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Cos their idea was: “If only you would lead decent, quiet lives
everything would be all right.”
You see, you didn't want to flaunt it.
So we used to flaunt it and upset them. laughs
So there was all that great drama going on
about people, you know, demanding a place to live.
Because by the way, the Lambeth housing list -
there were thousands of people on the housing waiting list.
And of course we were all as poor as church mice
None of us had any money, few of us had jobs.
Because at that time unemployment was quite high.
You're talking about the 1970s- late 70s,
when the economy was practically on its knees.
Thank goodness for the Brixton Gay Centre, or else I would probably have
been stuck in a pokey little bedsit in Wimbledon,
living on my own as a miserable gay man forevermore.
I mean... the first few days,
I remember the first party for 155 Railton Road was absolute dynamite.
I can remember 'Papa Was a Rolling Stone' being played
and everyone just dancing around in circles.
We thought capitalism's downfall was imminent.
It was coming to an end,
and we were on the brink of something quite dramatic and revolutionary - which we were.
Which we were! This was serious Gay Liberation Front politics.
So that was happening there and then,
but we thought change was happening on a national level.
For a moment we thought everything was going to change - globally, even.
But... not to be.
Should we start with the Gay Centre thing?
Well the thing was, the Gay Centre grew out of the South London GLF.
South London GLF started meeting in the library about 1972.
And then the sort of radical queens said, "Let's squat an empty building."
You see, this caused a furore, because the conservative people thought "you musn't do that".
Anyway, we went ahead and did it, which meant that one or two people left.
I'm still friendly with one of them, but he was a bit conservative and didn't approve of squatting.
And that's how we started the Gay Centre.
Well, we wanted to be more public.
We were having public dances and things - in the church crypt, and the town hall and things.
But we wanted something that was more public.
So we squatted this building, Railton Road, and had it open as a drop-in centre.
We had a coffee bar. You could go in and be given a cup of coffee.
And we used to have events in the basement, discos ...
there was great controversy, because there was a thing called the Gay Wrestling Group.
And the Gay Wrestling Group wanted to meet in our basement,
and the political purists didn't approve of wrestling. laughs
Of course, they were all queens! I mean, they were just getting their hands on one another.
It wasn't really aggressive wrestling. Anyway, we overrode them and they were allowed to meet in the basement.
And they had all these dirty mattresses on the floor, which they used to wrestle on.
laughs, So that was fun.
What was the controversy around the wrestling?
Oh, because 200% political right-ons
thought wrestling was very macho and disapproved of it on principle.
There was a disapproval of macho behaviour?
Yes - being real men and heterosexual and all that sort of thing.
It was disapproved of by... by fairies. laughs
We had a telephone, which was like a sort of early version of gay switchboard.
Have you heard of a thing called ice-breakers?
Well, a lot of us were in ice-breakers.
We had these stickers we used to put all over the place in phone boxes,
saying, "Homosexual men and women can ring ice-breakers every evening of the year between 8 and 10 o'clock."
Occasionally you got giggling.
You'd find kids had read this and dialed the number then giggled at you. (laughs)
Yeah, I mean there was nothing terribly planned about this. We just sort of thought it was a good i-
Well let's start with the gay centre first
Because that was really the focal point for more gay people to move into the area and squat more houses.
So that's really a good point to start... to start thinking about that.
The Gay Centre was there for several reasons.
One was to provide an alternative place to meet,
for whatever activities you wanted to get involved in,
in contrast to the commercial gay scene,
which was actually very limited at the time and it was actually not particularly friendly to gay people.
It was just there to basically, we felt, to rip people off.
So we wanted to provide an alternative social centre.
But also secondly,
in line with a lot of groups who were in and around Railton Road,
we really wanted to put down our own marker, and say that
"We've got a right to exist as a social group as much as anyone else."
So, it was in the beginnings of saying, "Well, we want to create our own space,"
and we wanted to demand that as a right -
not something that is provided by someone else, on sort of a grace and favour.
We were saying we wanted our own, self-identified, gay space.
Thirdly, it was also a place that we could run various political campaigns from.
So it has those three functions: the social, the political and our 'coming out,' if you like.
Terry Stewart. Ex-Gay Liberation Front, 1975-1984.
I was involved in running the London Gay Centre,
And from that the gay centre was very much the hub of a lot of the politics of GLF South London
...emanated from there
It was quite a political hub, and a social hub as well.
Very important to people in terms of meeting up with other lesbian and gay people,
and discussing the issues of the day.
And of course we were all as poor as church mice, none of us had any money
few of us had jobs, because at that time unemployment was quite high.
