London's Nocturnal Queer Geographies

London’s nocturnal queer geographies Ben Campkin and Laura Marshall Why have London’s LGBTQ+ nightlife venues been closing and what is at stake when they are lost? There are contradictory pulls in neoliberal cities. On the one hand there has been an acceptance of mainstream Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Queer (LGBTQ+) identities, as celebrated for example through commercially sponsored and officially endorsed Pride rallies. On the other, real estate-led global city competitiveness is affecting our capacity to secure the heritage of queer publics, and for them to keep a foothold in the spaces they have historically occupied. Internationally, researchers are charting the effects of gentrification on neighbourhoods associated with LGBTQ+ communities. In the UK, since LGBTQ+ rights have been won in large part through European Union-led legislation, the trajectory of an increasing liberalisation of attitudes and legal protections is not guaranteed. Recent data shows losses of a wide range of cultural and social spaces, but the provision of LGBTQ+ night- venues has suffered an even more dramatic fall than has been seen for pubs in the UK overall; and LGBTQ+ night-venues have suffered disproportionately in London’s wider losses of nightclubs and grassroots music venues, as they have been rapidly succumbing to commercial residential and infrastructure-led developments. If pubs, generally, are important to the social life of neighbourhoods, LGBTQ+ venues function as vital infrastructure for these groups, providing spaces of care and community against wider contexts of oppression and violence. In London, as in other cities internationally, increasing attention is being paid to LGBTQ+ heritage alongside that of other minority groups. But are these efforts in vain, given that they are up against the forces of urbanisation and the ever-deeper financialisation of urban centres? Queer cultural infrastructure During 2016 there was extensive media and public discussion of threats to the night-time venues serving London’s LGBTQ+ communities, prompted by a spate of closures. In response, London’s mayoral candidate and later mayor, Sadiq Khan, emphasised his commitment to preserving the capital’s LGBTQ+ spaces, and positioned himself as an advocate for LGBTQ+ communities. Since he has been in office Khan has appointed a new Night Czar, Amy Lamé, with whom he has marched at the front of London Pride; and the Greater London Authority (GLA) Culture Team have included LGBTQ+ spaces in their work on London’s social and cultural infrastructure, in order to shape plans and policies to protect and sustain it. By 2016, activism around threats of closure had prompted the formation of Raze Collective, a charity representing LGBTQ+ performers, and Queer Spaces Network (QSN), which brings together activists and community members with an interest in preserving and supporting spaces for the LGBTQ+ community. But there was very little evidence about exactly what was happening, or why. Working with these groups we therefore set about designing a research project to map LGBTQ+ nightlife spaces in the capital.1 What did the profile of London’s LGBTQ+ scenes and spaces look like? Which factors were driving closures and ongoing threats to venues? How had this impacted London’s LGBTQ+ communities? In addressing these questions, we decided it was necessary to cast our attention back to 1986 - when the Greater London Council was disbanded, marking a shift in urban regeneration policy towards the neoliberalism that remains dominant, and has so damaged the fabric of London life. Our research quickly produced strong evidence for the importance of nightlife spaces to community life and wellbeing. It highlighted the diversity of the capital’s LGBTQ+ nightlife as a valuable contributor to neighbourhoods, the night-time economy and culture. And it produced the first concrete evidence of the recent intensity of closures, as well as the significant impacts on the longest standing and most community-valued venues. It also became apparent that the - relatively few - spaces run by and for women and Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) LGBTQ+ people had been disproportionately vulnerable to closure. Alongside other work on pubs, grassroots music venues and nightclubs in general, the GLA’s interest was in assessing the trends of openings and closures of LGBTQ+ venues in order to identify opportunities and challenges related to what it has designated as London’s ‘cultural and social infrastructure’.2 In this endeavour, London civil servants have forged alliances with specific campaign groups, including Raze and QSN, to develop evidence to underpin Khan’s forthcoming Cultural Infrastructure Plan for London. Queer facts, queer figures The GLA - and journalists - were mainly interested in the headline figure for the drop in LGBTQ+ venue numbers. Statistics make good headlines and have strong currency when it comes to making policy decisions on politicised issues. Quantitative data wields clarity and clout. But this focus on headline figures often has the effect of shifting attention away from more nuanced accounts, and of misrepresenting or erasing important factors that have an impact on the most marginalised members of LGBTQ+ communities. And a response that overlooks these complexities is likely to repeat and reinforce the fundamental power asymmetries and injustices that feature strongly in processes of urban change. With this in mind, when the community groups and GLA emphasised what they wanted was essentially a counting exercise - how many licensed premises were there now, compared to then? - we insisted on approaching this quantitative exercise, queerly. We wanted to combine data on the number and location of venues with a variety of qualitative evidence: surveys, ephemera from archives, online and offline listings, public workshops, detailed case studies of long-running, closed and extant venues, and so on. We felt that this was essential in order to pay close attention to intersectional identities and varied experiences, and therefore to represent the asymmetrical social and spatial power dynamics at play within London’s LGBTQ+ communities. Surveying community members, as well as performers, producers and venue owners and operators, was essential to understand how these groups perceive the role of LGBTQ+ night-spaces, the impacts of closures, and what the responses should be. We therefore asked respondents to self- describe demographic characteristics, and this resulted in a powerful illustration of the diversity of expressions of sexuality, gender, ethnicity, abilities, socio-economic background and other variables through which people identify. Analysing the responses also brought the impact of venue closures, and threats of closure, into sharp relief. The narratives expressed wide-ranging anxieties, driven by a sense of threat to individual and community heritage and wellbeing; people were anxious about the loss, or potential loss, of spaces that had embedded within them the histories of LGBTQ+ struggles; and they told us of their own personal histories of coming out and establishing social ties. These anxieties were often linked to a perception that London is losing distinctiveness, as heterogeneous minority cultures are being diminished. Such insights into individual experiences counterbalance boosterist ‘global cities’ discourses that promote celebratory visions of London as a city with thriving LGBTQ+ communities and spaces, narratives which are particularly conspicuous during Pride. Losing ‘safe’ spaces When people expressed concern for the harm caused by the loss of venues they frequently referred to ‘safe spaces’, and this concept was articulated in various ways. Commonly, respondents described spaces that enabled safety in self-expression; that provided a sense of security, community and belonging; that allowed them to find or to be with friends; and that offered them protection from forms of harassment, discrimination, threats and violence, as experienced in a cisheteronormative world. Safe spaces were prized as being open, non-threatening, refuges, inclusive, pockets within safe neighbourhoods, and spaces free from cisheteronormativity, or as places where normative assumptions, values and practices were challenged. Examples of ways in which this feeling of safety was manifested included being able to use gender neutral bathrooms or gendered bathrooms without having one’s gender questioned; not feeling ‘other’; and feeling safe within groups of people with shared experiences and respect for differences. Respondents referred to ‘havens’ or ‘substitute homes’. Survey respondents reported that venue closures had had negative effects on mental health and emotional wellbeing, especially in relation to people’s sense of identity and community. Terms chosen to describe the closures were consistently strong, conveying intense anxieties: ‘erasure’, ‘erosion’, ‘devastation’, ‘ostracization’, ‘stigma’, ‘the world closing down’, a fear that people were being pushed ‘back into the closet’. Some individuals stated that LGBTQ+ venues, specifically those local to them, were the main spaces in London where they felt a sense of belonging. Since venues had been disappearing without being replaced, closures were commonly seen as forcing LGBTQ+ people to live less social, less public, lives, and this was having the most impact on already marginalised groups within the LGBTQ+ communities, for example in eliminating spaces for women. The importance of LGBTQ+ nightlife spaces

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