Outside the Gay Centre on  re-opening day after the eviction

I first got involved in gay politics when I was in Shepherds Bush. I don't know how I got to hear about it but GLF were having meetings at Notting Hill Gate. My wife had only just arrived over here (from Australia) and 14 stormy hysterical weeks we had and I had this boyfriend Tim. I wanted to go to one of these Wednesday night meetings at All Saints Hall and he drove me there mainly because he was terrified of me being this other homosexual swanning around the supermarkets. Those meetings were huge. Hundred and hundreds of people. There was a stage set up with a few people talking and others sitting around near them and the rows and rows of people all around. I had no idea what was going on. There was some American or Canadian guy with a beard was doing all the talking. No idea what was going on. Didn't understand any of it. I didn't understand what I was there for. I certainly didn't identify with the other people. They were a lot of queers who had come to the thing and I was from outside. I know I found it all quite fascinating without being able to understand.

This boyfriend I came with kept on saying "Oh well, you've seen enough now. No, no, no. What do you want to hang around for". He had already cruised everybody and decided there was nothing to hang around for. "Oh, I wanna hang around a bit longer" ( I said). What for? (he asks). Of course you don't know 'what for'. You just want to. So between him and my wife, who managed to put the kalabosh on me going to the Wednesday night meetings as well...she said "Oh I'm going out with Mrs. so-and-so on Wednesday. Can you look after the children." I said "Okay, yes. I'll baby sit." Come next Wednesday she has arranged again to go out. I said "No. I want to go to a meeting on Wednesday night." She said "Oh, I thought you had given that sort of thing up." That was really treacherous I thought because I opted out the week before.

Anyway I went to several of those meetings and I ended up on this big youth march about 1971. Once again I didn't know how I came to know about this big march or thing that was happening at Hyde Park but I didn't feel it had anything particularly to do with me. I came out at Marble Arch in order to go up Edgware Road to Church Street to look round the junky book stalls. Once I was out at Marble Arch station I saw the crowd getting ready over at the corner of Hyde Park. I wandered over there and somebody stuck something in my hand and asked me if I would start making a poster on the pathway. Abandoning the book hunting expedition I went off on the march and had a marvellous time. It's one of the best marches I have ever been on. It was a gay youth march.

In hindsight, of course, I realise me forgetting that there was a march on the Saturday and that turning up a half past one or whatever it was to go to Church Street was actually me fooling myself. Though had totally forgotten there was a march on and it came as a surprise to me to see the crowd assembling over there I realised much, much later that in fact that was what I was really going out for even though I didn't remember it. Anyway that was that until I moved to South London which was not very long afterwards. Then I started to go to the meetings down there. I think that must have been two or three weeks after they had started down in the Minet library. 

Once again I turned up there feeling very, very green. I remember you knew where the biscuits and the tea kettle were and other people there like Jim Scot and one or two others all seemed to know what they are talking about and I sort of just sat and listened. No real understanding of where they got their information from or their ideas from etcetera. Anyway GLF South London was well and truly under way then and ... that was that.

Oh, it gave me a gay identity. I mean that seemed to develop very, very quickly and very, very sharply. From those sort of two or three meetings I mentioned earlier that I didn't comprehend I couldn't keep myself away from them even though I didn't know why I kept going to them. That crystallised into a more orderly structure at the Minet library.

I think it was the idea of joining with other people. I was certainly aware that black people had joined together in different parts of the world where other groups had joined together. That didn't seem to natuarlly apply to gay people or didn't make me feel that way. I think subconsciously I was looking around for something to join without knowing why. Certaily I didn't think "Oh, that's a group I can get involved in." I didn't think in such concrete terms at all. I just wandered along out of curiosity. Instinct probably, even. But it was after I i started going regularly every week to the Minet library that it started to come together and I could identify with the other people there and I identified also with the movement. Also a vocabulary was being defined. Ideas were being defined. What I felt after all that was that the unexpressed feelings inside me couldn't be expressed because there wasn't a vocabulry for them. The ideas didn't exist. The feelings were there and South London (GLF) provided a way of putting these things into a formal structure and context. That part of me that had been waiting for something like this grabbed hold of it very, very quickly. I found myself...everything I heard and everybody I saw and the way they related and the way they thought about themselves...there was something inside me that kept on saying "yes, yes, yes" this is me "yes, yes, yes,". 

