This article compares queer social scenes in three English towns and cities during the “long 1960s,” from around the time of the recommendations of the Wolfenden Committee for the partial decriminalization of sex between men in 1957 to the passing of those recommendations into law in 1967 and the emergence of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in London three years later. I consider how queer experience was affected in these years by local identities, demographics, geographies, and socioeconomic circumstances in Brighton, a seaside resort sixty miles south of London, in Plymouth, a naval city on the border of Devon and Cornwall, and in Manchester, the center of a much larger industrial and metropolitan area in the northwest. Looking closely and comparatively at these places demonstrates how and why the local matters to queer scenes and lives, even in the midst of wider, rapidly expanding mass and connective cultures.Footnote 1
The decision to explore places outside the capital is deliberate. London has tended to compel our historical and nostalgic gaze at both the “Swinging Sixties” and queer lives; there has been virtually no sustained social and cultural historical analysis of queer experience outside the city for this period.Footnote 2 This is not to rob London of its significance; its iconic queer status was enhanced during this time, and it is an important reference point in many of the interviews that underpin this piece. However, what was happening there was also distinct and was not necessarily replicated in other parts of the country; London's queer story cannot stand in for that of other places and was in any case itself multifaceted.Footnote 3 Local circumstances in Manchester, Plymouth, and Brighton moreover partially determined how close London felt in its imagined and actual queer (and 1960s) dimensions.
Occupationally, Plymouth and Manchester were predominantly working-class citites.Footnote 4 Associated cultures were quite different between the two, however.Footnote 5 In Plymouth, a relatively remote and also conservative (small and large “c”) city, families were closely connected through the docks and navy.Footnote 6 In Manchester, meanwhile, a range of big manufacturers across the city and region were key to the economy. It had a strident union and radical tradition, and from 1964 seven out of the city's nine constituencies were Labour.Footnote 7 Brighton was different again, with large numbers of sole traders and small businesses, often catering to day-trippers and weekenders from London and beyond.Footnote 8 Growing numbers of Brightonians were also commuting daily to the capital (one in twenty by 1971).Footnote 9 Though Brighton had plenty of people who were working class, there was less union and workplace collectivity.Footnote 10 The town was marked instead by individualism, expressed divergently in a political party leaning toward the Conservatives and an increasingly visible bohemianism and counterculture.Footnote 11
These briefly sketched dimensions, together with other contexts and circumstances, significantly affected the ways that queer possibilities were conceived and taken up or resisted. I deliver some sense of this through an examination of the press in these years and more substantially through oral histories gathered by community groups in each place and by the 2016–2018 Queer Beyond London project (more formally known as Sexualities and Localities, 1965–2013), for which I was principal investigator.Footnote 12 This work was conducted in different ways, with varying aims, methodologies, and imperatives. Brighton Ourstory, a lesbian and gay community oral history project, began in 1988, a year charged with outrage at the passing of Clause 28—a central government measure prohibiting local authorities from “promoting’ homosexuality”—and with grief at the mounting death toll to AIDS-related illnesses in the town. There was a felt urgency in capturing voices that the government wished to silence and that might soon be lost. Interviewees in Plymouth for the Pride in Our Past project of 2011 and 2012 had a different vantage point.Footnote 13 Legislation permitting gays and lesbians to serve in the military was by then eleven years old, easing the need for discretion in the city. Section 28 (formerly Clause 28)Footnote 14 was no longer in force—it was repealed in 2004—and the government's social inclusion agenda was by then positively encouraging support for LGBT community projects on the part of local councils and the Heritage Lottery Fund.Footnote 15 As the project name suggests, it was an endeavor to marshal a sense of pride in the present by recouping a queer past hidden from view.Footnote 16 For Manchester I drew on interviews from a series of smaller projects, including The Modern Lesbian (2010–2012) and Queer Noise (2016). These were underpinned by different imperatives again—to redress partially the dominance of gay men in community histories and to understand better the significance of Manchester's long-standing and cutting-edge music and dance scenes on overlapping youth and queer cultures.Footnote 17 Our more recent work for Queer Beyond London involved interviews circling our interest in locality and witness seminars at which participants shared memories with and in response to each other. These seminars were an attempt to leaven the inevitable individualism of much testimonial work and to think through collectively ideas of community.Footnote 18
The sense we gained of queer life in Manchester, Plymouth, and Brighton from this material was shaped by the different preoccupations and approaches of these different projects and of course by the people who elected to take part in them—almost invariably people now identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (though overwhelmingly as one of the first two categories) and often as active politically and/or as community organizers or volunteers. Participants tended to deploy terms and frames of reference that had currency at the time they were interviewed, reminding us that their testimonies were filtered through ideas about identity and community that came to the fore after the 1960s. My use of the term queer is an attempt alongside to signal same-sex sexual and emotional relationships and associated identifications, places, and subcultures that were not being named and understood in those ways then (or only unevenly so). The term also signals eccentricity rather than binary opposition to prevailing norms and allows us equivocally to address anachronism. That said, because queer theory foregrounds subjective fluidity, and because it is often deployed in strident defiance of hetero- and homo-normativity, queer can, without some caution, obscure people's everyday investments in prevailing norms and the constraint some felt within different (queer) roles and identities in the past. Queer also has and does hurt. It has long been wielded in homophobic attack, and it is important to remember that despite the reclamation of the term from the late 1980s, it is for many associated with a literal punch. In short, we blunt the term's utility if we lose sight of its multiple meanings and the ways it has been used then, now, and in the time in between.Footnote 19
These observations about terminology touch the dance between past and present and between the vicissitudes of memory and the analytics of history at stake in oral history work. Though the “evidence of experience” seems to give us intimate access to the “truth” of a person, place, and time, its reach and significance is much less direct, as Joan Scott argues.Footnote 20 Oral histories can be recuperative and reparative; they are sometimes all we have to draw on in thinking about marginalized people and communities past.Footnote 21 But that recuperation is necessarily mediated by what happened between then and now, by the contexts in which the interviews were gathered (as I've suggested), and by the ineffable workings of memory and the unconscious. In addition, as Penny Summerfield's work vividly demonstrates, accounts are shaped by prevailing cultural narratives and mythologies.Footnote 22 In play in the testimonies I use here, for example, are trenchant—if relatively recent—ideas about sexual identity, about “coming out” as a key moment in a life story, and about the central significance of queer scenes to queer lives.Footnote 23 Also important are the popular renditions of particular places and times—of Brighton being “a gay mecca” or of the 1960s as “swinging,” for example. These various mediating factors inform my discussion as I shuttle between these testimonies and newspaper coverage from the time to build a sense of local queer scenes and dynamics in Manchester, Plymouth, and Brighton.Footnote 24 I look at these places in turn in my three substantive sections; first, though, some further social and cultural context.
SIXTIES CONTEXTS
Underpinning many of the social and cultural changes of the 1960s were the high employment rates enduring from the 1950s and increased levels of disposable income. An enlarged group of fifteen- to twenty-four-year-olds (a million more than there had been a decade earlier) were tending to spend this income on records, cosmetics, clothes, and going out—to the cinema, to new coffee shops, and to music and dance venues.Footnote 25 Youth cultures were increasingly visible. Beatniks were spotted in the early 1960s in El Sombrero Café in Plymouth and sleeping rough on the beach in Brighton.Footnote 26 Working-class mods with their sharp suits and scooters and rockers with their leather jackets and motorbikes came to national attention in the running battles on Brighton seafront and in other south-coast towns in 1964.Footnote 27 Middle-class dope smoking hippies were remembered in and around universities later in the decade—in the long-established Victoria University in Manchester and the new University of Sussex (from 1961) on the edge of Brighton.Footnote 28 In line with the national trend, the number of full-time students (aged sixteen plus) in Manchester more than doubled across the decade, from 11,530 in 1961 to 23,770 in 1971; in Brighton, they trebled, from 2,990 to 11,340.Footnote 29 Away from the family home, many of these students found more scope to look and behave differently. Though disparate, these various “tribes” of young people were linked by the value they placed on self-determination, visible difference, and the questioning of convention.Footnote 30 This phenomenon was part of what Jeffrey Weeks has described as a growing democratization and new informality in “styles of [everyday] life”Footnote 31 as the decade progressed.
Alongside and related to this trend was greater mobility.Footnote 32 More people wanted to travel and had the disposable income to do so. Motorway infrastructure developed rapidly from the late 1950s, and car ownership grew exponentially.Footnote 33 Foreign travel came within reach of more than just the elite, especially as holiday pay became more common and Spain (the most popular overseas 1960s destination) actively courted tourists.Footnote 34 Gatwick Airport, twenty-seven miles north of Brighton, was by now catering to the charter-flight market to Europe.
This new capacity for travel was accompanied and fostered by a growth in connective media and mass culture. The national press already had huge readerships,Footnote 35 but the 1960s saw the expansion of the magazine market, the diversification of radio, and the wider reach of television. By 1969, 91 percent of UK households had a television, rising from 58 percent in 1959.Footnote 36 Television provided shared reference points through music, light entertainment, and current affairs programming—the latter including documentaries and debate about the reform of the law on capital punishment (1965), abortion (1967), and homosexuality (1967). Regionalism and localism remained strong; the local press, which I draw on extensively, continued to have high circulations.Footnote 37 People nevertheless now knew more about broader social and cultural trends. Apparent changes in sexual attitudes and behavior thus took on national proportions in debate, even if they were experienced unevenly at a local level.Footnote 38
Greater disposable income, consumerism and mass culture, the beginning of a decline in manufacturing (evident especially in Manchester), and a rise in the number of people with academic degrees (in Brighton, for example) were, in short, re-inflecting local interwoven cultures of class, youth, and sexuality.Footnote 39 Jeffrey Weeks argues convincingly that “the pattern of autonomy and isolation” that marked working-class life and associated “distinctive sexual cultures … [was] beginning to dissolve” by the end of this decade.Footnote 40 Change was not even or wholesale, however. A Times journalist observed substantially more people in cardigans than miniskirts on the London Underground in 1966, and many more people elsewhere in the country were remote from places where they could buy miniskirts, let alone visit coffee shops or clubs.Footnote 41 Changing fashions and pastimes could mask underlying conservatism and stubborn resistance to change, something we can identify especially in Plymouth. The decade saw vicious racism—relating mainly to Afro-Caribbean immigration—distressingly evident in Manchester's inner suburb of Moss Side, for example. Surveys of attitudes on race and a range of social and moral issues showed much less distance between young and old than is often assumed.Footnote 42 There was still a trenchant commitment to marriage and to sexual fidelity within it, and if people were less censorious about premarital sex, most had not had sex when they married or had sexual experience only with their future spouse.Footnote 43
Homosexuality continued to disgust, and even those who were in favor of reform tended toward sympathy for a blighted minority rather than thoroughgoing acceptance of difference; 93 percent of people surveyed in 1963 thought homosexuals needed treatment.Footnote 44 Much argument for legal change still hinged on the class-bound distinction between the dissolute queer and the respectable homosexual.Footnote 45 The legal reform of 1967 reflected this. The key to legal sex with another man was access to private space, something available to far fewer then than now. And still most people disapproved: the National Opinion Poll found that 50 percent in the higher ABC1 social groups (defined occupationally) approved of the change in the law; in the lower C2DE, the figure dropped to 34 percent. The same survey found that 30 percent of ABC1 and 26 percent of C2DE interviewees disapproved of “unisex clothing.”Footnote 46 Jose was spat at on a Manchester bus when she did not conform; Aileen was called a cow for wearing trousers in Glasgow.Footnote 47
There was nevertheless some reassurance for queer people in this decade. Possibilities were more apparent in the increasingly visible youth and countercultural scenes. For all its limitations, the 1967 act did make a symbolic and practical difference to many. Once the law was passed, Rex Batten and his partner felt able, after fifteen years together, to buy their first double bed.Footnote 48 More cultural representation—and so more queer reference points—on radio, in TV, in cinema, and on the stage contributed to teenager Michael's politicization in Plymouth, as we will see.Footnote 49 The deliberately staid Homosexual Law Reform Society (from 1958) was joined by differently oriented, more grassroots groups in the 1960s: the lesbian Minorities Research Group (MRG) formed in 1963, and a year later the North Western Homosexual Law Reform Committee (in 1969 renamed the Committee for Homosexual Equality, in 1971 the Campaign for Homosexual Equality, CHE). Though there was as yet “no overarching discourse of sexual rights,”Footnote 50 both organizations were avowedly lesbian and homosexual in their membership and looked to building networks of local social and campaigning groups in areas including those I explore here.
With representations of queer lives in the 1960s almost invariably focusing on London, it is hardly surprising that the city remained a crucial reference point and draw; the two men I discuss most in relation to Plymouth (Michael and Ted) each moved to the capital for a while. The MRG and the lesbian social group Kenric emerged there in 1963 and 1965 respectively. The Gateways on London's Kings Road was doubtless the best-known lesbian club in Britain, especially after it featured in the 1968 film The Killing of Sister George.Footnote 51 In a newspaper exposé of a northern queer pub in the same year, London was used to underline the journalist's apparent dismay: the pub was not “in sinful Soho or permissive Paddington” but in “the homely Yorkshire town of Leeds.”Footnote 52 The capital served as a cipher here and more broadly for queer depravity, a reputation built up and generalized over the previous century and more. Matt Houlbrook accounts for and nuances this reputation in his study of the first half of the twentieth century, crucially demonstrating the significance of class in the orientation of queer identity, community, and modes of life and resistance in London.Footnote 53 My work on late Victorian and postwar London similarly suggests how experiences of the capital could differ hugely, depending on where in the city individuals lived and socialized, and on their class status and the extent of their disposable income.Footnote 54 Houlbrook and I both make a case for seeing queer London not as a totemic whole but as a series of differently scaled localities where queer experience was modulated as much by immediate local imperatives as by wider circulating ideas, discourses, and styles. Disaggregating the capital gestures toward a similar local particularity and distinctiveness elsewhere—as Helen Smith shows in her analysis of cases in London, Yorkshire, and the West Midlands in the 1940s and 1950s.Footnote 55 In Birmingham, for example, Smith found a subculture and exclusive identity associated with sex between working-class men, while in Rotherham there was plenty of (homo) sex but little sense of the men involved “being” homosexual. Smith demonstrates that regional and local circumstance, identities, and cultures mattered deeply in that period. I argue in the following sections that they still did in the 1960s.
MANCHESTER
Aside from the wealth of oral history material relating to Manchester, I selected this city because of its scale; I wanted to consider what this metropolis beyond London, without the trappings of a capital city, was like for queer people in the 1960s and how the scene there differed from that in the other two much smaller provincial centers. In 1961, 661,000 people lived in the City of Manchester itself, but the wider urban area (subsequently known as Greater Manchester) encompassed about 2.7 million. At this point, 47 percent of men worked in the manufacturing sector, 12 percent more than the national average (though the figures were in decline, as was the population of the city).Footnote 56 Stereotypes of local working-class stoicism, grit, and straightforwardness were tenacious here and related to an industrial and radical past and present.Footnote 57
Manchester was unevenly modernizing in the 1960s. Council blocks replaced dilapidated terraces in some of the inner suburbs; a multistory car park went up behind Canal Street, conveniently adjacent to the queer Union and Rembrandt pubs. A new motorway encircling Manchester from 1960, linking it more directly to satellite towns and cities, plus five city center stations (two of which later closed), meant that Manchester was a well-connected place. This was significant to the youth and music scene in the city; people came from across the region for Northern Soul nights at the Twisted Wheel, for example. Some worried about what this might portend. The Bolton Evening News complained about Manchester coffee shops being nighttime magnets for dissolute youth: “Such moral decadence [in] the city tonight, happens in the small towns tomorrow,” it warned, echoing wider concern about such places and the supposedly more sexualized youth who frequented them.Footnote 58
In 1959 a new chief constable of Manchester, John McKay, initiated a crackdown on “anti-social” people and the places they frequented. New Afro-Caribbean immigrants and shebeens in Moss Side were increasingly targeted, and so too were queer men. According to the new commissioner, a deliberate and misguided policy of non-engagement in the four years prior to his appointment had resulted in just three prosecutions for male-male importuning in Manchester. In the four years following his appointment, the total reached 506.Footnote 59 Police now routinely put queer venues under surveillance and brought charges for lewd dancing or other licensing infringements. They would “turn up to try and sort out who was gay and who wasn't” at the Trafford Bar of the “lush” 1930s Gaumont Cinema on Oxford Road—a place where “half the blokes were wearing make-up” and some used polari, a cant slang used especially between queer men.Footnote 60 Double doors led from the Trafford Bar into the cinema's Long Bar, popular with American servicemen stationed at Burtonwood (twenty miles to the west of the city) until the early 1960s; there was almost certainly, as in Plymouth, some social and sexual mixing between the groups.Footnote 61 The two landlords who began running the Rembrandt Hotel as a queer venue on nearby Canal Street from 1962 were fined three years later for running a disorderly house. The landlord of the neighboring Union Hotel was jailed the same year for allowing his pub “to become a canker at the heart of this great city.” The court heard that he had “exploit[ed] abnormality for personal gain” and allowed “men dressed as women” to “writhe in a sexy way” on stage and tell “filthy jokes.”Footnote 62 Drag shows in this long-standing queer venue were in fact already notorious—apparently popular in the 1940s with those American servicemen who might stumble in from the Gaumont Cinema bars.Footnote 63 McKay stepped down in 1966, but his policies endured. In 1968, Club Rouge on Brazenose Street (near the Twisted Wheel) had its license trimmed and the manager was fired and fined after plain-clothes policemen observed—and partook in—same-sex dancing at the venue.Footnote 64
Luchia, who moved to Manchester from Ireland as a teenager in the early 1960s, remembers that “the police and the gay bashers were always hanging around and you had to run the gauntlet” between the Union, Club Rouge, and New York (another queer venue). Though she described the fun to be had in these venues, the broader climate, she said, was “vicious and a disgrace and it took its toll: every six months or so we'd hear of someone else who had died and who took their lives. And we couldn't even go to the funeral.”Footnote 65 Luchia did not mention the Moors murders in her interview, but she was certainly on the Manchester scene when Ian Brady visited the Rembrandt and Union to watch “the maggots … running their hands through their hair, posing, waiting, giving the smile.”Footnote 66 In 1965 Brady picked up seventeen-year-old Edward Evans at Manchester's Central Station (fifteen minutes walk from the Union and a cruising spot before its closure in 1969). He took him by car to Myra Hindley's grandmother's house about half an hour away in Hyde, just east of Manchester, where he abused and murdered him. There was less sympathy in the press for Evans than for Brady and Hindley's other victims. As one Fleet Street journalist had it in his 1966 account of the murder, Evans was “a queer” who “drifted from one haunt of homosexuals to another.”Footnote 67 It was in this derisory context that a working-class “community” of dykes, drag queens, and prostitutes tightened.Footnote 68
Luchia blushed when someone at the factory where she first got work explained to her what a lesbian was and told her also that they—and “pansies”—gathered at the Union. She decided to visit the pub: “I stood on Canal Street looking at all these people going in and out … I saw men dressed up as women and vice versa … I'd never seen anything like it in my life.” Once she plucked up courage to go in, the landlord, his wife, and others at the pub became “like family.”Footnote 69 They found her bar work at the “classier” Club Rouge, where actors from the early TV soap Coronation Street sometimes drank, and also a place to live nearby with others “like her.” Her fellow punters meanwhile advised her against the treatment her doctor was pressing on her and gave her the confidence to resist. That doctor would almost certainly have been aware of Manchester's Crumpsall Hospital, a prominent center for aversion therapy.Footnote 70
The Union's reputation drew people from some distance. Luchia had initially traveled seventeen miles to get there, and in a case in 1962, it transpired that the two men police spotted “kissing and cuddling” in a car in a quiet lane in Middleton just off the new motorway had met in the pub earlier that evening.Footnote 71 This wider notoriety and hinterland allowed the community based at the Union to grow and consolidate. Luchia describes it using familiar Mancunian tropes of resilience and mutual support. “As [our numbers] got bigger, we got bolder,” she said. “We would step out together onto Canal Street with our drinks [and] had queans at each end guarding us.”Footnote 72
The felt need for such “guards” and the repressive police climate fired the campaigning work of Allan Horsfall, a National Coal Board clerk, former Labour councilor, peace campaigner, and (as one paper coyly put it) “bachelor.”Footnote 73 He was writing letters to the press from early in the decade; one of his first came in response to the prosecution of a group of men in Bolton who had met through work at the hospital there and through a pen-pals club.Footnote 74 Dozens more letters followed, signaling to homosexual and “normal” readers alike that there was plentiful queer activity in the region (and not only in its dissolute center), that the police were active in response, and that there were some, like Horsfall, who were prepared to speak out. In 1964 he co-convened the first meeting of the NWHLRS, which by the end of that year had distributed ten thousand leaflets arguing the case for reform to Greater Manchester's councilors, social workers, magistrates, trade unions, newspapers, and other groups and individuals.Footnote 75 Horsfall laid plans for a network of Esquire social clubs (on the model of working-men's clubs), although a 1969 application for one in Swinton (just within the motorway ring road) was turned down by the council. “I don't want these people here,” said one councilor bluntly.Footnote 76 More successful were the CHE groups, which were holding meetings and social events in working men's clubs and church halls across the region from the early 1970s. The push for reform in and around Manchester in these ways came from the bottom up, in line with a local tradition of grassroots radical and Labour politics in which Horsfall had been closely involved.
