The Gateways Club

The Gateways Club, just off Chelsea’s Kings Road in London, was the longest surviving lesbian club of the 20th century, open from 1931 to 1985. It also became the most famous, when it featured in the 1968 Hollywood movie, The Killing of Sister George, where real life club members came out on screen, dancing cheek to cheek in front of millions, before gay liberation ever hit the headlines.

In her book, From the Closet to the Screen - Women at the Gateways Club 1945-85, Jill Gardiner shares the stories of 80 women who went there. They include the author, Maureen Duffy, whose best-selling 1966 novel The Microcosm, immortalised the club, and grew out of interviews with its members; Maggi Hambling, the artist, who arrived on New Year's Eve, dressed as Bonnie, then changed her costume to Clyde at midnight; sociologist Mary McIntosh, who wrote 'The Homosexual Role', and Pat Arrowsmith, the peace campaigner, who listed the Gateways as her club in Who’s Who.

But how did anyone ever find the Gateways in the early days when clubs didn’t advertise and many a young woman grew up thinking she was the only one in the world who felt this way?

It was 1963. I hadn’t identified myself as a lesbian. I persuaded my boyfriend to go to this weird pub in Soho full of drag queens. There was this woman sitting opposite me with her boyfriend. A couple of drinks later, I suddenly found myself asking her if she had ever wanted to go to a queer club. She said, ‘Funnily enough, yeah.’ Our boyfriends looked pretty gob-smacked. The next week, she and I went back to Soho and found the Huntsman in Berwick Street. It was an eye-opener to me, full of people boasting how much they’d nicked that day. At about 3am an axe came through the door. There was some sort of gang conflict going on. It was mayhem, and the police arrived, at which point all the same-sex partners dancing switched to the opposite sex. I found myself dancing with a bloke called Bobby.   -  Marion

Through her visit to the Huntsman, Marion found the Gateways.

That was my introduction to the gay world, and although it was exciting I knew I wasn’t going to meet anyone like me. A lot of the women in the Huntsman said they’d been in children’s homes and were living off the streets. The femmes were often on the game and one of the aspirations of the younger butchy types was to become a pimp.

The Huntsman during the day became an ordinary cafe called the Coffee Pot. After we’d had a big raving session one night, I was still there in the morning, having a pot of coffee when this young woman came in, Sasha, and she knew some of the people I was with. She was gay: I couldn’t believe it. She was setting up her own business as a couturier and had been to a material shop nearby, and she knew some of the people I was with. She had lots of eye make-up and bouffanted dark hair and was dressed very trendily.

Sasha introduced me to the Gateways. I remember Gina [one of the owners] sitting at the bottom of the stairs, in a black dress, and I was impressed that she looked very sophisticated. There was a man in a suit behind the bar, and Greta said, ‘That’s Ted, that’s Gina’s husband’, and I just couldn’t work it out. Smithy [often assumed to be Gina’s lover] was there too, a woman with fair cropped hair, polishing glasses.

I was excited that there must be lots of people like myself around who had ordinary jobs. I was struck by the ordinariness of everybody - they just looked like a cross section of women you would see walking around the streets. I identified as a hippy at the time. I had long hair, jeans and purple boots with Cuban heels: slightly more ‘unisex’ than most people there.

Someone came up to me and said that blonde Archie had sent her over. Archie was  very good-looking but a bit frightening. She’d sent over to find out if I was butch or femme. I said I didn’t know and I got a message back saying, that I ought to make my mind up soon or I might find myself in a bit of trouble.   -  Marion 

© Jill Gardiner

From the Closet to the Screen is available at:

Gay’s the Word bookshop in London (who deliver almost anywhere worldwide)

City Books in Hove   

BFI Shop 

‘Now, I've really come to be myself. I always wished to get to this point, where I could talk about everything.’

This week we're honoured to share Jane Traies' account of how she became involved in collecting stories from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group. Published to celebrate International Women's Day, they sharply illustrate the horrors faced by lesbian and bisexual women escaping persecution - and the difficulties of proving their cases when claiming asylum here. Please buy the book - Free To Be Me - proceeds go towards supporting the work of the LISG.

 ‘FREE TO BE ME’

In the spring of 2017, I received an email from a volunteer with the Lesbian Immigration Support Group in Greater Manchester called Sorrel. She told me they were supporting a Ugandan woman whose claim for asylum on the grounds of her sexual orientation had been rejected by the Home Office, because they did not believe her to be a lesbian. Among the reasons given for not believing her were: that she had been married, that she had been apparently heterosexual until quite late in her life, and that she and her lesbian partner had not lived together. Of course, many older lesbians have such a life story, so I was surprised at what I then took to be simply old-fashioned ignorance on the part of the Home Office (I know now that it was typical of their hostile approach to LGBTQ+ asylum-seekers). 

