Locating Queer History - Matt Cook

I wanted to start by introducing you to some queer folk and some queer places from four regional English cities in the 1960s. The Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts making it takes a lot of time, but because we want to encourage a love of learning, we think it's well worth it. We never make you pay for lectures, although donations are needed, all we ask in return is this. Send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you are listening right now. Now, let's get back to the lecture And we work, we're gonna work clockwise. So Lucia moved from Ireland to Manchester as a teenager in the early 1960s. In the factory where she found work, she heard about the pansies. I'm gonna be doing a lot of this <laugh>, just to warn you. She heard about the pansies who drank at the new union on Canal Street, and along she went, I stood on Canal Street looking at these people going in and out. She said, I saw men dressed as women and vice versa. I'd never seen anything like it in my life. These punters became like Lucia's family, and she was taken under the wing of the straight landlord and landlady who found her bar work nearby and also a place to live. This sense of family really mattered because of attacks by queer bashers and particularly intense poli police activity in Manchester in the 1960s and seventies and indeed beyond. We had to take care of ourselves, she said. And as our numbers got bigger, we got bolder, and we would step out of the new Union onto Canal Street with our drinks, and we had queens at each end guarding us. They were vicious against the homophobes, she said, in a 1969 expose. There we, there we go again, of the leads queer pub, the hope and anchor. And you can see that the hope and anchor's just on tucked on the right there, um, of the least queer pub, the the hope and anchor readers of the national scandal rag the pe. The people were introduced to Jane who worked in a local mill where she arrived and left, left early before everyone else because people would ridicule her so much at work at the Hope and anchor. Other punters told the people that she gets most hurt, if not referred to as her, and she but found it generally to be a place where, as she said herself, she could enjoy herself without feeling out of place like Lucia. She found a sense of family here two weeks after the People's Report, the Hope and Anchor Pub was ransacked by leads and Glasgow Rangers football fans. And it closed leaving Jane and others without their anchor point for a year before it reopened as the new penny or the bent Penny as it became known locally in interviews recalling the pub in its new incarnation. So from sort of 1970 ish, several men said they would rarely or never go there. John remarked everything would be straight back to work. Your job would be untenable. He and others had too much to lose. Others had too little to gain. Ruth remembers remarked on how male dominated this pub was, and a couple of others also nearby. She came from Wakefield to find like-minded people one night, but returned home disappointed. Eileen moved to Brighton from Glasgow because of its near queer notoriety in the 1960s or by the 1960s, she relished being able to go out on a Sunday wearing a pair of slacks and quotes. Nobody turned around calling me a cow. Ted from Southampton felt euphoric when he moved here in the 1960s. I just dived in and I never looked back. He said one of the several pubs that Ted enjoyed was the Golden Fleece, which had two bars with very distinct atmospheres. Bert in one was the soul of discretion. Dennis in the other was one of those flamboyant queens. His bar was hilarious and riotous, but Denis could be indiscreet and might compromise you in public discretion, still clearly mattered in Bri Britain's San Francisco. Nearby kins ca casuals, the smutty con, the SMU smutty combination of Phil and Ken, the men who owned it meanwhile fed a distinctive queer style in Brighton in the sixties and seventies with terribly Hawaiian shirts and all sorts of twi at the neck. Grant remembered remembering 1960s Plymouth. This is there in the bottom left from the vantage point of the 2010s local born Ted. A a different Ted. There's quite a lot of Teds, um, was nostalgic. It was better when it was against the law. He said we were like a big family. We all knew who we were and where we could go. We always used to go for drinks on Saturday night at the Laier Hotel, which is pictured here. The gate, the queer bit was this lower level extension at the back. Um, it was only a little place, but we were used to it and the staff knew us. Another local, a teenager in the sixties was forbidden by his parents from going down Union Street, notorious for the sailors who went out on the lash. There. He went, nevertheless, of course, and remembers the paramount. You got up to this tall, really tacky room with a tacky bar where they played jukebox music and you got all the services, you got the prostitutes, you got the queer boys. Basically the dregs of society ended up there and sometimes you'd get a drunken sailor saying, come here darling, I wanna dance with you. The imperative though, was to keep below the proverbial radar. You have your joke, you muck about, but nothing else. One, one, Laier punter told gay news when they visited in the early 1970s. Now there's much to connect these places and experiences in each. There was at least one tacitly queer pub. Brighton had several, which had a mix of punters who found some sense of ease and possibility, quite a lot of fun, and for some, a sense of family in what were in other ways and in other places hard times. These were years when the homosexual heterosexual binary with which we are now so familiar was becoming more entrenched and discussed. And in each city, this separation was becoming more evident in a way illustrated in this documentary, um, on leed, which I'm just gonna show you a small clip of, let's see if we can, Although in Leeds as in other northern cities, most people do not adopt a Victorian moral attitude and even express a kind of tolerance. It is still difficult for a homosexual to fit into the tougher and less permissive environment that defines there. Some homosexuals have their own places which they must stick to. Others have nowhere. Are there many in Leeds that you know of? I don't know, but I feel bit like <laugh>. I suppose it must be really? Yes. But they all keep to their own little hos Well, various pub are notorious. I went down to hope and anchor for a giggle, wasn't they? Yeah. And why that A giggle? No, it was <laugh>. It was actually not funny, but something I probably would laugh. I dunno, I don't. Funny. I, Well, I'm from Manchester. I was a student in Leeds when we first came up, you know, went on this pub crawl to, with a couple of the students to see what the place was like. We saw every pub near off, went to a few clubs and, uh, some of the, some of these pubs were filled with queer out, the teddy boys all queers. And, um, some are in drag and some are not, but they don't, they don't, don't really mind you as long as you, um, sort of not bother them and not stare so much. But then some of the students at the university in charge of the union news then doing his articles are on leads sound to you won homosexuality and the whole bank know him. Everybody in Leeds, I think that's far enough. And he went there and took some photographs and the, the quiz there just sort of played up to them. So it seemed doing antiques, dancing on tables and stuff and stripping off, I think the podcast shirt off, which you don't do normally. You know, there's obviously sort playing onto the students. And then later on, um, one of the sort of Sunday scandal sheets must have cut onto his story. A good story. They came on with photographers and did a double spread it, quite iterate story I believe. And, um, Leeds were playing football team rangers, Glasgow Rangers and late le pretty bad anyway for football. People smashing windows and stuff. And I think the Rangers lost and they were probably been a pub crawl afterwards and they must have come across this place or heard it from this paper anyway, and they went there probably taking the mick a bit booed up, you know, and of caused some trouble fighting and, and, uh, place was closed down. It was quite a interesting, I think, vivid image of leads at that time. But what I think is particularly interesting about this short, this short clip from this film, um, is the way in which we don't get to meet any homosexuals that they talk about so much. This is about people who are over there in their haunts. Um, and we are getting this perspec this from very much from the perspective of the norm. What the film also suggests is a real sense of real and pres present danger. I was really struck when I was looking again at this film and just thinking about what it must have been like to be in the hope and anchor that night when the Rangers, um, and Leeds fans descended and started fighting and destroying ransacking the pub to this, to, to, to the extent that it had to close down. I mean, a terrifying experience. And this sense of real and present danger was, again, present in each city to varying degrees. And this is perhaps no surprise because arrests and prosecutions, um, for homosexual homo homosexuality continued across the 1960s. And in fact, after the 1967 act, which partially decriminalized homosexuality, arrests increased, men and women continued to lose their jobs if their sexuality was revealed. And women also lost their children in distressing custody battle battles. Trans folk, um, appear in the press infrequently, um, in the 1960s, but when they do, it's usually to do with reports of suicide and attack. So we can generalize, I think, between these cities and na nationally about queer experience in the 1960s and beyond. And I don't want, I mean these threads of connection are very important, but in this lecture, I want to think a bit further about what marks out these cities and these folk. And so make an argument that the particular dimensions of locality, the local geography, economy, politics, size, history, and also distance from London, make a real difference to the identity and commu identities and communities which formed and were experienced in each of these places. If we just go back to our cast of characters, we might glimpse something of this. So we might spot Lucia and her friend's defiance. We might see Ted's caution and also nostalgia in Plymouth. We can see the sense of embattlement in LEED city center, and we can see too the sense of possibility and scope for some visibility, flamboyant or otherwise. For Eileen, the other Ted and their circles in Brighton communities scenes and identities had a different cadence in each of these places because of particular circumstances and inflections of local, regional, national, ethnic, and other identifications. If the call to come out was soon to be articulated loudly nationally and internationally in the early 1970s, it was taken up very unevenly in each of these cities. And so by looking at each of these cities in turn, two in the north, two on the south coast, but all within the English jurisdiction, I'm going to pull out the factors that I think have made for these differences. In doing so, I want to suggest the significance of thinking about sexuality in particular and local contexts, and suggest the need to be suspicious of sweeping accounts, which often place London front and center, and assume that its history can also count as a national history. There are cities, uh, Uh, Two at the top, two at the bottom there. So if we start with Manchester, the largest of our four cities, but in decline in the 1960s as the manufacturing base shrank and a program of slum clearance took hold, 544,000 people lived in the city in 1971, a drop of 80,000 from 1961, really quite a sub substantial dip. The population fell by a further 90,000 by 1981 before gradually recovering to roughly the 1971 figure. By 2021, under very different economic conditions, the wider greater Manchester region meanwhile maintained a more consistent population of 2.7 million, including some of those who had left the central parts of the city. Others moved in. However, Africa, Caribbean immigrants settled in the inner south suburbs from the later 1950s. And the number of students in the city doubled from about 12,000 to about 24,000 from 1961, uh, to 1971. And that's kind of in line with the national trend. These incomers contributed to a burgeoning youth culture in the city, which was centered on dance halls, shebeens, and all night cafes, which were according to the Bolton Evening News, hives of mole decadence. A somewhat associated queer scene developed