LGBTQ+ lives in the South West

There was no kind of public or school or educational forum or group where you could be yourself. Another thing I remember particularly well was at the Sixth Form College I went to – so, this would have been kind of ‘88, ‘89, ’90 – and the student union there was coming under pressure from the National Union of Students because they didn’t have an LGB soc – LGB society, as they were called then – and why didn’t they? And again, there was one of my peers who I kind of really looked up to as being really trendy, said oh, well, I don’t think there’s much call for it around here. This kind of idea that there aren’t gay people in Devon, we don’t need that, we don’t need anything. And it’s just like being erased while you’re still alive. And you can’t speak up. And I wouldn’t have dared to say anything. That invisibility, I guess, is a sort of side effect of not being able to talk about things at all. And it’s self-perpetuating, of course.

And it wasn’t till I went to university that I actually, finally managed to kind of join a group for gay people, and that was an absolute revelation. But by then, it was probably too late. I think the psychological damage was probably done by then. But nevertheless I was obviously very, very glad to meet those people. But then of course I had to return to Devon after I left university. And that made it feel like going to university was just a flash in the pan, and now I was back in Devon. It was like going back to, honestly going back to the Dark Ages, which is probably not quite fair, but… And there were actually pubs you could go to back then, although the kind of people that maybe I would have hung out with had already left the area. And I’ve kind of stopped engaging really with what’s on offer locally, I mean there’s very little, but it must have been very different in cities. And Devon’s still not a great place to be. I shouldn’t say that, should I? But it’s true. It’s very limited and restrictive.

In Plymouth – and again, imagine a world without the Internet – so, in Plymouth, I didn’t know what a lesbian looked like. I didn’t know there were any in Plymouth. But there was a radical bookshop, and I think many small provincial towns had bookshops like this. It was a small, radical bookshop on Mutley Plain in Plymouth called “In Other Words”. It’s long gone now, but it stocked books and magazines and various newsletters and things that were kind of to do with people who lived on the margins. So there’s a lot of really interesting stuff to do with poetry and literature and the arts scene. And I used to find this place fascinating. It was just down the road from my school, and we’d sort of sneak off there, couple of school friends and I would go in there. And I suppose that I was quite academic and quite booky, so I quite liked books anyway. And there’s a whole bunch of stuff about books of poetry and literature by women. And I was quite interested in reading about, you know, women, radical women’s lives in history. So that was the kind of thing they stocked.

And they also had magazines like “Spare Ribs”, sorry, “Spare Rib”, which came from more the ‘70s than the ‘80s actually, that was associated with sort of second wave feminism. And I remember reading “Spare Rib” and actually feeling a bit awkward reading it in public, reading it on the bus, you know, it always seemed a bit kind of secretive and radical. Seems hilarious now! But there were overt relationship references in that, relationships between women, and there were pictures of, you know, women who identified as lesbians in it. And I thought that was really extraordinary. Okay, so that’s what lesbians looked like. And I really started to enjoy reading about historic women who, you know, were kind of unconventional in some way or another, so that’s kind of how I found my niche really.

So I got home from work that day and I’d got a copy of Gay Times. I don’t know where I got it from. I got it from some, I think I’d got it at WHSmiths in Bolton, because there’s no way it would’ve been sold in Leigh, back then. And I just happened to be flipping through the back, the ads. And there was an ad for this hotel called Cliff House Hotel in Torquay, ‘Britain’s premier gay hotel’, and I thought, oh I wonder if, you know, I wonder if they need any staff, blah blah blah.

So I got home from work that night, actually I was flipping through the magazine at work, while I was supposed to be doing the thing, like doing the, you know, terminals and things. And so I rang them up. I got home and rang them up, and I explained who I was. And they said ‘oh, we’ve got, you know, we’ve got a really busy period coming up over Christmas and New Year. Can you come down for two weeks over Christmas and New Year?’

And I went ‘oh I’ll see what I can do. I’ll see if I can get the time off’. Anyway, I managed to get the time off, and I lied to my parents saying ‘I’ve got a trial run at this hotel in’, I didn’t tell them it was a gay hotel because I came out at the age of seventeen, and that was like oh my god. They wanted, you know, to get the priest round, conversion therapy, blah blah blah blah blah, and all. Which obviously does not work. It just does not work. The proof’s in the pudding at the end of the day.

