ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the future of the queer pub and whether it is vital to the maintenance of the evolving queer community. It seeks to ask what can be learned from London’s historic queer pubs: what important principles do they advocate for wider societies that are increasingly at risk of being lost altogether. Unlike many queer bars and clubs that are located in concentrated urban nodes, queer pubs form a small and diffuse network, littered throughout the marginalised, cheaper areas of the city, often associated with ‘the discarded, the derelict’. ‘Queer space may be a contradiction in terms. Some would argue that queerness, as an ineffable ideal of oppositional culture, is so fluid and contingent that the idea of a concrete queer space is an oxymoron.’ The democratic business model of London’s historic queer pubs has recently become subject to the threat of regeneration, labelled as unsustainable in the contemporary socioeconomic climate.
