Queer Intentions

by Amelia Abraham

  We were at the meeting to talk about resurrecting my favourite gay bar: The Joiners Arms, a now defunct but legendary place – a grimy, one-storey, one-room bar-cum-club with a pool table in the centre that had made it look like a depraved youth club. It opened in 1997 and had been going for twelve years when I first arrived; although I knew people like the designer Alexander McQueen and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans had long since partied within its four walls, I never felt I’d missed the zeitgeist. Not even when it was near empty on karaoke Tuesdays. I remember Beth Ditto from the Gossip turning up at The Joiners and singing at karaoke, my friends trying to chat up the gay members of The xx – which isn’t to emphasize its celebrity cachet, but to illustrate the fact that it put everyone on an equal playing field. It was famously cheap, welcoming and uninhibited. The air always felt thick with possibility, as well as the odour of sweat and testosterone. It was a male-dominated space, although transgender matriarch Stephanie always propped up the bar and Sunday nights were full of women.

  Between the pub itself and the local all-hours after parties, you could spend most of your weekend in or around The Joiners, emerging wide-eyed on Monday morning in an outfit that had somehow seemed like a good idea on Friday night. And I did: between 2009 and 2012, I went to The Joiners Arms (along with one or two other gay bars) pretty much every weekend. The blueprint was always the same. I would arrive, already drunk, probably with one gay male friend and one straight girlfriend who was pissed off that she’d lost by majority rule and been dragged along. We’d swiftly get drunker, to acclimatize. Then, as these were the days before dating apps, we would survey the room, our cruising ground – or even circle it, depending on the floor plan that evening – looking for people we might be attracted to. Sometimes I’d ask my straight friend to flirt with me to ‘drum up attention’. Over the course of the evening, we would work up the courage to hit on people. Four out of five times the attempt would fail and I’d leave with my gay male friend, the straight one having left out of boredom hours ago. On the night bus, or on the walk home, we’d lament the fact that no one but each other wanted to accompany us – a ritual that brought us closer together. Sometimes, we’d go on to another club to continue the party, like East Bloc, an underground techno and house club near Old Street with Keith Haring-esque paintings on its black walls and a labyrinth of corridors and rooms, the only place I’ve ever taken drugs that I found on the floor.

  The Joiners closed in January 2015, after property developers snapped up the land. A lot like Brooklyn in New York, Hackney was an area of London that had become increasingly expensive since artists, gallerists and fashion designers took advantage of the comparatively cheap rent there in the 1990s and 2000s. The bar wasn’t struggling for customers – it was full every weekend until its dying day – it just got priced out. The elderly landlord, David Pollard, had rented the building from a brewery, and when the brewery sold the land to property developers, he was informed that his lease was not going to be renewed. It turned out that the developers had also purchased the adjacent buildings on the street and planned to turn the site into a block of luxury flats. These flats would contribute to the shiny new gentrified facade of Hackney, a process that saw locally owned businesses replaced with chain restaurants and hip coffee shops while low-income families living in the surrounding council houses were also priced out.

  In the years between 2006 and 2016, London became a gay bar graveyard. In this decade, 58 per cent of London’s gay bars closed their doors, compared with 44 per cent of non-LGBTQ+ nightlife venues. I didn’t really care so much about Candy Bar, one of the first I noticed go, a gay bar for women in Soho that closed in January 2014 after a 50 per cent rent increase. Although it did look like a brilliant caricature of a lesbian bar – all glittery interiors and a clientele in fedora hats – like something off the TV show The L Word. Personally, I preferred mixed spaces and cared more about the closures of Escape and Madame Jojo’s, two fun clubs next door to one another in Soho – the former a generic gay bar that could have been in any city in the UK with its rainbow neon lights and pop chart playlist, the latter an iconic drag and cabaret club that had been hosting more and more straight nights over the last few years for economic reasons. Soho, London’s foremost gay neighbourhood, was the area suffering hardest, but there were closures all over the city: The Black Cap, a beloved drag pub in Camden; The George and Dragon, a gay pub in Shoreditch; Hoist, an S&M club in Vauxhall. So many closed that it felt as though we lost another every couple of weeks; my gay friends grieved, while many of my straight friends failed to notice.

