In 2016 there were 125 LGBTQ+ venues in London, but by 2022 the number had fallen to 50, according to the Greater London Authority. More have closed since, including the garish G-A-Y Late club in Soho and more laid-back queer pub The Glory in east London. New venues have also opened, including The Divine in Stoke Newington (run by the same team as The Glory) and lesbian bar La Camionera in Hackney.
“The key thing this month is the contradiction,” says Olimpia Burchiellaro, the author of The Gentrification of Queer Activism. “There’s all the gay flags and the celebrating of otherness, but is it just performative if the queer spaces we are celebrating are unable to continue in the face of the violent economic landscape?”
Burchiellaro says the “main narratives” surrounding the closure of so many queer venues are “society is more accepting now so queer people can go to all venues”, and “everyone’s at home on Grindr”.
“But it’s not that – the main factor is economics,” she says. “Our places are being redeveloped by property developers, or the owners are massively increasing the rents. That means the only way for places to survive is to sell shitloads of alcohol, which limits what sort of activities you can put on and what sort of people can afford to come.”
Burchiellaro, who is part of the collective that persuaded planners to force the developers of the Joiners Arms in Shoreditch to include a queer space in the redevelopment, says smaller independent queer venues, and those that also try to put on daytime events or for people who don’t drink, are facing the toughest challenges. “And it’s those spaces that try and provide vital networking spaces, and information about where to access HIV services, work and housing,” she says. “Focusing on drinking and dancing is all very fun, but it’s important to remember the important cultural and community role queer spaces play.”
‘A refuge from the refuge’
Amin Ghaziani, a professor of sociology and Canada research chair in urban sexualities at the University of British Columbia, has been thinking about the future of queer venues for some time. In 2014 he wrote There Goes the Gayborhood? , an academic study of America’s changing gay neighbourhoods.
Then, when on sabbatical in the UK in 2018, he kept hearing about “the death of London’s gay bars”. “Every other person I met was talking about it. It was alarming,” Ghaziani says.
A couple of weeks later he was invited to a party on the outskirts of London. He’s not quite sure where it was “but this was definitely not in Soho”. When he walked into the “underground” party, which was organised solely via WhatsApp and Instagram, he thought to himself: “This doesn’t look like nightlife is dying … There were thousands of people in the warehouse.”
It was also the first queer space in which Ghaziani found himself “at the centre of a dancefloor that centred me in return”. This wonderful experience, he says, was because the party, a Bollywood-themed night called Hungama (which means “a celebratory chaos” in Hindi), was designed specifically for queer South Asian people like him.
“I’m a queer man of Indian background from Chicago,” he says. “This night really spoke to me. [In other queer venues] I have experienced moments of being discriminated against for the way I look, or sexually fetishised for the way I look.
“These kinds of experiences have occurred across my entire life and have been challenging for me. When I was in Hungama no one asked me, ‘But where are you really from?’, when I said I was from Chicago. That question might seem benign, but it makes you feel like you don’t belong.”
‘Uniquely liberating and impactful’
He found his night at Hungama “so uniquely liberating and impactful”, that he immediately embarked on a new adventure: to go to as many queer club nights as he could “in the cracks of capitalism” in and around London. He made it to 42, but believes there are far more. His club night odyssey became his new book: Long Live Queer Nightlife.
“These events teach us a lot about what’s happening in LGBTQ+ communities and nightlife scenes in London and around the world today. Club nights are becoming more visible in the context of a closure epidemic of mainstream venues like gay bars,” he says. “They are set up by segments of the LGBTQ+ community that have experienced repeated experiences of exclusion and non-belonging in gay bars.”
Ghaziani says that while LGBTQ+ people and relationships are protected by the law, and more welcomed by society as a whole, “knowing that there’s a door that you can walk through and be yourself and surrounded by others like you is a source of unending power”.
“Historically, that power derived from experiencing the gay bar as a refuge from the wider heteronormative and homophobic world. But today, there are some people who need a refuge from the refuge.”
