by Andy Beckett
When the Highbury demo was suggested, the Gay Liberation Front had been in existence for six weeks. It had been founded in a basement classroom at the LSE by a dozen students and academics. By late November 1970, its membership had mushroomed to over 200 ‘sisters and brothers’, according to its campaigning newspaper Come Together, all of them impatient for a response to the ‘hundreds of crimes committed against gay people by the police and the establishment every year’. On the 25th, the GLF held one of its regular and increasingly tumultuous meetings. Stuart Feather was one of those present. ‘There was a discussion about having a demonstration,’ he told me. ‘But people said, “What are we going to have a demonstration about?” A guy suggested we went and demonstrated outside the American embassy against … [the] visa restrictions if you declared you were gay. I thought, “That’s up to the American gays to get together.” And the guy was, it turned out, very much of that old left, Vietnam, Grosvenor Square generation.’ Feather paused. ‘The other proposal – it was the only other real suggestion – was to go and protest the arrest of Louis Eakes.’
Sex between men had been decriminalized in England in 1967, in one of the path-breaking social – rather than economic – reforms for which the Wilson government of the sixties would be fondly remembered. But the liberalization of the law had only been partial: it remained illegal for men to have any sexual contact with each other in public. What constituted a public place was broadly defined, and prosecutions were pursued with vigour. Plainclothes policemen were sometimes assigned to favoured gay cruising spots such as Highbury Fields, which was dimly lit at night and had its bushes and public toilet. One autumn evening in 1970, Louis Eakes, who was a well-known Young Liberal, was seen by policemen approaching several men on the Fields and asking them for a light for his cigarette. Eakes denied that he had been looking for sex – he denied that he was even a homosexual – but he was arrested for ‘gross indecency’.
Eakes was not a perfect martyr. When Feather heard about his arrest and his denials, ‘I immediately thought, “This guy is gay, and he’s just trying it on.”’ A few months later, Eakes would be arrested and convicted after a similar episode in another park. Yet for the Gay Liberation Front, Eakes’s reliability and sexuality were beside the point. At 9 o’clock on a Friday evening, ‘150 beautiful gay people’ (Come Together’s description) and reporters and photographers from several national newspapers met at Highbury and Islington station. Wearing multicoloured capes, flares and stage costumes, carrying torches, candles and balloons, smoking joints, shouting, chanting and playing musical instruments, the GLF protesters marched into Highbury Fields. At the far end of the park they halted and quietened. The group’s demands were read out:
That all discrimination against gay people, male and female … should end … That sex education in schools stop being exclusively heterosexual. That psychiatrists stop treating homosexuality as though it were a problem or sickness … That gay people be legally free to contact other gay people, through newspaper ads, on the street and by any other means … as are heterosexuals … That employers should no longer be allowed to discriminate against anyone on account of their sexual preferences. That the age of consent for gay males be reduced to the same as for straights. That gay people be free to hold hands and kiss in public, as are heterosexuals …
After each demand, the GLF’s newspaper recorded, ‘We all responded with “Right on!”, which echoed round the Fields.’ The journalists, the protest’s escort of standoffish policemen and a few perplexed passersby – Highbury was still a traditional working-class area – looked on. Then, many of the marchers decided to make one of their demands into a reality on the spot, by kissing and holding hands. There were no arrests, but Come Together reported: ‘A brother overheard a bunch of straight, grey reporters describe us as a bunch of “pooves”. So we descended on this bunch and demanded a retraction.’
Next, Feather recalled, ‘We marched around a bit, and then we all went off into the bushes and lit cigarettes.’ Finally, most of the protesters headed to the nearest pub, the Cock – perhaps its proximity was not the only thing in its favour – for a few rushed euphoric drinks in the half hour before closing time. The whole protest had lasted ninety minutes. ‘It didn’t feel historic,’ Feather told me. ‘It was just exciting.’