alongside, brought to wider visibility during the sixties by particularly aggressive policing, which came with the appointment of John McKay as the new chief of police in 1959. Landlords and punters at the Rembrandt, a country pub in the city. And the more working class new union, which we've seen already, both on Canal Street in the southern part of the city center, found themselves in court on various indecency and licensing charges. These and other venues were mapped in local press coverage as a result, flagging the existence of a nascent queer scene. As surely as the dangers associated with it, it showed you where you could go if you were interested. The intense police activity and press interest in part explains the stridency of queer community here that we saw in Lucia's testimony, the formation of the Northwestern Homosexual Law Reform Committee later, the CHE, the campaign for homosexual equality was founded here in the mid 1960s. You can see that on the right, right on the, on the left hand side, uh, left hand side there, um, and direct action, lesbian and gay organizing at the start of the 1970s in a campaign of kis and slogan painting on city central railway. Bridges, for example, has been understood locally as an extension of the city's longer radical lineage of Peter Lou and the Hursts. So said Paul Fairweather, Manchester City Council's first gay officer from 1984, and another radical local initiative. Paul suggested that this mancunian history and tradition together with union and work workplace comradeship underpinned a particular sense of solidarity and an upstart queer scene in Manchester. Large enough to have lots going on, but unlike London, small enough to be socially and politically networked and completely manageable. I'm quoting Paul here. So, um, we've got a combination of factors. A city, a city large enough to have a critical mass of queer people, particularly intense police activity, um, marshaled against queer and black people and the venues they used from 1959, right through to the 1980s, a broader tradition and history of solidarity and radicalism, and an interestingly, an enduring crossover queer scene, which brought different people together. So in the sixties, but also in into the seventies and eighties, there were Central Manchester venues like Paddy's Goose, Tommy Ducks, and the Blooms Hotel, which were nominally regular bars, but popular with queer and trans people. If I went to the Goose on a Wednesday, I'd be sure to find some other trans people to spend the evening with, said Jenny Ann, who felt anchored in the city in the seventies and eighties as a result of these places, and also because of a trans support group running outta the university, tra chaplaincy on Oxford Road, crucially with a car park that allowed her to arrive and also to leave, uh, discreetly and safely in the years to come, these traditions continued. Manchester remained on the cutting edge politically. It hosted the largest anti clause 28 demo in the country in 1988. And you can see that, um, up here on the left hand side, on the right hand side, apologies left and right, always tricky. Um, and it also, the city also gained a larger national and international reputation for its cutting edge and crossover music and dance scenes in a city in decline. It was cheap in the 1970s and 1980s to live and to put on parties in the industrial buildings and warehouses that were increasingly lying empty in the center. Kate, a trans woman, told me an interview, the only people who seemed to live in town in the late 1980s who were queer. We didn't even have a supermarket. There was something about not just moving to Manchester, but living in the center of it. We just wanted to be right in it to be part of it. The labor controlled city council was amongst the first in the country to appoint, um, a lesbian and gay officers, as we've seen already and committees in the 1980s, mid 1980s. And the council actively supported the new gay center. It helped gays and lesbians into housing, recognizing the disproportionate difficulties many of them faced, especially in the context of the AIDS crisis. And they helped facilitate the formation of the UK's first gay village through licensing and, um, and street furniture and other, and other initiatives. Um, and this happened in the deserted warehouses and buildings around Canal Street, the post-industrial landscape lending itself to this kind of renewal. In the early 1980s, the area around Canal Street was still, and I'm quoting full of cotton workers by day and prostitutes by night, according to the former landlord of the Rembrandt Rembrandt. Thereafter, the warehouses emptied and only the prostitutes were left in 1990, etched out of an old building on Canal Street. Um, the glass fronted Manaus opened as the first of the new style bars modeled, um, on, on those in Paris and Barcelona around the same time to introduce, said one of the owners a bit more sophistication to the scene, though interestingly, punters initially crowded upstairs to avoid being in full view. The risk of exposure was still very real for many. Soon after this area became the hub for city, city Center, warehouse, apartment living bar and Club-based socializing and AIDS related community fundraising and support. The new potential of the Pink Pound was especially evident here and queer as folk. The Landmark Channel four series of 2001 cemented the Village's place on a queer cutting edge for a much wider audience. And the city tourist office was soon promoting it alongside Curry Mile. Another newly defined urban quarters. Kwin from Leeds found it liberating, exciting to have such a place where there was at least a couple of lesbian venues and knights alongside the majority that were gay male Joe contrasted the bright lights of gay Manchester with parochial Plymouth. The Village, um, was criticized for being an exclusionary ghetto, for being too commercial, too young, too white, too straight, too gay for not being queer enough. And partly as a result, it provided a spur to an alternative in the two thousands associated, especially with the Northern Quarter and harking back to earlier music, queer and drag scenes. This alternative, um, scene traded frequently on ideas of local working class industrial and radical authenticity. Rather than the Euro-American trends, which were seen to dominate the village scene and venues, it