As the scholar Amin Ghaziani comments in his recent book on London’s changing queer nightlife, dancefloors have the potential to act as a through line for bodies that find themselves out of place in normative space: ‘Nightlife is transformative for people who are marginalised by multiple vectors of power, as it enables unique ways of seeing and being in the world. And what worlds are they building?’ While queer nightlife has the tacit promise of more inclusive world-building in the margins of heteronormative life, it can also reproduce everyday forms of discrimination that continue to stratify the desirability of queer subjects and bodies. From mainstream queer venues that continue to welcome white bodies above all others to the ongoing hostility faced by trans* people within queer communities, the promise of nightlife as an escape from the daytime world of discrimination is cut through with the realities of exclusion. As the scholars Kemi Adeyemi, Kareem Khubchandani and Ramón H. Rivera-Servera argue in their collection on queer nightlife, ‘for all the way that queer nightlife spaces can provide refuge and play, they can also be sites of alienation that are circumscribed by normative modes of exclusion.’ A striking example of these forms of exclusion was highlighted by one of our interviewees who recalled a daytime ‘tea and sympathy’ group which met in the mid-1980s in central London:
We’d have, sometimes after the tea, if they didn’t have to rush home, we’d have a little tour of, let’s go to a bar together, gather our coats and muster up the courage and then, of course, suddenly twelve Asians would appear somewhere in town and then… they’d never seen this before. […] So, then there was like a parting of the waves, make space.
Queer South Asians took on the insider/outsider role of what the scholar Nirmal Puwar has called ‘space invaders’, minoritised bodies which consistently find themselves to be out of place through gendered and racialised difference.
Undaunted by the reception, our interviewee described trying to connect to other men he read as South Asian in the bar. He recounted how one ‘achha [okay], where are you from?’ was met with a resounding, ‘I’m from Cardiff and you can fuck off.’ Would being close to other South Asian men threaten those able to pass as white? Or would being associated with other South Asian men reorientate the way this man was viewed from being unthreateningly exotic to being part of a visible community that could threaten the status quo? Lurking behind the ‘fuck off ’ is a fear of how accepting South Asian men might shift the dynamics of who or what queer space is for. While several of our interviewees touched on feeling exoticised within white scene spaces, especially in the 1980s, for one that exoticisation was a dead end when it came to sex: ‘That was the main crisis in our little gay lives. Black guys at least supposedly had these huge dicks everybody wanted, but the brown ones had nothing anybody wanted.’ Shakti Disco and Club Kali supported queer South Asians to become desirable, and desiring, subjects.
While media portrayals of queer nightlife have tended to focus on the celebration of camp spectacle that critiques gender normativity (one of the seminal examples of this in British television drama was Queer as Folk set in late 1990s and early 2000s Manchester), much of this chapter focuses on the less glamorous and more ordinary approaches to the social and cultural functions of queer nightlife in the British South Asian diaspora. Clubbing was not seen as ‘respectable’ by many first and second-generation South Asians living in Britain, with several of our interviewees describing not being allowed to go out to nightclubs due to parental pressure, not to mention the racism they faced when they did try, from the door to the dancefloor. A rich vein of South Asian club life developed in spite of these pressures.
A generation of South Asians in the 1980s developed an underground music scene with a pragmatic twist: this scene took place during the day. Early South Asian club promoters struggled to secure nights at white-owned clubs, especially at prime times. The South Asian daytime rave scene of the 1980s and 1990s developed across cities like London, Birmingham and Bradford. It filled the commercially ‘empty’ daytime of the club with desi beats for young South Asians who would not be able to leave home at night. Bhangra fused with hip-hop, jungle, garage, reggae, techno and house to create a sound that spoke to the cultural and political influences that were shaping identities anchored in a different version of what being British meant. These spaces also broke stereotypes about the role of women in South Asian communities. DJ Radical Sister (Rani Kaur) and DJ Ritu were two of the women to be found behind the decks, tapping into the rhythm and desires of a new generation of British South Asians. An article interviewing one of the women who promoted nights in the 1990s captures the thrill of daytime transformations of halls and bodies:
‘We would go to college in our traditional Salwar Kameez, then at Wednesday lunchtime we would get dressed into Western clothes in the toilets, do our makeup and head to the hall.’
Sabah [a pseudonym] laughed, ‘Our parents thought we had been at the library, it was like a secret club for us all. When we got back home for dinner we were always buzzing! We were on such a high and just prayed our parents wouldn’t notice the wiped-off eyeshadow.’
If some women were taking off their salwar kameez to go clubbing, others were deliberately putting theirs on. One of our interviewees described her time in London from the mid-1980s as a ‘crazy, wonderful and, like, heady time’ when organising was energised by the possibility of change. Dressed in a salwar kameez and a pair of Doc Martens, she described one night at the lesbian bar Rackets in the mid- to late-1980s (the name was designed to disguise what kind of bar it really was) when she arrived with a group of friends and insisted the DJ played a Bhangra track. They took over the dance floor, and eventually two of them ended up dancing on the bar: ‘We weren’t thrown out, which was a miracle. But that’s how we got to do those sorts of things and introduce our own cultural music.’ Before Shakti Disco opened in 1988, queer South Asians were an integral part of South Asian and queer club life. Ritu, along with several of our interviewees, recalled their time in some of London’s notorious bars and clubs which have long since disappeared, including The Gateways, which had been open since the 1930s. The longer story of queer South Asian nightlife has slipped from view. In some cases those stories and communities have been lost as venues and nights have closed, but in other cases what makes queer South Asian nightlife so unique has fallen between the stools of South Asian club scenes and the history of black queer nightlife in Britain, both of which continue to be under-researched scenes.
Publisher: Queer Directions
Pages: 253
Price: 699
This excerpt has not been edited by queerbeat.