About Us

SHOUT Festival of Queer Arts and Culture returns to Birmingham from the 5th-15th November 2020! 

And watch out for the Birmingham LGBT History Festival, returning in February 2021.

SHOUT grew out of a desire to celebrate and promote the diversity of Birmingham’s LGBT cultural community. Launching in 2009, SHOUT Festival (a project of Birmingham LGBT) was created as a direct response to a significant lack of representation for of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans, and Queer in Birmingham’s arts venues.

Each year since we have grown and changed building in ambition and taking on new challenges, we’ve been a film festival and an arts festival, we’ve worked in different venues, we’ve started new conversations and taken on new shapes and ideas. In recent years we have developed a robust and dynamic annual festival taking place for 10 days each November.

In 2017 we introduced the first Birmingham LGBT History to coincide with LGBT History Month in the year of the 50th anniversary of the Sexual Offence Act. We are now well into our ninth festival year, and a much anticipated and firmly fixed highlight in the city’s cultural calendar.

In June of 2017 we received the news that SHOUT Festival had been successful in its application to join Arts Council England’s National Portfolio for 2018-2022. Becoming a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO) will allow SHOUT to take a significant step forward in our work, our partnerships, and in delivering the festival. We will expand our work into new areas; support and develop emerging artists, work with venues to make them more accessible and inclusive for queer people, commission new artistic work, and continue bring the highest quality queer art to the city.