  Other cities were undergoing a similar transformation. In Manchester, the Queer as Folk heyday of the late 1990s and early 2000s gave way to a spate of closures, including the popular bars Taurus and Eden. New York’s Chelsea lost a number of its gay bars to drugstores and bank chains during the 2010s, and a similar thing happened in San Francisco, due in part to the invasion of the tech industry: ‘The tale is familiar in a city that is becoming ever wealthier with the arrival of newcomers taking high-paying technology jobs downtown or in nearby Silicon Valley,’ said the Los Angeles Times in 2016. ‘In 1992, nearly 1,300 businesses closed or changed locations, according to a 2014 report by the city’s budget and legislative analyst. By 2011, that number had grown to nearly 12,800.’ Like San Francisco, the reason London seemed to be hit particularly hard was due to its high land value. In 2016, it became the city with the most expensive rents in Europe. Yes, many gay bars couldn’t afford to hold ground, but with these high rents and a high cost of living, a lot of my friends couldn’t afford to go to them quite so often either.

  However, the closure of London gay bars wasn’t just down to the economic situation; many argued that they were a casualty of the cultural climate for LGBTQ+ people. Shortly after The Joiners shut up shop, I decided to start writing about the club closures for work, which, perhaps ironically, caused me to sober up and ask myself the bigger questions about what was happening to these places. In talking to LGBTQ+ people for the articles I wrote, a new idea emerged: that the physical gentrification of the city wasn’t the full story; that our desire to go to gay clubs itself might be on the wane. If marriage rights and parenting rights were an upshot of our acceptance, the closure of gay bars might be the downside. After all, why would you need to go to gay bars if your sexuality no longer had to define you? Or if you were at home looking after a baby?

  One of the founders of a drag party called Sink the Pink put it well when I interviewed them in 2014: ‘We didn’t feel like either of us belonged in a gay club or a straight club, so we just wanted a club where you bond on what you’re into and what you’re wearing, as opposed to who you fancy. This is what works for us and seems to fit how people want to club at the moment,’ they told me, their words affirmed by the fact that this night was quickly becoming one of the most popular in London. The lesbian writer Eleanor Margolis echoed their sentiment when she suggested, in the Guardian, that the closure of Candy Bar was due to ‘the gradual acceptance of queer women into the mainstream’. Others told me it was no coincidence that most of the closures peaked around 2014, the exact same year same-sex marriage was legalized. In early 2015 I found a quote in a book by Sarah Schulman that summed it up perfectly. It was by the legendary New York performance artist Penny Arcade, and it was about the homogenization and gentrification of New York’s Lower East Side after AIDS first hit: ‘There is a gentrification that happens to buildings and neighbourhoods, and there is a gentrification that happens to ideas,’ she said.

  Amidst the closures, I found myself wondering whether Penny Arcade’s words applied to me. At some point, I had stopped going to gay bars as frequently as in those early days at The Joiners and East Bloc. I had found my people, come to terms with my sexuality, got a girlfriend and decided to stay in more. Much like a lesbian Carrie Bradshaw, I came to think: ‘Am I no longer going to gay bars because they’re closing, or are they closing because people like me are no longer going to them?’ B
ut then, also like Carrie, I got consumed by another relationship and forgot that I’d even asked the question to begin with.

  Routinely throughout my adult life, I had frequented gay bars when I was single, but not when I was in a relationship. It was the same after I came back from Iceland; if the upshot of my break-up had temporarily been an excuse to punish my body with alcohol and cruise strangers in clubs, or at least to drown my sorrow in them like I had with Amrou, that plan had quickly been foiled by the fact that I met someone new and amazing so quickly and found myself steamrolling towards another relationship. For the months after LA, all I wanted to do was eat a takeaway with Emily, go out for nice dinners with Emily, lie in bed all day with Emily, and partake in other endless activities that revolved around sex or food. Once again, it was almost as if I had taken what I needed from gay bars and then abandoned them in their time of need.

