My London musical/radical soundscape 2023

Reading other people's end of year lists is like listening to people talking about their dreams - occasionally interesting but mostly very much not. So this round up of musicking and political activity from (mostly) London 2023 is really for my own benefit and to document a few things which might otherwise vanish from the historical record or at least my memory.

Best gig of the year for me was Kneecap at the Electric Ballroom in Camden, a giant mosh pit in a sold out gig for Belfast Irish language rappers. Just up the road at the Roundhouse in December, Lankum were also excellent. Irish hegemony in my music tastes for the first time since the 1990s. Love the Roundhouse (also saw Big Moon there in May  and a couple of years ago Laura Marling), not so keen on the cavernous Ally Pally where I saw Sleaford Mods with John Grant, but a good gig.

On a jazzier tip, loved Ezra Collective at Hammersmith Apollo in February, and Laura Misch's mellow cloud bath performance at the Peckham Old Waiting Room. Nearby at the Ivy House pub SE15, The Goose is Out continued to curate some excellent folk nights including Martin Carthy and Stick in the Wheel. They also put on a monthly singaround session where people take it in turns to stand and sing one song at a time; I sang there earlier in the year and also at Archie Shuttler's Open Mic at the Old Nun's Head. Strummed the banjo and mandolin a bit.

In terms of my own music making the highlight was taking part in the Wavelength Orchestra event on the beach in Gravesend in June, an improvisational performance where assorted musicians sustained notes based on the duration of waves (although it was low tide and they were more like ripples). I took along my old Wasp synth, my dad's bagpipe chanter and my grandad's harmonica to add to the mix.

 

Went out for my birthday to a Mungo's Hi Fi night at the Fox & Firkin in Lewisham, checked out my local Planet Wax record shop and bar in New Cross. Enjoyed giving a Peckham anti fascist history walk for around 30 people in October, and chatting about my own history on Controlled Weirdness' 'Tales from a disappearing city' podcast.

I always appreciate the unexpected random encounters with music in the city, like coming across an Italian hip hop collective (Hip Hopera Foundation) performing in Beckenham Place Park or bumping into morris dancers by my local pub. Loved dodging the rising tide on the Thames shore for a dark 'Noise TAZ' in the summer.

Politically I am not a super activist at the moment but do try and get myself out there in times of emergency - and with climate change, war, anti-migrant racism and transphobic 'culture wars' it feels like that is most of the time at present. Or as Benjamin put it, 'The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule'.

The year started with ongoing strikes from NHS, rail workers and teachers, I popped down to various picket lines and protests. It has been hard to keep track of the endless state onslaught against refugees, including the 'Illegal Migration Act' which criminalised seeking asylum. Protest too becoming increasingly criminalised with climate emergency activists being locked up for months or even years just for walking in the road or doing a banner drop.  My most sustained activity was turning up regularly to defend a drag event at the Honor Oak pub in South London from far right opposition (which I wrote about at Datacide). I got increasingly fed up with anti-trans nonsense from fellow old lefties  and said so. The end of the year dominated by the massacre of October 7th and the seemingly never ending massacre in Gaza ever since - highlighted by both Kneecap and Lankum at their gigs.

Perhaps it remains true, as Frederic Jameson said, that 'it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism', but the neo-liberal capitalist utopia of a world united and pacified by globalised markets has vanished too. It is not hard to imagine a kind of end of capitalism as we know it, at least as a global system, replaced by endless ethno-nationalist violence and conflict for shrinking resources like water and arable land. Harder sometimes to hold onto a politics of hope for a better world, but what is the alternative?

'South London Loves Trans People' - at the Honor Oak pub in May

Stop the Migration Bill protest at Westminster with speakers on Fire Brigades Union fire engine (13 March 2023)

Refugee solidarity on London anti-racist demo, 18 March 2023

Gaza ceasefire demo blockades Carnaby Street, 23 December 2023

Anyway here's a slice of London's musical/radical soundscape as experienced by me in 2023:

Seen and heard in film above:

1. Striking Lewisham teachers, January 2023.

2. Ezra Collective perform Space is the Place, Hammersmith Apollo, February 2023.

3./4./5. Extinction Rebellion demo in London, April 22 2023.

