This LGBTQIA history tour takes readers across the UK to uncover hidden queer stories
BY MATT COOK AND ALISON ORAM
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”. 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 in 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 protecting the lives of gay people.
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 compares 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.
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 differently in different places depending on local circumstances and dynamics. The partial decriminalisation 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 culture 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 community 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, podcasts, 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 conferences nationally and internationally. 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.
Queer Beyond London by Matt Cook and Alison Oram publishes in paperback on 5 November 2024. Get your copy here.
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