When Cruz 101 first opened its doors on Canal Street on May 22, 1992, it was heralded as the next big thing. Just six years earlier, the bars neighbouring Cruz had been raided by police on an almost-weekly basis in attempts to catch gay men and arrest them for gross indecency.
But the 90s came with new ambitions and a better hope of equality. The retirement of Chief Constable of Greater Manchester James Anderton in 1991 - who once described gay men as ‘swirling in a cesspit of their own making’ - only helped with that optimism.
Once a shipping warehouse, the building of Cruz 101 had been stripped of its interior and replaced with a nightclub like nothing Canal Street had ever seen before. The lack of blacked-out curtains and a bold aesthetic made sure, from the moment you walked in, that you knew this was something completely different.
