Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  ‘It was underground, sexual, and had these lights, these huge halogen lights that were really, really hot, so everyone was sweating. They were all mobilized on hydraulics. Not like these flat LED lights you have now – they were operated by people so they could be timed to the music.’

  He told me that, in Heaven, when men used to hit on him, he’d be so preoccupied with the music that they’d usually get bored and sulk off to seduce someone else; ‘I always wanted to stay to the end, dancing until the last record,’ he said wistfully.

  I had seen him in action; I believed him.

  Growing up in Barons Court in West London, Jeffrey started going out with his brother when he was just twelve years old, mostly because he didn’t want to be at home or at school. His mum was thrown out of the house when he was eight, and no one really talked about it again. His main carer, his grandma, was a strict Victorian-style matriarch, and there was a pervasive ‘what would the neighbours think?’ atmosphere in the house, a strange and unspoken pressure to conform that didn’t sit well with him as a young, closeted gay boy. At school, conforming was off the cards because Jeffrey was racked with nerves, had a stammer and breathing problems, was dyslexic, and everyone assumed he was gay.

  ‘How did they know you were gay?’ I asked.

  ‘Cause I looked like a girl!’ he replied in his almost-Cockney accent. ‘Plus my brother had gone to the same school and he wore make-up and Gay Liberation badges. They called me “queer”, “poof”, any name under the sun. I never actively denied it or anything. In my personal experience I was instinctively of the notion I’m a minority of one, my sexuality is a minority of one, my opinions are a minority of one, and I’m the only one going through it. It was hard for me to sense anyone else was feeling the same, but I had my brother.’

  The first distinctly gay place Jeffrey remembered his brother taking him was a cafe on Whitehall, just along from Trafalgar Square, that was open 24/7 – ‘Barkley Brothers, run by Maureen it was’ – where ‘rent boys and cross-dressers used to hang out, take all the blues and stay up all night. I thought they were all amazing, because they had none of the hypocrisy, and they were so visually being honest about who they were. I always felt protective of them. I mean, they were always fighting with each other of course, but for me they were really nice cause I was a kid. People around me would use words like “degenerate”, “queer” or “freak”, and they were talking about these people I knew who I found really fascinating, so they’ve always been a term of endearment to me, those words. I’ve always been attracted to people like that.’

  The first actual gay club Jeffrey went to was called Sombrero. It was on Kensington High Street, owned by ‘two Spanish queens’. He described it as his first great love. He met his first boyfriend there. Back then you had to be twenty-one to have sex with men so Jeffrey was under age. Not that that mattered much to him. ‘I would sit at a table and get drinks bought for me cause I was sixteen, cute and I looked like a girl. But I never let anyone take advantage of me and I’ve never been a real prolific sexual predator, I’m way more interested in the situation, the music, the lighting, the ambience.’

  ‘What was the ambience at Sombrero like?’

  ‘To me, Sombrero was an oasis, full of Italian waiters. There were tables and chairs so it was very social, a round light-up dance floor with alcoves around it . . .’

  ‘So Seventies,’ I said, as if I had been there.

  ‘So Seventies . . . the DJ played disco – the best disco! – and Italo music, all that stuff. It was a really great time for music. I just danced my head off like crazy. It was downstairs, too. I love when clubs are downstairs; I like the separation between the street and the club, like we’ve entered into another world. I don’t smoke myself but that’s why banning smoking in clubs was bad. People go in and out, in and out now, engaging, disengaging. You don’t lose yourself. What I love is that anticipation and fear about going to a club, you feel anxious and that feeds into this euphoria. When you go into a space that’s sexualized, people look at you in a different sort of way.’

  Most gay bars were members’ clubs back then, he said, meaning you had to know someone and there was a ‘whole paraphernalia’ to get into places. ‘In Sombrero you had to have food to go along with a drink because they didn’t have a licence, so you had to have a spam salad, you were given it. No one ate it, mind, so the place was full of spam salads. Except me. I used to eat it because I didn’t have much money, and I used to go to the kitchen cause this really sexy Italian guy used to be in there and we’d snog over the spam salads.’

