PRE-AMBLE
After nine months of trying to find an access point to the Plymouth LGBT archive, I finally met dr. Alan Butler at Pride– and he kindly let me in.
My first discovery in the archive was a comprehensive and unpublished autobiography of Jo Monk– who at the time of the last entry in the Plymouth archive, (2012) was nearly one hundred years old. Her story is one of homosexual galivantings, resilience, workplace gay hookups, horror, and historical queer joy.
Very few of the Plymouth archive’s materials on her are digitised, so all I have to go off is the notes I was scrawling as fast as I could when I was at the archive. Because of this, my attempt to biographise her will not be as comprehensive as I would like.
BIOGRAPHY
Early Life
Born in 1917, growing up in Hampstead, London, Monk was educated in a Sacred Heart Catholic convent on Highgate Road and then another convent on Verulam road in Hertfordshire during her adolescence.
The first thing Monk reported in her autobiography is that she never received any kind of sex education but she didn’t let that stop her from having lots and lots of gay sex throughout her life.