So I went down to Torquay. And oh my god it was amazing, it was just incredible. They were so welcoming and so lovely, and it was absolute, so for Christmas and New Year they did like these packages. I can’t remember, was it fifteen or seventeen bedrooms that they had, so there were like thirty-odd like people staying in the hotel, mostly gay couples, gay men, dadada. And then on the like Christmas Eve there was a huge party, and it was like fancy dress and like stuff I’d never seen before, you know what I mean?

It was just a real like ‘oh my god’. And it was so flamboyant and so outrageous, and so, you know, it was amazing. And the same thing happened at Christmas, ah New Year as well. So then after the Christmas and New Year period they asked me to come back for the season starting in March, for Easter kind of thing. So I went back up and went ‘I’ve got a job in a hotel in Torquay.

So I went, moved back down to Torquay, and the first thing that we did was we went to Tenerife for two weeks, before starting the season, which was amazing. It was fantastic, it was brilliant. So I was kind of cocooned in this little gay life, you know, and then Section 28 came in, and that was, it was a little bit, you know, bearing in mind that we were living through the AIDS pandemic and we knew people that had AIDS, that were dying of AIDS.

And we did a lot of fundraising and all that kind of thing, and did, so Torbay Hospital, we’d do visits to people that were in the hospital and become buddies to people that were dying back then. So a lot of stuff. And then Clause 28 on top of that, and we were like, you know, ‘oh my god what is this thing? What are they trying to do to us?’

But in Cornwall people often have this conception that you’re in a rural area so everybody starts in a position of, you know, being homophobic. The reality is often quite different. And Cornwall doesn’t have a gay scene, so there are little pockets of things that go on, but there’s no scene in the sense of bars and clubs, which tend to draw people to, you know, a physical location to meet other people.

And because we don’t have that, we have had a gay bar and we’ve had a gay nightclub, both of which lasted a few years, but Cornwall traditionally has a much longer history of like social groups that don’t have one physical venue, although there have been some, some that open, but usually for like one night of the week. So that is the nearest that you’ve got for a scene, so it much more relies on relationships between people.

But people are, this sounds a bit obvious, but people are not living in that scene, they are living in their communities, and that’s where that experience of something directly yourself, so when your neighbours know that you’re gay they know you as a person. And except for those that experience homophobia with their neighbours, lots of other people find their local neighbourhood accept them for who they are, much more than they might expect, or much more than it might be expected from outside, because of that integration that is already there.

You’re not separate and over there. You are part of that community. We’re all part of many communities, but your physical neighbourhood you are probably in a rural area more likely to be connected with your neighbours than you might be in an urban area where you can go to a place within that that is the scene and you would be more likely only to connect with people who are like you. So a lot of people do report that they get on fine with their neighbours, but there are some who have individual experiences, it’s more likely to be with individual people that there is the problem, and that is their problem. But those people I believe are in the minority.

But no, my first like queer community was when I was working at Safeway. So I started working at Safeway when I was like fifteen, in Plimstock. I think, it was called Safeway and now it’s called Morrison’s. And it was in the café there that I started working, and I met two people who are older than me, called Sophie and Alistair, who were like, god I must’ve been fifteen and they were like eighteen and twenty-one or something.

And then they took me to Zeroes for the first time, which was like Plymouth’s gay bar. I don’t think it’s there any more. I went to The Swallow and was just like ‘what is this world? It’s amazing’. And then just drove around the south-west going to like gay bars with them. Like in Truro, to Eclipse. And they were amazing, but they were like really different to me.

Like they like had left school and were working in Safeway, and we were, you know, they were amazing people and I like loved that world that they showed me, but it wasn’t the world that I was looking for. It was a part of the world I was looking for, but not, I didn’t feel like I’d found my people. But yeah, they were great, lots of fun. But yeah, that wasn’t at school, it was outside of school. And I got into lots of trouble for like going out with like older people and stuff.