What I had been carrying around for a long time was a very strong sense of unfairness in society because even when I was well and truly back in the closet and married with children etc. My relationships with people who came to dinner, friends of my wife, everybody I worked, with was taken up by arguments about homosexuality or about queers. That and blacks and women and working people as against the well off aristocrats etc. I have been extremely argumentative all my life about these issues particularly about homosexuality or queers as it was then. I had been arguing these things for years with people I knew but, once again, a very defensive position sort of "Well, why shouldn't we after all. What business is it of any body else. We're not doing any harm. Why did it matter to so-and-so what we do." That sort of defensive position. It was only after one's feelings of unfairness or injustice could be articulated in the Gay Liberation Movement that you are once again going over to attack was had formerly been thought of as being the norm, the desirable, married life. You stopped feeling that you had to defend yourself. But in fact the people who need to defend themselves are the people who want to look down on you. The onus is on them to make out a case than for me to make out a defence. 

Political activity? No. Those were the first demos I had ever been on. I never belonged to a political party before. I had political feeling but once again they weren't formalised either. I knew what I regarded as being right and wrong. What was just and what was unjust. What was sensible and what was stupid. The idea of a Monarchy was stupid for a start. The idea that all sorts of race things...which in fact used to crop up in Australia as well...they used to crop in a personal way in my family in the area where I lived. The arguments I used to have with my father about this and the people I worked with. But I have never belonged to anything. No.

We had a thing were every Saturday or Sunday morning or something (in South London) we went along to a new shopping district. Sometimes it was on a Sunday when something like the Walworth East Street market was open. I know we went to a whole number of different places round here on the South side (of London). Mainly on Saturday morning in shopping areas handing out leaflets and carrying a few placards etc.

How did this affect my sex life? My affair with my previous boyfriend had come to an end. I wasn't having sex with any of the people I was with in any of these groups although there were a number I fancied. I don't think I really had any sex life then not until I met Colm. Yes, because when the Gay Centre came along and there was the involvement in Icebreakers and there were always conferences we were going to...we were so high minded about everything...so pure in our politics and at the time there was a separation, though we talked about sex is for pleasure, there was a separation form the that the old identities we had about going to cottages and or going to the Biograph (gay cruising cinema) and picking someone up at a CHE conference was seen as very unpolitical. Many people felt that. I remember meeting Lee Hughes once over at the Biograph and he was very, very embarrassed. He said to me "People like us aren't supposed to do things like this". Even a couple of years later when I met Terry Stewart, Terry wasn't around in those day, I met him in that cottage in St. Martins Lane or Charing Cross Road or wherever and he was absolutely scoured? With embarrassment. He, a political gay, had been discovered cottaging. Looking for sex. I don't think I felt as bad as all that.

I felt it was all fucked up by very high minded, pure, altruistic attitudes that to go back to cottaging and all that was some kind of back sliding. The old shameful days we were trying to throw off. 

After we moved from the Minet library we wanted to find somewhere more central because that was one hell of a place to find (difficult). Also what used to annoy me as my feelings grew stronger was that we used to meet there...we saw ourselves as being some sort of pressure group, educational group...something intended to set out and make some kind of impression on society ... but we used to meet there once a week and nobody knew we were there. Apart from the caretake in the library. We were effectively hidden. We moved from there to a pub at the Oval (Hamilton Arms) and we were 'suffered' there. Eventually there was a fight with the National Front (fascist party) and we were thrown out. Then we went to the Oval House. But once again we were on other people's territory. We had not place of our own were we could store records or newspapers or keep our own equipment. I felt it was actually time that we made ourselves much more public all the time and that we had a place to call our own. I knew this had happened in America to some extent and I felt with weekly meetings we were simply repeating ourselves and we needed to make some sort of, not exactly a quantum leap, but some sort of definite new move. Otherwise we were in a bit of a rut. We needed to put ourselves much more on the public stage. Also part of the reason for doing this because of experiences I and other people had in the squatting movement. I don't think the value of the squatting experience can be underestimated in any talk about what happened in Railton Road because experience of squatting and the politics of squatting are the foundations on which all of this was built. 

There were people who never missed a meeting at the Minet library and people who were very forward in doing placards or leaflets etcetera for our marches who in fact never, ever, ever, came to the Gay Centre at all. There were several others who came once and once only and we never saw them since. What I felt about those people was that although they had been in GLF for a couple of years when it came to doing action that was seen in those days as being radical, that is attacking private property, they discovered that they were rather conservative after all. Those were the ones who were the losers. I can think of many people who never missed a meeting at the Minet library who, over the years, I have never seen since. Never seen them on a march or at a Town Hall dance or a disco. 