6. Martin Carthy singing High Germany at Goose is Out folk club at the Ivy House SE15, April 2023

7. Wavelength Orchestra in Gravesend (OK not actually London) on beach next to St Andrews Art Centre, June 2023

8./9. Dancing in the streets in Honor Oak, defending drag event from far right opposition, 24 June 2023

10. Stick in the Wheel at at Goose is Out folk club at the Ivy House SE15, June 2023

11. Torquon on Thames Beach, Noise TAZ, 19 August 2023 

12. Khabat Abas, Thames Beach Noise TAZ, 19 August 2023 (Kurdish experimental cellist)

13 Leslie, Hilly fields, September 2023 (pop up electronic performance in the park)

14. Blanc Sceol,  Deptford Creekside Discovery Centre, September 2023 (acid sounds on self made acoustic instruments as part of 'Thorness and Green Man' autumn equinox performance with artist Victoria Rance)

15 Cyka Psyko - Sardinian rapper with Hip Hopera Foundation, Beckenham Place Park, 24 September 2023

16. Laura Misch in Peckham 21 October 2023

17. Palestine demo, Battersea, 11 November 2023

18. Kneecap, Electric Ballroom, 29 November 2023

19. Sleaford Mods cover West End Girls at Ally Pally 2 December 3034

20. Lankum singing The Pogues' Old Main Drag to remember Shane MacGowan at the Roundhouse, 13 December 2023.

21. Palestine demo, Carnaby Street, 23 December 2023

'They call themselves the Gender Benders' (1984)

I saw an online discussion recently about the origins of the term 'gender bender'. Seemingly Jon Savage used it in a 1980 article about David Bowie in The Face, and it seems to have been in use in UK/US in the 1970s if not earlier. But it was with the advent of Boy George and Culture Club that the term became applied in the popular press to a whole fashion scene/subculture. The first example I could find at British Newspaper Archive was from the Sunday Mirror, 22 January 1984, 'Gender Benders' by Linda McKay.

'They are shocking. They are outrageous. They call themselves the Gender Benders, the latest youth cult to follow in the high-heeled footsteps of bizarre pop idols Boy George and Marilyn. These days, far from simply dressing up in the privacy of their own homes, the Gender Benders are coming out of the  wardrobe. They wear their camp clothes in the streets, to the local pub and even shopping in the supermarket… The Sunday Mirror has made an in-depth investigation of the crazy new cult, which will become part of the fashion history of the 80s,

Gender Benders are are easy to spot. These days you can see them on suburban streets from Penzance to Penrith, More and more parents are discovering their children turning to astonishing new fashions that make even Boy George look butch. And It can be a terrible shock to suspect that your son is bisexual or gay. But our research shows that most Gender Benders are anything but gay. In fact, most of their blood is as red as their lipstick. They make-up and dress up entirely out of a sense of fashion. And the girls find it a turn-on and sexually attractive'

Update (27/9/2022):

For a 1970s example of the term see a letter entitled 'gender benders' in Texas Monthly (August 1978), describing a sex reassignment clinic in Houston.  Simon Reynolds (see comment below) has spotted a 1981 book by David Egnar, 'The Gender Benders: a look at the trends distorting the roles of men and women' published by Radio Bible Class, a US Christian publisher - a book bemoaning the undermining of biblical gender norms by feminism and the sexual revolution .

'And I Dance with Somebody' - Diamonds are Forever & the Yokohama AIDS Conference 1994

In 'And I Dance with Somebody: Queer History in a Japanese Nightclub' (History Workshop Journal, Autumn 2020), Mark Pendleton  reflects on queer spaces, drag and HIV activism (among other things) through the prism of  'a drag-based club night called Diamonds are Forever' which was launched in Kyoto in 1989 and is still going. Pendleton frequented the club while living there in 1998-9 and returned to it recently.

