Transgressive Queer Space-Making in London

This is another in a series of blog posts by the students in my PhD seminar on public intellectuals.

Transgressive queer space-making in London

by Jody Liu

Prior to my time abroad in London, UK, I had spent my formative years attending parties of some of the greatest techno legends: Jeff Mills, Juan Atkins, Kevin Saunderson. Through these shows, I forged connections with music producers and djs, radio show hosts and music label owners, and event organizers both in Detroit and internationally. As a result, I came into a familiar network in London as I was settling into an unfamiliar city.

As I immersed myself in the underground electronic music scene, I connected with several queer people of color who hosted cultural events in music, dance, and the arts. Almost every weekend, I made the trek from my small rear-garden flat to various parts of the city: Elephant & Castle, Hackney Wick, Peckham, Tottenham Hale. Somehow, I had the energy to stay out until 5 or 6 in the morning. I would get home just as the birds were starting to chirp and people were heading to early shifts. The nights out nourished me, in some ways; there was something about striking up conversations with strangers in the smoking area, smiling across the dancefloor at each other, everyone moving in rhythm. Slowly, I began to recognize people as we found each other in different spaces week after week. This ritual of coming together and dispersing, of connecting--however momentarily--before returning to our everyday lives, made these places all the more special. For many queer individuals, these places provided respite in an otherwise hostile world. 

This personal connection to London’s music subculture led to my interest in how and why these spaces of community were disappearing. As an urban planning student, I wanted to understand how the profession could engage more critically with queer issues. But more importantly, how could urban planning support these rapidly-disappearing spaces that were so vital to marginalized queer communities?

Through our conversations, I began to understand how queer organizers and friends were navigating the disappearance of queer spaces across London, and more generally, the decline of LGBTQ+ neighborhoods. For a while now, they had found peers outside of established gay neighborhoods. They felt excluded from the image-conscious, consumption-focused venues for various reasons. Instead, they have relied on ephemeral, decentralized, and virtual spaces to sustain themselves. Through their actions, these individuals and organizations were both resisting and staking claim on a heteronormative and patriarchal envrionment.

In this blog post, I illustrate how changes in planning priorities have intensified the closure of queer venues across the world, using London as a case study. Furthermore, I describe how my interviewees have been mobilizing in different ways to assert their right to the city. The post concludes with a discussion on the need to continue fighting for lgbtq+ justice alongside the struggle for racial, labor, and gender equity. 

Declining venues, declined gayborhoods 

Researchers at the University College London found that between 2006 to 2017, the number of LGBTQ+ venues in London had decreased from 125 to 53. This loss in venues is situated within an overall decline in the nightlife scene, with a 44% closure in UK nightclubs (2005-2015), 35% in grassroots London venues (2007-2016), and 25% in UK pubs (2001-2016). The loss of both LGBTQ+ and non-LGBTQ+ specific venues can be attributed to shifts in urban redevelopment under the Margaret Thatcher administration. The neoliberalization of urban planning in that era, which shifted towards more market-led regeneration, continues to have reverberting effects in London’s property market and development.

This approach is evidenced in the growth-first logic that the Greater London Authority (GLA) has pushed for in regeneration schemes. (The Greater London Authority is the governance body that oversees administration across London’s 33 boroughs, including strategic planning.) Most recently, the banking crisis in 2008 and the ensuing period of economic instability further cemented the age of austerity. To bring in revenue for the city, the GLA loosened planning regulations to capture “flows of global investment” (Imrie et al., 2009) through increasing permitted developments. The focus on economic growth pushed requirements for social sustainability to the wayside, thus exacerbating the issue of community venue loss. 

As a result, queer spaces have evolved as a reaction to, and recovery from, such neoliberal regeneration practices. Mayor Sadiq Khan, who intends to improve cultural sustainability under his leadership, has been supporting these efforts. For example, the government has established the LGBTQ+ Venues Charter and a Culture at Risk office to safeguard the loss of these venues.  However, it remains to be seen whether these initiatives will reflect the diverse needs of the queer community. 

