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Sharon Hayes’ In My Little Corner of the World, Anyone Would Love You at Studio Voltaire features a five-channel video projection onto plywood hoarding that runs the length of the gallery Each track plays footage of a different room in the same house People walk in and out of shot, sitting down to read out loud to themselves or to one or two listeners They are seen sorting and shuffling papers, stapling, typing, tidying Occasionally someone will set up a gramophone record to play and sit and listen The papers from which they read are letters to and from the editors of lesbian, lesbian feminist and effeminist newsletters Each letter contains its own urgency sewn through stories, questions, warnings and expressions of gratitude for the publication’s existence There are frequent invocations to the others who will read the letters: ‘thank you sisters’, ‘good luck sisters’, ‘I’m sorry sisters’   The pamphlets were published in the UK and the US between 1955 and 1977 by organisations including the Daughters of Billitis (DOB), formed in San Francisco in 1955, and the Minorities Research Group (MRG), formed in London in 1963 These groups produced newsletters you had to subscribe to, whose lists were closely guarded The importance, difficulty and distance of the conversations they contain comes through as they are read, as does the particular pitch of their historical moment Whilst varied in their political position and relationship to the group they address, the letters all contain a certain clipped formality, a primness that can still be found in the ‘Letters to the Editor’ sections of certain newspapers Hayes, she tells me when we meet in south London, ‘was interested in the way in which the publications sat inside of their readership, that readership was a community but it was also a readership of writers Everybody was being solicited to actually write, to actively construct discourse, to give names, to offer stories, to make narrative’   Hearing them read aloud now, it’s clear that the newsletters were a precursor to chat rooms and comments sections for a marginalised and disparate community These letters track the vocal,