pushed boundaries in terms of music performance and what it meant to be queer the more frequently de deployed term. In this alternative circuit. The gay village nevertheless maintained its status as a place of socializing, community remembrance. Um, there's a, the opposite there, the Canal Street. There's a park called Sacville Park, which has a memorial to Alan touring, um, to people that died, um, in the AIDS crisis and to, um, people who have suffered transphobic, um, um, um, attack and, and, and murder. The bars and clubs of Canal Street etched outta former industrial buildings were, and are still busy and are a tourist draw. So if Manchester, um, became by the 1980s and 1990s, queer notorious Brighton was ahead of the game already by the 1950s courting the pink tourist pound, and described by one late 1960s journalist as the gayest place in Europe and visibly so Brighton and Hove together had in 1971, 230,000 residents, it was a really compact or is a really compact, um, um, city hemmed in by the south downs on the one side and the sea on the other. The population densities was were high with flats and bed sits close to the center and to the social scenes. The local economy was consistently reliant on sole traders rather than big employers, hotels, cafes and shops provided what a Alan Bea Bay described as classic low paid queer work, militating against the ethic of solidarity extending from the workplace we see in Manchester, whilst also fostering an individualism, which I suggest was Brighton's hallmark. Only 21% of Brighton and Hoves population worked in manufacturing in 1971, 10% below the national average and 20% lower than Manchester. And this declined further over the period. More people here were self-employed and in professional managerial and skilled role roles with a substantial proportion. One in 20 in 19 71, 1 in 12 by 2011, commuting the 60 miles to office-based jobs in London such work. These office-based jobs opened up possibilities for women in particular to have lifestyles independent of family as Alison or has argued commuting, separated work from home and home, sexual and social lives for many brightonian further underpinning the onus on pleasure and consumption in the city itself. So the keynote I'm highlighting was self-expression and individualism. And this was, um, um, and this was enhanced by an arts and students seen, which had a disproportionate impact here because of the small size and geography of the city. The University of Sussex in the middle there opened in 1961, rapidly gaining a radical reputation. And alongside there were new town center buildings for the college of arts and crafts. The Brighton Festival began in 1967 and rapidly became the biggest arts festival in England, a queerish independent bookshop. The unicorn opened much earlier here than in the other cities, and there were also avowedly gay hotels earlier than in other parts of the country. Um, we can see that the proprietor of the new Steen Hotel, um, which had been around I think since the late sixties. This was moreover in the 1960s and until the early 1990s, a relatively cheap place to live, certainly not now. And this made for a youthful and counter-cultural population. An associated queer life was tangibly woven into brighton's cultural and commercial fabric. And this, and this was a draw to a steady stream of migrants from other parts of the country in decades when homophobia was felt acutely elsewhere. Surveys in the mid 1990s show very few members of the L-G-B-T-Q population were born, were actually born in the city. And this is a rather different profile from in Plymouth, for example. And there was a sense of this, uh, in this, of a city enthusiastically chosen, and again, by individuals and for themselves. Um, you can see a theme emerging here, um, and though Brighton remained very white, the income has furnished some sense of cosmopolitanism and bought different experiences and ideas to bear on the community and sense of counterculture here. The queer scene was already substantial enough by the 1960s to be riven by cliques and snobbery. Grant recalled that lots of queers would say, oh, I wouldn't go into that place. It's frightfully rough and tumble. His own queer set went out during the week to avoid the rougher queer blokes from Midland and Northern cities, who he said visited at weekends. There was a distinctive style too, as we've already seen. Michael found the quick witted, bright and Queens very alarming when he arrived from Luton in 1960 as a 22-year-old. And Grant remembered that Colorwise in Brighton, it was a bit grotesque. There was a fashion link between Brighton and London and much chuckling to and from the capital in ways that gave this smallish seaside resort a metropolitan edge. By the seventies, there was clear links between hippie feminist, left wing and queer people, and causes helping make Brighton to gym possibly one of the easiest places in the country to come to terms with an alternative from mainstream identity. This was certainly political, but the sense of queer ease and possibility in Brighton in these years partly explains why it wasn't urgently political, certainly in comparison to Manchester and Leeds where gays and lesbians were facing, especially heavy handed policing on the one hand and on the other open violent hostility from the national front. So there's a diff a real different cadence, texture to queer life in Brighton as opposed to to those two other cities. Strikingly queer folk in Brighton were behaving before 1967, as if what they were doing was legal. And in that sense, the act made relatively little difference here. Clause 28, when it came in 1988, was a different matter, especially in the context of the AIDS crisis, which hit Brighton, so especially hard consolidating networks and communities of care. Clause 28 banned the promotion of homosexuality by local authorities, and this was a particular affront in Brighton, which had a reputation as we've seen as a town of historic, queer ease and visibility. The particular fervent activist upsurge in Brighton in the late eighties and nineties, the springs from this eighties moment, from clause 28, and gave community here a new texture as opposed to Manchester. The council was cautious and did not celebrate and market the city's queer credentials until the late nineties and two thousands. Activism and community