I met him at his flat in Ladbroke Grove in the late summer of 2005. His pretty stucco corner of west London, associated for the last half century with social and political experiments, was steadily succumbing to pastel restaurants and upmarket bathroom shops. But on the fifth floor of Feather’s slightly shabby white terrace, a whiff of sixties and seventies bohemianism lingered. Jimi Hendrix had lived in the flat below. Feather had been in his own housing association one-bedroom pad for twenty-six years. It had modular white sixties chairs, an easel in the living room and a mural on the bathroom walls and ceiling. Everything was a little faded, neatly arranged and preserved, museum-ish; not much in the flat seemed to have been bought after 1980.
Feather sat carefully in one of his vintage chairs, lean and crop-haired, wearing a paint-spattered T-shirt, smart shorts and sandals over tanned ankles. He was in his mid-sixties, but his eyes were still strong and blue, his recall of his radical life precise and unsentimental. He had grown up in Yorkshire: ‘My dad was a lorry driver, and then he got a fish-and-chip shop.’ As a teenager, he wanted to go to art school, but ‘that was out of the question … I ended up as an apprentice engineer on a production line in a light engineering factory in York.’ At this, Feather’s confident, slightly mocking voice dropped and turned more halting: ‘That job just got a bit too hairy because it was quite obvious I was gay, and I started getting a lot of, sort of, not aggro so much as … kind of being sent up and sort of pushed out of the way …’ In the late sixties, he moved to London. ‘I found myself a rather bourgeois life,’ he continued, fluency returning. ‘I wore Gucci shoes. I had a boyfriend and a job in an employment agency. And a cosy little flat down at World’s End in Chelsea. Being gay to me was no longer a big issue. One of the demands of Gay Lib was the right to hold hands in public. Well, I’d been doing that with guys in Chelsea for a long time.’
Then, one day in the autumn of 1970, ‘Two friends of mine went shopping down Oxford Street, and they were given a GLF leaflet. We all went along to a GLF meeting. They were the most extraordinary people. I’d never met people like them before. They were mainly young, beautiful and long-haired. I was sort of longhair-ish, but I had no political awareness at all. Here people were really talking about being gay, and how it affected their lives. They saw no point in any kind of parliamentary process for what they were trying to do. Their attitude was, “The government can change the law, they can give us rights – and then take them away. Our aim is to change public opinion, to change people’s minds.”’
Some of the style and confidence of the early GLF had, like other aspects of the British counter-culture, been imported from America. Gay-liberation groups had formed there first, in the aftermath of the Stonewall riots of 1969, when police raids on a gay bar in New York had for the first time provoked a militant response. In the summer of 1970, founding members of what would soon become the British GLF visited the US and were inspired by the new gay assertiveness they found. In America, they also sensed the potential for pioneering alliances between gay liberation and the era’s other radical movements. In August, the Black Panther leader Huey Newton had emphatically included homosexuals in a rhetorical list of ‘oppressed people’ – and had then gone much further: ‘Maybe a homosexual’, he had written, ‘could be the most revolutionary [of all].’
By 1971, the British GLF had too many members to hold its meetings in borrowed LSE classrooms. Its gatherings moved to Middle Earth, a huge labyrinthine basement in Covent Garden that had been a famous venue for counter-cultural events during the sixties. Up above, Covent Garden was still a fruit-and-vegetable market. When the GLF mounted one of its flamboyant demonstrations nearby, ‘There were a few vegetables
thrown,’ Feather remembered dryly. Yet down in Middle Earth, with its endlessly receding rooms, its ceiling pillars and gloom, the meetings of GLF activists, usually seated in a circle and speaking in excited political slogans and insider-y gay slang, acquired a mystique, a certain fashionability even: celebrity bohemians such as David Hockney, John Lennon and even the Bloomsbury Group survivor Duncan Grant, then eighty-five years old, attended or lent support. ‘There was an incredible warmth – you could really say love – between the early GLF people,’ Feather recalled. ‘Through the process of joining the GLF, by coming out, people were losing their places to live and losing their jobs. But we tried to live the GLF manifesto. And it seemed limitless.’