We get a differently articulated sense of this upstart right “to be” in a “terrible, filthy pub” amidst the “dark Victorian maze of streets”Footnote 77 off Shudehill on the other side of the city center from the Union. This was the meeting place of the New Group of lesbians, affiliated to the MRG. Social worker Judith remembers the New Group having about fifty members: “Basically it was professional women. It was more butch or middling than femme … I used to enjoy it because I had pretty dresses, had a whale of a time … and all scrupulously moral.”Footnote 78 There was clearly an appetite amongst middle-class lesbians for this affirmative space and network; Judith said that the Union was “too rough a do” in the 1960s for her MRG girlfriends to take her there.Footnote 79
In the Union, Horsfall's campaigning, and the New Group there was a shared onus on community formation, but class clearly mattered to feelings of comfort and belonging in these contexts. So while the Union, the Picador (“a firetrap of a place … full of butches” on Shudehill),Footnote 80 and the Bus Stop café (an all-night haunt of young queers and prostitutes near the Gaumont Cinema) were popular with working-class queer people, the New Group was “professional,” and the Rembrandt was described as “a country pub in the city” where the men were outwardly respectable and “very well-dressed.”Footnote 81 In the eyes of the police and censorious onlookers, however, these subcultural distinctions blurred: they were all dissolute.
In the second half of the 1960s, ten minutes to the south of Canal Street, homosexuals gathered at the university as part of the Homophile Society. Around 1971 it morphed into a CHE group which Angela went to when she arrived in the city to study. She found it rather staid and male dominated—though she did learn there about the new Gay Liberation Front group and through that found a more strident politics. Inspired by their critique of the “exploitative” gay scene, Angela and a friend went to the Picador “to see if we could convert and talk to some of these gays.”Footnote 82 Luchia was there that night and remembers overhearing some “posh” women discussing politics. She asked to join their conversation and invited Angela to come to one of the meetings she had been organizing above the Union. There, Luchia said, “we started to break down barriers—we were all equal [and] … we started to educate each other.”Footnote 83 Angela remembers that this was where she first met “a proper lesbian”: at the university “it was cool to be bi”; it fitted with being “a student and a hippie [in a place] where people were talking about liberation.”Footnote 84 At the Union, meanwhile, community was forged in the face of ongoing police harassment and street-level abuse and on the back of an embedded sense of (Mancunian?) mutuality.Footnote 85 “We were all outcasts,” Luchia said: “A lot of the women were escorts, on the game,” and there were petty criminals and drugs—used “to get blocked” rather than to “open minds” (as university students described their drug-taking). In “com[ing] together” in that upstairs room, there was an attempt to find solidarity between these different networks in a broader 1970s context of “less isolated” class cultures.Footnote 86
Manchester's size and accessible hinterland, class makeup, growing student body, and particular “character” shaped the ways queer lives were lived there in the 1960s. Jigsawing together scraps of testimonial and other evidence suggests some piecemeal self-assertion and readiness to form supportive connections in the decade before the liberationist call to “come out” and “come together.” This supportive impulse might pivot on wider traditions of class solidarity in the city but was also a response to the palpable dangers of queer life—in the bashings from “normal” men, the raw hatred directed at them by Brady and others, and the ramped-up police activity. The connections formed in the 1960s underpinned a strong sense of collectivity that became especially tangible in lesbian and gay responses to further challenges in the city in the years that followed. These included Chief Constable James Anderton's notorious continuation of his predecessors’ homophobic policing (1976–91), the introduction of Section 28 in 1988 (a particular anathema in a city that, from 1984, had a council solidly, radically, supportive of its lesbian and gay citizens), and the large-scale AIDS crisis in the city that demanded community cultures of caregiving resonant with Luchia's evocation of “family” at the Union.
PLYMOUTH
By the 1960s, Plymouth had been substantially rebuilt following the air bombardment of 1941.Footnote 87 Its center was depopulated and the city zoned for supposedly more convivial family living. One was less likely here than in Brighton to find a central bedsit a couple of doors down from a queer bar. Though it was growing—from 204,409 people in 1961 to 239,452 in 1971—it could be hard to be anonymous in Plymouth; the city was remote, families were tight, and people were often connected through shared work and social spaces.Footnote 88 Ted recalls that a woman who saw him coming out of the queer back bar at the Lockyer Hotel threatened to tell his mother.Footnote 89
That bar was near the city-center end of Union Street, the thoroughfare that ran to the docks to the west. Most people drinking or dancing in the pubs and clubs on this street would have had some connection to these docks or the navy. In the 1960s, 25,000 people were employed directly in one or the other, and roughly the same number again were in associated trades.Footnote 90 More people here than nationally were skilled and semiskilled, with fewer in the middle-class and unskilled social categories.Footnote 91 We get an oblique queer sense of this in the list of thirteen men appearing on charges of gross indecency before the quarter session at the end of 1959. Of the thirteen, three were or had been in the navy in the lower ranks, one was a military policeman, and the others were three clerks, a mechanic, a demolition foreman, two laborers, and a salesman.Footnote 92 All but the salesman likely were or had been employed in the docks. Such men were always more liable to arrest than those in the middle or upper-middle classes, but the range and type of occupations nevertheless reflects that of Plymouth more broadly.
Michael was thirteen when this news story hit the local press, signaling to him both the dangers and the possibilities of queer sex in the city. Around the same time, his father, a musician, described a visiting singer to the Palace Theatre as “an old nancy boy” and later forbade his son to go to the Lockyer Tavern (on account of its “nancy” clientele) and to Union Street. As a result, these places were firmly in Michael's sights when, at fourteen, he was “right out on the town. I was down at the Lockyer, I was down in the Palace, I was down Union Street, I was cottaging and sort of hooking up with anybody and everybody.”Footnote 93 The back bar at the Lockyer was a well known, “cramped and nicotine-stained” queer hangout by the 1960s.Footnote 94 It was mainly men who drank here, though there were also some lesbians and “normal” customers who would come through from the front bar—sometimes, said one woman, to “[stir] up trouble” or “take the mickey out of the girls or as they called them butch women.”Footnote 95 Ted, who was twenty-three in 1960, described the landlord and “elegant” landlady who—like the licensees at the Union in Manchester—“were very nice to us [queers]”; they would sometimes have lock-ins and drinks in their upstairs flat. Ted talked of a camaraderie among the regulars and a playful competitiveness when visitors came from out of town: “I remember a chap coming down from Brighton, and he was an ex-Plymouth boy … he turned up in this big, flash American-styled car, beautiful car, and we were all looking at him in the bar and saying ‘I bet I can get off with him’ … And anyway I did and we went out in the car [to the countryside].” He told another story about having sex with a visiting Londoner (a model “photographed by Cecil Beaton”) in his car on Dartmoor;Footnote 96 increased car ownership and the rural surroundings offered multiple possibilities. Ted also suggested a local interest in queer men from elsewhere, and especially from places with a certain queer sheen like Brighton or London.
