Opposite the Ritzy in Brixton, in what is now Windrush Square, there is a set of abandoned and rather dilapidated-looking public toilets. They are an inconspicuous sight — the kind of landmark that fades into obscurity in a place you know well, so that you have to recalibrate your eyes to notice it’s even there.
I must have walked past them dozens of times over the years growing up in London (usually under the influence of something, I confess). But catching sight of them on my way to meet Jason Okundaye to discuss his upcoming book, Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain, they exude a new, flirtatious energy.
‘I had also always seen those toilets and never in my life thought anything about them — they’re just unsuspecting toilets,’ 27-year-old Okundaye tells me, sitting across the table in a cosy café on Brixton Hill. ‘Now, I think about the fact that all of these Black gay men would congregate outside there and that’s how they found community.’
Amid the soca sound systems and Caribbean markets of Eighties Brixton, the Windrush Square toilets were a known site of cottaging and cruising for débutantes in the gay scene to initiate themselves with their first sexual experiences. This kind of public gathering (and public sex) has long established networks for gay men to connect before widespread commercial clubbing spaces or social media.
There are many points of reference like this in Okundaye’s book. A social and oral history of the first ‘out generation’ of Black gay men in Britain, it is also a history of place, specifically Brixton — the spiritual home of the UK’s Black community but also the lesser-known nucleus of a diverse, activist queer scene.
‘We’re used to this one narrative about Brixton, which is Windrush arrivals, police brutality and unemployment,’ Okundaye says. ‘These narratives are incredibly important, but they are not everything. I also want people to know that in Brixton in the 1980s, you would have a gay Black man riding a bike, in a wig, playing music out loud and doing that proudly, not hiding. My intention was that people [would] walk through Brixton and look again.’
An old Nineties nightclub, Vox, hidden just off Brixton’s bustling high street, once heaved with the sweat and swinging hips of Black gay men; the building’s most recent iteration was as a private members’ club owned by Soho House. The proverbial ivy has now crept over many of these places, or they have fallen foul to rampant gentrification, never honoured with blue plaques or immortalised in history books.
‘Where the KFC is now used to be the Prince of Wales, and that was also a really important space for these Black gay men to find each other and to socialise,’ Okundaye says. ‘I’ve seen photographs of them hanging around outside, an openly gay group of Black men, cruising each other, making friends, finding a place to sleep.’
Revolutionary Acts is gorgeous, gossipy and warm. Told by Okundaye through interviews with seven interconnected queer ‘elders’, he reverently (and sometimes flirtatiously) gives these unsung heroes their retrospective flowers. Much of Black British history has been siloed into the private sphere: hiding in photo albums, forgotten videotapes gathering dust or fading memories of those who lived through it.
Okundaye gently teases out this history from figures such as Alex Owolade, a fiercely ideological grassroots activist and self-described ‘loonie leftie’; Marc Thompson, a Black HIV awareness advocate with a cheeky sense of humour (‘men used to get their dicks sucked over there!’ he says on returning to the site of Vox); and Ajamu X, a fetishist, photographer and founder of the Black Perverts Network.
‘It’s hard to pick a favourite, but I will anyway,’ Okundaye says, when I ask him whose story touched him the most. ‘Dirg Aaab-Richards — he was the most hesitant to speak to me. He didn’t necessarily see himself as having an important or interesting story to tell, but as we were interviewing he really began to grow in confidence.
‘He was a worker for the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre project, and would talk about the fact that he’d often take on the administrative tasks that other people wouldn’t necessarily want to, like tidying up the room that [they] rented out to secure it next week.’
The book is, at times, also devastating. Okundaye’s recounting of Black British newspaper The Voice’s reporting on footballer Justin Fashanu’s sexuality and suicide — particularly a controversial column by Tony Sewell in 1990, now perhaps most famous for the Government’s widely discredited 2020 ‘race report’ — is an uncomfortable reminder of the homophobia within certain sections of the Black community, and what Okundaye describes as the ‘double jeopardy’ of being Black and gay. (Sewell, Okundaye notes, was and remains ‘an idiot’. ‘Make sure you include that, people need to know.’)
‘It’s not something that we should shy away from, being honest about and discussing,’ Okundaye says. ‘There’s the influence of religion, ideas around masculinity for Black boys, the idea that any kind of expression of femininity or emotion is deviance — those are all a problem. But there are also moments of hope. It’s not the case that there was just this big, homophobic Black community; most of the men were accepted by their families… and talk now about having positive relationships with the rest of the community.’
That double jeopardy was also a result of an outsider status within the gay community, which often manifested in racist door policies of central London gay nightclubs, which, as Okundaye notes, is not a relic of the Eighties.
‘I mean Jeremy Joseph [the owner of G-A-Y] went on this rant against Somali people on Facebook [in a longer 2016 post about a spike in crime]. The [LGBTQ+] superclubs… those are the kinds of people who own them — that is not a welcoming space for a Black queer person. So, it’s like, why would I go to G-A-Y and put money into that person’s pockets? I haven’t been there since.’ (Joseph immediately apologised for the incident.)
It is striking then that, despite the far more hostile social and political backdrop of Revolutionary Acts, the picture of Black queer nightlife in London looked somewhat more vibrant and accessible than it is now.
‘There has definitely been a real death of physical space,’ Okundaye says. ‘We’re seeing pubs and bars constantly closing down. Because of the housing crisis, people who might have wanted to set up a queer bar or club are going to sink that money into a house deposit instead.
‘Back in the Eighties you could get grants from local councils, community interest funds… but no one’s got money any more. When these spaces do pop up, when there’s Queer Bruk or Bootylicious once a month, they’re always packed. The enthusiasm is there… but there’s never a permanent fixture. But there are always going to be dormant moments and periods of flourishing. It will always come back because people want it.’
This is, perhaps, one of the values of speaking to and forging meaningful connections with elders as Okundaye does, the comfort of the knowledge that people who looked and felt and sounded like us danced before and will dance again.
‘Of course,’ Okundaye says. ‘If we don’t speak then we lose things, we lose the recipes.’
