Biography

Stephen Bourne is a historian who specialises in Black British heritage and gay culture. Although he came from an educationally disadvantaged background, Stephen graduated from the London College of Printing with a bachelor’s degree in film and television in 1988, and in 2006 received a Master of Philosophy degree at De Montfort University for his dissertation on the subject of the representation of gay men in British television drama. In 2017 he was awarded an Honorary Fellowship by London South Bank University for his contribution to diversity. Also in 2017, Stephen was honoured by Screen Nation (“Black BAFTAs”) with a special award for documenting Black British film and television heritage.

From 1989, Stephen was a research officer at the British Film Institute on a project that documented the history of Black people in British television. The result was Black and White in Colour (BBC2, 1992), a two-part television documentary that is considered ground-breaking. In 1991 Stephen was a founder member of the Black and Asian Studies Association. In the 1990s, he undertook pioneering work with Southwark Council and the Metropolitan Police that resulted in the founding of one of the first locally based LGBT+ forums to address homophobic and transphobic crime. Since 1999 he has been a voluntary independent advisor to Southwark Police.

In 1991, Stephen co-authored his first book Aunt Esther’s Story with Esther Bruce (his adopted aunt), which was published by Hammersmith and Fulham’s Ethnic Communities Oral History. Since that time, Stephen has become one of the country’s most prolific historians of Black Britain.

In 2014, Stephen’s first edition of Black Poppies: Britain’s Black Community and the Great War was published by The History Press to coincide with the centenary of Britain’s entry into the First World War.  A new, revised edition of Black Poppies was published in 2019 and this was followed by a young readers’ edition in 2022.

In 2016 Stephen’s acclaimed biography of the singer Evelyn Dove, Evelyn Dove: Britain’s Black Cabaret Queen, was published by Jacaranda Books. In 2017 came Fighting Proud: The Untold Story of the Gay Men who Served in Two World Wars for I B Tauris and in 2018 War to Windrush: Black Women in Britain 1939-1948 for Jacaranda Books.

In 2019, he curated Forgotten Black TV Drama, a retrospective for BFI Southbank and, later that year, Stephen’s Playing Gay in the Golden Age of British TV was published by The History Press.