The club was started by the 'artist and activist Furuhashi Teiji, also known by his drag persona Glorias' who while living in 1980s New York  became part of 'the East Village’s burgeoning drag and gay scene centred on the Pyramid Club'. Back in Japan he started the club in Kyoto as well as being involved in 'the radical performance art collective Dumb Type, which challenged social norms around gender, sexuality and identity'.

Pendleton honours the club founders but also warns against 'a narrow focus on creation.. A scene is created, sure, and that act of creation is fundamentally important, but what is created is also experienced by participants, who may or may not be known to the creators themselves and who make those spaces their own through their acts of resistance, or their dance moves'.

In Japan and elsewhere, Pendleton argues, queer spaces can be 'A retreat from the heteronormative world outside. A place to grow into cultures and histories marginalized from that world. That flash of bliss that gives a sense of a future beyond those dull places that fettered us. And a damn fun night of dancing, as a political act in and of itself'.

The 1994 International AIDS Conference in Yokohama

Pendleton highlights the significance of the Tenth International AIDS Conference held in Yokohama in August 1994, a decade into the AIDS crisis and the first event of its kind held outside of Europe or North America. The conference was attended by 10,000 people from 140 countries, with researchers, clinicians, policy makers, community workers, activists and others gathered under the slogan ‘The 

global challenge of AIDS: together for the future’.

Pendleton is critical of a framing of this conference as a culture clash between 'the conservative Japanese society and the western activists' (International AIDS Society), noting that it 'also featured Japanese artists and activists joining with those from elsewhere to remind scientists and policymakers that HIV positive people continued to live their lives through the crisis'. Specifically, Furuhashi and others involved with Dumb Type and Diamonds are Forever  intervened at the conference 'hanging red banners and hosting a party to reflect this insistence and the mechanism through which they understood that life could continue to be realized – collective acts of dancing and love. The AIDS acronym was stripped of its association with illness, stigma and death to become 'And I Dance with Somebody, accompanied by the slogans LOVE POSITIVE in English'.

Yokohama 1994 - image from Mori Art Museum

I attended the Yokohama conference and the party mentioned here so it was great to see this documented, and I thought I would contribute my fading memories of this event and my small collection of documents related to it (I wish I'd taken more photos now of course - I did take some of Yokohama street art which I've featured here before)

'Love Positive' with its slogan 'And I Dance with Somebody' was a series of cultural events, including a Symposium involving the US art critic and ACT UP activist Douglas Crimp. The Love Ball was an evening event taking place in the Plaza in front of the Pacifico Yokohama International Convention Center, the main conference venue. The Ball was described as 'A party to conference participants and the general public' with 'appearances by Diamonds are Forever's drag queens from the Kyoto club scene'. 

'And I Dance with Somebody' - postcard from AIDS Poster Project, Japan

More details are included on this fyler which lists DJ Lala and performers including Ms Glorias (Furuhashi), Simone Fukayuki, Maria Le Reina, OK Girls, Blue Day Girls and others:

As I recall there were a few hundred people there. It wasn't the wildest party, starting as it did in daylight in the humid outdoors, but it was a striking departure from the conference format of endless presentations. The drag acts would certainly have disabused anybody with misconceptions about Japan being a homogenously conservative nation! Of course I was familiar with drag, but I guess the mainstream UK conception of it at the time was of men dressing up as versions of women. If I had to describe it now I would say in Yokohama it was people (who may have defined themselves as men, women or neither) dressing up in outrageous costumes that were beyond anything usually worn by anybody and in a sense beyond gender.

There was a kind of utopian energy, captured in the slogan on this postcard featuring OK Girls, one of the acts participating in the Love Ball: 'O Developed Nations of Desire! O Superpowers of Fantasy' . As described by Pendleton, Japanese slogans on the banners 'imagined a dissolution of binary divisions, whether HIV+/-, man/woman or citizen/foreigner: "I have a dream that my status disappears. I have a dream that my sex disappears. I have a dream that my nationality disappears"'.

 After the performances everyone was invited up on the stage where we danced to disco.

