“One of the happiest parts of connecting with this history is finding my place in it as a lesbian”
CJ DE BARRA, IMAGE BY CANVA
When it comes to discussing queer history, we are in danger. Soon, we will have no one alive who remembers life before the partial decriminalisation in 1967. We have been so focused on our capital that we forget that smaller towns or cities have a queer past, too.
Nottingham is one such place long overdue for recognition. After all, Bob Mellors, the founder of Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the UK, is from here; we had the first nightclub (La Chic) with a license for gay men and lesbians, and the first out footballer, Justin Fashanu, is a former Nottingham Forest player. Fashanu credited the Nottingham queer scene for helping him come out in 1990.
Queer history is seldom ever written down, but when it is, there has been a traditional focus on London or Manchester. After all, both cities have a larger, more vocal queer community. Meanwhile, other cities are only just starting to question their place in history. What is deemed as queer history in London is often not applicable in different cities. Case in point, how many people in the Midlands spoke Polari?
For this reason, I founded the Notts Queer History Archive (NQHA) in 2022. NQHA is a radical archive that houses 170 oral history transcripts, 208 items and 830 newspaper articles. For three years, I ran around the city with my trusted recording device (my phone) and met my queer elders for a tea or pints. The result is a record of queer life from 1960 to 2025.
One of the happiest parts of connecting with this history is finding my place in it as a lesbian. I met so many inspiring older lesbians who had fought for my right to hold my wife’s hand in public, even to call her my wife in the first place. I learned about the sixties lesbian bars, which were a revelation. The back bar of the Napier Inn, the sympathetic landladies of the New Town Inn and New Foresters were all to be found in one of the most tightly knit working-class areas, St.Ann’s. Interviews, research and archives painted a picture of the butches in neat suits smoking, femmes enjoying the piano playing and the fighting over who asked whom to dance. So much so that Jim, who owned the bar, would often turn the hosepipe on those fighting.
I heard the stories of the women who set up their own lesbian support systems, such as the Lesbian Link phone line in 1979, the lesbian centre in 1986, Diversion (a DIY newspaper) in 1986, and Morrigan Lesbian Housing Coop, the longest-running one in Europe, in 1979. I learned that Nottingham Pride, then called Pink Lace, was started by a trans woman, among others, in 1997. It was later revived, against all odds, by a lesbian in 2003 after it had been cancelled for two years. These stories of queer joy were juxtaposed against heartbreak as lesbians told me about caring for their friends during the AIDS crisis, often in the place of families.
There are so many of these stories all over the UK waiting to be discovered. It’s up to those of us who live in small towns, rural cities and villages to start not just demanding that our stories matter too, but begin radically researching them, before it’s too late.
CJ De Barra’s new book, Queer Nottingham 1960 to 1990, is available to order through bookshops like Five Leaves Bookshop, Waterstones or Amazon. You can find the Notts Queer History Archive on social media and get in touch to donate items or interviews through nottsqueerhistoryarchive@gmail.com.
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