Cleo Rose at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern in the 1969 ITV documentary ‘What’s a Girl Like You…’
Queer spaces are where you find them. It’s just a case of knowing where to look.
One of the sadnesses of the current spate of closures affecting London’s queer venues is that the number of known sites is dwindling at a rate of knots. There are some new arrivals (The Glory, Bloc Bar) and there’s no shortage of dynamic queer energy at work in the city – it’s just getting more distributed, harder to locate unless you keep plugged into the scene week in, week out. You knew that on certain nights if not every night you could go to the Black Cap, the Joiners Arms, Madame Jojo’s, the Nelson’s Head (and so on) and get your fix. Now they’re gone.
George & Dragon
This week, the George & Dragon, neighbour to the Joiners and Nelson, has been added to the list. In just a decade, it had become a gem and an institution, a boozer, a place for shows, an art gallery, a glorious hole. (See this history of the place from Ponystep and this tribute from Dazed.) But on Tuesday night, a post on the George’s Facebook page announced that the lease was going to be put up for sale following a rent hike.
News of the closure spread on Wednesday. It was grimly apposite timing for a long-planned event taking place that evening at BFI Southbank. Titled London’s Vanishing Queer Spaces, it offered a collection of archive material, expertly curated by the BFI’s Simon McCallum with David Edgar, showcasing the city’s queer nightlife culture from the 60s on. It was all rare, some almost never seen. Most of the material came from TV documentaries, with a good number of laughs to be had from the quaintly detached commentary of some excerpts. Others got it better.
We met lesbians at the Gateways in 1967 and were told they “want to relax in the clothes and in the way that make them happy” – something I’d argue we still need queer venues for today.
We saw 1977 pilot footage for Ron Peck’s seminal feature Nighthawks, recreating the cruising terrain of the Catacombs club in Earl’s Court, with postures to die for. Don’t get that on Grindr.
We went inside a gay members’ club in Walthamstow in 1979, hearing how one regular, Mike, was ostracised by the gay community after coming out in the local paper. Don’t make trouble, he was told.
We visited Heaven in 1980 soon after its opening, where George Melly (who, the narrator told us, “was himself gay until he was 30”) described it as a place where you could “do anything you want – or at least make preparations to do it later”.
We glimpsed a young Marilyn and saw a clone in conversation with queer punks in 1983, discussing different kinds of uniforms and the power of a smile.
We were behind the camera with Derek Jarman in 1984 when he filmed dancers at Benjy’s, lights streaking on the VHS as the disco tracks played.
We met Andy the Furniture Maker and saw a mixed queer club in 1986 where dancers were filmed not in the clinical fly-on-the-wall mode of earlier documentaries but in luxurious slow motion.
We witnessed Kinky Gerlinky in 1992 in all its polymorphously perverse glory and heard host Winn remark on how our culture insists on seeing the basic fact of “being sexy, or being sexual, as something freaky”.
We accompanied a few queens marauding around Soho for Pink Weekend 1996 and heard a crazy idea about weddings for gay couples.
And we saw performances recorded at the Black Cap and the RVT in 1969. At the Cap, the privately shot footage carefully showed only the drag act (good timing, iffy material) and not the audience. But the Tavern material, filmed as part of an ITV documentary called What’s a Girl Like You…, showed a crowd of real social and sexual diversity enjoying amazing, raucous performances that ricocheted along the length of the old bar and wouldn’t seem out of place on the Tavern stage tomorrow .
It was an embarrassment of riches that I found more moving than expected. I was lucky to be part of the post-screening panel, which was chaired by Neil Bartlett and also included Tamsin Bookey of Unskinny Bop, who is also an archivist; and Justin Bengry, who’s involved in Historic England’s current Pride of Place project to map sites of queer importance past and present around the nation.
Just as interesting as the material, I thought, was the context of its exhibition. The place was rammed – having moved up from the 130-seat NFT3 to the 450-seat NFT1, it was still sold out fit to burst. There was an anticipatory buzz and a notably diverse crowd compared to most other queer events in London. Not in every way – it was certainly mostly white and there were more men than women – but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen people from quite so many different parts of today’s scene, and from different generations, at a single event.
(It was expansive in other ways, including conceptually: one of the most interesting comments came from a man who remembered going to the RVT in the 60s and thinking of it less as a queer venue per se – drag acts notwithstanding – than an all-inclusive working-class community pub.)
But of course there were still plenty of absences. While gratefully appreciating the extraordinary achievement of this rare and remarkable event, it’s also important to try to pay attention to the strands of queer history that weren’t on the screen, and parts of the current community that weren’t in the room. The footage contained more women and people of colour than might have been expected but still a large majority of white men. This was quite rightly discussed in the Q&A, with Simon reporting that the overwhelming amount of the scant archive material available is of white men (structural misogyny and racism in action even within the context of queer documentation) and Tamsin providing a whole bunch of suggestions for how people can go about contributing their own material to various archives to contribute to redressing that imbalance.
And, as one audience member pointed out, £8.35 (the non-member concession price) is still too expensive for many queer people. Economics is inseparable from queer rights just as its inseparable from the operation of a cash-strapped, publicly funded cultural charity like the BFI – but it’s worth noting that a lot of material from the event and other queer archive holdings ares available for free at the BFI Southbank Mediatheque.
There were other absences. In the toilets, I spoke to a guy who had been at bars and clubs all the time in the 80s but most of his friends died and he stopped going out. He had come to glimpse a bit of his own past and perhaps see some old faces. He didn’t recognise anyone.
I was left with an intense sense of shared identity with places and people from the past, humility at the various kinds of resilience they’ve shown and pride at trying to contribute in my own little way to that ongoing flow of ideas and emotions and connections. Also a sense that things can always be better within the queer camp – more fully recorded, more fully inclusive – as well as in the world at large. And a sense of the urgent need to cherish the now – to recognise and value how important and nourishing places like those on screen, and in our streets today, are while they exist.
There’s also the simple fact of how validating and galvanising it is to see a community’s experience across time – familiar places and performers, perhaps friends, perhaps even oneself – up on screen. At different times, from different viewers, ripples of recognition radiated around the room, rings in the trunk of this great queer tree.
It seems to me the reason the event attracted so many people – and might have accommodated so many more – is that it asked a basic question: “Do you care about queer culture and identity?” In an era of supposed legal equality, some see this as a settled issue. But this is also an era in which it’s getting harder rather than easier to express a sense of culture and identity different from normative mainstream expectations. For many, the answer to that question is plainly and loudly yes.
There’s huge potential for more such events at the BFI – London’s Vanishing Queer Spaces was surely a great example of its mission to ensure that film is central to our cultural life. It was also a great example of how – while consistently queer sites are vitally important as safe and nourishing spaces we know we can count on – they are a means to an end.
Venues facilitate what really matters: meaningful connection between people. That can happen anywhere. On Wednesday, it happened at the BFI. For a while, it will still happen at the George & Dragon. We need to make sure it keeps happening, in our spaces, in other spaces, and often.