was instead determinedly, grassroots and off, often mobilized in opposition to this council. An interview in Plymouth described going to Brighton and realizing you could be gay there an identity he didn't associate with his home city. Devastated by air bombardment of 19, the air bombardment of 1941 Plymouth was remodeled in the post-war years as a self-consciously modern city, albeit with historic seafaring roots. Its center in that reorganization was depopulated and reconstructed suburbs were zoned for supposedly more convivial family living. You were much less likely here than in Brighton to have a central bed, a couple of doors down for a queer bar. This reconfiguration was apparently something of a draw. The population grew by 35,000 across the 1960s, reaching 239,000 in 1971, more or less, uh, the same as Brighton, but less, much less densely packed. The city's culture and reputation still revolved around the Navy and the docks. In the 1960s, a full 40% of men, 11% above the national average, worked in public service of one type or another, largely on account of the military presence. 25,000 people were employed directly in the Dockyard or Navy in the 1970s and roughly the same again in associated trades. This amounted to just under a quarter of the city's working population. More people here than nationally was skilled and semi-skilled with fewer in the professional and managerial or unskilled social categories. As a result, many Ians shared a class and occupational background and identity, often aligned with a strong sense of family tradition and culture. It was like Brighton, also very white interviewees in Plymouth repeatedly emphasized the work and family networks of gossip and their concern with what the neighbors might think. There was a felt need to keep below the proverbial radar and for very pressing reasons. Homosexuality was outlawed in the armed forces until 2000 for both men and women affecting not only those directly serving, but their partners and families. If in Brighton, the 1967, um, sexual Offenses Act was an irrelevance because people were already living as if what they were doing was legal Here, the 1967 Act was an irrelevance because there was another national audience or ordinance which had a particular impact on this military city. The military presence and its significance to the local economy meant there was only a negligible peace movement here. Neither was there much of an anti-racist or feminist movement in this oval, overwhelmingly white and traditional city. The art scene was small and the student population didn't expand until much, much later, the late nineties. Now these things matter because they are factors that prompted and sustained the alternative scenes politics and countercultures, which feature in different ways in each of the other cities, especially from the late 1960s, and which aligned gay, lesbian and trans identities closely to the left and to counterculture. In this period in Plymouth, we see something very different, but it did not mitigate against queer fun Here there was a big, big, I'm quoting a big, big scene for women in the early 1980s around the station. Chaun told me she remembered that we used to designate God loads of little pubs around North Road. Everyone would kind of gather on say, a Thursday night so the landlord would know we'd all, we'd all descend on, on whatever night it was. This scene was however, fairly invisible unless you knew women who were part of it. When Prudence and Gay moved here from Manchester in 1982 to set up the another words, bookshop, which is there in the middle, um, they also established a local lesbian line because of what they identified as the local ignorance of where to go for advice and for friendship with other lesbians. The couple themselves bought a certain manism with them, and because they ran their own business and didn't have local family to worry about, could afford to be more avert than many queer people in the city. In other words, was remembered by several as a daringly prominent hub. It was almost like an alternative reality, said, Alan, I was living in Plymouth and I was living in the traditional Plymouth, but there were these little pockets of places, like in other words, that I could access if I felt brave enough. Then there was the luckier until 19 77, 2 years after Bell Cook did this wonderful rendering of its interior, um, 1977 when the new landlord turfed out the gaze and one or two other pubs or clubs and more loosely queer venues like the Paramount, which Michael described earlier. There was an equally vibrant outdoor sex scene in the city's many green spaces involving men, including a sizable number of sailors who often didn't identify as gay, but enjoyed casual sex with other men. There seems to have been a tacit knowledge and toleration of this. There was a sense here in the sixties and really right up until the 1980s that you could retain your normality and your masculinity whilst also having some casual gay sex as long as you didn't act gay. At a workshop I ran in the city, a story surfaced of a father who beat up his son really quite seriously in the early 1980s when he discovered that this son was gay, despite the fact that he himself, the father, had regular casual sex with men in this military male dominated city. There was an especially thin dividing line between the sex men might have with each other, and homosexual identities taken up by others which were deemed to be beyond the pale. Such lines were sometimes policed by the kind of terrible violence that this father meted out to his son. The imperative was to discretion, and this was facilitated by the separation of homes in Plymouth from places of social and sexual recreation. There's, there was, as a result, no real pushback in Plymouth against P Clause 28, partly because there was little impetus to be visible in the first place. What's especially interesting about Plymouth is the nostalgia I mentioned earlier, and which we see especially vividly in Dennis's testimony. Dennis came to Plymouth as a trainee Submariner in the 1970s, early 1970s, and came out as gay and left his marriage in the early two thousands When I was a junior rating. He said in the 1970s, I shared a cabin with three guys. And so we had that community feeling of you look after one another. It was normally a case of a group of us going to Union Street. You