One aspect of the GLF creed, which was in keeping with the broader mood of the counter-culture, was a slightly woolly but heartfelt anarchism. ‘Oppression by the Big State Machine also affects gay people,’ Come Together declared in early 1971, echoing Huey Newton, ‘And they are as interested in fighting it as are all other groups that suffer from it.’ In February, the GLF joined the great London march against Ted Heath’s Industrial Relations Bill. Carrying placards that ranged from the sober – ‘Homosexuals Oppose the Bill’ – to the mildly cheeky – ‘Poof to the Bill’ – and holding bunches of leaflets attacking homophobic discrimination in the workplace – ‘nearly one million trade unionists are homosexual’ – a hundred or so GLF activists presented themselves to the demonstration’s organizers. They were not made to feel entirely welcome. Since they were not a trade union, and since no one wanted to march with them, the GLF were informed, they would have to stay at the back of the demonstration.
The activists did as they were told, but the novelty of their presence and the noise they made, chanting their way through Piccadilly with their Jesus beards and hippy centre partings, attracted media attention regardless. A cartoon in the London Evening Standard the next day sensed an unease in the trade union establishment about its new allies. A huddle of middle-aged men, heavy-set and with pipes and war medals, are in a union office wallpapered with press cuttings about the size of the demonstration. ‘Well,’ says one, ‘I make it eighty to one hundred and fifty thousand, depending on whether you include the “Gay Liberation Front”, or not!’ Come Together, typically, was more frank about the march: ‘Many, in fact most, of the people on the demo were real male chauvinists … and therefore our enemy. We were there to CONFRONT the male chauvinism of working people.’
During 1971, the GLF’s political exhibitionism acquired a bolder edge. ‘I and a couple of others introduced the whole concept of drag,’ said Feather. ‘I saw it as much more direct than wearing a [GLF] badge, much more confrontational. With a badge, people would say, “What’s the Gay Liberation Front?”, and you would start talking about the concepts, rather than “Why are you wearing a woman’s dress?”, and then you saying, “Why are you wearing men’s clothes?”’ Yet with this new boldness – ‘Among the drag queens we were really up for questioning … [even] what was gay and what was straight,’ Feather remembered – came implications for the GLF membership. Not everyone wanted to wear drag or dismantle all the barriers between sexualities and genders; many of the activists just wanted to get a fair deal for gay men. From late 1971, the GLF’s weekly London meetings turned into shouting matches between factions. ‘There was a reaction against the drag queens,’ Feather admitted. ‘It came from the guys who just wanted’ – a cutting note of mockery came into his voice – ‘a male way of doing things, let us say.’
In 1972, the London meetings ceased. The GLF split into groups based in the north, south and west of the capital. Each group had distinctive characteristics: more working-class in the south, more middle-class and politically conciliatory in the north – where activists set up a late-night coffee stall for men cruising on Hampstead Heath – and most dogmatic and drag-orientated in the west. These groups quickly evolved into communes. The most experimental of these was in Ladbroke Grove.
