I was chatting with a co-worker last week, and realised that the origins of Manchester’s Gay Village are not necessarily well known.
Whilst there have been forms of habitation in the area since at least the Romans, the city of manchester really originates in the explosion of textile manufacturing during the Industrial Revolution. The area that is now the Gay Village was once, like a lot of central manchester, mostly warehouses for storing goods brought in on the canal from liverpool. You can kinda still tell this from the architecture, the stocky red brick blocks - again, like a lot of central manchester. It perhaps goes without saying that these goods were the products of a colonial empire. In the early days, the majority of this would have been cotton, produced in what is now the southern united states, as well as sugar and tobacco from britain’s Caribbean colonies. manchester city council still boast about being “the city built by King Cotton”.[1] Over time, american cotton was replaced with Egyptian and Indian, due to the disruption of the u.s. civil war, and a wider variety of colonial goods from all over the world. Cotton in particular, but also products like sugar, highlights that most of these colonial goods arrived in britain as raw produce, supplies for british industry. This was why manchester needed its cluster of warehouses around the canal; a ready supply point for the city’s factories, as well as those further afield in lancashire. Of course, there were also a few pubs for canal and cotton workers in the area, and by night, the shadows of the tall buildings provided cover for sex workers, cut out of the industrial army.
In the late 20th century, however, after the so-called ‘Suez Crisis’ or 1956 but before the defeat of the Miners’ Strike in 1985, the british empire was forced to change strategy. Industry in britain emerged from the second world war badly damaged, and both anti-colonial movements abroad and the labour movement at home were growing increasingly strong. Other imperialist nations faced parallel crises in the same period, as evidenced by the crisis of overaccumulation in the 1970s. In britain, as in much of the rest of the world, capitalism’s strategy was to forcibly create new markets, at home by mass privatisation, forcing national resources into economic competition, and abroad by using a combination of IMF measures and brutal colonial violence to open up new resources and force local populations into acting as proletarians for western capital. As part of this strategy, british capital relocated much of its industrial production abroad, pulling the rug out from under both domestic labour movements dependent on those industries, and anti-colonial forces who had long sought the means to industrialise their economies. The contours of colonial supply chains had shifted, and manchester’s warehouses were no longer needed.
But the urban poor hadn’t gone anywhere. The informal (and illegal) red light district continued and even grew in the wake of industry’s collapse in the area, and with the reduced attention, it was also now safer for other forms of sexual practice to flourish. Of course, there had always been gay sex in manchester’s parks and backalleys, but by the mid 1980s, the area around Canal Street gained a reputation as somewhere to seek out homosex - one can assume, with some of the ambiguity between commercial interest and pleasure described by accounts of working class cruising elsewhere. Samuel Delany, for example, in his accounts of cruising on Times Square; “Occasionally men expected money - but most often, not.”[2] But in Canal Street at least, it is certain that sex work in the area preceded its reputation for homosex, and it seems unlikely that any gay subculture could have appeared without the informal networks of communication, mutual aid, and self-defense developed by sex workers for survival against the state and civilian violence.
In most accounts you’ll find, this period is treated as something fearful and dangerous - and of course, it was. The police were fully aware of the area’s reputation, and in 1987 regional chief constable James Anderton described the gay subculture there as “swirling around in a human cesspit of their own making”, as if homosexuality was responsible for national industrial decline.[3] Lesser known transphobe journalist, Beatrix Campbell wrote in the Guardian in 2004, “Anderton, an evangelical Christian, encouraged his officers to stalk its dank alleys and expose anyone caught in a clinch, while police motorboats with spotlights cruised for gay men around the canal's locks and bridges.”
What were people risking this harassment for? For many of them, this risk would be merely relative. Public sex has been a historic norm of working class life, even among ‘heterosexuals’, conditioned by cramped living conditions and the relative absence of bourgeois norms of private domesticity. As ever, working class cultures sought out forms of pleasure and support, inevitably mixed and mired, under the pressures of violence and economic deprivation. If you are already homeless, or a sex worker, or a migrant, the police have you marked already. What’s to lose? And what’s to gain? Money, for one thing. In the midst of mass unemployment, sex work has always been a refuge or a last resort - whether for those in need of quick cash or forms of relative autonomy from the gruelling regulated labour still available. But aside from economic needs, there is also the appeal of an intimacy in the shadows, away from prying eyes, a bit of fun after the working day or to break up the monotony of unemployment. It’s a cliche, but secrecy can be sexier - the darkness, the adrenaline whirling together with spit and cum. It is difficult to shuffle between expectations; there is no reason to think these relations could not be loving, caring, tender, but there is nothing wrong with a casual fuck where no one knows your name.
The boundaries of cruising cultures are porous; it is hard to say how many people participating in this world would have seen themselves as gay, harder still to know for sure how many would see themselves as men - though certainly, some did not. Some scholars have suggested ealy gay subcultures may have partially modelled themselves on relations between cis women sex workers. But this framing perhaps obscures a different circuit of practice, between the world of women’s sex work, cis and trans, and cultures of sodomy, in which identifications as male varied significantly across class lines.[3] Certainly the gay middle classes would have been mixing along Canal Street at night too - but I don’t think they could be described as dominant, and they participated in a basically working class culture in pursuit of pleasures their own class could not then provide.
In 1988, the Thatcher government established the Central Manchester Development Corporation, under the direction of the city council. This was another phase of the new strategy described above - the aim of the Urban Development Corporations, already tested successfully elsewhere, such as the old dockyards in london and merseyside, was to take the urban shells hollowed out by industrial collapse and fill them with new opportunities for capital, primarily in housing and consumer outlets. While an earlier generation of policing had aimed to suppress the illicit social world around Canal Street by force, the council now had the funds to ‘clean up’ the area for good. The first of the main new gay bars, Manto, opened in 1990. By the end of the decade, it had become cool and modern enough to merit the attention of Russell T Davies, who wrote ‘Queer as Folk’,putting the Village on the map, both for local nightlife, the national gay scene, and - importantly - international tourism.
