Photos courtesy of Ray Batchelor.

Queer Tango Festival in London May 2026: Seven very different creatives explained why they write, or support writing about queer tango.

• Arno Plass read from his academic book, QUEER TANGO – A Transformative Artifact (2023)

• Astrid Weiske, the organiser the famous International Queer Tango Festival in Berlin from 2011-2025, presented the story about her life in tango, a booklet created in collaboration with Queer Tango London in 2026.

• Birthe Havmøller, initiator of The Queer Tango Project, talked about publishing free ebooks about queer tango and mentioned two of the Queer Tango Project’s self-published anthologies: The Queer Tango Book (2015) and Queer Tango Futures (2021) and invited the audience to submit their book projects.

• Else Buschheuer read a couple of pages from her autofictional novel Ex@Woman (Abrazos, 2026)

• Ray Batchelor, the chair of the event and co-organiser of the Queer Tango Festival in London talked about his book Queer Tango Politics (2023) and Queer Tango Histories (2020/2026) both published by the Queer Tango Project as free ebooks and print on demand paperbacks.

• Ray Sullivan read from his self-published book, Changing the World One Tango at a Time (2024)

• Tomek Kulinski, a tango photographer who is in the process of making a book, presented a dummy of his photography book with black and white photographs of (queer) tango dancers.

The event took place in the Library of the Bishopsgate Institute which houses the largest LGBT collection in the UK: