The developed gay scene
1980
“A lot of us felt lost after the Gay Centre closed, I’m still friends with a lot of the people I met there, there is a kind of regret as those days were wonderfully exciting, we were making it up as we went along. With the burgeoning of the commercial gay scene and the reduction of gay world to pictures of pecs and commercialism, products and the gay pound is depressing to an ageing radical who had hoped there would be something more human, flexible and creative.”
“I think it’s been an enormous benefit though as younger people can come out onto a much more developed scene which in many ways is more supportive, but there is a slight sadness that nothing carried on that gave us that buzz, a slight regret that a lot of the notions we were trying to challenge are still around, i.e. women still earn less. I notice a slight resurgence of a casual anti-gay humour, it’s almost acceptable to call someone a ‘puff’, as if those battles have been won and gay people are sufficiently high profile to take that sort of thing, but then in Iran there are still gay people who live appalling lives because of their homosexuality.”
Contributed by: Malcolm Gibb, 58