Clearly, this African grandmother did not fit the Government’s stereotype of what a lesbian ought to look like. Grace, the woman seeking asylum, was working with her solicitor to put together a fresh claim to the Home Office; Sorrel had heard of my life history work with British lesbians born before 1950, and wondered if there were case studies in my previous research that could be used to support Grace’s new claim? Would I be prepared to contribute an ‘expert statement’ about the trauma and difficulty of coming out as an older lesbian? From the brief details of Grace’s story that Sorrel had given me, I could already see that many aspects of her experience were mirrored in the life-stories I had collected in the UK. Of course I would write for her!

Sorrel also told me that Grace was now 71 years old. So Grace and I are the same age. I sat at my computer, thinking about the differences between Grace’s life and mine, and understanding my own privilege in new ways. Whatever difficulties I had faced in the past because of my sexual orientation, they paled into significance beside Grace’s struggles. I am an educated white woman with a good pension, living in a country which now has laws to protect LGBTQ+ people. I’m also fortunate to be able to engage in research work that gives me immense personal satisfaction. The opportunity to use some of that privilege to help someone else was an unlooked-for gift. 

And that was how I came to meet not only Grace, but also some of the other members and volunteers from LISG. We had plenty of time to get to know each other in the months that followed, because Grace’s fresh claim for asylum was also refused in its turn. It was more than another two years before she was finally granted ‘leave to remain’ in the UK. During that period, I learned a good deal about the asylum system in the UK and also about the admirable work of LGBTQ+ asylum support groups up and down the country. Of these, the Lesbian Immigration Support Group in Greater Manchester is one of only two dedicated solely to helping lesbians and bisexual women. 

It seemed to me, as I got to know them, that the work of the group and the lives of its members were exactly the kind of subject that oral history exists to preserve. I tentatively proposed the idea of an oral history of LISG. By this time, I knew several of the group members personally and had met others at Grace’s appeal hearing and at the 2019 lesbian summer festival, LFest. I hoped that these shared experiences had begun to create a context of familiarity and trust between us, that would enable us to work together. 

LISG currently has about 30 members, supported by half a dozen volunteers. Under normal circumstances, there is a LISG meeting once a month. This is a sociable occasion as well as a business meeting and always includes sharing food. Most of the members are in social housing in various outer suburbs of Manchester and many were fairly isolated even before the pandemic, so the monthly meeting is a much-valued gathering. In the first week of January 2020, I attended this meeting for the first time, to talk about the idea of making a book based on the oral histories of some of the women in LISG. I shared my hopes that such a book would do three things: raise awareness of the particular issues faced by lesbian women claiming asylum on the grounds of their sexual orientation; publicise the work of LISG; and, potentially, raise funds to support the group’s work. At the end of the meeting, the group voted in favour of going ahead with the project and ten women said they would be interested in taking part.

I then needed to find a suitable place to carry out the interviews: somewhere sufficiently private, and as cheap as possible since the project was unfunded. A few days’ queer networking on social media led to the offer of free accommodation at the LGBT Foundation in Manchester’s gay village. This very generous gesture was particularly welcome since most of the women were already familiar with the building: it is home to several asylum support and LGBTQ social groups which they had engaged with previously. It also meant that our only immediate expenses would be paying the women’s bus fares into central Manchester. (The subsistence benefit paid to people seeking asylum – the Asylum Support Rate – was slightly raised in 2020 to £39.60 a week, which means that the asylum seeker is surviving on £5.66 a day. At the time of our project, the return fare from the outer suburbs into central Manchester was £6.00.)

In the last week of January, I returned to Manchester and carried out seven interviews. They were emotionally challenging, both for the researcher and for the narrators. Many of the stories were distressing: women told of physical and sexual abuse, rape, forced marriage, mob violence and murder. Many tears were shed during the interviews; sometimes there were gaps in which we had to stop the recorder, make coffee and talk about something completely different. In spite of this, I was struck by the absolute determination of the women to speak out in this setting. Mary, for instance, whose experience had been particularly horrific, wept quietly and continuously throughout her interview. I reminded her at several points that she was free to stop, but she pressed on in spite of the tears running down her cheeks. She explained that not being able to talk about what had happened to her was part of the past she felt she had escaped: ‘Now, I've really come to be myself. I always wished to get to this point, where I could talk about everything.’

By the time of my second trip to Manchester in early March, concern about the spread of the new coronavirus Covid-19 was already widespread. I had planned a third visit two weeks later but by then the whole country was in lockdown and, reluctantly, I had to abandon it. But by then thirteen women had told me their stories and there was enough material for our book.

The pandemic lockdown was stressful for all the group members, many of whom were already struggling with poor mental health and found enforced social isolation very difficult. In June, the much-missed monthly meeting was resurrected via Zoom, and was joyously welcomed. I also realised how important the LISG WhatsApp group became during this time – not only to inform members about practical developments, but also for the flurry of greetings and loving wishes which appeared each day.