You're talking about the 1970s, late-70s, when the economy was practically on its knees.
And of course the British economy had been hawked off to the royal bank.
So, it wasn't an easy time.
So squatting, in terms of having somewhere to live, was vital.
In terms of young gay people coming to London, it was somewhere you could live.
You couldn't afford to have housing at that time,
and certainly we wouldn't be known as openly gay people living in rented accommodation
Landlords wouldn't have been too happy to have you as their tenants.
So it was a means of being able to live during that economic downturn, as it were.
In a reasonable way, along with gay people.
It also meant we were able to develop our political ideas about who we were, and what we were hoping to achieve.
It was vital in terms of personal growth and growth of the LGBT movement of the day
I should mention the other alternative groups along Railton Road.
There were a lot of them.
The People's News Service, which was an alternative news service to the bourgeois press.
Straight press.
Two women's centres. One was actually next door to the Gay Centre.
Around the corner from Railton Road, on Shakespeare Road, there was the Race Today Collective,
which was a group of Black radicals.
There was a food cooperative.
That was slightly further down, just off Railton Road, on Atlantic Road.
But bearing in mind, not very far away, there were two streets of fully squatted houses.
One was Villa Road, and the other was St Agnes Place.
We had this idea that besides providing a social space for gay people,
we wanted to try an alternative way of living.
So we had this idea of actually chucking out the notion of private property.
We noticed that the garden walls were splitting people into different units,
so we thought, "Get rid of all of that,"
so that it becomes the property of all the gay people in those squats.
It became a proper home for us.
So you'd often come down in the morning and someone was making home-made bread,
and somebody else was sitting there having a cup of tea, having an argument about something current.
And... it was...
It was a nice space. It was a welcoming space, and it was a space where we were able to grow.
Now, in 1976 we had one of the hottest summers,
so a lot of our time was spent in the back garden,
arguing, debating, developing ideas, drinking cider.
Most of our life was in and around the flats, around the squats.
But we did go to local social areas as well, just down the road from us.
It was a front line. A lot of the clubs were, like, black shabines. (shabine = illegal bar)
I went into one or two. I had no real difficulty with them,
but again, it was a straight space.
And then we discovered this woman called Pearl.
And Pearl had a space which was another shabine, but it was a gay shabine.
And Pearl would often welcome you in.
My name was 'Ginger.' She called me 'Ginger' for some reason, of course I'm not ginger, I'm blond.
We had a great time there. And that was a space away from- even though it was, like, her private little shabine- it wasn't a commercial space.
It was a local space - where the Black gay community came together, the white gay community. It was predominantly Black.
And there was a great camaraderie between people.
Brixton by this time had a lot of Afro-Caribbean- a large Afro-Caribbean community,
and yet the Brixton squatting community was almost exclusively white.
A couple of Black guys from Portugal lived there for a short time, but no local Black squatters- Black gay squatters joined.
In a way, these men came together because they were all gay.
But I think what you start to see playing out is how other identities and identifications were also very important.
So class, or ethnicity, or nationality, or whether they had moved from outside London or within London,
all those previous life experiences and identifications were at least as important in the way they lived in those squats as the fact that they were gay.
So I think there's something really interesting about somewhat deconstructing gay identity,
and saying, "Well, it's not necessarily the primary identity."
You know, it might be as important that these men were white, for example.
In terms of the way they thought about their experiences there.
Because what had happened or what was happening was that the idea of a distinctive gay identity,
if we think about gay identity, it was perceived as a white identity - and often as a white, middle class identity.
So a lot of Black *** men in Brixton - and there was a Black *** community there, there was an illegal bar, there were cruising areas and so on -
a lot of those men were not negotiating their *** identities in quite the way these white squatters were doing,
who were making a very explicit statement about their *** identity,
which was often much harder to do for men who were negotiating their place within family, community, church and so on.
So I think there are some really interesting things to observe both about the inclusions that the squats enabled,
but also the exclusions - who was excluded-
not deliberately, or meanly, or maliciously, but just by the kind of politics and the kind of identity that was coming into shape there.
There was no physical violence. The only physical violence we had was from a white man who was very, very screwed up.
He used to come in and ask us what we did, and he'd get very drunk.
And he came in one day and...
...he went berserk. He smashed a chair and started hitting people with it.
I nearly killed him, actually, because he had his hands around Phillip's neck and Phillip was going green,
so I hit the bloke on the head with this broken chair leg,
and luckily - because if you do that you can kill somebody, if you hit them in the wrong place -
luckily I only knocked him out. (laughs)
Yeah we did get hassled, there was a youth club that was fairly close which was run in the methodist centre
And of course when the youth came out of that centre, they would attack the gay community almost every night they came out.