The Plaza venue for the Love Ball (though this photo is of another event at the conference)

My encounter with the Kyoto crew was fleeting but it cheered me up, the conference itself was (understandably) a sober affair. At that point the World Health Organisation was estimating that 6000 people were being infected with HIV every day and that at least 17 million people had acquired HIV world-wide. Medical treatments had not progressed much beyond AZT, which had first been licensed in 1987. There was some positive news at the conference, such as a study that showed AZT could prevent babies being born with HIV to HIV+ mothers. But even the limited treatments available were out of reach of many in Sub Saharan Africa where the  majority of people living with HIV resided.  In her speech at the closing ceremony, 'Noerine Kaleeba from Uganda said that many young women there were asking why, if AZT was effective in reducing mother-to-child transmission, did they not have access to it' (quoted in Orr, Children, Families and HIV: The Global Picture, 1994).

It sometimes felt that such issues were as at risk of being sidelined in the increasingly professionalised AIDS industry of doctors, drugs companies and NGOs. Of course many of these people were doing good work and I was in the latter category myself. But there was a need for a strong activist challenge to put the lived experience of people with HIV at the forefront, and to maintain a sense of urgency.

There were some people in Yokohama from direct action group ACT UP, and they staged a protest at the closing ceremony focused on immigration restrictions on people living with HIV. New York activists reported that  'ten ACT UP members from New York, eight from Paris, and more than 100 members of Tokyo's OCCUR spearheaded several events during the week, including an unprecedented AIDS/coming out march in Yokohama on the opening day of the conference' (The Advocate, 15 November 1994)

ACT UP New York Press Release for Yokohama
(full publication here)

OCCUR (Association for the Lesbian and Gay Movement, based in Tokyo) had established  'The Executive Committee for Learn from PWA and Minorities' in May 1994 and had spent the months leading up to the conference lobbying against immigration restrictions on people with AIDS, sex workers and drug users that would have prevented many people from attending the conference. While some flexibility seems to have applied for the conference, the Committee continued to argue against discriminatory immigration laws and that 'The fight against AIDS has no border and so efforts must be made to assure all PWA/H's [People with AIDS/HIV] freedom of international mobility and to encourage solidarity through global networking, cooperation and actions of community-based organisations'. 

Newsletter published by 'The Executive Committee for Learn from PWA and Minorities'/OCCUR for Yokohama conference (full text of document here)

As well as discrimination against people with HIV, another big issue in Japan at the time was the blood products scandal. At least 1,000 haemophiliacs had been infected with HIV through blood products and those affected were taking legal action against the Government and drug companies for failing to take action when the risk was known. Japan did not switch to heat-treated blood products until more than two years after the US had taken this action.

With language barriers and time constraints I didn't engage with Japanese activists other than picking up their literature and attending the Love Ball. But with the visible presence of OCCUR, Love Positive and the large numbers of young people who acted as volunteers to help conference attendees, there was no sense that Japan was in need of enlightenment from outside. The issue of discrimination, including in relation to immigration, was one faced in most parts of the world.

I didn't do that much networking and socialising on my all too brief visit, I diligently spent my time in conference sessions as I was writing a report on it. I did meet some interesting people though, including hanging out with some folks involved in a HIV prevention project with young women sex workers on the German/Czech border (we went on a trip to see the Amida Buddha statue in Kamakura). With so many people present there must have been many connections made, some with lasting significance. For instance, a meeting in Yokohama led to the foundation of the Asian Pacific Network of Sex Workers.

[Mark Pendleton, a historian of Japan, is conducting research on the Yokohama conference, so I am sure would be interested in any memories or reflections - you can find him on twitter]

Commemorative stamp from Yokohama conference 1994

Drag is about many things

'Drag is about many things . It is about clothes and sex. It subverts the dress codes that tell us what men and women should look like in our organised society. It creates tension and releases tension, confronts and appeases. It is about role playing and questions the meaning of both gender and sexual identity. It is about anarchy and defiance. It is about men's fear of women as much as men's love of women and it is about gay identity'

Drag: a history of female impersonation in the performing arts - Roger Baker, London, Cassell, 1994

(photo from New Orleans in the 1950s)

An 18th century drag ball in London

Richard Norton's Homosexuality in Eighteenth-Century England: A Sourcebook includes lots of fascinating material, not least in relation to 'Molly Houses' and other places where gay men socialized in that period. The following account from 1718 alludes to a Ball in Holborn, in the vicinity of which a number of men were arrested and imprisoned.

