Sex, Time and Place

Queer Histories of London, c.1850 to the Present

Simon Avery, Katherine M. Graham, Simon Avery, Katherine M. Graham

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781474234955
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Sex, Time and Place extensively widens the scope of what we might mean by 'queer London studies'. Incorporating multidisciplinary perspectives – including social history, cultural geography, visual culture, literary representation, ethnography and social studies – this collection asks new questions, widens debates and opens new subject terrain. Featuring essays from an international range of established scholars and emergent voices, the collection is a timely contribution to this growing field. Its essays cover topics such as activist and radical communities and groups, AIDS and the city, art and literature, digital archives and technology, drag and performativity, lesbian Londons, notions of bohemianism and deviancy, sex reform and research and queer Black history. Going further than the existing literature on Queer London which focuses principally on the experiences of white gay men in a limited time frame, Sex, Time and Place reflects the current state of this growing and important field of study. It will be of great value to scholars, students and general readers who have an interest in queer history, London studies, cultural geography, visual cultures and literary criticism.

SECTION TWO

Exploring Queer London

CHAPTER FOUR

London, AIDS and the 1980s

Matt Cook

Soon after I moved to London in August 1990, I met my boyfriend of fourteen years at Bang! (subsequently G-A-Y) on Charing Cross Road. Bang! was London’s first big US-style gay club. It opened in 1974 and in its early years drew stars like Rod Stewart and David Bowie at a point when sexual ambiguity and bisexuality had a certain rock and pop cache.¹ By the time I danced there that night it seemed more niche: the ‘gay plague’ had, some felt, further entrenched the existing homo-/heterosexual dyad. That divide was also visibly apparent in the new European-style gay bars which opened in Soho in the early 1990s, cementing the area’s reputation as the capital’s gay village. Condoms and safer sex advice were available at each of these and there were often bucket shakers raising funds for the range of AIDS charities by then operating in the city. These bars, clubs and charities were represented at Pride in central London each July – an event I never missed then. As numbers reached over 100,000 for the Euro-pride event of 1992, Gay Times reported the sense of this being ‘an unstoppable movement, part of a tribe that had scattered but is now reunited’.²

I became a buddy for Terrence Higgins Trust (THT) in 1991. I made new friends in my local buddy group in Clapham, and was partnered with men I would probably never have got to know otherwise. My boyfriend volunteered for the Immune Development Trust based in Islington, offering massage therapy to people with AIDS (PWAs as the acronym now had them). AIDS and HIV was a frequent topic of conversation in our domestic life. He was seven years older than me – a significant age difference at this historical juncture. While I had moved to London at twenty equipped with an (apparently) clear knowledge about risks, he had come out earlier in London in more uncertain times. It was his friends and former lovers he and sometimes I visited at the Middlesex Hospital in Fitzrovia and at the brand new Chelsea and Westminster (formerly St Stephen’s Hospital) in Fulham Road to the west. Much less often than many men I knew, but more frequently than most people in their early twenties, I went to funerals in central London churches and the cemeteries which fringed the capital, and to memorial services at the Lighthouse in Ladbroke Grove and a former synagogue in Spitalfields. Looking back, we now know that AIDS-related deaths in the UK were peaking at around 1,000 per year in these early years of the 1990s. The vast majority of these were in London.³

This personal but also substantially shared geography shaped my understandings of what it meant to be gay at this time. Looking back, I realize how new this city was, how fundamentally it had been shaken and re-inflected by the AIDS epidemic, and how recently hospitals, clinics and cemeteries had entered the routine lives of gay men, young and old. Gay men and their urban ‘haunts’ were exposed more clearly to view in the 1980s and battle lines were re-drawn across urban spaces (and between the metropolis and provinces) as fear and homophobia faced off anger and grief, pride and shame. New solidarities were forged and fresh enmities and disaffections emerged. Familiar spaces became strange or uncomfortable, and others were newly associated with gay life (and death). Ideas of urban safety, danger and community were reappraised and reconfigured. In barely eight years, gay lives in the city had been transformed – and so too had the ways in which others thought about them.

There were a number of intersecting reasons for these shifts – among them the legacies of gay liberation and the vivid urban counter cultures of the 1970s; economic crisis and then recession; a growth in intercontinental travel; housing reform; and the emergence and development of Thatcherism and the ‘new right’. However, the pace, scale and dimensions of change simply cannot be understood without taking detailed account of AIDS, its disproportionate effect on gay men in the UK and the way London became the clear epicentre of the national epidemic. In what follows I explore first the ways in which London took on this status and then look more specifically at some of the overlapping geographies which re-shaped the city for many gay men during the 1980s – geographies of support, care and treatment; of activism and socialization; of fear and insecurity; and finally of death. These ways of experiencing and understanding the city have changed again since I first engaged with them in 1990 – not least because of new treatments for HIV and the advent of the Internet. I nevertheless argue that they continue unevenly to haunt our city.

This piece is specifically about gay men in relation to AIDS and the city. There are other crucial layers of analysis which I leave for another time and which relate to intersecting yet distinct networks associated with AIDS and responses to, and of, positive women, haemophiliacs, intravenous drug users, BME individuals and communities, and those who did not identify in any of these ways. The general marginalization of these other experiences was germane to the ‘gaying’ of the epidemic in London and so to the dominance of gay male experience in accounts of AIDS and HIV in the UK. I am working further on the interface between diverse groups and individuals caught up in the AIDS crisis. This, though, is not the focus of my study here.