  ‘Well, that really throws out the door my cardinal rule to never eat anything you find in a gay bar,’ I said.

  ‘The thing about that time was that they say they legalized homosexuality in 1967, but really it was just a containment law,’ said Jeffrey. ‘You had to be over twenty-one and in a locked room to have sex. So there was still a mentality that you had to be hidden. People were still in their denial state of mind. Gay clubs were still underground.’

  The same went for New York, he explained, where he travelled on a one-way ticket in 1978. At first, when he arrived, he only knew two people, whom he’d met in Sombrero, but luckily after the invitation to sleep on their floor expired he met a boyfriend with an apartment. For a while, he even stayed with William Burroughs in his famous Bunker (‘I knew who he was cause of my brother’s books’) and hung out with Allen Ginsberg (‘a bit lechy’), as well as other members of the group (whom Jeffrey describes as ‘that poetry lot’). To meet people, he would go to gay bars, like Hellfire, ‘a tiny bar, and by the toilets there was a door that you opened and the back room was like a whole block of people having sex’.

  The similarity between London and New York in the seventies, said Jeffrey, was that they were both bankrupt cities. ‘London had the three-day week, all that kind of bullshit, and in New York people were burning out their houses to make insurance claims. What’s really good about a financial crash in any city is there’s less police because the city can’t afford so many, there’s less rules about who can do what, and the opportunity to occupy spaces rockets sky high. People come from around the world with creative ideas, and when everyone’s got no money they’re on an equal playing field, meaning the creativity goes through the roof.’

  The only problem was, Jeffrey was one of these people, and therefore utterly penniless. ‘People would say, “How did you get here?” and I said I walked from there and they said, “WHAT?” It was really dangerous to walk around the streets then. I looked like a crazy person with a little jam jar of vodka, long black coat, curly hair. I was a child. I lived off going to private views, eating all the food, drinking all the drink, getting on the phone they had in the back rooms of the galleries and calling people up to find out where the parties were.’

  Around that time he met all the ‘Parsons School fashion lot’ and they started going to other gay bars. ‘The Ramrod in the Meatpacking District was – what’s his name . . . Robert Mapplethorpe’s favourite place. Then there was Ninth Circle, quite young crowd, indie boys. The Anvil I loved, it had a cabaret bit and the first time I was there a drag queen did “I Will Survive”, the Gloria Gaynor song. When it next came on the radio I said, “That queen’s got a record out!” because she had sung it so perfectly. GG Barnum’s had a Latin mix about it, and in one room there was a dance floor with a trapeze going on above you. The other room was Puerto Rican trans women singing with their lovers on stage. That was always very beautiful to watch, this celebrated love between these men and these women.’

  At this point, Jeffrey’s own eyes filled with love. Clearly gay bars had provided not only a place of refuge from childhood to adulthood, but also a place to be with other people who were made to feel like outsiders, a place to be sexual, social, a place to actually do gay rather than simply be gay. For him they were spaces where the culture came alive, an alchemic blend of secrecy, hedonism, the unexpected.

  ‘Has there ever been a perio
d when you didn’t go out?’ it suddenly occurred to me to ask.

  ‘No,’ he said, taking a sip of his pint.

  As Nicola brought us another drink and I sceptically surveyed the food menu, Jeffrey tried to pinpoint the moment when he, like me, first started noticing gay bars closing, or at least going in a different direction. It happened around the time he left New York, he said. ‘Studio 54 was great. I wouldn’t say it was the best club in the world but it was good,’ he said, noting that the thing that was different about it was how gay and straight people came together on the dance floor. Back in London, where Heaven had just opened, the crowd was similarly mixed, the last days of disco were unfolding and the London nightlife scene was gradually turning to punk. Sombrero had started to attract people like David Bowie, the gay managers of various bands, while Adam Ant filmed a video down there for his song ‘Antmusic’. Eloise’s, a lesbian bar, was filled with punks, and the famous Vortex club turned queer. ‘Punk was gay to me, it wasn’t anything else. It was people dressing up and having a laugh, being challenging to the world around them.’ But the punk club Blitz, which had formerly been a cabaret restaurant, summed up the shift that was taking place; according to Jeffrey, it was ‘gay, queer, whatever’.