Other venues that Michael and Ted mentioned were not as specifically “homosexual” as the Lockyer but offered plentiful queer opportunities. In the mid-1960s, Michael picked up men at a “modern” coffee shop at Drake Circus on the other side of the city center from the Lockyer—El Sombrero, popular with the beatniks whom his mother had warned him against. On Union Street there was the “elegant” Long Bar at the Palace Theatre, which drew a mix of service personnel and queer locals, and Diamond Lil's, a venue remembered affectionately as a drinking haunt well into the 1980s.Footnote 97 It was “a sort of sailors’ place with these drag queens,” said one regular.Footnote 98 For after-hours drinking and dancing, there was the nearby Paramount Club, where, Michael recalls, “you got all the services, you got the prostitutes, you got the queer boys, basically the dregs of society ended up there … And guys would dance with each other, and sometimes you'd get a drunken sailor … saying: ‘Come ’ere, darlin’, I wanna dance with you!’”Footnote 99
Ted remembered that “nobody took any notice if two men or two matelots [sailors] got up and danced together [at the Paramount]. It was okay.” He was nevertheless “very wary” of the advances of a group of five sailors there on one particular night: “They started to say, you know, ‘Come back with us,’ and I said, ‘Where are you?’ and they said, “We're off the frigate. You can come back on board with us.’ And I said ‘No,’ and they said, ‘No, we're all right,’ and they all started kissing each other to prove they were OK.”Footnote 100 In his refusal—“You know, five! You can cope with one. Or maybe two”—Ted perhaps had in mind the frequent queer bashings in Plymouth that often involved members of the forces. In general, though, he describes the ease of homoerotic interaction at the Paramount and also at Mambos, another queerish venue. He looked forward to “blank week” at the latter, the days when sailors had already spent all their money “on the girls” and so “would come into the Mambo and … you'd probably buy them a coffee and get off with [one].”Footnote 101
This lively sex scene involving both queer and normal men extended to nearby cottages and cruising areas. Michael would regularly pick up sailors and married men: “I reckon a good 50 percent of my hook-ups were one-night stands with guys who identified as straight.” Among the other half were his first boyfriends, including one of two queer ex-sailors living together just off the Hoe, and after that, the “first love of [his] life,” Richard.Footnote 102 He was a former dockyard apprentice who had subsequently been bitten by the travel bug spreading through the 1960s; after two years backpacking around Europe and North Africa, he had returned to Plymouth, got a job as a security guard at the new Westwood TV studios, and picked up Michael in Hoe Park on the seafront. Richard's story, like Michael's, speaks both to local possibilities and imperatives and to wider social and cultural change. The evening and nighttime casual sex circuit clearly offered more than just fleeting pleasure; for Michael and Richard, it was an important way of forging friendships and of finding longer-term lovers. Ted, meanwhile, enjoyed the scope for daytime homosocial relaxation, especially at Lion's Den Cove on the eastern edge of the Hoe. It was a place protected from view by a dirty glass screen and a “men only” sign in the 1960s; “[p]eople would go up there and spend the day there.”Footnote 103
Such behavior might be tolerated in Plymouth as long as it fell below the radar. Michael remembers his mum and dad being angry about a spate of cottaging arrests in the city: “Damn ridiculous, just let them get on with it,” they had said. Despite their disapproval of theatrical “nancy boys,” the beatniks at El Sombrero, and Michael's colorful shirts, they were also permissive in this sense and supportive of Michael when he introduced Richard to them as his boyfriend. They came to “adore” Richard, and he in turn was astonished by their familial embrace: “He was horrified when he came home … to my parents, and Christmas morning we all piled into my mum and dad's bed. My sister, her husband, me. He was standing there. ‘Come on!’ [we said].”Footnote 104 This was one of the ways the local family-focused culture might be expressed.
Richard's own Plymouthian family behaved very differently. He “was not even allowed in his parents’ bedroom,” and Michael certainly was not; he was kept apart. A more disturbing story involved a father who beat up his son badly when he discovered he was homosexual, even though he himself had had casual sex with men.Footnote 105 Evident effeminacy or queerness—in an errant queer son, “nancy” performers, or colorful shirts—might be derided even if sex between men was common and tolerable in particular contexts. In this military city, the dividing lines between homosociality, homosex, and homosexuality were especially thin.
Police efforts in addressing the queer menace in the 1960s were not as concerted as those of the Manchester force, and there was some equivocal accommodation. Ted remembered that “various policemen would be up there [at Lion's Den Cove]—sunbathing. Nude, as well.” In his prolific cottaging adventures, Michael noted multiple blind eyes being turned and once picked up a policeman outside an empty public toilet and had sex with him in the cop car. He also recalled a local “Quentin Crisp character” called Rita who would put on makeup and go to the Lockyer and the cottage opposite, which was notoriously “good for military” who might check in at the end of their night out on Union Street. (The Lockyer itself was likely out of bounds to servicemen.)Footnote 106 “Everybody knew Rita,” Michael said, “which is why very often she wouldn't get caught. Police would just say: ‘For Christ sake Rita, go home! Put it away!’”
The apparent permissiveness with which this “character” was treated is equivocal, however. Michael remembers how Rita was repeatedly arrested and served time in Exeter prison. His “first fling” was also prosecuted and compelled to have electric-shock therapy in lieu of a prison sentence. “It ruined his life,” Michael said.Footnote 107 Similar stories emerge from Brighton and Manchester, but in Plymouth there was an additional layer of regulation in the form of the military police. Some venues were placed off limits to service personnel, and “there'd be paddy wagons, the military police” ready outside others to pick up the drunk or otherwise transgressive.Footnote 108 Jeannie, a member of the Women's Royal Army Corps, did not go to queer venues in Plymouth until after she left the forces in 1964 at the age of twenty-six. “You more or less had to pretend to be straight,” she said. The military police “were always going through all your [things]; [you had to] scurry to hide everything under the lino … all the letters and what have you.”Footnote 109 Discovery could lead to punishment, dishonorable discharge from the forces, and exposure to family and friends.
These circumstances lent a particularity to Plymouth's queer scene. It seems to have been even more male dominated than Manchester and Brighton in this period; a vibrant lesbian scene did not develop until the mid to late 1970s. Moreover, even if many men were sexually transgressive, there was a desire and perceived need to negotiate carefully established local, military, and familial traditions, protocols, and expectations. This dynamic is much less visible in Manchester, a much larger city, and Brighton, a more notoriously queer one.
This local narrative is replayed by most interviewees, though some striking examples of self-assertion slip through. Rita for one seemed not to have been cowed, and Michael was confident on the sex and social scene. He was buoyed perhaps by his youth, attractiveness, and supportive family. He was also finding some anchor points for his identity and politics in his family's socialism and in queer-themed books and films. He saw Victim when it first came out in 1962 at the vast—but for this film, virtually empty—3,254-seat Odeon Cinema on Frankfort Street in the city center. (It was one film during which he did not stray to the projection booth for sex with the projectionist.) Later he borrowed Peter Wildeblood's Against the Law (1955) from Plymouth Central Library: “I read that and thought ‘Wow, if anybody got caught with me, I'd just tell the truth and say I belong to this as well.” He added, in imagined contravention of a trenchant local culture, “To hell with what anybody thought.”Footnote 110
Both the film and book Michael mentioned substantially centered on London, and it is perhaps no surprise that he and Richard ended up there, joining a CHE group and marching in the first gay pride parade in 1972. Returning to Plymouth soon after, Michael found he did not fit in with the local group. “I kind of breezed in a bit. And said: ‘I worked in CHE in London, in Harrow,’ and they were so unwelcoming…. I was invading their space.”Footnote 111 The members perhaps resented being implicitly measured against a metropolitan yardstick.