Alternative making of queer space

My interviewees reflected the aforementioned ambivalence towards government initiatives through our conversations. One respondent explained, “This is a good first step towards protecting these venues. But I am worried most of their efforts will focus on Soho… which, to be honest, I haven’t frequented much at all since first coming out”. Other interviewees shared similar sentiments, expanding on how different aspects of their identities affected their experiences within Soho. 

Soho is perhaps the most recognizable gay neighborhood, or “gayborhood”, in the UK. It’s a neighborhood of with rich LGBTQ+ history, having hosted clandestine queer social clubs in the 1920s (when homosexuality was still criminalized in the UK). In 2005, it was the heart of a campaign against the Westminster City Council. LGBTQ+ businesses challenged and won the right to continue displaying the Pride flag on their premises, which the council had ordered them to remove as a violation of planning regulations. 

Despite this history of LGBTQ+ struggles, many of the interviewees actually expressed a disconnect with Soho. While Soho venues were the backdrop to some of their first “coming out” memories, they no longer found it relevant to their everyday lives. As one interviewee shared, the commercialization of the neighborhood made the venues feel unapproachable. He explained how, as a queer person from an immigrant and working-class background, he felt uncomfortable in spaces that catered largely to wealthy, white gay males. He shared, “I have both been fetishized as an ‘object’ of desire, and looked down upon”. The cognitive dissonance contributed towards the interviewees’ ambivalence regarding the venue charter. They believed the charter will mostly support the spaces that already have more resources and political support. 

Their experiences trouble the gay neighborhood-as-liberation model, which was first termed by sociologist Manuel Castells’ seminal work on the Castro district in San Francisco. In describing the Castro, Castells argued the transformation of the marginalized gay ghetto into a deliberatedly constructed neighborhood was a trajectory through which gay and lesbians could attain legitimation in the city. Geographer Jack Gieseking, however, argues this “liberation” model buys into a neoliberal approach--one which depends on gentrification and displacement of other marginalized communities to secure a better life for gays and lesbians. The model seeks assimilation into the American Dream of homeownership, rather than drawing a critical connection between the struggles of queer people to other marginalized groups in the United States. In other words, the gay neighborhood-as-liberation model aspires to problematic heteronormative and capitalist ideals. As a result, the interviewees have found different ways of sustaining themselves and resisting their erasure from the city through alternative spatial practices.

Emerging queer space: the Queer Picnic and Femmes of Color Open Brunch

In contrast to the static nature of Soho, interviewees often had to stake claim on heteronormative or homonormative spaces to construct a place for themselves. As a result, these spaces are often ephemeral, fragmented, and virtual. Through seemingly mundane acts of socializing, mingling, and eating together, queer people of color actively challenge the public gaze and perceptions of what being queer means.

In June 2017, I attended the Queer Picnic in southeast London, which attracted over 300+ people from across the city. People of diverse gender identities, ethnicities, abilities, and generations gathered and proudly affirmed their existence in a large public park. On its Facebook, the event page asked: “Are you tired of the stress of navigating London as a queer person of color or even as a queer white person? Do you love being with other queers but feel that Pride [Parade] is just a bit too corporate/assimilationist/white/expensive/policed or triggering?”. This statement unearthed a broader discontent within the (minority) queer community with wider LGBTQ+ culture. Interviewees felt mainstream LGBTQ+ culture has become depoliticized and corporatized as particular queer identities (i.e. white, cis-gendered, gay men) have become more accepted. Similarly, the Femmes of Color Open Brunch also described itself as an alternative to Pride. By positioning themselves in this way, it reflects the problem that Hannah Dee argues, “London Pride – once a militant demonstration in commemoration of the Stonewall riots – has become a corporate-sponsored event far removed from any challenge to the ongoing injustices that we face”. 