  To Jeffrey, the seventies and eighties were the golden era of clubbing, before the nineties brought with them the commercialization of venues, before gay bars were bought by big brewery chains, and before banking made property so expensive that small independent venues could no longer survive. ‘It can honestly make a huge difference, capitalist greed. In the age of the pink pound, and as gay people got a bit more accepted, people started marketing to gays as a disposable-income group, and then you get these homogenized gay bars like the G-A-Y franchise growing, making money. That’s not a liberated format, it’s just another construct. You can’t manufacture a good club. For me, it’s about the quirks. They’re why venues with certain feelings are my favourite clubs. Sombrero was one of those moments. It was a place where people came together; the soundtrack was beautiful, the dancing, losing myself in the life and energy, in my minority of one. That’s what I was searching for. That’s the journey.’

  I suddenly pictured Jeffrey in a slogan T-shirt that said ‘Minority of One’ and smiled to myself. ‘All of the places you really loved, they must all be gone now?’ I asked him, knowing that, other than Heaven, most of the iconic venues he’d mentioned weren’t around any more. ‘Doesn’t that make you sad?’

  ‘I’m used to things coming and going,’ he shrugged. ‘Sombrero lasted a long time, but now that’s gone. Heaven’s still there but it’s morphed, it’s a shell of what it was. Now we don’t even have Soho but Soho has moved into other areas. Nothing does last forever. And even if you keep the outside of a building, the energy of a space is changed.’

  ‘Where does that put the Save The Joiners Campaign then?’

  ‘I don’t know what will happen if The Joiners reopens. I agree that if you love somewhere, you should try and support it or protect it somehow. If they’ve been inhabited by outcast people or political groups, there is a point to keeping some of these places. But it won’t be The Joiners any more, it’ll be a civic centre gay bar that has to meet a lot of council regulations. The only reason it was what it was is because it was this illegal drug den, invisible to most people around it, but that all these fashion and art people came and adopted. The Joiners went through a whole arc of reinvention, the mix became really eclectic and, you know, it just fit that moment in the night. But right now I’m way more interested in finding new places to inhabit and I think frustration is a really powerful tool for invention. I was brought up on squats and situational parties and that was exciting. It’s only recently, after the closures, that we’ve had this move back to more illegal things, which I’m very encouraging of. The only way to be underground is illegal.’

  He swigged his pint again.

  ‘There is no nirvana, so you can get over that idea. It’s the act of making something that’s most relevant.’

  A few weeks after my meeting with Jeffrey, one of the people from The Joiners campaign got in touch. They had spent the month and a half since our meeting going back and forth between the council planners and the property developer until a decision was finally reached: the developer agreed to grant a twenty-five-year lease to an LGBTQ+ landlord, £130,000 to fit out the venue, and the same closing hours as The Joiners had before it shut down in 2015: 4 a.m. weekends, 3 a.m. Thursday and Sunday, and 2 a.m. Monday to Wednesday.

  The Friends of The Joiners Arms had successfully done what they set out to do: saved the pub (or, at least, a version of it) and sent a strong message to developers that community organizing can speak louder than cash.

  I phoned Amy. She was elated. ‘I hope it’s going to have long-lasting effects, in that developers will be aware that if they try to bulldoze a space used by a minority group they might have a PR disaster on their hands, or it’s going to cost them a lot more time and money to get things approved.’

  Towards the end of our call I asked her if she was worried about whether, if they won the new space, people would actually come to it. This seemed like a question she’d already considered. ‘I think people will come, both old and new. A lot of people say that since The Joiners closed they don’t go out that much – but maybe that’s because it wasn’t there.’

  Still, she said, the plan for the new Joiners was to reimagine it as even more inclusive than it was before, more accessible, run by different parts of the community, and serving that community around the clock – a kind of pastoral centre in the day, and a club at night. But all of this could only become a reality if the Friends of The Joiners first managed to raise the money to secure the venue.

