Jason Okundaye on the Black gay community and its tensions: “The movement has always been a broad church”

Between them they had created a thriving subculture, so I wanted to bring their voices together and paint, from a minority experience, a broader, beautiful picture.

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You get a real sense of the men’s characters. Was that important?

I’ve sometimes felt that Black British history has lacked texture and character: the details that reveal someone’s individuality and personality. We might focus on what a person achieved in the context of getting the law changed, for example, but miss a sense of who they actually were. This book is as much about the individuals as it is about the big events and changes in which they played a part.

I particularly wanted to communicate that the period between the 1970s and 1990s was a historical moment at which things were tense. People were facing racism, homophobia and the Aids crisis, and there was a nascent, growing gay activist and cultural movement.

They may have been united on the fronts of race or sexuality, but that didn’t necessarily mean everything was harmonious – and, anyway, that’s not the way I think we should look at queer history or Black history. We need to look at the conflicts, and the tensions, and the ways in which people felt let down or even isolated by their community, as well as the ways in which they came together to make each other’s lives better.

One of the characters you open the book with is a man named Ted Brown. Can you tell us about his story?

Ted was born in New York. His parents were British Jamaicans: his mother was a civil rights activist who was deported during the 1950s era of paranoia about communism. The family eventually found their way to London in 1959, where they were met by the National Front shoving dog waste through their letterbox.

During this time, Ted was coming to know his sexuality. It’s important to remember that, at this time in Britain, there weren’t gay institutions, let alone Black gay institutions. So while people such as Ted may have realised they were gay, they wouldn’t necessarily have known of or had access to anywhere that they could go.

They may have been united on the fronts of race or sexuality, but that didn’t necessarily mean everything was harmonious

But, by the start of the 1970s, the Gay Liberation Front [an early gay activist organisation] had emerged, which marked the first point at which people in Britain were organising as out and proud gay men and lesbians. Ted first encountered its members in 1970, and through his story I wanted to communicate what it was like to have been a Black man working as an activist within the parameters of both race and sexuality. What did those differences mean for how you were treated within activist movements, and the way people were able to navigate those spaces?

You write that people such as Ted had to navigate such spaces with less buoyancy and more subtlety than, say, white counterparts. Why was that the case, and what impact did it have?

When I first started looking at Brixton, I found that plenty of narratives focused on the Black activism that took place there, and plenty of separate narratives explored its gay activism. I think this separation has historical roots.

Organisations such as the South London Gay Liberation Front hosted street parties, theatre productions and big public demonstrations, but the fact that Brixton had a strong Black community meant that, if you were a Black gay person, those activities might have taken place in front of your relatives or members of your church – who might not have been ready for that. The fact that you had these different groups witnessing and monitoring what went on meant that some Black gay men were not able to be open.

We should explore the fact that Brixton is the site for the stories in your book. Why were so many people drawn to the area?

Brixton was the place in which you really started to see an open Black gay scene develop, and that’s largely due to one man. Patrick Liverpool, who had come down from Huddersfield, bought a house on Morval Road in Brixton in which he started to host regular parties.

Word got out that there would be these fabulous parties attended by lots of Black gay men with music, DJing, and drag queen pageants, and a scene grew up in which people were really able to get to know each other. The news reached other parts of the UK, too: men would hear about the parties and decide they wanted to move closer.

All of this led, eventually, to the kinds of stories you hear of Brixton in later years: the guy who used to take a boombox and dance outside the police station wearing really short glitter shorts, and the drag queens who cycled down the street wearing wigs and full faces of makeup.

But I should also stress that Black people have long been attracted to Brixton and south London in general, because there’s always been a thriving community and food, music and art scene. Even today, it is still a crucible and a reflection of wider race relations in Britain.

What does the story of another interviewee, Dirg Aaab-Richards, tell us about being Black and gay in Britain in the 1970s and 80s?

Dirg was massively influential in educating young people about the issues surrounding being LGBTQ, and in setting up youth clubs around south London during the 1980s. These weren’t just for Black gay men, but all sorts of LGBTQ youth. This was at a time when the law [in England and Wales] said you could only have same-sex sexual relationships over the age of 21, so he was trying to create a space in which young people could build a family and community with each other.

An interesting discrepancy you highlight is that Dirg describes himself as a “modest revolutionary”, yet other people you spoke to talk about him as being a really central, pivotal figure.

Yeah, that’s right. I didn’t want to present the history of activism, and particularly Black gay men’s activism, only as pure pageantry, big demonstrations and confrontations with the state. Of course, it did include those things. But it was also about putting out chairs and locking the room at the end of the day, and communication: typing things up, sticking posters on walls and getting flyers out to mobilise people.

The experiences of another man, Alex Owolade, highlight the frictions between Brixton’s activists. What was his background?

I felt it was vital to include Alex’s story because it really shows that the Black gay movement has always been a broad church. People have come from such different backgrounds and political persuasions, and yet ultimately have been able achieve political goals together.

Alex’s mother was a nursery teacher who organised against the closures of nurseries, and he was always taught to be on the side of striking workers. By his teens, he was proudly and openly aligned with communist movements, which meant that when he joined the Black gay and lesbian movement he had a very different ideology from many of the other men I spoke to.

People were either really inspired by him or really repelled. This is one of the key ways in which I wanted to show that writing a history of a minority community isn’t just about togetherness, but also about conflicts, differences and frictions.

A key moment of tension within this community surrounded the Black newspaper The Voice, which had been founded in 1982. What happened?

