Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Rowena described living in Manchester as a student in the late 1990s and going out clubbing to the gay village before it had become a destination for straight people as well. Though she was on the receiving end of homophobic abuse on the streets, she loved living in Manchester at a time when it was emerging as Britain’s cutting-edge queer capital, with Brighton down south enduring as the more familiar seaside ‘gay Mecca’.1 Rowena’s straight student friends thought her social life was ‘so much more cool than anything they did’. ‘They knew that’, she said, ‘because all their nightclubs were rubbish.’ On one weekend in 1998 Rowena moved from the bars to the clubs and ended up at Manto on Canal Street to chill out as the next day dawned. The area was still edgy, not least because rival drug gangs were operating in the clubs and through some of the bouncers. Suddenly, as she and her friends chatted, ‘some guys with machine guns turned up’ and shot out the whole plate glass front of the bar:
We had to hide under the tables. And nobody was injured, amazingly. But the police, who were there within minutes because you could hear the sirens, circled the outer premises of the gay village until these guys had gone. And they wouldn’t come in. They didn’t want to endanger themselves and they were probably paid off by the drug people, I don’t know. But they certainly didn’t care about protect- ing the lives of gay people.2
Rowena’s story gives an intense flavour of the pleasures and dangers of Manchester’s queer bar and club life in the 1990s. Behind her testimony are intertwined local contexts which make the experience particular to this post-industrial city. These contexts include the much-touted Mancunian ‘give- it-a-go’ spirit and council support for lesbian and gay rights which, together with the newly vacant warehouses, allowed for the development of the village in the first place. Another thread is the heightened suspicion of the police here – the legacy of an especially repressive regime from the 1960s through to the 1990s.
Queer beyond London hinges on local dynamics like these as it traces and com- pares the queer dimensions of Manchester and three other English cities: Brighton, Leeds and Plymouth. It shows how the local economy, population, city government and local history and culture shaped experiences of LGBTQ
(lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) identity and community in these places. It shows too how people’s gender, the money they had, their class, ethnicity, age and education, and much more besides, affected how they engaged with the queer fabric of their particular city. The book demonstrates, unsurprisingly, that LGBTQ lives have been lived fully and in diverse ways ‘beyond London’, the city that has tended to be at the centre of explorations of the country’s queer past and present.3 Unfolding the queer histories of other English cities shows us that London was not necessarily hugely significant to LGBTQ people living elsewhere. Of course, events in the capital – and not least in parliament – had a regional impact. But that impact was felt differ- ently in different places depending on local circumstances and dynamics. The partial decriminalization of male homosexuality in 1967 is regularly taken as a key turning point, for example, and in some ways rightly so. But to many in naval Plymouth the change in the law felt like an irrelevance given that male and female homosexuality were forbidden in the armed forces until 2000. A cul- ture and habit of discretion remained deeply embedded there well into the new century, directing but certainly not closing down queer possibilities in this city. That measure in 2000, meanwhile, had much more impact in Plymouth than in Brighton, Leeds and Manchester where other local events shaped LGBTQ lives more immediately and dramatically than those hitting national headlines. In Brighton, the foundation of the University of Sussex in 1961 brought in many more students who changed the tenor of queer life in this seaside town. In Leeds, the years 1975–1981 were traumatically marked by the serial murders by Peter Sutcliffe, fuelling deeply felt anger at misogyny and violence against women, and contributing to the radical lesbian feminist politics in the city. The active support for gays and lesbians by Manchester City Council (MCC) from 1984 and a horrific homophobic murder in Plymouth in 1995 shifted the relationships between LGBTQ communities and the authorities in those places.
That local events and contexts like these would matter to LGBTQ people in different cities is probably self-evident, so why did it strike us as the idea for a book? Over the last decade especially, our work has drawn us into a com- munity of independent and university-based queer historians and to a range of LGBTQ projects which expanded our awareness of the breadth and depth of regional and local queer history. These projects, plus associated websites, pod- casts, screenings, art installations and walking tours, have proliferated in Britain in the 2000s, often showcased as part of LGBT+ History Month each February (since 2005) or in the rich programming of LGBTQ community history con- ferences nationally and internationally.4 We became fascinated by what such
projects revealed individually but also in conjunction with one another, and by how they might tug at more London-centric queer histories. It is probably no coincidence that we decided to work together on these ideas while we were both outside the capital, Alison in Leeds and Matt in Brighton, where fellow queer historian and project team member Justin Bengry was also living. In these cities we encountered distinct queer histories which exposed gaps in more established accounts of the LGBTQ past.
A growing body of work in print also inspired us to join the conversation about English local LGBTQ history. The Brighton Ourstory Project produced a compelling oral history of lesbian and gay life in their town in the 1950s and 1960s; Robert Howes created an intricate account of political organizing in Bristol and Bath since the 1970s.5 Paul Flynn rooted his history of gay Britain in Manchester’s cutting-edge dance, music and bar scenes, arguing that they affected and reflected wider national change.6 Helen Smith, meanwhile, com- pared the striking differences between male sexual networks and associated self- understandings in Yorkshire, the West Midlands and London via court cases in the mid-1950s.7 Histories which highlighted the distinctive urban and rural queer networks across other nations – from the towns spanning the Canadian prairies to the racial and rural politics of the American South – further whetted our appetite for research on places at our fingertips.8
We bring additional perspectives to the table by including local trans histo- ries and by looking across the gender divide at both men and women and their intersecting queer scenes (more commonly explored separately). We take a longer (and later) time period than most of these other studies, discuss a broader range of themes and think about different places in direct comparison. In this way, we have been able to develop understandings of how particular cities have shaped queer experiences and cultures and also how these have in turn reoriented urban life and broader feelings of local identity. We found that gay and Mancunian pride were closely intertwined, for example, and that pride felt different again in Brighton, Plymouth and Leeds.
