On first moving to London in mid 1973 I ended up living in digs in Clapham – ie a rented room in my landlady’s house. Work was a clerical job in St Martin’s Lane that invloved a daily commute by tube to Leicester Square from Clapham Common station – where in due course I made the happy discovery that you could buy Gay News from a newsstand outside the entrance.
It took a bit of courage to buy my first copy, but the world didn’t cave in: nobody pointed, insulted me or sneered. Gay News was a pioneering publication of its day, quite unlike today’s gay glossies with their graphic ads for chatlines, escorts and porn. It was printed and presented as a serious community newspaper, and its driving philosophy was openness and visibility. A whole book will no doubt written one day on the subject of GN and its importance to the LGBT community in seventies Britain.
I took to buying it every fortnight and reading it ostentatiously on crowded tube trains on my way in to work. On one occasion I became aware of the presence behind me of a classic City Gent, as we used to call them – pinstripe, moustache, umbrella, briefcase, the works. He was obviously building up to speaking, with little harrumphing throat-clearing noises as he shifted into position to address me directly. Finally, he coughed and said, “Ahem, the fortnights just seem to fly by, don’t they?”
It was in the classified ads section of GN that I saw South London Gay Liberation Front were putting on A Ball in a month’s time at Surrey Hall in Stockwell – just up the road from where I lived. Waiting for it was the longest month of my life.
Eventually Saturday October 20th arrived and, literally trembling with anxiety and anticipation, I caught the tube to Stockwell and walked to the Surrey Hall, only to find a gang of youths loitering outside the door. Either I’d come to the wrong place – or they were waiting to beat up any poofs who tried to go in. But on getting closer it became apparent they were carefree, laughing and all wearing GLF badges.
It was an emotional homecoming, a realisation that I was not alone and there really were other people like me out there. Not just the terrifyingly elegant and impossibly attractive queens and rent-boys of Earls Court but ordinary young men and women going about their daily lives who simply happened to be queer.
To the SW7 crowd that GLF Ball would have seemed horribly naff. It was exactly like all the provincial school or town hall discos we’d known as teenagers with loads of shy people sitting round the outside of the room in semi-darkness and somebody playing records. To me it felt comfortable and familiar, but with this overwhelming difference: the men were dancing with men and the women dancing with women. It probably sounds banal nowadays, but at the time it was completely novel – and a huge liberation.
Dancing had been one of those bafflingly pointless things from schooldays – like football – that I’d never really “got”. That night in Stockwell it was suddenly OK to to go up to someone I genuinely fancied and ask for a dance… When he said yes – and David Bowie’s “Moonage Daydream” came on the sound system – the penny truly dropped. Dancing was all about attraction, courtship and above all about sex. And it was absolutely brilliant.
Afterwards on the way out I bought a GLF badge and a copy of “With Downcast Gays – Aspects of Homosexual Self-Oppression” by Andrew Hodges and David Hutter – which completely changed the way I thought about queer sexuality – you can still read it online here…
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