go out together, you enjoy together, you are entertained and you take it from there. And I think that's lost now because everyone is an individual. They go back to their room and they shut their door. They just live on their own. The places, the pubs, the bars they were probably frequented by sailors be they gave you they straight or what have you. It's gone at the swallow, the only remaining gay bar in Plymouth, uh, where 95% of the people were L-G-B-T-Q. Denis said he didn't feel comfortable amid people doing their own thing, being flamboyant, being garish, being loud. The greater visibility of LGBT people in the two thousands had not led to a greater feeling of community for Denis, like those serving in the Navy in these later years. People at the swallow were just doing their own thing. By the time I interviewed de Dennis, the culture here around sexual pleasure was anchored more firmly in identity as it had been in Brighton since the sixties, at least with a single bar, gay bar, and a receding public sex scene. Plymouth had less to offer the casually interested or indeed those who identified as gay or lesbian if there was a drive to reinvent a scene in Manchester and Leeds at this time. There was little of that here. There was not the critical mass and several interviews referred to a local apathy and an enduring reluctance to put your head above the palate. Kevin describes friends who went annually to Pride in Manchester to be gay. I'm quoting, they have four or five days to be drunk to dance. They have World Aids Day Remembrance, and then they come back to normal life down here With a population of 750,000. So we're onto Final City. City Number four leads, people, um, leads was three times the size of Brighton and Hove and Plymouth and was in addition well networked by Road and Rail with nearby Bradford Wakefield, Huddersfield, Hal, and Halifax, offering multiple opportunities for socializing activism and sex. It had some of the same traditions of labor and working class solidarity as Manchester. It was similar too, in terms of students and associated youth counter and activist cultures, but queer life and community was also distinct here, marked by the later seventies by separatism and also a social scene oriented away from the center. I signaled at the outset the edginess and male dominance of this part of Leeds in the sixties, seventies, and also eighties. Ajamu from Huddersfield meanwhile described a particular discomfort here in the 1980s. He said you had rock shots, you had the new penny, and then there was a pub not far away called the wip, and the WIP was a national front pub. And then also because some of the gay bars were still also predominantly white, there's a sense of your new meat. So a lot of black folks would not go into town in in Chapel town, even though you weren't out, you were kind of safe. Chapel town was, uh, the, an inner northern suburb known for Africa, Caribbean immigration, and also streets with large houses lending themselves to communal squatting and often subsequently management by housing cooperatives. This is the area where Ajamu who identified then as bisexual socialized in Shabis and reggae clubs and also domestically for specifically Gacy. He would cross the pennines to Manchester rather than going into the center of Leeds a couple of miles away or mile away. The large houses. Meanwhile enabled a lesbian feminist and separatist community to form and also to be sustained with a social scene developing in rooms rented in local pubs. The Dock Green, which I rather lightly was a former police station, you can see it pictured there. And also in an Afro-Caribbean community Center in Bradford, there wasn't the appetite or resource amongst these women to establish city centers bus and city center bars at a moment when the scene there was in decline and widely seen as unwelcoming to women. There was some sense of solidarity between the black and lesbian communities because of the particularly active neofascist groups in the city. The national front was something that brought a lot of people together in opposition, said Yvonne. Really the only people who supported our community was the black community and the only people who supported them were us. And so a very close link developed in the seventies, ad hoc, not official, she said when gay pride was switched from London to Huddersfield at the last minute in 1981 to protest against ex escalating police activity against gay men in what had previously been a fairly convivial queer hub. March marches in Huddersfield traveled into nearby Leeds after the march to join the 20,000 people gathered in Harehills Potters, potters Newton Park for the camp for the Northern Carnival against racism. And this is a repeated theme of the seventies and eighties, this interconnectedness of politics, activism, and counterculture. The particular separatism, the particular separatist politics in Leeds was partly to do with the early emergence of the women's liberation movement here from, um, its out, its, its, um, inception in 1969, but it was also fired and consolidated in anger at the horrific murders by Peter Sutcliffe. The so-called Yorkshire Ripper between 1975 and 1981. And the misogyny, which laced the press and police response, women against violence against women were especially active here, as was the reclaim the night movement. By the late seventies, there were all women working collectives, art and theater projects, and also early self insemination networks aided by a local anti-sexist gay men, uh, men's group, not gay men's group. There was thus a strong sense in inner north Leeds of a distinct lesbian counterculture and community, which was transformative for many if alienated for some others. What's also clear in Leeds is the ways the suburbs and satellite towns came to matter, queerly in the seventies and eighties, much more than the EDGY Center. This began to shift in the 19, in the late 1980s when lesbian initiated initiated action against Clause 28 drew gay men to the kind of joint campaigning that had waned here in the early seventies. Kwin remembers walking with men for the first time. We were talking about joint efforts about being lesbian and gay. This was new, it was scary. There was also much more mixed socializing from the late eighties, including at the biannual Victor Victoria costume balls, which were huge events, significant