The differences between people within Brixton’s Black gay community really came to the surface in 1990, when Justin Fashanu became the first footballer in the top tiers of the sport to publicly confirm he was gay. The interview he gave to The Sun newspaper that October was a bit of a seismic moment, because Fashanu was a popular Black sports star and an aspirational model for the Black community.

The Voice, a national Black newspaper published weekly at the time, ran an interview with Fashanu’s brother, John [also a famous footballer], in which he said he saw Justin as an outcast, disowning and disgracing him. There were a number of other articles, too, describing how homosexuals were apparently attention-seekers and all sorts of other homophobic drivel.

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Ted Brown and Alex had very different visions of how they should approach The Voice. Ted had set up a group, Black Lesbians and Gays Against Media Homophobia, and wanted to take a diplomatic route to challenging the newspaper: appealing to its advertisers, for instance, and trying to meet with the people in charge to force a right to reply. Alex took a more military approach: he wanted to campaign outside of its offices, be really loud and visible, and even shut the paper down.

Ted, in turn, didn’t want to be seen to be attacking the newspaper, this Black institution, because he knew that – despite the fact it had been homophobic – it was still a valuable resource for Black people. He didn’t want trying to shut it down to be seen by some people as indistinguishable from, say, a racist attack. Meanwhile, Alex’s argument was that it was pushing poison into the community and so wasn’t fit for purpose.

I was really interested to bring out those differences and show that, even within an activist movement with shared goals, different strategies can lead to conflict.

You stress in the book that Black gay men don’t lead solely political lives, and that it’s also important to look at their social and sexual stories – without sanitising them. Which aspects don’t get the attention they deserve?

I think, with queer history, we sometimes shy away from the fact that, ultimately, these people came together because they were sexually attracted to each other. I didn’t want to present a history purely about the activism with none of the sex, none of the desire and none of the pleasure. Omitting the cruising, the cottaging and the sex parties that went on would just have been dishonest.

When I talk about the importance of not sanitising things, I also mean that I didn’t want to skip over the fact that sometimes Black gay men might not be nice people to each other. A key example of that was Marc Thompson’s HIV diagnosis in 1986, at the age of 17. Rather than finding immediate solidarity and community with other Black gay men, he found that people were gossiping about him and revealing his HIV status to other people behind his back.

It’s uncomfortable to realise that these men weren’t necessarily supporting each other, particularly when you consider what the media, the police and politicians were saying about gay men diagnosed as HIV positive at the time. Sometimes community fails us, and we need to hold ourselves accountable for that. The ways in which gay men have treated other HIV-positive gay men has not always been supportive, and for some people, the Black gay community hasn’t always necessarily been a positive thing.

I want to talk a bit more about the social spaces Black gay men set up. How important is it to consider the physical environment?

We’ve talked about the way Brixton is central to this story. One of the reasons is that you can walk down a street and the public toilets you pass were where Black gay men used to have sex with each other, but also meet and become friends. Or, on another street, a house that has been carved up and turned into flats was where fabulous house parties went on. I wanted to show that you can walk through an area and not even realise just how much history is around you.

Black gay house parties were particularly important because they mimicked the spaces in which Black gay men had grown up: the family functions, the barbecues, the parties. They transposed them and gave them a new identity, offering an introduction to this community and a space in which people were really able to express themselves – and, in some cases, have sex for the first time.

The start of this Black gay party scene meant that there was now a demand for nightlife, which began in tiny little sweatbox venues. But those house parties and small early venues proved that there was demand – and as the new out Black generation started feeling happier and safer to enjoy themselves, demand increased until there was an entire Black gay entertainment ecosystem.

At the start, we touched on the fact that these stories don’t tend to exist in traditional, formal archives. Why do you think that is?

There are a couple of reasons. If people don’t see their lives as important to the national story, they’re not necessarily going to be that forthcoming about them. Some of the people I interviewed asked me, what are you interested in this for? If you aren’t used to seeing people like you in history or in the media, then you can’t imagine that someone in 30 or 40 years might be interested in asking about it. You might not necessarily expect, either, that a book on Black gay history might be something people want to read.

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We’ve got to talk about the commercial context: I’ve written a Black gay history book, now, in 2024. Could it have come out in 2014? I don’t think so. But times have changed, and people’s interests have changed too.

Something the men also told me is that they have not necessarily been the best at recording their own lives. That makes sense, because when you go on a night out, for instance, you’re not necessarily thinking, 'I’ll take a photo for history.' You’re just taking a photo with your friends, rather than thinking that in 20 years’ time someone might want it for a digital archive. These men just had less of a sense they were living through history.

You write that the act of researching and writing this book has not only enriched your life but also forever changed your perception of the Black presence in Britain. Why do you think it’s had such an impact?

The men I spoke to were so spirited and so proud to be openly gay, and had such incredible stories to tell. They achieved such amazing things but, strikingly, were so unassuming. They weren’t big public figures – you’re not necessarily going to find them on Wikipedia or even on Google – but that just proves you could be sitting next to an older Black person at a bus stop and have no idea about the amazing things they’ve done or witnessed.

It just shows that there is such a heritage, and such an inheritance, we can take from all Black people, not just Black gay people, and continue to pass it on. But that really depends on us being curious, and open, and willing to learn from them. I felt so inspired by that: even if you’ve gone through the worst and hardest of times, your story doesn’t have to end there.

Jason Okundaye is a London-based journalist and author of Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain (Faber & Faber, 2024)

This interview first appeared in the April 2024 issue of BBC History Magazine