Amin was describing a time after gay men had officially become marketable best friends that you could bring both shopping and to brunch . . . as per Sex and the City, Will & Grace and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy (all my favourite shows as a teenager, and still my favourite shows today, if we’re being honest). It was the time when I’d come of age, a time when the term ‘post-gay’ was bandied about by academics as a way to describe the idea that being gay no longer had to define you. A time when ‘gay ghettos’ like gay bars and gaybourhoods might suddenly no longer be necessary. Amin’s book is full of examples of this cultural shift. He quotes an article in Newsweek from 1998 in which James Collard, then editor of Out – a magazine aimed at metropolitan American gay men – declared the death of the gaybourhood: ‘First for protection and later with understandable pride, gay men have come to colonize whole neighbourhoods, like West Hollywood in LA and Chelsea in New York City. It seems to me that the new Jerusalem gay people have been striving for all these years won’t be found in a gay-only ghetto, but in a world where we are free, equal, and safe to live our lives.’ Another example Amin gives is a quote from the American statistician Nate Silver. When Out named Silver as Person of the Year in 2012, he told the magazine he defined himself as ‘sexually gay but ethnically straight’. I quoted this last example back to Amin, like a suck-up.
‘Right,’ he said, nodding. ‘And if societal change reduces the stigma, straight people start socializing at gay bars that they used to avoid because gaybourhoods had been where outcasts, perverts, criminals were hanging out and living. Now, you lift the veil of stigma and you see more straight people coming in. A lot of talk about how gay bars are changing looks at the influx of straight women to gay bars, like bachelorette parties . . .’
‘Who in turn can sometimes put gay people off actually going to the gay bars.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘But also if there are LGBT people who are no longer likely to cite their sexual orientation as the most important aspect of themselves, then one of the differences in their behaviour may be their patronage of gay bars; they may not feel the need to go to them. And if these gay people no longer feel like the only place they can socialize is in a gay bar, well then you’re distributing the economic base, meaning the net revenue of gay bars is decreasing.’
It made total sense but it didn’t address the issue of safety; I thought of all my friends who had been attacked in straight spaces for looking gender non-conforming, or for exhibiting same-sex displays of affection, like the lesbian couple I know who had recently kissed in a South London pub and had a pint poured over their heads by some wanker. I put this to Amin: what about these people?
‘Oh, I think physical expressions of gay sexuality are not entirely safe in straight bars, no,’ he agreed. ‘Anybody who says we can go to any bar we want and do the things we used to do in gay bars is overstating the nature of acceptance. In some surveys that show up, some people are comfortable supporting gay rights in theory – formal rights, hospital visitation, inheritance rights – but they remain uncomfortable supporting informal rights such as the freedom to express affection in public places by sharing a kiss or holding hands. I call this “performative progressiveness” . . . performing a liberal sensibility without the backing of action.’
Amin’s words reminded me of a stat I’d seen recently, that said more than half of British LGBTQ+ people didn’t feel comfortable holding one another’s hands in public, despite the fact that we were living in an age when we could legally get married. This seemed to be what Amin was talking about: the idea that you could have legal equality, but still not be safe or feel safe. Performative progressiveness seemed to indicate that being gay was OK, while doing gay wasn’t – and the latter was what we needed gay bars for.
That wasn’t all, though. There was another reason we still needed gay bars, Amin interjected, unexpectedly handing me a book by a man named Howard S. Becker. He said it was about marijuana users. I must have looked confused because he began to explain: ‘In there, he says that even these experiences that we think are purely pharmacological actually have a very social element. The experience of being high is not something you just have on a blank slate or something that is caused by chemicals, but that your interactions with other people teach you what it means to be high.’
Where are you going with this? I thought, saying something to the same effect.
‘Well, to take that analogy and import it, even the notion of gay pride, for instance, was not something that just existed. For me to understand what that meant I had to learn it, through interactions with other gay people.’
He told me about the first time he had gone to a gay bar: when he was eighteen, in Ann Arbor, a few weeks after he started at the University of Michigan. He recounted the nerves, how he walked past the bar again and again, too scared to go in. Eventually, when he did go inside, he met someone he would see again, and later form a relationship with. As the relationship unfolded, he would write in his diary that he was going to hell, and then, terrified that the words existed in print, he would tear the pages out of the diary and burn them. But over time, the person he met in the bar that night helped to erode his fear. Older and already out, the person gently pushed and nurtured him into coming to terms with his own sexuality, to forget what he’d been taught growing up in a Muslim household: that being gay was shameful or sinful.
‘There were many conversations in that relationship that would begin with a request like: “I would like to hold your hand down Main Street,”’ Amin said. ‘I was uncomfortable about being seen, clearly visibly marked as gay. But his response to my resistance was almost always reframing the situation, that it is a beautiful thing, an expression of intimacy, affection, potentially love. And over time, I relented.’