not just in their scale, said Edwin, but because they were with men, the area around the new penny was meanwhile beginning to gentrify. City center living was becoming generally fashionable again. A new and converted warehouse apartments in this area near the station appealed especially to those who were traveling to and from London for work. As leads developed from a center of manufacture to a hub for legal and financial services, the new bars reflected that by now established LGBT Identitarianism. But sex and Desire were still not only understood and experienced in these terms here. When the AIDS and Sexual health charity Mack was established in this part of the city in 1990, it served deliberately men who had sex with men, an approach that had been rejected in Brighton, where campaigning was directed very specifically at gay men in ethnic, in ethnically and culturally diverse leads. It was more common in bright than in Brighton for men to have sex with each other without claiming an associated, distinctive or exclusive sexual identity. Rather as in Plymouth earlier messaging targeting gay men made thus have missed its mark. A sense of this expansiveness and diversity was fostered at nearby wharf street chambers nearby to mesac headquarters, an anti-capitalist workers cooperative, which began operating in 20 20 12 in a disused hosiery factory. Again, the post-industrial landscape offering some queer potential social and support groups met here, and it gained a particular reputation as a welcoming space for trend trans and gender non-binary. People who had previously often felt the need to travel or move from LEED for community, notably to Manchester where there were longer standing networks and a different if still uneven tradition of inclusivity. The central part of Leeds became a queer hub again, and there is a sense of return in this, even though the shape and dimensions of community had shifted dramatically since the days of the hope and anchor in the 1960s. In the years in between Leed queer life flourished mostly beyond this part of the city in the suburbs and satellite towns, and through social and political networks converging in community centers, the upstairs rooms of regular venues and people's homes, the scene was always underground in Leeds said Ajamu. And as a result for people like Colin from Plymouth, if you said a gay city, Leeds certainly wouldn't have come to mind at all. This was to do with geography and demographics with alternative social, sexual and political scenes and with a local authority, which was supportive, but less proactively so than in Manchester. As a result, industrial decline played out differently on queer life here. So let me conclude. In the seventies, um, and eighties, pride was definitively apart from that trip to Huddersfield, a London event. Now there's barely a weekend between June and September without a pride event in one city or another across the uk, including Manchester, Brighton, and Plymouth, which held its first pride later than the other cities in 2010. And typically for Plymouth out of public view in the city, inside the city hall. This fanning out of pride from the capitol in the 1990s, but especially the two thousands speaks to shared queer coordinates and trajectories. These relate to shifts in understandings and experiences of identity and community to changing attitudes and patterns of socializing to the internet and the inception of smartphones to legal change and to processes of industrial decline and urban regeneration. We can point also to broad economic and occupational shifts towards the service sector, which had an impact on queer scenes and flagged the new potential of the pink pound. Deindustrialization meant that in some cities there were vacant buildings ripe for queer conversion. This was part of a process of gentrification which made city center living and socializing fashionable once again, especially for those who were single or child free. Some celebrated these shifts, others saw homogenizing commodification, commercialization and a loss of a radical edge. There was though much unevenness in this process. The result I've suggested, a very particular local circumstances, the tenor of local government, the scale and fervor of local L-G-B-T-Q and intersecting politics, the activities of the police and neofascist groups, and then the particularity of local geography. Uh, demography and history modulated the way wider trends wider national, international trends played out on local queer life. Hence, although pride as a feeling has been wrapped into queer identification since the 1970s, it has had a different cadence in each of these different places. In Plymouth, there was a longstanding pride in passing in Manchester, a twisting together of gay and civic pride in leads, a transformative feminist pride and politics. And in Brighton, a pride in self-expression, camp visibility. And in being as the council now proudly announces never normal. And I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you. That was excellent. Um, I'm thinking about the contemporary vitriol and rhetoric leveled at, uh, trans people. I'm wondering how much you think that is a bit of history repeating itself with some of the homophobia faced by the citizens of the 20th century? Yeah, complete. Yeah, no, it, I think there's two things about history. I mean, the first is that the, that there's a very strong sense of being there before. I mean, I, I came out in 1990 and the late eighties and early nineties, the kind of homophobia and the particular rhetoric about danger to children and, and, and these various other, and pretense and all these, all these various, um, you know, um, homophobic the, um, strands of homophobic rhetoric are getting remobilize, um, a against trans people in, in the present. And, and, and surprise, surprise in the runup also to, to, to a general election. But I suppose what I'd add to that, maybe in a way that I think, you know, gives us maybe some hope, is that I think the emergence and flourishing of trans historical work of trans history, um, and queer historical work that, um, includes work on, on trans people, um, and networks. I think it really, um, gives the lie to the current transphobic rhetoric that trans is, that trans being, trans being gender non-binary is something new and modish. So I think this kind of deeper history and