Abstract
Soon after arriving from Ireland in the mid-1970s David got off the bus in Brixton, south London, and wandered along Railton Road.
There was this group of black men standing around and I remember going up to them and saying ‘excuse me, could you tell me where the Gay Centre is in Brixton’. This black man said ‘sure, I’m just going home. I can take you up there’. [… I] waited there and about a minute or two afterwards this vision in purple and red and diamonds walked past. He flashed his eyes at me and swished around the corner and up the stairs. […] It was Alistair. He took me to 159 Railton Road and it was liberation because I looked around at all these people who looked like me […] we were going to change the world tomorrow — overnight and there as going to be gay liberation in a year’s time. Marvellous. (David’, 1983)1
This was David’s introduction to what became known as the Brixton Gay Community. The first house in this community — the one visited by David — was squatted in 1974; the gay centre he mentions opened in squatted premises just along the street at 79 Railton Road in the same year. Nine more houses were subsequently squatted on Railton Road (between 153 and 159) and the parallel Mayall Road (between 146 and 152), and were home for between 50 and 60 men for anything from a week to almost ten years.
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Notes
On the different interviewer/interviewee dynamics see: Matt Cook, ‘Squatting in History: Queer Pasts and the Cultural Turn’, in Social Research After the Cultural Turn, ed. Sasha Roseneil and Stephen Frosh (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012)
Michael Frisch, A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990)
see also Lorraine Sitzia, Seeking the Enemy (London: Working Press, 2002).
Nick Anning, Nick Wates, and Christian Wolmar, Squatting: the Real Story (London: Bay Leaf, 1980)
Gordon, The Nuclear Family in Crisis; James Hinton, ‘Self-He1p and Socialism: the Squatters’ Movement of 1946’, History Workshop 25 (April 1988): 100–126;
Alison Ravetz, The Place of Home: English Domestic Environments, 1914–2000 (London: Spon, 1995), 109–112.
A. Sherman, ‘Squatters and Socialism: Symbols of an Age’, Local Government Review 139, no. 45 (15 November 1975): 763.
Nicholas Saunders, Alternative London (London: Wildwood House, 1978).
Aubrey Walter, ed., Come Together: The Years of Gay Liberation (1970–73) (London: Gay Men’s Press, 1980), 158.
Benjamin Shepard, ‘Play as World Making: From the Cockettes to the Germs, Gay Liberation to DIY Community Building’, in The Hidden 1970s: Histories of Radicalism, ed. Dan Berger (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2002); dir. David Weissman and Bill Weber, The Cockettes, 2002.
Andy Beckett, When the Lights Went Out: Britain in the Seventies (London: Faber, 2009), 245.
Josephine Schuman, Empty Dwellings in Greater London: A Study of the Vacancy Question (London: The Council, 1981), 14, 18–19.
Paul Addison, No Turning Back: The Peacetime Revolutions of Post-War Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 121.
Jerry White, London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People (London: Vantage, 2008), 135.
Shankland Cox Partnership, Lambeth Inner Area Study: People, Housing District (London: Department of the Environment, 1974), 41.
Carl Bridge, Robert Crawford, and David Dunst, eds., Australians in Britain: The Twentieth Century Experience (Clayton: Monash University Press, 2009), 6.
For more on the importance of mobility and of globalisation to gay identity and community see: Weeks, The World We Have Won, 217; William L. Leap and Tom Boellstorff, eds., Speaking in Queer Tongues: Globalisation and Gay Language (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003)
Martin F. Manalansan, Global Divas: Filipino Gay Men in the Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
Tony Chapman, ‘Daring to Be Different?: Choosing an Alternative to the Ideal Home’, in Ideal Homes? Social Change and the Experience of the Home, ed. Tony Chapman and Jennifer Hockey (London: Routledge, 1999), 196.
Don made similar arguments prior to moving into the squats in: Don Milligan, The Politics of Homosexuality (London: Pluto, 1973).
On the significance of meals and mealtimes see: Daniel Miller, ed., Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors (Oxford: Berg, 2001), into, 9
Elia Petridou, ‘The Taste of Home’, in Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors, ed. Daniel Miller (Oxford: Berg, 2001); Ravetz, The Place of Home, 212
For an account of a central London squat in Piccadilly in the late 1960s see: Phil Cohen, Reading Room Only: Memoir of a Radical Bibliophile (Nottingham: Five Leaves Press, 2013).
John D’Emilio, ‘Capitalism and Gay Identity’, in Powers ofDesire: The Politics of Sexuality, ed. Ann Snitow (New York: Monthly Review Press 1983)
Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed, eds., Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community, and Lesbian and Gay Life (New York: Routledge, 1997).