We look at our cities from around 1965, the height of the ‘swinging sixties’. These were years in which some lesbian, gay and trans people were mobilizing more visibly on their own account in Britain – as part of the North-Western Homosexual Law Reform Committee and the lesbian Minorities Research Group (MRG) from 1964, and the Beaumont Society, a TV/TS (transvestite/ transsexual) social and support group, from 1966. We were interested in how this apparently new consciousness played out in different places. More prag- matically, most of the available LGBTQ oral histories take us back only as far
as the 1960s (with some very notable exceptions),9 and we wanted our book to be anchored in people’s testimonies of their everyday lives. Our loose end point is 2015. This was the year we gained generous funding from the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council to pursue this research and these comparisons; 2016 was the year we began delving in earnest into the rich source materials in each city. Some of that material had been gathered together only in the previ- ous five or six years – in projects ranging from Pride in our Past in Plymouth (2011) to Brighton Trans*formed (2014).
These years at the end of our period saw queer regional life becoming more visible through these projects and in other ways too. Regional pride events were proliferating (119 at the last count) and museums and heritage organizations across the country were engaging more actively with the queer past,10 partly because of the requirements of the Equality Act of 2010. LGBTQ people living beyond London were also increasingly represented on film and TV and in the media. Brightonians were prominent in Sugar Rush (2005–2006), My Transexual Summer (2011) and successive seasons of Gogglebox (from 2013). Last Tango in Halifax (2014), God’s Own Country (2017) and Gentleman Jack (2019) (about Anne Lister of Shibden Hall) provided queer takes on West Yorkshire. The path- breaking drama Queer as Folk (1999) had earlier introduced Manchester’s Canal Street to national and international audiences. Our period, we decided, should come more or less to the present day of our project; we wanted to explore the reasons behind – and the significance of – this regional queer flourish.
Changes at a national level certainly affected our cities – whether those were in laws that had an impact on LGBTQ people or cultural shifts which fluctu- ated between tolerance and homophobia. Lesbians and gay men were gain- ing a voice in mainstream media from the 1960s on national TV programmes such as This Week (1964 and 1965), aired in the context of debates about decrim- inalizing sex between men.11 Soon after the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, coun- tercultural and new left politics helped to generate the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and the longer-lasting Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), both of which inspired a flowering in the 1970s of lesbian and gay political and social organizations and publications. Public opinion, while decrying the ‘flaunting’ of queer sexuality, also gradually moved to a greater measure of tolerance. However, the AIDS crisis from 1981 devastated the gay male community and was used as a rationale for right-wing political hostility. Gay men and lesbians were seen as vectors of disease and as a threat to familial and (in some eyes) national stability. A few left-wing local authorities actively supported their les- bian and gay citizens (Manchester included), but there was further challenge
from the state in the shape of Clause 28, which, once enacted as Section 28 in 1988, prohibited the teaching or ‘promotion’ of homosexuality as a ‘pretended family relationship’. This stimulated a surge in national activism, uniting les- bians and gay men even as wider public support dropped back. The profile of lesbians and gays (though not at this stage of bisexual and trans people) grew as a result, in TV soap operas such as Eastenders and Brookside and magazine programmes, especially Out on Tuesday (1989–1994). Under the New Labour government from 1997, moves towards equal citizenship really gained ground, with a string of legal reforms including the equalization of the age of consent in 2000 and Civil Partnerships in 2004.12 The 2000s saw a less contested visibility and growing acceptance. Gay and lesbian bars were more often glass-fronted than underground; LGBTQ lives were more often folded into mainstream media in a move from the cultural margins. The oscillation between liberal reform and moral anxiety over the last half century had culminated in a loose cultural consensus in favour of equality and tolerance. This can be seen to a degree in all our cities, though not in the same ways within and between them. And just as these local contexts tempered the impact of supposedly sweep- ing national social, cultural and political change, so it was with international events and shifts. The Stonewall uprising in New York, the onset of AIDS, dec- larations on human rights or the international circulation of queer film, art and popular culture certainly had tangible effects in Brighton, Leeds, Manchester and Plymouth, but not evenly or ubiquitously.
In their testimonies queer Brightonians, Plymouthians, Mancunians and
people from Leeds tend to emphasize different moments and different histories. The progress suggested by a broader story of legislative change has not neces- sarily been experienced as such by the people we discuss in this book; several hanker after the tighter forms of community or the fun they remember having in bars where you weren’t on show through plate glass to a passing public. Such past experience and nostalgia unevenly affects everyday lives in the present. Time is not experienced in the straightforward ...