What else put people off? I am sure it was a lot of the heaviness within. I think most of us involved in those days did tend to grasp the new religion in an very, very fundamentalist way and very dogmatic about what was and what was not permissible. I think that seemed to happen with lots and lots of groups. The women's movement showed quite a lot of that sort of thing. Certainly the heaviness without. I expected that to be a short term thing. I remember thinking when we first moved in there we might as well write off the plate glass windows right at the beginning and be prepared to have some sort of external war because those windows are not going to last and that there would be trouble when we go public and it would last for a couple of months. Until in fact people got bored with it and we ceased to be a novelty. And it worked out more or less that way. The heaviness was a little bit heavier than I expected from the street gangs outside and that was unfortunately because we were placed in the same street as that particular youth centre just further up (from the GC). If that had been somewhere else then a lot of the real heaviness would have been avoided. 

Yes, I mean it was only a matter of between 5 or 6 months before you'd overhear people on Railton Road giving directions to someone to the bus stop (outside the GC) "Oh you go down here. When you get to the Gay Centre you cross over and you take the first street on your right and then you turn left and walk about 150 yards and you'll come to it." The Gay Centre then had just become another public landmark like a pub or a post office.

(Election Campaigns). Oh, I think they were valuable in a number of different ways. A lot of the things we did from the Gay Centre, ostensibly they were supposed to be informing the public or letting other people know or putting our point of view across. But in fact a lot of it was just things we wanted to do because we wanted to do them. The real reason for a lot of these activities we got involved in was that we were trying out our new found confidence and muscle and because they were fun to do. Certainly the election campaign was. That was going public in a particular way. One of the reasons behind that was because of all the free publicity we could get. I think they were very valuable in terms of manifesting our presence to a wider public and forcing people to actually see us and also for the confidence it gave us for being so much in the public and being able to feel in fact the we cracking the whip in a way. In fact our presence rather intimidated other people.

(The Town Hall election count). At the count the political parties hate each other the most. How they all drew very close together that night against us. The agent for the labour, Ken Phipps, said to me "You have set your cause back 20 years tonight" and how we laughed and said "You really mean it's going to take you 20 years to get over this?" They said "You're making a mockery out of Parliamentary politics" and we said "YES!". 

I have the photographs of Colm (Clifford) dressed as Brenda Hancock, the Conservative Pary candidate. Also I think that some of those things were good for some of the people who drifted into the GC or came there occasionally or who lacked the courage to be as upfront as some other people. With them being present when this was going on they could see that you could be as cheeky as you like and you could survive and come home laughing. I think that must have bee very good for them. 

What I thought was one of the most striking examples in the early days was Philip Alvarez. How for the 1st 5 or 6 weeks when he was at the GC he would sit around at meetings you would ask him for his point of view or his opinion on something he would say he didn't know or he wasn't sure. He was very much a small voice there. Kept very much to himself and full of doubts. It took about 6 weeks for him to be full of confidence and bounce and of course anger and pride as well. He was making his face up and standing on a soap box up at Hyde Park and taking part in that anti-fascist rally. 

The last time I saw Philip, the last time he was over here, he reminded me of sometime at the GC when I had a really heavy go at him. He must have said something that I thought was pretty wet. I lectured him for about half an hour in front of everyone in a very loud voice. I don't remember any of this but he said he remembers it very, very distinctly and how much he hated me, hated himself, hated the GC. How he just could not stop thinking about and how he felt so bad. That was the kick in the pants that he felt he needed. The heaviness. 

Actually that was something you were asking bout before. The heaviness. The same sort of thing used to be said about some of the people, myself included, in Icebreakers. Too heavy. I think there is a lot to be said for heaviness but once again it's a fairly blunt instrument that suits some people but doesn't suit others. There are some people who are going to be frightened by heaviness or intimidated by it and it's going to put them off. There are other people in fact who simply need that little boot. The heaviness of being thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool to find out very quickly

that they can swim very easily. I think there is a much to be said for it as against it. One just needs to try to be as sensitive as possible when you use it. 

(On 'Men's Groups'). I, Colm and Alastair went to them. Yes, it was a Men Against Sexism Group. They called themselves the 'Men's Group'. It was originally got going by some fellow from the squatters group or the People's News Service who went around leafleting all the groups around Railton Road. The Food Co-op, the People's News Service, the Black Bookshop etcetera inviting the men to a meeting at the Women's Centre. Not the one at 80 Railton Road but the one up on the corner with Mayall Road which was the centre for squatting. When a number of people went along from the GC, and that first night was very noisy and very stormy in which the 3 or 4 gays there had quite a lot to say and a lot of the straight men got very, very upset about it. At the end of it one of the straight men stood up and said that he wanted to thank the gays for coming along to this meeting and giving the men the benefit of their views on sexism. The point of that was that there is a Men's Group and then there are gays. A bit like that woman who founded the Char ladies cleaning union. May Hobbs. From the plinth in Trafalgar Square once years ago at a women's meeting, a Women's day thing, she was speaking from the plinth and from there she said "I would also like to give thanks to some of our gay sisters who have come along today to give us their support" It was a remark rather along those lines as though lesbians weren't women.