‘So going to a gay bar allowed you to meet someone who could teach you how to be gay?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘Being in London now, I go to Soho and see that, even if bars are closing or it’s gentrifying, the ones I go to are heaving with people and they’re very gay people. OK, so there’s a generational difference, it’s older gay men, and this is just anecdotal, but clearly there will always be some who feel a deeper connection with people in person rather than virtually. This is a fact of human life. Sociologists call it “homophily”, the fact that it’s a basic principle of our social life that like attracts like and that any amount of technological cultural or generational change will not undo the power of that.’
‘Homophily,’ I said, writing it down.
‘The colloquial phrase we use is “birds of a feather flock together”,’ Amin added helpfully.
‘Birds of a feather flock together,’ I repeated back to him, as if to speak it into existence.
I left Amin and walked home, thinking about my own use of gay bars: I had, at some point, stopped going to them so much because I no longer needed them, especially not as a white cisgender lesbian – cisgender meaning that my experience of my gender matches the gender I was assigned at birth. But just because I didn’t need them, it didn’t mean I couldn’t want them. And I wanted them because they gave me a sense of belonging that I now had a word for: homophily. The time I had been spun around the room by my friend to ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ in The Joiners, the time I had failed to seduce the only girl not wearing a fedora in Candy Bar, the time I had danced on a podium in a bikini top at East Bloc because there were no straight men around . . . all of this time I had been learning to be gay. In some twisted way, then, the fact that being LGBTQ+ had retained some of its shamefulness forced us together, encouraged us to find places and people who would help dissipate the shame, and kept gay bars like Central Station in business. I wondered: without them, where else would we learn to be proud?
chapter four
WHAT HAVE WE GOT TO BE PROUD OF?
In the summer of 1970, the first gay pride parades began to spring up across America. First in New York City and Los Angeles, then Boston, these events weren’t called
‘Pride’ just yet, but had names like Christopher Street Liberation Day or Gay Freedom Day. They were mostly organized to mark the first anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots, though a lot of what had happened in the interim year spurred them into motion too. LGBTQ+ activist groups like the Gay Liberation Front, Radicalesbians and the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries had formed in New York, with the goals of achieving freedom and visibility, and they wanted to go public with an event. One of the marchers at New York’s first ever Pride, activist and organizer Fred Sargeant, described it to the Village Voice newspaper years later: ‘There were no floats, no music, no boys in briefs. The cops turned their backs on us to convey their disdain, but the masses of people kept carrying signs and banners, chanting and waving to surprised onlookers.’
This early prototype of Pride was a protest, not a party, although in the archive photos from the Prides that took place that summer, the events look like both. A sense of joyful defiance is palpable; lesbians carrying signs saying ‘Hi Mom’, men holding hands on Hollywood Boulevard, and the crowds of people, mixed in terms of gender, race and age, embracing lovingly.
It wasn’t until 1972 that the first Pride happened in Britain. It was called the ‘UK Gay Pride Rally’ and it was held in London, on 1 July, because that was the nearest Saturday to the anniversary of Stonewall. If not a direct tribute to the trans women who led the riot, the UK Gay Pride Rally was at least intended to echo their sentiments: that the LGBTQ+ community would not stand to be oppressed. There were only around 700 attendees, but by making visible and externalizing that which was only found in gay bars at the time, it offered a political statement to the world that proud gay people existed and would not be kept underground.
Five decades later, Pride in London is in some ways the same: a day when LGBTQ+ people, not just from across the capital but from the whole of the UK, will wake up and feel as though – maybe just for that day – London’s streets belong to them. Many trans people will hopefully feel just a bit safer than normal in a country that still denies them basic rights, and drag queens will get the chance to flaunt a look that’s usually reserved for the cover of darkness. Pride in London is undoubtedly the UK’s biggest show of rainbow solidarity – silly and vital in equal measure – and every time I’ve gone, I have felt this energy. And yet, a kind of indifference to Pride has always persisted. I like doing poppers in the street as much as the next person, but the annoyance of being in a large crowd has, on a few occasions, outweighed my enjoyment of the spectacle. When I went in 2016, it poured with rain as onlookers shouted homophobic abuse at my friend; I got day-drunk and drowsy – it felt like any other miserable British day out.
There were other reasons I felt ambivalent about Pride in London, and like a lot of people in Britain’s LGBTQ+ community, I believe that the event could probably do us more justice. Over the years, the ethos of Pride has become diluted by a number of factors. With gains in equality has come the growing appeal of Pride to hen parties and other tourists, the corporatization of Pride by big business, and its co-option by insincere political groups looking to pink-wash their image. In 2014, Barclays Bank became a major sponsor; in 2015, Pride was criticized for inviting UKIP – a historically homophobic political party – to have an official presence in the parade; and in 2016, it invited the Red Arrows of the RAF to fly above the event, as well as allowing BAE Systems, one of the UK’s largest arms manufacturers, to march, angering pacifistic and anti-military LGBTQ+ activists. Brighton Pride, a regional UK Pride event, has even been sponsored by British Airways, an airline who offer up their planes to deport LGBTQ+ asylum seekers from the UK, while Pride in London’s own marketing has come under fire, too: 2016 saw a trashy ‘#nofilter’ ad campaign, and 2017 was worse – Pride was met with a brand-new level of criticism for its official advertising posters, emblazoned with slogans like ‘Gay man, straight man, we’re all human’ and ‘My sister is gay. I’m straight. Together we’re graight’. The queer community immediately hit back at the campaign with the question: Why are posters for Pride putting straight people at their centre?