Ted describes a similar feeling of disjunction when he moved back to Plymouth: “I had moved on and Plymouth hadn't. I went into the Lockyer and they did not even know the word ‘camp’ or ‘gay’ … They were laughing and said ‘What do you mean “camp?”’ And so we had long discussions about ‘camp’ and ‘gay.’ ‘Oh, that's London,’ they said.”Footnote 112 Ted and Michael saw themselves as differently queer after their experiences in the capital; on their return, both saw Plymouth as “stuck.” Another Ted, by contrast, was nostalgic for the regularity and familiarity of queer “family” life there in the 1960s: “It was better when it was against the law. We were like a big family; we all knew who we were and where we could go. You'd go out and visit people on a Sunday for tea and things like that. We always used to go for drinks on a Saturday night at the Lockyer Hotel. It was only a little place, but we were used to it and the staff knew us all.”Footnote 113
In Manchester and Brighton, youth and counterculture, partial decriminalization in 1967, and especially women's and gay liberation a few years later allowed some to feel more confident in being visibly queer, political, and irregular. In Plymouth, the ban on homosexuals in the military and the surrounding culture of discretion acted as a brake. Though beatniks hung out at El Sombrero, counterculture did not take hold in the city in the late 1960s and early 1970s. There was little place in this military city for the peace movement, which was elsewhere woven together with anti-racist, women's, and early homosexual activism (as it was for Allan Horsfall, for example). Plymouth Polytechnic was not formed until 1970, and even then did not have the radical pulse of higher education institutions in Manchester and Brighton. Although there was a CHE group, and several of its members were prepared to be photographed for Gay News (further evidence of a piecemeal willingness to be visible), the secretary told the paper that “what the world does today, Plymouth does ten years later … The best thing for gay people here would be if they all suddenly woke up with green noses. But then they'd probably start using makeup.” Gay News saw this reticence aligned with regional identity and a “strong vein of West Country conservatism.”Footnote 114
My interview with a former submariner about his memories of Plymouth in the later 1970s and 1980s yielded an account markedly similar to those offered by Ted and Michael about the 1960s.Footnote 115 And when in 1989 Colin and Peter from Manchester moved to the city to open a gay pub (The Swallow), they quickly identified an enduring onus on passing and discretion. “We picked [this pub] because … people could get there easily but wouldn't be seen going in … That was the prevailing attitude, that and the Navy attitude,” said Colin. The military police continued to sniff around for errant sailors there well into the 1990s.Footnote 116 At a time when gay bars with plate-glass windows were opening in Manchester and Brighton, in Plymouth the queer scene was less visible and less mixed. The “queer sixties” endured longer here.
BRIGHTON
Unlike Plymouth and Manchester, Brighton in the 1960s was already well known for its queer scene, in part because of its broader reputation for pleasure seeking. London was nearer and more tangibly part of the town's queer dynamics than it was for the other two cities. In 1949, a “little Kinsey” ethnographer accompanied a group of homosexuals to Brighton from the capital as part of his research; it was apparently the obvious place to go.Footnote 117
In 1961, 163,159 people lived in the town, a high point after a century and a half of growth (from 7,339 in 1801). The population dipped slightly thereafter (to 161,351 in 1971), though Brighton had the ongoing demographic ballast of adjoining Hove, with its 73,000 people, to the west. Together the two towns roughly matched Plymouth in population. Unsurprisingly for a seaside resort, the economy was service-sector based, with few big employers. Only 21 percent of the population worked in manufacturing in 1960, 15 percent lower than the national average and 26 percent lower than that in Manchester. Meanwhile, the proportion who were self-employed was around 4 percent higher than the national average, rising slightly across the period from 12 percent to 14 percent. More people were in professional, managerial, and skilled roles than in the other two cities, or indeed more broadly, and fewer were semi-skilled, unskilled, or unemployed.Footnote 118 Some commuted to jobs in London, often for the office-based jobs that expanded postwar and opened out possibilities especially for women to have “lifestyles independent of family.”Footnote 119 Though poverty was endemic in Brighton, it did not have the poor or working-class image of Manchester. The launch of the university in 1961 prompted a studenty reorientation of the town, and its reputation for the arts also developed in this decade, especially after the inauguration of the Brighton Festival in 1967. Students, young artists, beats, mods, rockers, and hippies were all associated with Brighton—though this youthful reputation in fact belied residential demographics; throughout the 1960s and until 1981, an above-average proportion of over-sixty-fives lived here.Footnote 120 Residents elected mainly Conservatives to the council and to parliament. This was, remember, a town of small businesses, without the kind of strong working-class community and history that energized the left in Manchester.
By the 1960s, Brighton had a central cluster of queer pubs. The Spotted Dog, the Greyhound, the “terribly small” and “tatty”Footnote 121 Pigot's bar at the St. James Hotel, and the Regency Club were all popular with working-class men and, to a lesser extent, women. Pigot's was remembered as a queer venue from the interwar years and, like the others, had a piano for regular sing-alongs. The Regency clientele, according to Brighton-born James, was “a third lesbian, a third gay men, a third straight.” It was, he said, “one of the friendliest clubs I'd ever known, certainly not an exploiting club.”Footnote 122 On the seafront, the Lorelei and “sleazy” Wanderin coffee shops (open all hours) were rougher, as were the Belvedere and Fortune of War pubs (the latter known for its butch lesbian crowd).Footnote 123 Chatfields was, too—and popular with a crossover crowd of prostitutes, rent boys, queer men, and sailors who would travel from Portsmouth for a weekend of fun out of view of the military police. Grant, originally from Kent, remembers that “anybody who had a flat or a house with a floor space would probably go down to Chatfields and chat up a sailor and take him home for the weekend.”Footnote 124 These places were cheek by jowl with “classier” queer venues: the cocktail bar at the “very very select” Argyle HotelFootnote 125 and the “lovely, old” St. Albans Club, also known locally as “the wrinkle room” on account of the age of its well-heeled actorly clientele.Footnote 126 At the Golden Fleece, the two bars developed distinct atmospheres, in part because of the presiding barmen: Bert was “the soul of discretion” in one; Dennis, in the other, was “one of those flamboyant queans.” His bar “was hilarious and riotous,” but he could be “indiscreet” and might “compromise you in public,” James said.Footnote 127
In such a compact town, sandwiched between sea and the South Downs countryside, these places were close to each other and to people's homes. As a result, there was more domestic socializing here than in the other two cities. More people had their own room or place (even if only a bedsit), so it was easier to take people back;Footnote 128 some with money had large central flats and houses that were good for entertaining. Phil and Ken (aka Rose and Esme Filk'n) held tea-parties on Sunday afternoons in their “beautiful flat” in Hove, replete with chandeliers and long velvet drapes.Footnote 129 Bob, from Worthing, a little further along the coast, remembers that “Aunt Rose used to sit at a high chair and pour tea out of silver pots.”Footnote 130 Harry, who moved to Brighton from Cheshire in 1958, recalls that “there'd sometimes be as many as forty people. You knew everybody. It was rather like a masons’ lot.”Footnote 131 Brighton was home—or a weekend home—to some well-known queer actors and playwrights; Dublin-born Patrick identified a theatrical “gay mafia” in the town: “expensive queans … throwing cocktail parties with art dealers and old actresses … there was an awful lot that went on behind heavily brocaded curtains.”Footnote 132 There was also an early “leather clique, the motorbike crowd,” who held parties in their homes, too.Footnote 133 If many such gatherings were exclusive affairs, post–closing-time parties could be less so: “You'd be at a club, and someone would say ‘party at so and so,’ and you didn't need to know who the people were, you'd simply grab a bottle and gatecrash,” said Hove-born Janice.Footnote 134 George, another Dubliner, remembers one party in Hove where there were lesbians and queer men, drag queens, and “sailors dancing with men.”Footnote 135
Homes could be less compromising places than the bars and clubs. Barbara initially travelled to London for monthly MRG meetings in pubs there, the easy link to the capital giving access to such additional social and political resources. An offshoot developed fairly quickly in Brighton, and Barbara, originally from Blackburn in Lancashire, remembers small MRG gatherings in each others’ homes—for fun and to provide support for women who felt isolated: “We would do the rounds, but our house seemed to be where they could always come at any time…. We used to periodically put on these dos, oh, they were lovely.” Her neighbors would offer to help: “The wife [next door …], she'd say, ‘Oh flow in to me for coffee, you can't cope with all that lot’ … She was always there, she knew. And never never openly discussed. But it was so obvious.” What Barbara describes was an unspoken acceptance on the part of her neighbor—an attitude that other queer Brightonians mention too.Footnote 136 Sandie, originally from Birmingham, lived in a bedsit in a house on Grand Parade owned by a “gay man” who “tried to [rent to] queer people if he could,” though she lived amiably there alongside a “straight girl and an old lady.”Footnote 137 George remembers a neighbor telling him that she “heard [his] little squabbles [with his boyfriend] from time to time,” signaling to him that she knew and did not mind.Footnote 138 These were reassuring gestures, especially before the change in the law in 1967.
