I shall be joining long-time queer activist Linda Bellos OBE and Robert Thompson, Chair of the Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive (LAGNA) to talk about ‘LGBT London – The Media and the ‘Loony Left’ on Tuesday, April 21st. The talk will take place at London’s Bishopsgate Institute from 7.30 p.m.

By way of ‘scene-setting’, I have written the following post about queer life in the 1980s for the Institute’s blog:

Queer life in the 1980s was an extraordinary mix of progress and setbacks as lesbians and gay men became increasingly visible. The 1982 launch of Channel Four – with its remit to address the needs of minorities – had a hugely positive impact on the representation of queer people. Out and Out on Tuesday offered a magazine-style look at lesbian and gay life: the Corner House was the first attempt at a queer sit-com and two series of In the Pink charted the development of queer cinema.

And despite the 80s beginning with global protests over the movie Cruising, filmic representations gradually improved. Films like Donna Deitch’s Desert Hearts and Stephen Frears’ My Beautiful Laundrette (another contribution from Channel Four) didn’t problematise queer people but rather social attitudes towards us.

But as our visibility grew so did the attacks upon us – from the physical to the political. The Campaign for Homosexual Equality’s 1980 report Attacks on Gay People found, for example, that “about one in eight [attacks] leads to the death or disablement of the victim”. A 1984 report by the Gay London Police Monitoring Group (GALOP) documented immense hostility from the police: for example, a man seeking police assistance when a group of men attacked a gay pub, was told, “Well what do you expect? You’re a queer in a queer’s pub. Fuck off before I nick you for being drunk and disorderly.”

A Victorian law, the Customs Consolidation Act (1876), was resurrected to justify repeated raids on Gay’s the Word bookshop. Countless gay men were arrested for ‘importuning for immoral purposes’, an offence that was created to stop ‘stage door Johnnies’ harassing showgirls as they left Victorian musical halls. Public displays of affection by lesbians and gay men resulted in charges of ‘insulting behaviour contrary to the Metropolitan Police Act 1839.’

With the first UK case of AIDS in 1981 gay men struggled to make sense of this mysterious and deadly condition. Prior to the introduction of HIV testing in 1985, life for many gay men included an anxious daily check for Kaposi’s Sarcoma skin lesions – one of the defining conditions for AIDS. Meanwhile the Press revelled in the notion of ‘the gay plague’, suggesting that we were both morally and medically infectious.

And then the passage of Section 28 heralded the close of the decade.