ABSTRACT
Media interpretations in the mid-2010s simplistically attributed the decline of LGBTQ+ spaces in London to the rise of digital technologies, such as mobile dating apps. In this chapter, I first interrogate these arguments, using qualitative evidence, before turning to the case study of a still-unfolding major infrastructure-led redevelopment, Crossrail, around Tottenham Court Road Station in central London, to highlight the more profound ways that LGBTQ+ venues are networked into processes of urbanization. In this case, in 2006, we see the first attempt by City Hall to name a threat to a venue specifically because of its negative impact on a protected minority, defined under the category of ‘sexual orientation’. We also witness the first uses, in London, of online campaigns to express community objection to the potential loss of venues. A formal equalities impact assessment process highlighted the threat to one of the capital’s biggest and most stridently commercial gay club nights, aligned as it was with international business and property interests. Smaller-scale venues in the vicinity, including those proactively inclusive of more marginalized LGBTQ+ people, were overlooked and closed. Often opportunistically located in precarious sites and buildings during temporary breaks in redevelopment cycles, LGBTQ+ venues of all models are vulnerable once those cycles accelerate. Under the current mayor, Sadiq Khan, following a crisis of closures in 2015, and after a period of extensive activism to protect and reopen queer spaces, licensed LGBTQ+ venues have now been categorized as ‘social and cultural infrastructure’ in policy discussions. I frame this designation by turning to earlier empirical studies of lesbian and gay populations’ networks from the late 1960s, and to debates about relationality in queer theory of the 2000s. I propose that thinking of today’s LGBTQ+ venues as queer infrastructure encapsulates the profile of dispersed, interconnected, heterogeneous LGBTQ+ communities in London, and the ways these attach to, traverse, and disrupt international lines of property, heritage, and identity in processes of social and cultural reproduction.