Some prefer a more ‘activist’ account of the Village’s origins. Campbell writes;
It was the ghost of Section 28 that seemed to spirit the gay village into existence. "There was no sense of a village," recalls Ian Wilmott, a gay liberation activist and now a Labour councillor. "The main dance clubs were outside the village, and what gay space there was existed only once you went through the doors and paid your money. The concept of gay space didn't exist. Section 28 was such a monstrous attack on civil liberties that hundreds of campaigners came together to oppose it. People were feeling besieged. We had no homeland, no part of the city. We needed somewhere ... It had to be more than a club. We willed the village into existence."
Well. Maybe. Certainly, the convergence of a left-liberal council bent on capital development with certain forms of gay activism is likely to have shaped the direction that capital development took. But the area was already associated with homosexuality; it was already a gay space, and what money changed hands wasn’t going into the pockets of developers either. This space had been carefully forged by the motley relations of sex workers, ex-warehouse and -factory workers, new migrant labour forces gathered in manchester by the pressures of neocolonialism - manchester’s popular classes, proletariat and lumpenproletariat, and anyone else who voluntarily joined them - in the darkness outside police searchlights. But it was the new post-Thatcher middle classes that were the target audience of the new Gay Village.
Much like neoliberalism pulled the rug out from under the national industry, so a gay public hewn from the new middle classes, oriented around state development, created property from the social world of proletarian cruising. The more activist-inclined among them were even able to speak of a new national homeland, a consumer microcosm of the thatcherite brand of white nationalism, not that of open imperialism, but of a besieged yet sovereign island nation.[4] It is not for nothing that both Campbell’s account, and that of Jenny Turner in the Independent in 1996, are troubled by the possibility that “straight invaders” might spoil the queer oasis; but the police, it is suggested, are happy to defend the safety of queer nightlife from assault and exposure. Greater Manchester Police have a reputation among campaigners and professional observers nationally for their brutality. In 2013, the british state itself recognised that more people died in police custody in manchester than anywhere else in the u.k., twenty in eleven years. The real number is doubtlessly higher, and it is hard to find up-to-date statistics - no doubt partly due to the fact that GMP do not keep full records of their own activity.
It is unsurprising that Campbell’s more recent preoccupations seem to be similarly security-oriented, now against straight men apparently bent on a hostile takeover of feminism for paedophilic agendas via the ruse of “self-identification”. Ultimately, journalists like Campbell are mostly insignificant (I would put money on the fact that most of you reading this probably hadn’t heard of her until now). More important is the fact that what she argues explicitly seems to mirror the implicit assumptions governing development policy across urban centres like manchester, leeds, and london. These programmes continue full steam ahead to this day. This month, manchester city council just approved yet another proposal, this time for new four skyscrapers, including luxury housing and 4,000 square feet of commercial space, costing £741 million. Meanwhile, many residents in the historically Black and working class community in Moss Side are increasingly being priced out by Airbnbs and new apartment developments - similar stories might be told across south manchester. Policing, gentrification, and a projected image of manchester as a ‘progressive’, ‘diverse’, or ‘cosmopolitan’ city are all different sides of the same story.
It may be said that I am romanticising the world of Canal Street before the Gay Village. I have no intention of romanticising police surveillance and harassment; god knows the Village has not put a stop to that. But it also cannot put a stop to people forging lives in the social breakdown capital leaves in its wake. Perhaps in forty years time, there may be new capital developments, launching themselves from these under-worlds, new projects of recuperation and gentrification. But capital can only recuperate. The city is made in the motley relations of manchester’s lumpen/proletariat, still fucking, loving, surviving, just outside of police searchlights.
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[1] I found this a few years back in a report put out by the Council alongside English Heritage on their redevelopment programme in the Northern Quarter. I can dig out the exact reference if anyone is interested.
[2] Samuel R. Delany, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (New York: New York University Press, 2019), p. 15.
[3] E.g., Matt Houlbrook in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 (University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2005):
“The men clearly understood their character as womanlike and modeled their relationships on female kinship. They described each other as “she” and “girls.” (p. 141).
“The world of the “West End Poof” always overlapped with that working class and immigrant “underworld” that also took shape around the Dilly [i.e., ‘Dilly Boys’, referring to something like what are now called rent boys] as polari’s currency amongst queans, prostitutes, and “criminals” alike indicates. Indeed, these spatial and cultural commonalities suggest how queans regularly found acceptance from the men and women they encountered each night. Quentin Crisp, for example, talked nostalgically about the “thieves, prostitutes and other social outcasts who were my friends.” Such a casual tolerance was particularly marked amongst the female prostitutes who walked the same streets and with whom men forged remarkably strong friendships.” (p. 156)
Houlbrook does not seem able to see the irony of stating that these ‘men’ were sex workers, ‘modelled’ their relationships on female kinship, AND had strong relationships with ‘female’ prostitutes, without simply recognising these historical experiences as continuous, rather than parallel across a semi-arbitrary gender binary. I will have more to say about this another time.
[4] If it is suggested britain’s young men were too busy sodomising one another to focus on serious work, I’ll just note that as the Industrial Revolution was emerging in britain, Engels repeatedly expressed a concern that by forcing working class men, women, and children to work in dark, overheated conditions, they would subsequently be forced to remove their clothing, and in the close quarters of urban overcrowding, the new bourgeoisie would then be responsible for the proliferation of all manner of perversions.
[5] Cf. Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation.