Access Plus Spanning Identities has been in existence since July 1997. Our inaugural meeting was initially planned as a one-off event. Around the table sat workers from disability organisations, staff of gay and lesbian organisations, with representatives of several government departments and, most significantly, a group of queers with disability.

Our focus that day was very much on service provision and how it discriminates against some of us, directly or indirectly. Just articulating that felt like a big start and some of us felt very keen to add activism to the process of articulation and suggested that we form a working group to hold a conference. That process took the next year or so. We started from scratch, sought funding, pooled all our ideas about how to make both the disability and the sexuality parts of the conference work, clarified our themes and organised speakers who had a thorough understanding of the issues and would present them powerfully.

We held the conference, 'Spanning Identities', in October 1998 with about 80 participants. By then we had moved beyond seeing discrimination in service provision as the sole focus and were looking at more cultural issues. The five themes of the conference were:

• participation;
• media representation;
• living in institutions;
• identity politics;
• violence.

The conference confirmed our belief that there was a need for a group like apsi and in March 1999 we became an incorporated organisation.