Brighton's queer commercial and domestic network in the 1960s was substantial enough to have its own class-based, occupational, and age-related cliques and networks (though also with notably more mixed-gender socializing than in Plymouth).Footnote 139 Grant remembers that “lots of queers would say, ‘Oh, I wouldn't go into that place, it's frightfully rough and tumble. Oh they're awfully common in there.’” His queer set might go out during the week to avoid the “rougher” “queer blokes” from midland and northern cities who came at the weekends.Footnote 140 Others went out of their way to encounter these and other visitors. The last train to Portsmouth left at 1.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, and before that “the cottage at the station used to be infamous”: “The queans in drag used to descend like a plague of locusts … so pissed they were falling arse over tit to find a sailor.”Footnote 141
If, for most, discretion remained crucial, Dennis's behavior at the Golden Fleece and the purported antics of the Saturday-night queans at the station testified to a particular “out there” camp self-confidence in the town. Phil and Ken announced their coupledom with a camp/crude surname combining their first names. Michael found the quick-witted Brighton queens “very alarming,”Footnote 142 and Grant remembered that “color-wise [in Brighton] it was a bit grotesque … pink velvet trousers with a green shirt … terribly Hawaiian shirts with all sorts of tulle at the neck.”Footnote 143 Filk'n Casuals—the gentlemen's outfitters in Bond Street run by and named after Phil and Ken—fed this distinctive style, stocking those bright shirts and their own innovations in tailored underwear (including in leather). There were echoes here of the new fashions emerging from Kings Road and Carnaby Street in London, but also of the earlier Sussex Arts Balls in the late 1940s and 1950s, which were notoriously sequin strewn and flamboyant.Footnote 144
Public nonconformity seems to have felt more plausible and less dangerous here than in Plymouth and Manchester. A barber in St. James's Street catered openly to butch women; Laurie would commute to her office in London in “a collar, tie, everything masculine on top, with a skirt.”Footnote 145 Aileen, who moved to Brighton from Glasgow, “could not believe the freedom women had … you could go out on a Sunday in a pair of slacks, really enjoy it. Nobody turned around calling you a cow.”Footnote 146 In summer, both homosexuals and heterosexuals could be seen on the beach openly “gazing into each others’ eyes.”Footnote 147 The men's beach at Hove was especially popular with queer men: “There was nothing in the rest of the country to compare … Lots of very famous and infamous people could have been photographed [there], I can assure you,” said Grant.Footnote 148 Vera meanwhile remembered going with a picnic to “sit up on the South Downs” with her girlfriend, or “to the hill past St. Dunstan's” by Roedean Girls school on Brighton's eastern edge. The school was the scene of “pashes” between girls and was a queer reference point in other ways too: “We used to say Nancy Spain [the butch journalist and TV personality of the 1950s and early 1960s] went to Roedean. You felt a connection, you see, because you knew she was gay.”Footnote 149 Margaret described traveling from London with other Kenric members and setting up camp on the Downs before going out in Brighton in the evening.
This outdoor “scene” in Brighton offered scope for relaxation and sex, but it was also tinged with danger. Vicky did not feel safe walking on the streets “dressed like we used to dress.” Despite the sense of comfort others expressed, for her and her friends, “If you couldn't get in a car or get a taxi, then you didn't go.”Footnote 150 “Queer rolling”—in which queer men would be attacked and robbed on the assumption they were less likely to complain—was common on the seafront.Footnote 151 As elsewhere, men risked arrest when they had sex or picked up in public places—as in a 1964 case of a sales rep who met two working-class brothers on a central Brighton street and took them back to his Regency Square flat, where they “whipped [him] at his own request” and committed “acts of gross indecency” together.Footnote 152 The public toilet in Black Lion Street (amid the central cluster of queer bars) was closed a year later because of the number of arrests there, many involving tourists.Footnote 153 Unicorn Books, run by the American beatnik poet Bill Butler in Gloucester Road, was raided by police soon after it opened in 1967. Butler was prosecuted for selling “obscene publications,” including the hippie International Times, which celebrated a “new attitude” of permissiveness and carried queer contact ads. Fellow poets Alan Ginsburg, Thom Gunn, and others were swift in providing Butler with financial support, signaling again the importance of new and wider queer and countercultural networks in the 1960s. Unicorn endured for a further five years partly as a result.
A year after Unicorn opened, the International Males Advertiser launched from Preston Street near the seafront. After six issues, it became the International Spartacus Guide, a magazine of listings, contacts, and features “for homosexual, about homosexuals, by homosexuals.” The offices became an informal resource for queer men in or traveling to Brighton. “We had, I guess, what was effectively the predecessor of Gay Switchboard … People came to our office, just arriving on the doorstep with their problems. It was quite dramatic.”Footnote 154 The window got progressively more suggestive: Eric remembered walking past and seeing “leather jock straps and things like that which I hadn't seen on display before.”Footnote 155 The office and its output spoke of an unapologetic presence that was attuned to a wider countercultural shift and homosexual (soon to be gay) politics, and also to Brighton's particular reputation as a permissive cosmopolitan place receptive to both. Queer commerce was more evident earlier here than in Manchester or Plymouth.