the particular ways in which trans identities and communities have formed in different places across the UK is a really important, um, you know, part of the, of the histories that we're trying to mobilize. And it, and it goes back to that kind of seventies, um, insistence that history is personal and history is political. So this is why these histories matter, because if we don't make these histories, then the transphobes, the homophobes get away with this presumption, this insistence, um, that these identities and communities, um, are somehow only of the present. Cool. Um, I'll, I'll take one from, uh, from Slido next. Um, the, uh, you, you've talked about four very different places, uh, across England. Um, what do you think those places, the culture of those places had in common over the period you've been looking at? Um, so in a way, what they have in common actually is, I mean, I think you can really look at each decade and you can identify, um, some, some, some, some common features. I mean, I talked about the kind of, there was a real resonance with some of these kind of, um, queerish, I've called them pubs, where there was a real crossover of people gathering, and it was kind of more or less the only place in the city where you might, you might go socialize. Um, and so you can see, um, you know, um, um, factors like that. I think you can also see, you know, a commonality in terms of, um, music cultures, some performance cultures. I think there's that sense from the kind of, um, two thousands of smartphones and the internet kind of maybe homogenizing in some ways queer culture. And, and yet I'm a bit resistant to these commonalities. I think that that, you know, it's not to deny them at all, but I think what we start to miss is, for example, the very particular impacts of the AIDS crisis, for example, on certain parts of the, of, uh, certain cities and certain places in the UK as opposed to others, um, and the different levels of fear, um, and community, um, coming together in those, in those different contexts. Um, and I think we can also see, you know, there's, you know, there's a kind of tangible difference between the kind of two northern scenes scenes of Leeds in Manchester, for example, for the, all the reasons I've talked about as well as things that make them, um, alike. And there's a kind of considerable crossover as well. I suppose If I was going to call it, I'd say that the biggest commonalities are between Manchester Le and Brighton. I think the fascinate the most, I mean, they were all fascinating in different ways, but, but for me, the most fascinating city was Plymouth. I mean, it was our kind of wild card case study, um, and it really threw up a very different dynamic and it threw up this kind of interest, really interesting nostalgia. So we tend to think about this, um, you know, trajectory where, you know, it was all terrible and now we are here and the laws change and everything's much better, um, supposedly. Um, but in Plymouth there was a real nostalgia for a very different form of community, a very different form of coming together for both lesbians and gay men in the city. And I thought, I thought there was something really interesting about that, and that really informed the way in which community and identity were understood in the present as well. Excellent. Thanks very much. Um, any questions in the room before I take another one from Slido? Hi, thank you so much. Um, would you speculate on what the future of queer England could look like given the ties that you brought up between economy and military hubs in the city and things like that? As the country's changing with cost of living crisis, what do you think the future of queer England could look like as people are moving differently and living in different places? That's a really wonderful and unanswerable question.<laugh>. No, no, no, no, no. It's very interesting to reflect upon, and in a way, one of the reasons why I think we talk about the growing homo homogeneity of queer cultures, um, is partly because of economic change. So actually the, you know, the, our our, you know, the distinctive, um, economy of Plymouth, for example, and of Manchester of Leeds, um, has shifted. Um, and there's much more in common between those three economies than there was even 20 years ago. And that really makes a difference. I, I mean, I, I'm not an economic historian, but I became convinced doing this, working on this project that the work people do and the economies of local paper really matter to the way in which they think about themselves. And so I think in a way, you could, you could talk about a kind of movement towards the service sector re inflecting, um, and homogenizing queer culture, um, in, into the future. Um, so that's, suppose that's one thing, um, to, to reflect upon. The other thing that I think is really notable, you, you, you, you, you have spotted maybe that I talked a bit about house prices in Manchester and Brighton. Um, and I think one of the things that is going to happen increasingly is, um, a a greater spread, um, of, of, of queer individuals and, and, and, and a community that's networked over larger areas. Because Brighton, you know, it was really interesting in Brighton, interesting stroke, sad in Brighton to interview El older L-G-B-T-Q, people who felt priced outta a city that they'd lived in for 30 years and were moving along the coast, some of them, to places where they'd started out and left because of the homophobic attacks and abuse they'd received there. And I think this kind of, and I think you're seeing the same in Manchester kind of spread out from the city. Um, and I wonder whether, um, we're going to see, um, you know, also a a, a social attitudes change unevenly. Um, I wonder whether we are going to see a greater spread and the significance of online networks connecting people. And I think that might be something to kind of reflect on, um, maybe my retirement project in, in 10, 10 years time. Uh, ladies and gentlemen, it's been a, a terrific, terrific evening of, of some fascinating insights, not just into, uh, queer culture, but into a, a wonderful reminder of the fact that the history of, of England and the history of Great Britain isn't just the history of London, uh, but it's the history of the whole country. Uh, please join me in thanking our speaker this evening, uh, professor Macka. Thank you.