It may just have been a happy coincidence that the announcement of the £100,000 cash needed to rebuild The Joiners Arms arrived on the same day as the Archbishop of Canterbury’s archaic, incendiary pronouncements on gay sex. To anyone familiar with the spit and sawdust Hackney Road gay bar, it didn’t feel like it. The late Joiners landlord, David Pollard (RIP), a garrulous socialist with a neckerchief, walking frame and opinions to spare, once described his patrons to me as “the joyful sinners”. Pollard would’ve laughed loud and hard at the timing of the victory for his old boozer’s incumbent resurrection. Bless his soul. The Joiners shut up shop in January 2015, another nail in the growing LGBT+ venue coffin; destroyed by digital sex apps and the insatiable London appetite for mediocre newbuilds.
For 15 years after first stumbling into it, The Joiners became my beloved local. I warmed quickly to its mythic state of lawless chaos, housing a semi-legendary, one-armed speed dealer who could ply his trade while holding down a useful game of pool. It was rough, ready, fast and loose. The smoking yard reverberated to the laughter of cackling queens across class, race and gender. Famous faces drifted by. Lee McQueen, Rufus Wainwright, Rupert Everett arriving in an incongruous limousine, like the actual Queen. The Turner Prize-winner, Wolfgang Tillmans, took an endless archive of snapshots capturing the fantastically odd excesses.