But we went up and egaged with the youth workers in that centre,
and they were predominantly young black men who were involved in that,
and talked about a need for them to stop this harassment going on.
So, invariably about nine o'clock- half past nine at night
we would get bottles thrown, people shouting abuse- homophobic abuse. And then it would die off.
And then there was other occasions when we'd have people come in, we had one guy come in one night
who was actually not black at all, he was greek.
Came in with a machete and set about trying to attack people in the gay centre.
And of course our relationship with the police was a similar relationship that the black community had with the police.
We couldn't trust them. The only time we ever met them was when they were either harassing us or arresting us.
It was a point of conflict, there wasn't a point of "call the old bill they'll come and they'll rescue us", that didn't exist.
And some of the times we did call the police, whilst we were the victims, we were made to feel like we'd brought it upon ourselves
I remember being firebombed on one occasion, and the police came round and said "oh it's just the ***" and drove off!
There was no attempt whatsoever to address that a criminal act had taken place,
Because at that time we were just the *** of the earth
(laughs)
Sound like I'm sitting in the mastermind chair, don't I?
I'm Edwin, Edwin Henshaw,
and I lived in various houses at the same time, for different things,
around Brixton - in Railton and Mayall Roads - between 1976 and 1978.
There were certainly these strands of ethos and values about how, as liberated gay men - or queens, or faggots or whatever we wanted to call ourselves -
there were certainly those strands of thinking about how people should live their lives.
It was all in constant argument and debate, and people had different views about it and so forth.
It was all kind of slightly fraught, but very creative at the same time.
Kind of a melting pot of... I don't know... high energy, arguments, bitchiness,
but also great things going on at the same time.
It was very...
It was an incredibly engaging thing, but it was also quite stressful, to be honest.
Coming out was a big issue in those days, much more so... probably much more so than it is now.
Because in those days there was no... there was no positive media portrayal at all of gay people.
It was all pretty negative, or very negative.
So in terms of making a statement, to stand up and be seen and say "This is who we are, this is what we're like,"
You know, that was a big part of the ethos of what gay liberation was about.
Drag was very prominent at the time, because that was genderbending.
Genderfuck. Genderbending.
The idea, again, of just enjoying yourself, and dressing up as you want to.
Putting, you know, a bit of slap on and a few feather boas and whatever.
The ethos of gay politics in those days was...
not to mimic the heterosexual style of life.
So, in some ways, gay couples were frowned upon by other gay men who were living there,
because you were not supposed to try to imitate what straight people are like.
They're the people we're trying to rise up against.
I don't know that straight people ever did visit the community centre.
But certainly, the ethos would have been very powerfully that this is our sacred space.
So why would they ever be there?
We're not on show to anyone here, this is our place.
It's hard enough for us to find somewhere that we can just be comfortable to be ourselves, and not be exposed, if you like, to derision,
or patronising attitude or whatever it might be.
The gay community centre would not be somewhere where people would willingly expose themselves to that.
If there ever were any straight people who visited the Gay Centre, I think they would have been exceptional people.
There was this kind of view that in order for us to find our identity and be able to feel strong
in the world, we needed the support of being self-contained in some way,
that we needed a nucleus of protected space where we could be who we were.
I think people... people...
...there were also a lot of people who were involved in things outside of that community,
and they would go there and probably get involved, and argue things and put views into those other contexts, but...
...it was going within that community, and that community was held to be a safe space.
Except that actually, of course there was huge amounts of in-fighting going on within it as well, but that was often creative.
I don't want to depict that as a negative thing. It had its negative aspects but it was also highly, highly creative,
and there was a huge amount of things like theater, political action, and...
...a lot of stuff came out of that place because of what was going on within it.
My intention originally was to get involved in the Gay Centre and political activity around there.
And within a couple of weeks I wanted to get involved in the whole squatting thing and alternative lifestyle.
And...
I arrived in about October. By November I had my own squat. That quick.
Most of the people there I knew politically, anyway.
I met Bill Thornycroft when I was in Gay Liberation Front Office Collective.
We were also members of the Communist Party, me and Bill Thornycroft. In fact, we co-founded the Communist Party LGBT group.
Oh that's another interesting thing, the Communist Party was the first political party to have a comprehensive LGBT policy,
and a lot of that was, again, drafted by people like Bill and myself.
How did the Brixton Faeries come about? The name - we were called Gay Liberation Front South London, then
Colm and myself and a few others decided to have a theatre group.