AIDS and London

Late in 1981, a 49-year-old gay man died of pneumocytis carinii pneumonia (PCP) in Brompton Hospital in west London. When AIDS was coined by the US Centre of Disease Control the following September, this man was retrospectively thought to be its first UK casualty. Over the ensuing years the death toll mounted: 29 by the end of 1983; 106 by the end of 1984; 271 by the close of 1985; 610 by year-end 1986. Initially, diagnosis and death came hard on the heels of each other, but thereafter alongside the death toll was a growing number who were becoming ill but surviving for longer.⁴ By mid-1989 there were 2,000 people with AIDS in the UK, of whom 1,000 had died.⁵ Over 70 per cent of cases to this date were reported within the four Thames health authority regions, most in the North West Thames area.⁶ The latter included Earls Court, Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove – all areas which had been associated subculturally and more broadly with queer life in the city in the preceding years (I use ‘queer’ here and at other points in this piece to include men and networks predating or not necessarily organized around or affiliated to a ‘gay’ identification).⁷ St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, St Stephen’s in Fulham and the Middlesex in Fitzrovia were leading the way in treatment and research. The first dedicated AIDS hospices in the UK – the Mildmay Mission Hospital in Shoreditch and the Lighthouse in Ladbroke Grove – opened their doors in 1988. London was also the centre of government and government action (and inaction) on AIDS. It was the base of the national media which reported on the crisis; it was where the first charities began; and it was where protest and activism was focused. All this underscored, entrenched and ‘dramatized’ London’s position as Britain’s ‘AIDS capital’.⁸

London had long been closely associated with queer lives,⁹ and since in the Western world AIDS seemed primarily to afflict such lives, the conjunction between the metropolis and this new syndrome appeared self-evident. London was moreover well established as Britain’s global city and AIDS was understood as a ‘disease’ of globalization and international travel and exchange.¹⁰ If music, dance and activist cultures from the USA had been precedent products of an international gay metropolitan circuit, AIDS seemed the latest import. In terms of a response to the epidemic, gay men, doctors and researchers in London frequently looked to New York and San Francisco for lessons in epidemiology, treatment, and models of both protest and voluntary care. Others were in turn inspired by innovations in treatment and the liberal and pragmatic health policy emerging in London.¹¹

Unsurprisingly, then, AIDS was initially seen in the UK as a gay Londoners’ disease. When the government began thinking harder about health education from the mid-1980s, the then chief medical officer, Donald Acheson, purportedly favoured advice to ‘avoid London’.¹² Responses to the National Lesbian and Gay Survey’s (NLGS) directive on ‘Gay Men and Health’ in 1986 meanwhile suggested that outside the capital many gay men remained relatively complacent.¹³ A twenty-year-old from Birmingham, for example, garnered a sense of safety in his distance from the capital:

I don’t think we need worry ourselves about having an epidemic as large as in the United States[. W]e don’t have the bath houses and the bawdy houses like the Americans do. If someone in the USA wants to have sex with 30 men in one day he can[;] in Britain he’d have to live in London, and even then he’d be very hard pushed to make 10.¹⁴

AIDS was often identified with particular places – in this case with New York bath houses and in the testimony of another with the Subway Club in London’s Leicester Square.¹⁵ It was sometimes places rather than acts that could seem infectious. Some of the Mass Observation project’s largely heterosexual respondents to a directive on AIDS in 1987 positioned dangers away from their hometowns and districts and firmly in the capital. A 53-year-old publisher from the south-east noted that ‘we had to visit London, and I have to admit that in the rush hour we felt very much aware that we might be in a hazardous zone’.¹⁶ A common thread in Mass Observer responses related to the fate such metropolitan AIDS ‘carriers’ had brought upon themselves. ‘For most of the country’, reported the Journal for Public Policy in 1989, ‘AIDS is something alien: a threat radiating out from the metropolis where, of course, the inhabitants are well known for their wicked ways and perverse habits’.¹⁷

The consequences for London and the ‘scandal’ of supposed preferential treatment for gay men in terms of health and housing exercised elements of the press. When Lambeth became the first local council nationally to designate homeless people with AIDS to be in priority housing need, there was ‘outrage’ in some quarters. Under a banner headline ‘AIDS Gays to Get Council Housing’, The Express cited the fears of a local Tory councillor that the borough would be ‘turn[ed] into a Mecca for these people[,] with Lambeth being flooded by gay men claiming they have AIDS and then demanding council housing’.¹⁸ Reaction tapped into fears about the concentration of AIDS cases in London. In 1987, the London Evening Standard wondered how the city would cope: ‘by the year 1994’, it proclaimed, ‘there will be more than a million carriers of AIDS in Britain. Virtually all of these will be living in central or West London, in places like Westminster, Kensington, Chelsea, Notting Hill and Ealing’.¹⁹ Echoing the concerns of Lambeth Tories about ‘AIDS gays’, this journalist worried that they would be drawn from outside London because ‘almost all of the hospital and out-patient treatments are on offer only in London’.²⁰ Such accounts fed th...