An attendee described feeling a sense of ease at the picnic; the organizers had been very intentional in creating an inclusive space. Unlike the Soho bars and clubs, which necessitated purchasing drinks or paying an entry fee, these do-it-yourself events were free or had a sliding payscale. The organizers also paid attention to people’s abilities, making sure the space was in an accessible section of the park. Another attendee mentioned how, due to social anxiety, crowded clubs or intimate bars were out of the question for him. He preferred the relaxed atmosphere of the park, which allowed for conversations to take place. In contrast, clubs often blasted loud music that made conversation difficult -- unless you wanted to shout at each other repeatedly. Additionally, the organizers had put together a taxi fund beforehand. While this may seem like a small detail, it made a world of difference. This fund ensured that people who felt uncomfortable using public transit could still attend the picnic without worrying about cost. These actions of care and community prefigures a future of more inclusive spatial practices, where queer people of all identities could feel safe and accepted. 

A new LGBTQ+ community center

This desire for more inclusive space outside of nightlife has galvanized a crowd-funding campaign for a new LGBTQ+ community center in London.

Back in 1985, the Labour-run Greater London Council had established the London Lesbian and Gay Centre. As Christobel Hastings at VICE explores, the Centre provided a respite during a time when queer people faced workplace discrimination, harassment, and arrests; it also provided office space for various queer organizations. The center was short-lived, however. Just after 5 years, the centre closed due to political infighting, financial losses, and the withdrawal of grant funding by the incoming Conservative government. 

While the center was set up as a workers’ cooperative, and purportedly ran on a decentralized structure, the Centre nevertheless ran into issues. In a Vice article, former visitors and volunteers recounted issues with representation (with most of the workforce being white and college educated) and conflicts between queer identities (and certain groups being “policed”). Despite these shortcomings, however, the Lesbian and Gay Centre nevertheless presented a model for what an anti-capitalist, community-driven space could be. 

Since then, London has been without a dedicated LGBTQ+ community center. Plans were made in 2007 for a community center in Soho, but a narrow vision for the center (i.e. white and gay male-focused) created a rift within the City of Westminster Council; ultimately, the plans were not realized.  In late 2017, as I was wrapping up my research project, a new initiative was underway in East London. A group of volunteers held open meetings, consultations, conversations, and workshops to envision a new LGBTQ+ centre. Collectively, the center will be a nonprofit multi-purpose, multi-generational space offering clinic and therapy spaces for service providers; a garden; an informational hub; and a workspace for individuals and campaigning groups. As of June 2018, they have raised about £102,000 and are working to secure a physical space. 

The future of queer spaces

The interviews revealed the paradoxical ways in which a queer space can be a site of inclusion for some, and one of exclusion and anxiety for others. In particular, more established neighborhood of Soho felt particularly alienating for the queer people of color I interviewed. Instead, they preferred and produced more decentralized spaces across the city. Such a diffused network of spaces disappear as quickly as they come into being. Queer spaces are made both by queer bodies and through queer practices; that is, spaces become queer through the presence of queer bodies, as well as through deliberate queer actions. The local library becomes a queer space as a gay, Black man learns about what it means to hold his Blackness and gayness from James Baldwin. The local beauty store becomes a queer space as an Iraqi of nonbinary identity buys make-up they’ll later use in a photoshoot centering trans and queer of color identities. Burgess Park became a queer space when the organizers planned the picnic, then people of all non-normative gender identities and sexual orientations gathered there. Thus, queer space can come into being through everyday actions and through deliberative planning. 

However, this does not mean queer minorities are against establishing more permanent and welcoming spaces. Some of the organizers expressed how having to constantly look for new venues to host events can be tiresome. What it does mean, however, is that queer spaces should not be understood as fixed and static; nor should the existense of a gayborhood be understood to mean queer rights have been fully realized. Rather, the fleeting and precarious nature of queer minority-led spaces signifies the political, economic, racial, and gender injustices they continue to face. It serves as a reminder that queer liberation is a continuous fight, one that necessitates us to act outside the confines of capitalism. ⧫

Jody Liu is a doctoral student in urban planning and policy at the Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California. Her work explores how queer communities center healing and mutual care to contest racial capitalism and carceral feminism across digital and physical geographies.