  Thankfully, for others the closures were a call to action, and the closure of The Joiners in particular sparked an impressive response. When news spread in 2014 that it was shutting down, a disparate but diehard group of about fifty customers came together to form the Friends of The Joiners Arms. They would meet in the pub itself at first, then in living rooms and local community centres. They were trying to save the pub, of course, but they also wanted to prove a wider point: that queer people were tired of losing out to the forces of capitalist greed and homogenization. They loved the bar for the ways it stood in opposition to these things. ‘We wanted to show developers that we won’t take things lying down, that we can play them at their own game using legal mechanisms to resist them,’ Kate, a Friend of The Joiners, told me. ‘We basically wanted to say, “fuck you”.’

  Early on in their campaign, the Friends got The Joiners listed as an asset of community value (ACV), which is when a property is deemed by the council to be of special importance to a community group, affording it extra protection against redevelopment.

  Now, at the Save The Joiners meeting three years later, I learned that after much back and forth with the local council, the developers had been told they could not take away a building with ACV status. For the first time in British history, the sexuality of the people using a space was to be included in a condition for planning approval. The developers were forced to agree to draw up plans for a new gay bar and to offer first right of refusal to LGBTQ+ owners, along with free rent for one whole year. The new bar would be on the same site and slightly bigger than the old Joiners, but it wouldn’t have a late licence (the old Joiners stayed open until 4 a.m.) because of potential noise complaints from residents of the flats being built on site. It also wouldn’t have a smoking area, and it would be offered up as an empty shell, without toilets or a bar or storage, throwing into question whether a community-led LGBTQ+ group would be able to afford to set it up.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ said one ex-punter, as we went round the group discussing the proposal. ‘The space they’re offering is completely unviable. They want it to close at midnight. The old Joiners didn’t even get going until then.’

  ‘One year rent free doesn’t mean much if the rent after that becomes prohibitively expensive,’ said another.

  The feeling was unanimous: the offer laid out by the developer wasn’t going to come close to creating an iconic gay bar like The Joiners. It was a ‘Trojan Horse draped in a rainbow flag’, concluded Amy, who’d been leading the meeting. The mood was solemn; no one said it out loud, but we all knew that cooperating with a luxury property developer to create a watered-down version of the old bar seemed like a distinctly un-queer prospect. Then again, how long could the group keep saying no for?

  After the meeting, I talked to Amy, a lesbian who’d moved to London from the Valleys in South Wales. I asked her why she had taken on the role as one of the campaign’s leaders. ‘What was it about The Joiners?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s hard to put into words what it was about the place, isn’t it? It had a very queer feel. It wasn’t clinical in any way, and you didn’t know what you were going to get when you walked in,’ she told me. Hearing her say this put a lump in my throat; it brought back the feelings of anticipation I used to get before I went to the bar. Amy described the strange paradox of The Joiners better than I could: as a place that was thrilling and exciting, but also a second home. ‘You’d talk to different people in the smoking area – it was friendly,’ she remembered, of the poky outdoors space which was literally about three by two metres. ‘And I always felt comfortable as a woman there, when sometimes in gay male spaces you don’t.’

  Then she told me that, if trying to save the pub had started out from a love of the place, it had evolved into loving the group itself – a bit like those recovering addicts who become addicted to going to addiction meetings instead of whatever drug they were on before.

  ‘This group’s like my therapy,’ she said jokingly. ‘I suppose it gives me the same sense of community that The Joiners did.’