On 25 May, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was killed by a white police officer in Minneapolis. The chilling video footage of his last minutes spread rapidly via social media; ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests erupted across the world. Almost all the current members of LISG (and a few of the volunteers) are women of colour; the majority are black. At this terrible time, the members of LISG responded with an outpouring of love and affirmation for each other, sending many messages, including video clips illustrating the beauty and power of black women. The role of our project in making marginalised black voices heard suddenly had a new context. Against this background, I started transcribing and editing the interviews.

Making the book ‘Free To Be Me’ became my ‘lockdown project’. With the help of the wonderful Helen Sandler at Tollington Press, the book was completed in just under a year. It is to be published on International Women’s Day 2021. All profits from this book will go to support the work of LISG. Please buy it, and tell your friends about it. 

(Buying direct from the publisher or the author https://www.tollingtonpress.co.uk/free.html  means that more of the money goes to LISG.)

Waiting for judgement

This week we have a powerful and thought-provoking extract from Free To Be Me: Refugee Stories from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group, edited by Jane Traies. 

The door to the tribunal office in Mosley Street is so quietly anonymous that you wouldn’t notice it unless you had a reason to be there. Before it slides open to admit you, the mirrored glass gives no hint of what’s inside: a small, equally anonymous hallway, where a friendly man politely searches your bag. Thoroughly. Then you need to step through an electronic gate, like the ones you see at airport security. On the other side, a second kindly Mancunian pats you down with equal thoroughness and passes a drug-searching wand over your body, just to be sure. Only then may you take the lift to Reception. 

Reception is a long desk at one end of a large, low waiting-room. All the rest of the space is taken up with seating of that modern kind made for offices: light oak veneer and soft blue fabric, functional, pleasant, neutral. The staff, like their colleagues downstairs, are friendly and courteous: public servants doing their sometimes-difficult jobs in the kindest way they can. At a few minutes after nine, there are already people waiting, even though nothing will happen until at least ten o’clock, and for some of them it will be a much longer wait. They sit in ones and twos, with serious, worried faces. Their tension is infectious. The staff on Reception are white; with one or two exceptions, the anxious people on the chairs are not.

I have arrived early, so I have time to observe all this before the women from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group start to arrive in ones and twos. They bring life and movement into the room. Lesbians and asylum seekers themselves, they have come to support a sister. They hug each other in turn, like the family they have become, and talk animatedly, catching up on each other’s news: who is well or ill, who has a new girlfriend, who has been sent a date for her appeal hearing, who has been granted leave to remain in the UK – or not. We are all here this morning to support Grace, whose final, last-chance hearing is today. She has been fighting for asylum in the UK for thirteen years, and none of us can bear to think about what will happen if she is rejected this final time. Three of us are here to be witnesses in her case; all the rest have come as observers, to offer love and friendship. I do not see such a crowd of sisters anywhere else in the room.

A black man in a very good suit approaches us and introduces himself as Grace’s barrister. I examine the small shock of surprise this gives me: there is clearly a stereotyped ‘pale male’ barrister in my head; and there are still so very few black barristers in England. So, in spite of his expensive suit and his privileged education, this man knows what it’s like to have the odds stacked against you. That feels like a good omen. He beckons the witnesses into a small office where he briskly outlines the case he plans to make and the questions he will ask us. We are all very tense, because we are fighting for our friend’s life. He explains that the Home Office’s Presenting Officer can cross examine us, and might be aggressive. He tells us that the judge who is presiding over our case is not known for his liberal views. I feel sick.

Back in the waiting room, Grace has arrived at last. The women surround the short, stocky figure, trying to reassure her. With her smooth skin and jet-black hair, Grace looks much younger than her years, but she will be 74 in a few months and she has not slept well. It’s no surprise that her asthma is bad today. She sinks down on one of the seats, coughing, groping in her bag for her inhaler. She did not have asthma – or rheumatism in her knees – when she arrived from Uganda; years of struggle in the UK’s hostile climate have taken their toll. 

The room has filled up now. So many people waiting for judgment, watching anxiously as men in suits with files under their arms thread the crowd looking for the people they have been assigned to help. Suddenly our barrister is here again, looking for Grace. He introduces himself to her, putting out his hand. I watch her quick frown of non-comprehension; then her face clears and she smiles up at him. For a second it seems to me that they are holding, as well as shaking, hands.

Then everything happens at once. Grace’s case is called; an usher comes to take her off to the courtroom. The chattering crowd of women follow her out. They will be too many for the public chairs in the courtroom – the system does not expect this level of support. It is quiet when they have gone. The three of us are left, sitting in a row. As witnesses, we cannot join the observers in the public seats, but must wait to be called into court one by one. The tension ratchets up a notch. Our conversation falters into silence.

That was the day that the idea for the book Free To Be Me: refugee tales from the Lesbian Immigration Support Group was born. You can read all of Grace’s story – and a dozen diverse others – in this book, due to be published on 8 March 2021.

Proceeds from the sale of Free To Be Me will go to support the work of the Lesbian Immigration Support Group. 

https://www.tollingtonpress.co.uk/free.html