 (Conflict with the 'wets' as in Laurieston Gay Men's Week). That was probably about 1976 when that that started to happen. Well, all I can remember of it was some measure of disapproval towards Jamie Hall I think and maybe one or two other people whose reaction to conflict the GC and gay people faced, even aggressive conflict from the state or the gangs, was very much a 'love, peace and brown rice' and 'turn the other cheek' etcetera and try to be reasonable and try to talk to people reasonably and they'll come round to your point of view which a lot of us simply thought doesn't work. It may work in some cases but I mean no Nigerian person would try to talk calmly and sensibly to a committed National Front member and going to convert that NF member. We felt it was a cop out in fact. A refusal to take strong or aggressive actions that might upset people. I know that I and certainly some others felt it was very necessary to upset people because a lot of people would not be jarred out of their traditional thinking without some very strong kick in the behind or humiliating experience or something like that. I still believe that but when Jamie decided to go up to Scotland to live on a farm and grow his own vegetables and that sort of thing we felt that this really was detracting from the struggle. To our mind it really didn't matter very much if you were living on your own in the midst of a wilderness somewhere in Scotland if you were gay if you didn't come into contact with society in a very strong way at all. I think a lot of us were still going through a stage where we felt that it is society that has to be confronted and that should be done on the streets of London in a way that it couldn't be done with some sort of subsistence farming in Scotland. 

(Malcolm G and Sue W re het stuff). I remember all that fairly clearly. I know a lot of feelings against bisexuals then. Certainly on some of the evidence we had people who came to the GC who identified themselves as bisexual. People who used the GC day after day, night after night but who refused to put on a gay badge and would say to whoever offered it to them in a very superior tone "I don't need to wear one of those. I'm not gay. I am bisexual." It seemed like a mixed parentage West Indian person saying that they weren't going to identify with the black struggle because they were half white. Once again in that rather superior tone of voice. We felt like that. It came to a head during the election campaign, with Malcolm Greatbanks and Sue Wakeling, I mean the whole thing was absolutely tacky. In the midst of what was meant to be or should have been one of the most strikingly daring things that any gay group had yet done in the country, and it certainly was running the first openly gay candidate for Parliament...it was all being done for the sake of the publicity you get in all the press who were so keen to cover the loonier elements of the elections...to have the gay candidate posing for photographs and giving interviews with his arms around some woman talking about how they'd fallen in love. If this had all been happening somewhere else it wouldn't have caused so much trouble but to be happening the GC at that time and to be having the GC being used as a launching pad for the story of their romance ... well it was pretty tacky. 

There was a week I know when every day there was supposed to be two or three members of different newspapers arriving and they were all spread over the course of a week. Round about Wednesday when one read a couple of the papers Sue and Malcolm had done an interview the day before in which, instead of talking about gay issues and the gay campaign and gay rights and gay liberation, they had been chortling with delight about how they'd fallen in love together during the campaign because they had worked closely together. Working together, planning things, writing things late into the night. Sue Wakeling and Malcolm. But this....had given them a chance to fall in love with each other. They were posing for photographs with their arms around each other in the GC and the interview consisted entirely of the story of their romance. I remember when I saw this in the paper I went down to the GC where the press where once again due to turn up about 11 in the morning. I lost my temper and I said "We are to have no more of this. We are not having any more photographs taken cuddling together. No more talk of how you have fallen in love" etcetera. Sue Wakeling stormed out of the centre saying "No man is going to dictate to her what she chooses to do with her sexuality." Ignoring the fact of what was happening in the 'gay' centre. Malcolm got up on his high horse and went off. He was up all night getting drunk and I remember when the Times turned up the following day to meet the candidates Malcolm wasn't there. He was hung over having been drunk all night. When I said he didn't turn up because he was drunk or hung over this was reported in the Times as well. Malcolm, up on his high horse, got extremely annoyed about that. As though this ruined his chances of winning the election. I think he had come to take his candidacy quite seriously by then. Talking about a Parliamentary candidate who was drunk the night before actually ruined his chances or lessened his chances of doing well in the election. There was quite a lot of bitterness and ill feeling about that and some of that resulted in the fact that Malcolm could not climb down from his high horse and say "Yes. Things got out of hand. It was all very foolish. If I had the chance I certainly wouldn't go through that nonsense again". 

