch, set up proper safety partnerships with Stop the Spike, Ask for Angela, Angels of Freedom and Night Safe Leeds, and created the Made It! Newcomer Meet, because walking into a queer space alone for the first time can be a lot and someone should be there. Newcomers went from 1 or 2 a month to 10 to 20. This is still the thing I'm most delighted about.
LFF Insta →LFF Safety Leaflet (April 2026) →
Community first content
When I started, LFF was five venues and around 100 people attending. Now it's much closer to a monthly festival with 30+ venues, a planned programme, and 150–300 attendees each month. On the socials, Instagram went from zero to 5600 followers. Discord is where the broadest and youngest range of the trans community find us. The proudest moment came in 2024 when we were nominated for a National Diversity Award. To be in Liverpool Cathedral surrounded by the most impressive LGBTQ+ organisations was a real moment for us.
I couldn't have done any of that alone, and I didn't try. I brought in two co-coordinators and built out a team of hosts and moderators. Better events followed, which meant we could do more ambitious content, which meant more people turned up, which is incredible in a climate that is actively seeking to close down LGBTQ+ lives.
Running a visible trans space during the last few years meant content had to do more than one job. We knew the politics inside out, and made a deliberate call to keep LFF away from all of it. Somewhere people could just turn up and have a good time. What we did put out, consistently, was queer joy... trans people at work, with their families, with their chosen families, living their lives. Joyous souls shown plainly and fabulously in everything we made.
For LFF's 18th birthday we made a mime video starring Emmerdale's Ash Palmisciano and a group of attendees. A BAFTA-winning cinematographer filmed it, the community loved it, and it went everywhere. Even the seemingly flippant parts of this are all about queer joy, positivity and visibility.
LGBTQ+ Innovations
in Marketing & Consumer Behaviour
During my Masters in International Marketing I researched LGBTQ+ consumer behaviour — looking at how brands like Savage x Fenty, Mastercard and Starbucks engaged authentically with queer communities, and what that meant for representation, trust and identity. It's the academic underpinning of what I do in practice.
Read the research →