  One sunny Wednesday morning soon after, I loitered in the bookshop at the London School of Economics, waiting for a man who’d dedicated many years to trying to explain shifts in the way LGBTQ+ people take up space. His name was Amin Ghaziani, a sociologist at the University of Columbia, who had pored over archives of newspaper clippings and interviewed hundreds of people in an attempt to understand something he called ‘the gaybourhood’, an urban area populated mostly by LGBTQ+ people, full of gay bars, usually a few other gay businesses, and lots of visible rainbow flags around the place. In his book, There Goes the Gayborhood?, which compiles the research, Amin argued that it wasn’t just the gay bar under threat from gentrification and assimilation, but the gaybourhood more broadly. If anyone could shed some light on why gay bars were closing, it was surely him.

  He arrived, a man of lithe build, wearing a grey suit, and led me upstairs to one of the university’s offices. I pulled up a chair and explained my interest in gay spaces, what they had given me. Then I asked him where his interest came from. He told me that it was personal too; in his late twenties and early thirties, when he was a doctoral student at Northwestern University, he lived in Chicago’s Boystown district, the historically LGBTQ+ area of the city. In the nine years it took to complete his degree, he said, he watched the neighbourhood change, noticing more straight couples pushing prams, and that among the straight men in particular there were gazes of discomfort when they watched same-sex couples holding hands. It became a topic of frustration for him and his friends, almost an obsession, and so he told himself that after he finished his dissertation he would write a book about these areas. It would be a form of therapy and catharsis, but it also seemed like an interesting intellectual proposition.

  ‘And what were the main findings of your research?’ I asked him now.

  ‘I found that gentrification, rising real-estate prices and rising rents, these factors are hugely important in explaining why gaybourhoods like Soho in London, the Castro in San Francisco or Boystown in Chicago are changing,’ Amin explained, quoting me a statistic that illustrated how neighbourhoods in America with a higher gay and lesbian population tend to experience higher increases in house prices, illustrating a pattern of LGBTQ+ people moving into poor neighbourhoods only to
get priced out further down the line.

  ‘But economics are only part of the story,’ he continued. ‘You could say some people are being priced out and others are evolving out. It’s that latter group that we talk about less.’

  ‘OK . . .’ I said, readying my pen.

  ‘To understand specifically what happens when gay bars disappear,’ he said matter-of-factly, ‘there are other factors to keep in mind. One, technology: the increasing popularity of geocoded mobile apps like SCRUFF and Grindr makes it easier to either meet someone for a night or a lifetime without having to go to a gay bar, a gay neighbourhood or even an LGBT community centre. Of course, not everybody who goes to a gay bar goes to hook up, so it is reductive to say that they’d disappear simply because of apps – it’s an overstatement. However, apps like Grindr are extracting a segment of gay bar patrons.’

  Kate from The Joiners meetings had said something similar: ‘Even if we meet online, we still need somewhere to go on a date, and the fact is, gay bars are safer than straight bars.’ I agreed, but from talking to friends this seemed truer for gay women, who tended to use apps to connect but still met in public places; except for my friend Lea, who lived in France, and who inexplicably always seemed to be going straight round to strange lesbians’ houses before the first date. Even many of my gay male friends tended to prefer to meet in a gay bar first.

  ‘Next: culture,’ Amin continued. ‘The reduction of stigma against homosexuality, the advent of what some people called “post-gay”, a moment we’re living in that is characterized by unprecedented levels of acceptance towards homosexuality. Surveys show that both gay and straight people these days are less likely to say anything about sexual orientation than they did in the past; we see much more homogeneity in the composition of networks, so straight and gay people mixing more, and earlier average ages of coming out. Also, if you look at the language LGBTQ+ organizations use, it’s less of “lesbian”, “gay” and “queer”, and more shifting towards rhetorical expressions like “pride” or “allies”. Sometimes “LGBTQA” means the “A” includes allies, whereby you’re not demarcating any real slice of life because that could be almost anybody.’