Urban Claims and the Right to the City is a great exhibition, currently on at Conway Hall, about contemporary grassroots community activism in Salvador da Bahia and London.
It’s based on a collaborative research project between Federal University of Salvador da Bahia and Lugar Comum in Brazil and Just Space and University College London in the UK, with original photography by Angus Stewart.
I’m one of the six London contributors, alongside people who work with Migrants’ Rights Network, Inclusion London, London Gypsies and Travellers, Latin Elephant and the Ubele Initiative.
Each contributor was interviewed and asked to discuss questions such as reclaiming space and the common good. My reflections take in the queer civic value of the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, the Posh Club, the weekly Black Cap vigil and the power of fun.
UCL Press will publish the research later in March 2020 with a free online edition.
Here’s my contribution (edited from the interview I gave a couple of years ago so slightly out of date in some details now).
Reclaim our spaces
In our campaigns we are not quite in the position of reclaiming because what we do is about not letting go of what’s already here; in this sense we are claiming spaces rather than reclaiming them. There is political value in the spectacle of resistance and value in what we have achieved by being stubborn. We are trying to resist the capitalist rhetoric which exists even within LGBTQ+ communities. With the Black Cap there have been repeated attempts to redevelop the upper floors for residential use. Although the council refused one such planning application in 2015 and the venue was doing well, the freeholder closed the venue. We worked to oppose the planning application and get the building recognised as an Asset of Community Value. In 2014, the Royal Vauxhall Tavern was sold to property developers and the new owner did not disclose their intentions or engage with the community. Although the venue was not closed down, we decided to organise and mobilize preemptively and successfully applied to make it a listed building.
When talking about our spaces, it’s also important to ask who are we and what is ours. There has been an assimilationist rhetoric around LGBT people within mainstream culture that suggests that everything is fine now that we can get married, join the army etc. This neglects important ways in which queer lives and history are distinct from mainstream experience and it can be disastrous if queer sensibility and politics disappears. It’s necessary to have spaces that are accountable to different politics. There is political and social power in being with people in a space in an embodied and affective way, particularly in a time when we’re incentivised to be alienated from each other and ourselves. To be in spaces with people you have something in common with is good for your mental health and capacity for resistance.
It’s also vital to recognise the exclusions implicit in we and ours. London’s so-called queer spaces have often been inaccessible or unwelcoming to women, people of colour, people with disabilities, trans people, older people, people who don’t want to be around alcohol or drugs, people who don’t look a certain way. Those exclusions are unjust and need to be acknowledged and addressed rather than ignored or reproduced.
Reclaiming is arguably something backward looking and night venues shouldn’t be the only spaces for LGBTQ+ communities. Their history shouldn’t be neglected or erased, but there is a need to think about the future and what other kinds of spaces can be created which are more inclusive and meet different needs within the community. We are asserting the importance of creating new spaces and having the right to carve out space in new civic structures that are emerging.
Common good
This could relate to what the Black Cap means for Camden, as an iconic space on the High Street even for people who are not LGBTQ+, or what the Royal Vauxhall Tavern means for Vauxhall as a flagship venue. Queer spaces could be a model for how all spaces should be: not organised around commerce, competition and quantifiable commodities. Performance and experimentation which are exciting, engaging and rewarding can only exist in spaces that are not concerned with maximising profits.
Common good has to do with resisting transactionality. Neoliberalism is pushing transactional relationships between people in a large proportion of human interaction and everything is treated as a competition, creating winners and losers. This is damaging, harmful, limiting. So this is not a model for spaces for common good. Particularly in London there is the view of urban spaces as a form of capital, as commodities. This was the case with the Grenfell fire for example, as people were told even as their homes burned down, ‘too bad if you can’t afford to live here’. The logic is that if the relationship doesn’t generate profit it’s not valuable. The postwar consensus of common good, even if flawed, doesn’t exist anymore. Values such as respect, not being racist, human rights, these are not non-negotiable anymore for some people.
Fun
At the moment a lot of things are broken in our society and aspects of that are alarming and terrifying. It’s easier to look at negative trends and have a dystopian view. But change also opens cracks and crevices, opportunities to start new things and different things. A good way of working towards them is through fun. This can be a test bed for imagining different rules and putting them into operation. Fun is a way of building muscles to change things and try out new ways of doing in small steps. It’s important to have spaces where it’s possible to have queer fun, playing with ideas, feelings and relations. Fun is a powerful secret weapon because it’s trivialised and patronised from the liberal perspective. You can get away with a lot if it’s framed as ‘fun’ because it’s seen as inconsequential. Fun can serve a function of relief but also to articulate ways of resistance and imagining utopias.
In our campaign around the Black Cap we have been holding a vigil for the venue on Camden High Street every Saturday for the last two years. This involves some spectacle, performance, people talking, singing and laughing. We are not angry, we are not disengaged. Celebrating the Black Cap as a place for fun gives people permission to engage in their own way, to tell their stories of being in that space. If we had been shouting in an angry way on the High Street for two years it would be getting old. The power of protest is contingent on resisting to existing structures. There is something subversive and a bit utopian about doing this on our own terms.
A lot of people don’t have very much fun so it’s important to let people know fun is possible and accessible. We need to find things to look towards as well as fighting against. Fun is a powerful technology to try out things that will take you into different directions.
Ben Walters / LGBTQ+ spaces
Over the last decade London has seen a loss of more than half of its LGBTQ+ venues. Although many spaces were commercially successful and well used, they were sitting on valuable real estate and couldn’t match up to residential development in terms of profitability. These sites are significant as institutions for queer community and culture and they are repositories of history and affective heritage. LGBTQ+ people still don’t have lived equality in many ways and it’s essential to have non-normative spaces where they can get together.
Ben Walters edited the ‘cabaret’ section for Time Out London between 2009 and 2013, after which the section was cut out. Writing about performance mostly taking place in grassroots venues, he found this work very nourishing personally, eye opening and heart warming, as he could witness work being developed by talented people on their own terms, which in itself was a political experience. After leaving Time Out, he started a blog, ‘NotTelevision.net’, continuing to engage with the cabaret scene but also with the rise in LGBTQ+ venue closures. This lead him into being actively involved in campaigns to protect queer venues, particularly the Black Cap and Royal Vauxhall Tavern which have been consistent sites of LGBTQ+ community and culture for over 50 years. For Ben, campaigning for LGBTQ+ spaces is intensely personal, as these places are important to him in social, political and sensory terms. Ben is also part of the Queer Spaces Network which aims to connect campaigns and individuals and work with London’s City Hall to look at planning regulations in order to get more structural support for protecting existing spaces and developing new kinds of queer spaces. The power of developers needs to be leveraged at municipal level and therefore the Queer Spaces Network has been working to influence London Plan policy, and also talking to the Mayor’s culture team and London’s Night Czar, Amy Lamé . Ben chose to discuss the concept of fun and its potential to make change happen, which is a key interest in his activism and also in his PhD research.
Urban Claims and the Right to the City, Conway Hall WC1R 4RL, until Thur 19th March. Click here for more info.
