Brixton Gay Squatters Tell Their Stories

The Brixton Gay Community of the 1970s formed around the UK’s first gay centre and a series of nearby squatted houses.

Between 50 and 60 men lived in these squats for anything from a week to ten years. In oral testimonies many of them describe how their experience shaped their politics, their ideas about sexual identity and community, and their creative lives. The South London Gay Liberation Front, the journal Gay Left and the Brixton Faeries are each linked to the squatting community, which in the mid-1980s was absorbed into the Brixton Co-op.

The houses – and the communal garden that connects them – are still reserved for gay and lesbian tenants: a tangible legacy of the earlier community.

This talk by Dr Matt Cook, Senior Lecturer in History at the School of Continuing Education, Birkbeck, University of London. describes the genesis and contours of the community, and explores the attempt by those involved to live differently.

Squatting In Brixton – the Brixton Gay Community of the 1970s.
Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association
Friday 13 March, 7.30pm
Conway Hall,
Holborn, London
The event is free