The context is interesting as the arrests were ordered by Charles Hitchin, Under City Marshal and a member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners, which campaigned against 'immorality'. Hitchin though was accused of being no stranger to 'He-Whores' himself, as claimed here in the words Jonathan Wild, the famous thief-catcher/crook whose capture Hitchin had secured:

'As he was going out of the House he said, he supposed they would have the Impudence to make a Ball. The Man desiring him to explain what he meant by that, he answer'd, that there was a noted House in Holborn, to which such sort of Persons used to repair, and dress themselves up in Woman's Apparel; and dance and romp about, and make such a hellish Noise, that a Man would swear they were a Parcel of Cats a Catter-wauling. — But, says he, I'll be reveng'd of these smock-fac'd young Dogs. I'll Watch their Waters, and secure 'em, and send 'em to the Compter.

Accordingly the Marshal knowing their usual Hours, and customary Walks, placed himself with a Constable in Fleet-street, and dispatch'd his Man, with another to assist him, to the Old-Bailey. At the expected Time several of the sporting Youngsters were seized in Women's Apparel, and convey'd to the Compter. Next Morning they were carried before the Lord-Mayor in the same Dress they were taken in. Some were compleatly rigg'd in Gowns, Petticoats, Head-cloths, fine lac'd Shoes, furbelow'd Scarves and Marks; some had Riding-hoods; some were dressed like Milk-Maids, others like Shepheardesses with green Hats, Waistcoats and Petticoats; and others had their Faces patch'd and painted, and wore very extensive Hoop-petticoats, which had been very lately introduced. His Lordship having examin'd them, committed them to the Work-house, there to continue at hard labour during Pleasure. And, as Part of their Punishment, order'd them to be publickly conducted thro' the Streets in their Female Habits. Pursuant to which order the young Tribe was carried in Pomp to the Work-house, and remain'd there a considerable Time, till at last, one of them threaten'd the Marshal with the same Punishment for former Adventures, and he thereupon apply'd to my Lord-Mayor, and procured their Discharge. This Commitment was so mortifying to one of the young Gentlemen, that he died in a few Days after his Release. — Any that want to be acquainted with the Sodomitish Academy, may be inform'd where it is, and be graciously introduced by the accomplish'd Mr. Hitchin'.

SOURCE: Richard Norton (ed.), Jonathan Wild Exposes Charles Hitchin, 1718, based on 'Select Trials at the Sessions-House in the Old-Bailey, From the Year 1720, to this Time', 1742.

Girls who are boys who like boys to be girls

'Nine men dressed in women's clothing were arrested on New Year's Eve in the discotheque of a Manama, Bahrain, hotel and charged with public debauchery, the United Arab Emirates' Gulf News reported this week. Police reports cited by the paper said the men were "heavily made up and wearing provocative outfits" while soliciting fellow patrons. The reports said the men were from different Arab countries but did not specify their nationalities. The paper noted that Bahrain has been seeking to crackdown on perceived homosexual behavior, which is illegal in the Persian Gulf nations, by introducing tougher immigration measures and prompt deportations'.

(Los Angeles Times, 6 January 2010)

'The UAE government has launched a campaign against what it describes as masculine behaviour among women. Under the slogan "excuse me I am a girl", it has launched a series of workshops, lectures and TV programmes. The aim, the UAE authorities say, is to help women avoid what is seen as "delinquent behaviour". That is how the social affairs ministry in the emirates describes what would in some other societies be known as homosexuality or transvestitism. Officials from the ministry told the local press that "masculine behaviour" among young girls was first spotted in special care homes. There were no studies available that describe the extent of the phenomenon in the rest of the Emirati society, they said, but it is believed to be common in girls' schools.