So the first bit of theatre we organised-
Colm gave me a lot of help during Pride, and we decided to, as part of Pride, to have a Brixton Faeries theatre group.
That's where the name was used- for the theatre group.
It was a Punch and Judy show, and it was supposed to be street theatre highlighting homophobia and sexism.
The person who squatted above me, Alistair - who was fairly flamboyant, extremely camp - was Mr Punch.
And I was his oppressed wife, Mrs Punch.
And my partner-to-be was our son, who came out as gay.
We also had to introduce anti-capitalism. We had the John Bull figure,
and Paul Newton as Britannia being pushed in on a wheelbarrow.
Sings: "Rule Britannia, your Britons are such fools. Britons always, always, always shall be slaves"
That was the theme to which they were rolled in.
It was just a bit of street theatre to make some points.
Brixton Faeries began to be used as the name for the activists and the theatre group.
It became the name adopted by activists, with Gay Liberation South London being sort of a more formal political part that
would negotiate with the council, or negotiate with the police... that became the formal part, if you see what I mean.
With Brixton Faeries becoming the direct action part of it. This is how I saw it.
The Gay Centre was also important as it was the basis for all kinds of politics.
When Gay News was being prosecuted, the National Gay News Defense Committee started there.
And mee and my partner at the time, Stephen, were joint secretaries of that. So a lot of things spun out of it,
with really quite... really big, national importance.
WH Smith had decided to refuse to sell the Gay News, the gay newspaper.
Usually, after a Gay Pride march, people would just disappear and not do very much,
but everyone was saying, "We'll tel you what to do after the speeches at the end of the march."
It was in Trafalgar Square, and they said, "There's a WH Smith's just down the road. You know what you think of WH Smith's."
Everybody just moved down there. I don't think anybody got arrested. I'm not sure.
But basically we pulled the places to pieces, scattered the books and magazines all over the floor.
Things like that, organised at short notice so people don't know what's happening.
We got a van hired. Martin, who wasn't part of the gay centre, who's now again sadly deceased.
He lived in West London. He drove a minibus all the way to the outskirts of Colcehtser and went to Mary Whitehouse's residence.
Mary Whitehouse being the moral campaigner who brought this private prosecution.
It was around Christmastime, and we sang a number of carols. Rang her bell - the door was left slightly ajar, for some reason...
and we sang 'A Gay in a Manger' and...
'Jesus Wants Me for a Bum Boy.'
And...
Again, that got into the press.
It was quite a good profile-raising thing.
And we sang similar songs during the campaign, during the large protest marches around Gay News.
We had a lot of influence. Ken Livingstone, in one of his early autobiographies said we were one of the most influential groups.
And in fact, he gave a speech once, which was put on the front page of the Evening Standard.
The speech was given to something called SLAGS, the South London Area Gay Society, and he said,
"If everyone did what the Brixton Faeries would do, our rights would arrive very quickly." Because we were into direct action.
South London Gay Liberation- South London Gay Centre,
there were one or two others at the time, but that was the one, I think. You know?
I think there was another one that grew up in North London or in East London, kind of in the wake of it.
Not so prominent, perhaps.
And then, you know, that would have laid the ground for, for example, the gay centre in the 90s,
that was more legitimised and had proper funding and was run as a business.
It would have had funding from... I'm not quite sure where, but the one that was in Farringdon for quite a few years,
end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s... it laid the ground for that kind of set-up.
So the thing about squatting is, it is absolutely priceless.
Without it, none of that would have happened. There would have been no Brixton gay community. Of that, I am clear.
There would be none of all that creativity that came out of the Brixton gay community.
That's clear. Without squatting, that would not have happened. We would have remained isolated in our bedsits,
or with our families. Or maybe you might scrape together a household or two.
But that was just such a... saving grace, that we were able to squat.
The place I felt most at home, and it's still the only place I've felt most at home, was in the squats in Mayall Road and Railton Road in Brixton.
That's where I felt the most support, the greatest ties of love and affection.
I... miss it greatly to this very day. I've got such very warm memories of it,
and that long, hot summer leading up to the Pride march.
Sort of out in the back garden, playing Ella Fitzgerald's- oh! Cole Porter's songbook.
All of us sort of in various stages of nakedness, just lying down in the back gardens.
It was all one huge garden - or park, nearly, by then.
I seriously miss them. Seriously miss them, and I've come nowhere near repeating it since.
We've become fragmented. When we were a strong, powerful community. We've become fragmented, with all that going.
The reason a lot of of that went was because some of us died.
Gary, Colm, Alistair...
But.. yeah, if I could turn the clock back...
Subtitling by Gianfranco Bettocchi