7a Colville Houses was like thousands of other properties in the area and in neighbouring Notting Hill during the late sixties and early seventies: a big, balconied, once-grand Victorian house, vacant for years as this part of London had grown poorer and more transient, and now perfectly suited to serve the counter-culture’s growing appetite for squatting and communal living. ‘All that we did in the Colville commune was to take Gay Lib that one step further,’ Feather told the oral historian Lisa Power two decades later, ‘and say that all men should wear a frock. We thought that it was the answer. It almost was. It still is.’ Andrew Lumsden, a sympathetic GLF activist but not a member of ‘Colvillia’, described visiting the commune to Power in less understated terms:
It was like stepping off the planet. You went into a no-daylight zone where there were places to sleep strewn all over the floor, posters to do with pop groups, endless sounds always on, you were always offered dope or acid. The welcome was lovely. It was unstructured to a degree that was terrifying if you had led any kind of structured life … None of the ordinary ways ofcoping seemed to be there. Somebody might be walking round without their clothes on, somebody else spending hours and hours making up. There was a wardrobe, a very large area for frocks and shoes and make-up and mirrors, people could spend hours in there … Somebody might be making love on one or another mattress, all in this twilight …
In Colvillia during 1972 and 1973, the transgressive games of the sixties, far from being played out, were energetically being taken further. ‘The more we learn about each other in the commune, the higher we get: much higher than anything that came after flower power,’ announced the Colvillia collective in a special issue of Come Together they produced. When the house was repossessed by the Notting Hill Housing Trust, the commune moved into a disused film studio down the road. The drag queens hung its interior so thickly with drapes that you could not hear the outside world. Money, sexism and maleness, privacy, ideology, personal identity and morality – all were scrutinized by the group and new approaches to them agreed. ‘Sharing everything, our material possessions of course, our ideas, our energy, our minds and our bodies,’ the collective wrote in Come Together, ‘meant that we had to change ourselves … You never really know another person until you live with them. The question is, how much do you want to know? How much are you prepared to show? What are you afraid of hiding?’ LSD consumption became close to compulsory. ‘The police did come once,’ Feather told me, ‘but they were so shocked and embarrassed that they kind of retreated out of the door. Goodness knows what the neighbours thought. But we didn’t have much contact with them.’
Yet as well as all this experimentation, there were less bohemian impulses in the commune. Many members were on the dole, putting their benefit money into the art deco teapot that served as Colvillia’s bank account. But, Feather recalled, ‘We [also] used to earn our money by going out on Fridays and Saturdays and buying and selling … a lot of women’s clothes, lots of pottery, lots of art deco stuff … We’d doll up in the morning and load everything into prams, and parade down to Portobello market, and run the gauntlet of the stall-holders.’ Like the Middle Earth meetings, the drag queens’ market stall attracted attention from beyond the usual gay circles. ‘I remember selling brooches to Brian Eno,’ said Feather, a very white, knowing smile edging across his tanned face. ‘He was very nervous of us. He used to sort of eventually negotiate his way to the front of the stall.’ The smile faded: ‘We also had all these Italian tourists coming up and taking photographs of us. We got really stroppy with them. We chased them down the street, saying, “You fucking bourgeois Italians, what d’you think you’re doing? You’re taking our photograph, and you’re not buying anything off our stall!”’
Colvillia did not last. ‘There was one middle-class guy who decided that if he was free, as we all were, to do what he wanted, then he would refuse to sign on [for the dole] any more, or provide any more money … And he had a boyfriend as well who wasn’t contributing anything. So the money was beginning to become abus
ed … And then one of the younger ones and this woman started using the money to finance a drugs empire … There was a mad Afghan guy as well, who used to lope around, and he turned out to be a big drug dealer as well … And then we didn’t know who was coming into the place and for what reason …’ Sitting neatly in his immaculate flat, Feather paused. ‘It just became very difficult indeed.’
By 1974, the commune was over, and so was Come Together and the GLF as a whole. Colvillia’s two sites were redeveloped. The house was divided into flats by the Notting Hill Housing Trust. When I went to have a look at it after seeing Feather, I found five storeys of drawn net curtains instead of a drag queens’ free-for-all. The film studio had also been replaced by social housing for families, for people who liked privacy. Tiny children’s chairs warmed in the sunshine in heavily fenced-off back gardens. The tidying away of the old local bohemia had not been without social benefits, but that tidying away had also been very thorough and unsentimental: at neither site was there the slightest vestige of the commune.
Yet Gay Lib did leave traces in Britain. Some were small. ‘There were one or two people one knew socially, who weren’t involved in Gay Lib, who were suddenly appearing in magazines doing a bit of drag,’ Feather recalled. ‘And you thought, “That should’ve been me.” I asked him if he still wore drag at all. There was an unusually long pause. ‘The drag thing … One still dolls up in drag a bit and goes out, to a party or something.’ But he didn’t live in drag any more? ‘That takes up too much time.’