These were some of the ways in which Brighton “started to liven up by the end of the sixties,” said Dennis. “Everything else … loosened up” as “things had got gay and we had got flower power” (tellingly combining gay and wider counterculture).Footnote 156 By 1968, Brighton was “gayer” than Hampstead, according to one woman who moved to the town from London apparently partly for this reason. In contrast to the situation in Plymouth, queer incomers were plentiful.Footnote 157 Journalist Geoff Roberts claimed that in “no other European city is homosexuality so open and apparently so tolerated.”Footnote 158 Interviewees certainly touched on feelings of isolation and fear, and queer bashers and the police were certainly active. But in Brighton more than in Manchester and Plymouth, there was a sense of possibility and excitement born of the scale of the scene, the visibility of queer people, and a wider notoriety. In all three places, we see examples of queer people behaving as if their behavior was accepted and acceptable,Footnote 159 but here such examples are legion. This tendency underpinned some early organizing and protest. The MRG was active locally (as in Manchester in the form of the New Group), and there were some piecemeal outspoken moves by students at the university. In 1965 one wrote to the Brighton Gazette to protest the “reactionary” opinion voiced in the Brighton Gazette about the Black Lion Street toilets; he called for “a militant campaign to change the law regarding homosexuals.”Footnote 160 A year later, a group of Sussex students joined others from Oxford University to lobby MPs in support of the Sexual Offences Act.Footnote 161 A Gay Liberation Front group with around fifty members formed at the university in 1971 and quickly organized what the Brighton Evening Argus described as a mixed “pop music discotheque with psychedelic lighting” at the Co-Op Hall in London Road, away from the seafront and the established commercial queer scene there. With 250 young revelers, including a local lorry driver and Coventry trade unionist, it was touted by the Evening Argus as something new: “The overall feeling was one of relaxed enjoyment, natural pleasure in dancing, and lots of laughter”—very different from what organizer Simon Watney described as “the extremely sordid atmosphere gay people usually have to put up with.”Footnote 162
Despite this early flourish, Brighton's Gay Liberation Front seems to have been less radically engaged than Manchester's, possibly because of the greater and earlier queer visibility and comfort here. “I think Sussex [University] was possibly one of the easiest places [in the country] to come to terms with an alternative from mainstream identity,” said Jim, a key player in the university's subsequent Gaysoc.Footnote 163 The activist jolt and mobilization in Brighton came later. In this town of historic queer ease, the sting of the homophobic backlash in the 1980s locally and nationally felt especially sharp.
CONCLUSIONS
Wider social and cultural changes in the 1960s weave through these accounts of Manchester, Plymouth, and Brighton. We see it in fashion and style and in youth cultures and student life, in the money some were able to spend on going out, in the scope to travel and move around more easily. These shifts modulated queer life, scenes, and experiences, and also expectations and aspirations—apparent in the nascent radicalism felt individually by Michael in Plymouth or more collectively by the women of the MRG in Brighton and the New Group in Manchester. In each city, there were those who owned and articulated a queer identity (with varying degrees of flamboyance and self-confidence) and at least one pub serving a mix of queers, queens, lesbians, and people who were gender-crossing. Camaraderie at the Union in Manchester, the Lockyer in Plymouth, and the Regency in Brighton was often forged in relation to class and in the face of varying degrees of local opprobrium. Queer and Swinging London was a shared reference point, though it meant something different for Brightonians within easy (even daily) reach than it did for the more distant Plymouthians. Undoubtedly, iconic places and national and international trends, ideas, and (for example, legal) imperatives had their place in local queer lives and imaginaries. I have nevertheless shown that these shared reference points were part of localized queer cultures that were also substantially different from each other. Casual sex between “normal” and queer men was not unique to Plymouth, but this crossover was especially pronounced there because of the presence of a large number of young servicemen who might be open to sex but not much more in terms of identity or community. Many here felt a need to separate and negotiate carefully queer and normal lives in what was a small, family-oriented and traditional city. The size of Manchester, meanwhile, provided a queer critical mass and facilitated what could be for some an enveloping subculture. Luchia initially shuttled between her factory work and the Union but quickly found jobs in queer bars and lodging with women “like her.” Her strong sense of community was forged partly in relation to the particular policing regime and probably also to a solidarity and straightforwardness associated with Mancunian identity. Brighton was exceptional in different ways again. As in Manchester, the scene was substantial enough for distinctive styles and reputations to attach to different venues that developed distinct reputations, but here there were more middle-class and artistic cliques as well as more of a domestic circuit. Queer life was already embedded in the culture of this permissive seaside resort in ways that had earned it a wide notoriety and plentiful visitors—many of whom stayed: Ourstory interviewees were from Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cheshire, Kent, and London, as well as other Sussex towns. Having accommodated a stream of weekending friends from London, John turned his home into one of the town's first clearly queer guest houses, Le Chateau Gay, in the later 1960s.Footnote 164 The value of the pink pound was more evident to him and others in Brighton at this point than it was in Manchester or Plymouth. In Brighton there was also a clearer folding together of queer, youth, and hippie subcultures, partly because of the proximity to London (the epicenter of that “sixties swing”), and partly because Brightonians were used to—or were often themselves—incomers who might live at some distance from family and associated expectations.Footnote 165
While there are certainly queer resonances between Manchester, Plymouth, and Brighton, we also witness different identifications, ways of being, and understandings of community and politics. We can trace these tendencies into later decades. I have suggested a continuity of some of Plymouth's queer dynamics of the 1960s into the years that followed. In the seemingly unabashed queer visibility in Brighton in the 1960s, meanwhile, we see some of the imperatives that soon attached to gay liberation. There and perhaps more substantially in Manchester, we can detect a nascent politics that partially underpinned later activism.Footnote 166 Local “sixties scenes” in these ways etched out some of the “imaginative space for the sexual revolution of the 1970s” (in the words of Raphael Samuel) but also help us to understand why the call to “come out” and “come together” was taken up unevenly.Footnote 167 It was easier to heed that call in Brighton or among students at Manchester University than it was in Plymouth.
Growing student populations, changing work and work patterns, urban renewal and gentrification, and civic and police accommodation of or resistance to queer people subsequently reshaped LGBTQ lives and scenes in further distinctive ways in our three cities. These distinctions partly explain why the national and international AIDS crisis or legal change away from and then in the direction of equality were experienced differently in each place—despite the sense some interviewees had of a loss of local particularity in the 2000s, and a hankering after earlier and supposedly more “authentic” times and scenes. Some interviewees contrasted distinctive local (and often also “rough” and “working-class”) places with more recent “generic” and “sterile” bars and clubs.Footnote 168 Gilad Padva and Elsbeth Probyn see this brand of nostalgia as somewhat queer, oriented not around childhood, family, and a society braced by idealized versions of these things but rather around the “move … made to belong to … another kind of family” and to “a glorified past and its mythic playgrounds, role models and halls of fame.”Footnote 169 We can feel something of this in accounts of carnivalesque Union Street in Plymouth, of the back bar at the Gaumont Cinema in Manchester, and of the drag queens in pursuit of sailors at Brighton station. James's, Luchia's, and Ted's respective descriptions of the Regency, the Union, and the Lockyer are laced with a wistful sense that these “nonexploiting” and queerly familial places do not exist in the same way anymore (or at least not for them as older lesbians and gays). While nostalgia should not lead us to flatten out and generalize queer experience in more recent times, it underscores the significance of the local and particular to the ways that queer lives were lived then and have been remembered since.
