“They’re privileged and don’t know it. They’ve grown up in a time where there is a solid gay community for them to find strength, they are not alone, and they know it! Would they have had the courage to wear a Queer As Fuck t-shirt in 1970? They do all come from (now, if not originally) urban areas with good gay centres. Don’t they know how lucky they are?” – respondent 323, November 1992.
I am sitting in The Keep archive in Brighton, looking through the National Lesbian And Gay Survey, which asked lesbians and gay men of 1980s and 90s Britain to document their lives. Lives lived when Section 28 was in its prime and the LGBTQI community was organising around the devastating effects of the Aids crisis.
Respondent 323’s words intrigued me, and raised more questions than answers. Was it true that lesbians mostly moved to urban areas at that time? Where had they moved from to get there? And what did it mean to have a “solid gay community”?