A social worker in charge of the campaign, Awatef al-Rayyes, was quoted as saying that this kind of behaviour could be attributed to a number of causes including the unfair treatment of wives by their husbands and lack of mixing between the sexes. This, she said, could lead to girls feeling more secure in the company of other girls and some may adopt the male role by having their hair cut short or by putting on a man's voice'.

(BBC World, 12 March 2009)

'Men of the Nancy Type': London 1927

"In 1927 the charge of keeping a disorderly house at 25, Fitzroy Square, near Euston Station, was brought after a long period of surveillance by the police . The actual charge was that in the house there were: 'divers, immoral, lewd and evil disposed persons tippling, whoring, using obscene language, indecently exposing their private parts and behaving in a lewd, obscene and disorderly and riotous manner to the manifest corruption of the morals of His Majesty's Liege subjects, the evil example of others in the like case offending and against the Peace of Our Lord the King, His Crown and Dignity'.

Let's take a look at some of these heinous offences as related by police observers. Police Sergeant number 42 reported on January 3rd: "At 11.35. p.m. three men entered the basement door. The door was opened by a man wearing pyjamas... I saw them dance around him in the hall. At 12.20 four men were admitted by the man wearing pyjamas, who kissed one of the men as they entered. At this time the gramophone was playing in the front room, people were jumping and dancing making a very rowdy noise. I could hear the men in the front room singing and talking in effeminate voices. At 3.30. a.m. two men came out of the door. They were very drunk, vomited in the area, struggled up the steps and left."

On another occasion: "I saw a man standing at the door in a dressing gown. He kissed one of the men as they entered, laughed and shut the door. At 12.30. a.m. I saw four men walking in couples approach the house, they were cuddling.. one another as they walked and speaking in low effeminate voices ... They were men of the nancy type. "

….Several of the guests were followed after they left the house, with officers noting that the men cuddled each other whilst waiting for a bus. They were described as being 'powdered and painted'. The policeman who followed them said that they smelt strongly of perfume and guessed that, by their appearance, they were 'West-End poofs or male opportuners.'

Police photograph in the aftermath of the 1927 raid,

showing Robert Britt (second from left)

Because of what they had heard and seen the police considered it their duty to raid the house on the 17th January, 1927. They surprised six people in one of the rooms. Robert Britt, a twenty-six-year­old dancer, was wearing a thin black transparent skirt with gold trimming and a red sash tied around his loins. The ladies shoes he was wearing caused him to appear taller than the other guests. He was naked from the waist up. Other people in the room were either in pyjamas or partly dressed. It seems difficult today to understand what offence they might have committed and even in the twenties a legal dispute ensued as to what exactly a disorderly house was. Several of the defendants were found not guilty but Britt was sentenced to eighteen months hard labour and others up to six months without hard labour".

Source: In Darkest London: antisocial behaviour 1900-1939 - Steve Jones (Wicked Publications, 1994).

Boy George

I won't be joining the tabloids in gloating over the fate of Boy George, jailed last week for 15 months for 'handcuffing a male escort to a wall and beating him with a chain'. I don't want to defend his actions - he seems to have got stuck in druggy paranoia, with bad consequences both for himself and others - but I hope he gets out soon and doesn't get too hard a time inside.

I am sure he can handle himself though - not just through his legendary bitchy wit (as highlighted in his entertaining autobiographies Take it Like a Man and Straight) but through his physical presence. As I recalled in a previous post, I remember seeing him at Turnmills in the mid-1990s standing head and shoulders above most of the crowd and built like a working class Irish South London geezer - which is actually part of what he is.

I was never a great fan of Culture Club's music, but I did appreciate the global gender confusion they caused. I actually liked Boy George's DJing though - people were snotty about him not being able to mix, but he wasn't just a celebrity putting on obvious tunes. He put out some great dance tracks on his More Protein label, including Lippy Lou's wonderful lesbian white ragga pop house anthems Freaks and Liberation.

Anyway I am sure we haven't heard the last of Mr George O'Dowd.

Bubblepunk

Simon Reynolds kicked off a week of posts about The Sweet with the provocative question 'was there in fact a better British hard rock vocalist of the 1970s than Brian Connolly of The Sweet?'. Of course die-hard 1970s rockists would have been horrified at the very suggestion of admitting The Sweet to the hard rock canon - a glam pop band who didn't even write their biggest hits.

But anybody listening to tracks like Ballroom Blitz or Teenage Rampage now would surely have to agree with joint songwriter Nicky Chinn that 'the records sound quite raw and punky... this was pop that had an edge: there were hard guitars, there were crashing drums'. Not only that but the songs were short, punchy and relatively fast compared with some of the ponderous 'real' heavy metal of the time - what Barney Hoskyns has called 'The beefed-up, turbo-charged 'Chinnichap' sound - bubblepunk'.

The band even had a proto-punk attitude several years before The Sex Pistols, as Chinn recalled: 'We were doing "Ballroom Blitz" on Top of the Pops, and all day Steve [bassist Steve Priest] had been acting a bit strangely. After the opening bars of the song, he turns round with his back to the camera, and on the back of his leather jacket were the words FUCK YOU'. Unsurprizingly, this was never broadcast by the BBC.

Even their gender bending is often derided, because unlike Bowie they didn't learn it from Lindsay Kemp. They are sometimes bracketed with Slade as 'brickies in eyeliner' (to use Siouxsie Sioux's memorable phase). But for a generation of pre-pubescent children like me watching in awe on Top of the Pops it probably had a bigger impact than Bowie, if only because they were so ubiquitous. As glam blogger the Stardust Kid puts it: 'In most respects glam rock is totally fake, but to young kids like me it was real and alive. It may have been 'Brickies in eyeliner' but to the kids it was 'stardust for the dudes''.

I'm not sure I would go as far as Barney Hoskyns in suggesting that The Sweet influenced black American style from George Clinton to Prince, but who know maybe he's right that 'Space-age glam also played a large part in the look of P-Funk. George Clinton was funk's own Roy Wood, while Bootsy Collins - the rhinestone-encrusted overlord of space bass - was the Sweet's Steve Priest on Pimpmobile overdrive'.

But I do agree with Todd Haynes (director of glam celebration Velvet Goldmine) that glam was 'the result of a unique blending of underground American rock with a distinctly English brand of camp theatricality and gender-bending. And for a brief time pop culture would proclaim that identities and sexualities were not stable things but quivery and costumed, and rock and roll would paint its face and turn the mirror around, inverting in the process everything in sight'.

From Youtube - The Sweet on Top of the Pops in 1973 performing Blockbuster - all silver platform shoes and gold catsuits. The band were sometimes accused on stealing this riff from David Bowie's Jean Genie - in fact both of them probably took it from The Yardbirds 'I'm a Man', itself a cover of Bo Diddley - orginality is often over-rated!

Most quotes from Glam!: Bowie, Bolan and The Glitter Rock Revolution - Barney Hoskyns (London: Faber: 1998). Brian Connolly (top) and Steve Priest (bottom) on the cover of German teen magazine Bravo, 1973 (sourced from Cover Browser)

History of Gay Bars in New York City

History of Gay Bars in New York City is a remarkable blog that does just what is says. There is some great material - police raids, mafia connections, reflections on differences between Italian and Jewish gay cultures. Nothing's been posted since December last year, so hope this project hasn't ground to a halt.

In view of my earlier post on Holland Park in the 1930s, I was struck by a New York Times report of a February 1923 raid in Greenwich Village:

Village Raid Nets 4 Women and 9 Men: Detectives Thought They Had Five Females, but Misjudged One Person by Clothing

The police continue to pay special attention to Greenwich Village. Every tearoom and cabaret in the village was visited yesterday morning by Deputy Inspector Joseph A. Howard and Captain Edward J. Dempsey of the Charles Street Station, and a party of ten detectives. Detectives Joseph Massie and Dewey Hughes of the Special Service Squad were at the Black Parrot Tea Shoppe Hobo-Hemia, 46 Charles Street, to witness what they had been informed would be a “circus.” They arrested what they thought were five women and eight men. It developed later, however, that one of the “women” was a man, Harry Bernhammer, 21 years old, living at 36 Hackensack Avenue, West Hoboken, N.J. He is familiaryly known in the Village as “Ruby,” according to the police. The charge against him is disorderly conduct for giving what the police termed an indecent dance (NY Times 5 February 1923)

A London Drag Ball, 1930s

"If you went to clubs in those days before the war, you'd have been arrested and put in prison. I know personally a case where a woman, who I knew very well, started this gay club. Now I am talking many years ago, before the war, and I could see the danger. I said, you've got to stop it. But she took a house in Holland Park. It was known as the Holland Park case. They just danced, nothing so blatant as they do now. And one Saturday night the whole of Holland Park, reaching up to Shepherd's Bush I should think, was simply full of black marias and police. People thought the war had started or something. And there were two young policemen who were dressed up. Of course they gave the evidence. And everyone was arrested.

Now what I'm saying is history. They took them all to Brixton prison. And kept them there, they were not given bail. When they went up to the Old Bailey, it was top news, they had placards then, you know. The Evening News used to have a placard on, and everyone was talking about it. The judge made them wear a placard. He said there's too many to deal with these terrible people, put a placard on them and a number. And so they were numbered, with the indignity of this bloody placard. And then the trial came to the time of the sentences and he sentenced them to imprisonment.

When it was all over, the judge called these two detectives and praised them. He said, I am going to recommend your promotion for dealing with this horrible case. I feel so sorry, it must have affected you mentally. And I direct now that under no circumstances must you ever be involved in a case again of any description with homosexual men because no human being could stand it. It just shows you the scathing bitterness they had for it" (Roy, born in Brixton in 1908).

Source: Between the Acts: Lives of homosexual mean 1885-1967, edited by Kevin Porter and Jeffrey Weeks (London: Routledge, 1991).

The Holland Park Avenue drag ball raid is also covered in Matt Houlbrook's excellent book 'Queer London', where its is reported that 60 men were arrested in the raid leading to a trial in March 1933:

“The ballroom had been let for a series of dances by Austin S. – more commonly Lady Austin – a twenty-four year old barman, John P., a twenty-two year-old waiter, and Betty, who ran other West London dance balls. Publicized via word of mouth and a flyer advertising ‘Hotel Staff Dances’ within a network of friends working in nearby hotels, the events were run “only for our love for each other”. In court, arresting officers described a “blatant” spectacle of sexual transgression: men had danced together, kissed, and been intimate: they had worn women’s clothes and makeup and called themselves “Lady Austin’s Camp Boys”… David M [one of these arrested] asked of one policeman: ‘Surely in a free country we can do what we like? We know each other and are doing no harm… it is a pity these people don’t understand our love. I am afraid a few will have to suffer yet before our ways are made legal’’

Source: Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (University of Chicago Press, 2005)

Drag Ball in London, 1879

Under the headline “An extraordinary ball — men dressed as women,” the cutting [from a local East End newspaper of 1879] tells of a dance held in the Zetland Hall in Mansell Street on the evening of Friday 25 April. Three detectives attended the event and witnessed “some sixty or seventy per­sons dancing… Although quite half of the dancers were in female attire, the officers soon discovered that there were not half-a-dozen women in the place, the supposed females being merely men dressed up in women’s clothes.” It continued: “These, how­ever, danced together, kissed each other and behaved in any­thing but an orderly manner.” Needless to say, the dance organiser, Adolph Voizanger, was fined £20 and costs or, in default, threatened with two months’ hard labour. However, the newspaper was keen to point out that the police were sticklers for thor­ough research: “The officers stayed at the hall from about ten pm on the Friday night until four the next morning”

Source: Pink Paper, 6th February 1998