All of this crap advertising reminded me of the 2014 advert for Burger King’s ‘Proud Whopper’ burger, which was released for San Francisco’s Pride and came packaged in a rainbow-coloured wrapper. The advert showed customers unwrapping the burger expectantly, biting into it and trying to figure out what was so different, only to realize . . . the Proud Whopper was just the same as the regular Whopper! Enough to put you off your food, and a prime example of the hammy corporatization that shrouds Pride festivals today.
Of course, Pride is important: the pan-European LGBTQ+ rights organization ILGA-Europe explains that ‘Pride is the strongest, most visible symbol of the LGBTI movement – it’s a litmus test of how well democracies are functioning. Prides can be an indication of how well governments protect and promote human rights.’ I had no doubt that this was true, that it was a moment and a means to hold countries to account for the way they treat their LGBTQ+ population. But it seemed that Pride had morphed into something different from what it once was; as I had sensed that day in the rain at Pride in London, the event had somewhat lost its potency. Perhaps this was why several alternative events in London had sprung up: UK Black Pride, Peckham Pride, Queer Picnic. Britain wasn’t the only place where this was happening, however, and so, that July, I decided to go to the city where I had heard that tensions were running highest.
I wouldn’t say I forced Amrou to come with me to Berlin Pride, but I was persuasive. I promised them a Pride that made London’s look like a family picnic, a utopian city where all the best clubs are queer clubs and straight people queue for literally hours just to get into them. I also knew that Amrou hadn’t been on holiday for four years. Truthfully, I had no idea what to expect; the only time I’d been to Berlin I had been mercilessly rejected from Berghain, its most notoriously difficult club to get into, and all I really knew about Pride in Berlin was that there were so many different versions of it that it was difficult to make out what each of them stood for.
Christopher Street Day was the big main event that took place in the centre of the city. Then there was the alternative Kreuzberg Pride, focused more towards the trans community. And then there was Dyke March, a lesbian-orientated option. They all happened, I read, over one weekend, and I didn’t know how we could possibly attend all three. What I did know was that Berlin is the home of alternative culture, with a thriving BDSM community, a staunchly political gay scene and the most terrifying lesbians in the entire world. Wherever we ended up, that had to make for an interesting time.
I arrived in Berlin on Friday afternoon; Amrou had a drag event that night so they wouldn’t arrive until tomorrow. To save money, I had booked a hostel in entirely the wrong part of town, so once I was out, there was no popping home. My plans to meet German friends fell through three times, and I began to experience the acute loneliness of being a tenuous friend to people in a strange city. I walked around and eventually settled at an Italian restaurant in the tourist centre. For some reason I couldn’t stop thinking about Salka. It had been months since we broke up, but when you react to a break-up by pinballing around people and cities and jobs, the rare moments you find alone with nothing much to do become difficult. Frustrated, I gave up and walked the hour back to the West, where I was staying. Just as I got there a friend messaged me: ‘Where were you tonight at Dyke March!’ Drunk, lonely and emotional, I started to cry. My phone rang. It was Emily.
‘What’s wrong?’ she said softly, ever patient.
‘I’ve missed Dyke March.’ I wept like a baby. ‘I’ve spent all my money flying to Berlin to report on Pride and now I’ve missed Dyke March. I’m officially bad at my job.’ My guilt about work was now exacerbated by my guilt at thinking about Salka.
‘I’m sure all the dykes haven’t gone home,’ she said, taking my trivial problem quite seriously. ‘Why don’t you try and find them now?’
The unofficial Berlin Dyke March after par
ty was at a bar called Südblock, in the precise direction I had just walked away from. The party was in full swing when I got there. I could see lesbians dancing under rainbow disco lights inside the building, which seemed barely reachable, given that hundreds of dykes were sitting on the floor outside, drinking beer out of cans. The floor was strewn with banners reading brilliantly confrontational statements like: ‘You think I’m straight BUT I’M NOT’. It seemed like the natural conclusion of Dyke March. I searched for my friend – a self-described leather daddy dyke who was equal parts clever and condescending. ‘You need to be going round here and interviewing these women about what you missed,’ they pointed out when I found them.
‘Yes, thank you, I am going to do that,’ I said through clenched teeth.
Interviewing these women was not easy. Every time I walked up to a couple of dykes, they would kiss and I would have to back away slowly or pretend to be searching for a friend. The ones I did speak to all told me that they’d been coming to the event for several years, and that every year, they came to Südblock afterwards. ‘Pride is very male-dominated and also very consumerist,’ Julie, a thirty-one-year-old queer Berliner, told me. ‘I think Dyke March has more of a tradition of showing female and queer struggles. I think it’s more political and I feel more comfortable here – it’s not so much about the gay cis male, but people as femmes, fags, females, transgender feminine people.’
Queer Intentions Page 10