(What killed the GC). Well, I think it is because a lot of the people who had been around for a long time, the main pillars if you like of the centre, tended to stay away from the centre more and more. As the gay squats got under way and there were a number of houses close together that had gay people in them...as there were people, friends of ours from North London and elsewhere who frequently came to Brixton....these people would walk passed the GC and go up to those houses where they would be sure of finding their friends and no disturbing elements. The squats in a way became an alternative GC for some people because there you could have only the company you wanted with no distractions. No obligations about cleaning or answering the phone or locking up or making coffee for people or cleaning up the floor. I mean you could meet some of your friends down at the GC as well but by this time there was also quite a large, what I would call an unruly element at the centre, and ... I did it myself. I'd go from here (home) and go to 157 or 155 Railton Road because I could be sure I would meet a whole lot of people that I would like to be with. Whereas if I went down to the GC there would be some people down there ... what I thought were negative elements. There was that and during this lesser presence of the older hands at the GC this disruptive element I just mentioned to more and more powerful there. They had their friends coming in. Mainly people coming in there to smoke dope. They were having their straight friends who dealt in dope coming to the GC to sell the stuff from there.

The whole reason why the GC had been established was changing. The GC was no longer becoming a refuge for gay people to go to where there could be a guarantee that you would meet no-one except gay people. Some of the unruly elements would be quite destructive sometimes if you had say an elderly gay person rather timidly coming to the GC and they'd be laughed at and scoffed at and scorned at and made to feel terrible. 

Another element in this as well was there had been a move to make the GC more democratic. To have everybody who came there to participate in the meetings. It was felt that the structure of the GC consisting of the politically correct people who had their political meetings and a lot of other people who were less articulate who were left outside. A positive step should be taken to make the place more democratic by letting these people get more involved and the reason for this was given as being that they were prevented from becoming active participants in the GC, part of the decision making structure, because they had been intimidated by the heavy political people, being people who were more articulate then them etcetera. To some extent this may have been true. Certainly I felt that description might have fitted some people. I believe however that the larger number of the people concerned were people who had plenty of opportunity in the past to get involved if they had wanted to. But the reason they didn't do useful stuff, helpful things at the GC, the reason why they didn't pull their weight, the reason they didn't attend meetings and get involved was because there were people who just didn't give a damn about such things. Some people who were there simply just to take and put in as little as possible. Anyway these people were encouraged to take part in meetings and after they did so the meetings tended generally became like a bear garden especially if some of the meetings were rather short on some of the pillars of strength that had been around for a couple of years. Quite a number of motions could be voted out by the bloc showing of hands of this disruptive group of people. 

I don't think the GC has ceased to fulfil a need. In the fact the idea of the GC had very much outgrown its premises. In subsequent years one had meet many, many people who said "Oh, yes. I came to the GC on Railton Road once but, oh, it was so dirty. It was so uncomfortable. Or there wasn't a decent place to sit. Or there was too much noise and I never went back again." I am sure if we had then the sort of facilities that are being offered now in London for gay people. If we had a decent building that had some sort of funding so that you so that you could have dome decent areas to sit, to relax, to decorate etcetera. If the place had been a lot more attractive with a lot more room a lot of slightly fainthearted characters who needed encouragement would have been more induced to stay. But a lot of people came along and found the place filthy and dirty with broken old furniture and some shouting or arguments going on in the coffee lounge with Mark Carroll and somebody else. Kay perhaps, slagging each other off. This likely frightened them and made them disinclined to come back. I think the GC has outgrown its particular purpose. A lot of people also were frightened by the experience of coming to Brixton and finding they had to walk all the way along Railton Road to arrive at the GC. They felt quite frightened and nervous about it especially at night time and especially in the first couple of years when we had that gang, the Rebels, that used to accost and rob everybody. No, I think the idea of the GC had outgrown this particular building. If we had had a different location somewhere else and a different type of building a lot more of that person I have just described would have been induced to spend more and more time there. As it was we had this logjam of what I have described as the disturbing element and certainly the drug element. A lot of people came to the GC for a period of time. They gained a bit of strength and confidence and then they went off joined some CHE group or became involved in something else but the element that never moved on was this disturbing element that had nowhere else to move on to. Once the GC was discovered they were there night after night after night. It was moderately warm. There was cheap coffee. There was stimulation there and most of them had no money to go anywhere else. I think this led to a logjam. Other people cam to use the centre and moved on. These people just piled up and piled up and piled up. 

Receiving a grant from the Council would not have made much difference to that particular place. If we had a decent building close to the tube station, say, somewhere between the tube station and St Matthews church, somewhere near the Council housing offices on Brixton Hill that was properly funded I think all of that would have made quite a difference.