  In my limited experience writing about grassroots activism, people often drifted in and out. At the Joiners meetings, many people had dedicated three years of their life to saving a bar – a bar that they simply loved going to. Some might say: ‘We all know the feeling of going on a night out, taking too many drugs and not wanting to go home, but aren’t these people taking it a bit far?’ Not me – despite my own inaction, I did understand why the Friends of The Joiners cared so much. Bars like this were part of the reason why, at eighteen, I decided to leave the quiet suburban Home Counties where I’d grown up, and return to the city where I’d been born. Like thousands before me all over the world, it was my personal great gay migration from the rural to the metropolis. Many people I met shared my experience: arriving in a Mecca of pubs and clubs that were full of flamboyant people, usually from regional towns that had one gay bar and an uninviting, un-diverse scene. After growing up as a teenager in a place where I didn’t know anyone else who was openly gay at all, these bars were a place where I could fall into the crowd, no longer so different; they were playgrounds for exploring your type, expanding your mind and discovering the many different kinds of people who exist in the world.

  As these bars closed, we lost with them places where we could be who we wanted to be (in fact, I felt so safe from prying eyes in East Bloc that I had once mounted a podium and danced for four hours, wearing a gold bikini top). In these bars and clubs, I somehow felt simultaneously like someone else entirely and the truest version of myself. This was their power: they allowed people to comfortably wear things they wouldn’t on the street, to behave in ways they couldn’t otherwise; they enabled thousands of personalities to flourish. They were Petri dishes for subcultures, which were then released back into the world, making it a much more vibrant place. The idea that they could no longer be necessary was a strange one.

  Jeffrey Hinton is a man who fills me with joy. He is an iconic figure on the London gay club scene. Not everyone knows his name but many know his face. He’s in his fifties; his platinum-blond hair falls around his kind, round face in ringlet curls. He always wears slogan T-shirts that say things like ‘Andy Warhol Is Bad’ or just ‘SEX’. An important chronicler of gay history, over five decades he’s DJ’ed in gay bars, taken photos of the life unfolding inside them, and eventually moved on to filming in them – the medium he is best known for. He hoards all these films in his flat, occasionally loaning them out, somewhat reluctantly, at the request of massive institutions like the Victoria and Albert Museum or the Institute of Contemporary Arts, for exhibitions with names like ‘Club to Catwalk’, about how nightlife influences fashion. He is a brilliant DJ and often, in a London club full of raging homosexuals, he will be the one playing the music, making everybody sweat.

  I couldn’t imagine anyone better to talk to about gay bar closures than Jeffrey, because he had basically gone out gay clubbing when he was young and never gone home. I had witnessed the unprecedented rate of LGBTQ+ club closures during the period that I had come of age in them, but as someone who had seen so many
come and go for so much longer, Jeffrey might be able to tell me why we needed gay bars, and whether we should be sad when they’re gone

  Fittingly, he asked me to meet him in a London gay bar I’d never actually been to: Central Station in King’s Cross.

  The area used to be a well-known gay neighbourhood, run down and full of notorious gay bars, but as in Earl’s Court before and Soho after, these had shut one by one, and were replaced with office blocks or posh hotel chains. Central Station, however, had held its ground. A corner pub that had been there for decades, it was a London gay bar relic, fitted out almost exclusively in mahogany. About three minutes after we walked through the door, Jeffrey fell into conversation with the barmaid, Nicola. They’d never met before, but once they got talking Jeffrey explained that he used to DJ in the basement of Central Station in the 1980s, at a night called Marvellous, attended by the likes of Leigh Bowery and Sheila Tequila.

  ‘I remember whenever I came to set up it smelled of piss,’ said Jeffrey.

  ‘Oh yeah, that would be the piss dungeon. That’s still there,’ said Nicola, as I glanced ominously at my pint. She said that the pub was a multi-purpose space: they had an adult baby night (‘boring – all they talk about is their corporate jobs’), a mixer for cis men to meet trans women, and SOP, which stood for ‘streams of pleasure’, a water sports night. It being a Saturday at 3 p.m., we had walked in on something a bit more pedestrian, some sort of meet-up for board-game enthusiasts.

  After five more minutes of chatting, Jeffrey and Nicola figured out that they had both worked at the famous central London nightclub Heaven around the same time – Jeffrey had DJ’ed there, and Nicola had worked the bar. As she slunk off to serve someone, he turned to me, his face suddenly animated as he started to describe Heaven. He gushed that at its heyday, right after it opened in 1979, it was the most amazing club he’d ever seen.