Carl Whitman, ‘A Gay Manifesto’, in We Are Everywhere, ed. Mark Blasius and Shane Phelan (London: Routledge, 1997), 386–387.
On these points see: Alan Berube, ‘Intellectual Desire’, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 3, no. 1 (1996): 139–157
Stephen Valocchi, ‘The Class-Inflected Nature of Gay Identity’, Social Problems 46 (1999): 207
David Halperin, How to Do the History of Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 19.
Charles I. Nero, ‘Why Are Gay Ghettoes White?’, in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson and Mae Henderson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), 238
see also: Alan Sinfield, ‘The Production of Gay and the Return to Power’, in De-Centring Sexualities: Politics and Representations Beyond the Metropolis, ed. Richard Phillips, Diane Watt, and David Shuttleton (London: Routledge, 2000), 31–33.
Peter Nevins, ‘The Making of a Radical Blackgay Man’, in High Risk Lives: Lesbian and Gay Politics after the Clause, ed. Tara Kaufmann and Paul Lincoln (Bridport: Prism, 1991).
Peter Keogh, Catherine Dodds, and Laurie Henderson, Ethnic Minority Gay Men: Redefining Community, Restoring Identity: Research Report (London: Sigma Research, 2004)
Elijah Ward found something similar in his work on the relationship between gay men and the US black church. See: Elijah Ward, Catherine Dodds, and Laurie Henderson, Ethnic Minority Gay Men: Redefining Community, Restoring Identity: Research Report (London: Sigma Research, 2004)
Elijah Ward found something similar in his work on the relationship between gay men and the US black church. See: Elijah Ward, ‘Homophobia, Hypermasculinity and the US Black Church’, Culture, Health & Sexuality 7, no. 5 (2005): 493–504.
On this point see: Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 127.
Jeremy Black, Britain since the Seventies: Politics and Society in the Consumer Age (London: Reaktion, 2004), 11.
On the individualist strand in GLF thinking see: Power, No Bath but Plenty of Bubbles, 6; for an argument about the overlaps between counter and consumer cultures from the 1960s see: Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, The Rebel Sell: How the Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (Toronto: Harper Collins, 2005).
Boroughs Association London, The Future of London’s Housing (London: London Boroughs Association, 1980), 48; Ravetz, The Place of Home, 112–116.
George Mavromatis, ‘Stories from Brixton: Gentrification and Different Differences’, Sociological Research Online 16 (2011) http://www.socresonline.org.uk/16/2/12.html; Tim Butler and Garry Robson, ‘Social Change, Gentrification and Neighbourhood Change in London: A Comparison of Three Areas of South London’, Urban Studies 38, no. 12 (2001): 2145–2162.
Ruth Glass, London: Aspects of Change, vol. 3 (London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1964), intro; Chris Hamnett, ‘Gentrification and the Middle-Class Remaking of Inner London, 1961–2001’, Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (2003): 2401–2426.
Rowland Atkinson, ‘Introduction: Misunderstood Saviour or Vengeful Wrecker? The Many Meanings and Problems of Gentrification’, Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (2003): 2343–2350; see also: Addison, No Turning Back, 185.
Laurence Knopp, ‘Gentrification and Gay Neighbourhood in New Orleans: a Case Study’, in Homo Economics: Capitalism, Community and Lesbian and Gay Life, ed. Amy Gluckman and Betsy Reed (New York: Routledge, 1997)
Anne-Marie Bouthillette, ‘Gentrification by Gay Male Communities: a Case Study of Toronto’s Cabbagetown’, in The Margins of the City: Gay Men’s Urban Lives, ed. Stephen Whittle (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1994); Nero, ‘Why Are Gay Ghettoes White?’.
bell hooks, Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1990), 49, 43, 42.
Weeks, The World We Have Won, 176; see also: Mary Chamberlain, Family Love in the Diaspora: Migration and the Anglo-Caribbean Experience (London: Transaction, 2006)
Tracey Reynolds and A. Jones, Caribbean Mothers: Identity and Experience in the UK (London: Tufnell Press, 2005).
Mary Chamberlain, ‘Brothers and Sisters, Uncle and Aunts: A Lateral Perspective on Caribbean Families’, in The New Family?, ed. Silvia Silva and Carol Smart (Thousand Oaks: Sage, 1998), 133.
On this point see: David Middleton, The Social Psychology of Experience: Studies in Remembering and Forgetting (London: Sage, 2005).
On this point see: Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)
Mary Evans, Missing Persons: The Impossibility of Auto/Biography (London: Routledge, 1998)
Mieke Bal, Leo Spitzer, and Jonathan V. Crewe, eds., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1999).
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Cook, M. (2014). ‘Gay Times’: The Brixton Squatters. In: Queer Domesticities. Genders and Sexualities in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316073_10
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