Queer antipathy prompted an explosion of DIY bonhomie

For those who recall the specifics of it, London’s summer of 1995 looked like we had hit peak gay hedonism. Even the Pride event that year found its rave side, as the familiar Trade nightclub logo hovered over a tent in Victoria Park. The political climate demanded it. If we weren’t going to be recognised in statute, then perhaps the LGBT+ community could prompt a positive glance elsewhere? A brief scene-setting. Pride during the 1990s was the last blast of the annual gay march as protest. It carried the scent of the amateur. The decade began with 19,000 people coalescing on Victoria Embankment. By 1999, a year that galvanised queer politics due to the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub, we had topped one million participants. Corporations had started to notice and wanted in on it.Rainbow pride flag waving in the air during an LGBT public event in Piccadilly Circus, LondonGetty ImagesThere was plenty to protest. In 1995, it was still illegal for lesbians and gays to serve in the armed forces, or to adopt a child. Our fight for legal equivalence had come stuttering to a standstill when the age of consent inched down from 21 to 18, meaning we were still, ludicrously, expected to wait two years longer to have sex than our brothers and sisters. Further obstacles abounded, like Section 28, which outlawed the “promotion of homosexuality” in schools. The legalisation of gay marriage was a generation away, meaning betrothal was something gay people did only when they were in the closet. The gay happily-ever-after had only just been introduced to the cinema by way of Jonathan Harvey’s wonderfully evocative love story, Beautiful Thing, filmed on the banks of the Thames. Our most propulsive TV character, Warren in This Life, was beaten up, arrested for cottaging and mostly filmed solo in therapy. No surprises there. HIV/Aids still had another year to go before losing its status as an assumed death sentence, with the advent of combination therapies. The grip of 1980s morality, a particularly brutal decade for queer people, was only just beginning to show signs of loosening.London’s summer of 1995 looked like we had hit peak gay hedonismDespite the sociological temperature — scrap that, almost certainly because of it — we still knew how to throw a party like few others. Gay ownership of the night bristled with mischief, illegality, cut-throat glamour. The British clubs of the 1990s were the envy of the planet, spanning the acid house hangovers at Heaven, the cosmic elegance of Queer Nation and the handsy free-for-all at The London Apprentice. Aware of this one gloriously delinquent, defiant asset in the gay social suit of armour, Gay Pride upped its rave valve for summer 1995, ending with a pill-soaked party in Victoria Park. A tent housed some of this explosive energy, pairing the Ministry of Sound with Trade and DTPM, reverberating with the energy of floodlit house music, woozily disinhibiting stimulants and the customary surfeit of white denim. Read MorePride had stopped looking like something devised at a community meeting in a civic hall. It retained the heat of the political tension of the moment, then defused it with hands-in-the air defiance. The idea that banks and supermarkets might one day buy into this corporeal explosion of bodily resistance, pulsing to the rhythm of the night, seemed simultaneously unthinkable yet somehow inevitable. The problem with inequality is that sooner or later it gets boring, costly and irrational for everybody. The bacchanalian excesses going on at Clerkenwell nightclub Trade, which opened its doors at the ungodly hour of 3am on Sunday then partied hard and fast into the afternoon, bequeathed a sort of trashed Olympian flavour to the idea of the London gay nightclub during the decade.In one corner, christened Muscle Alley, men decked in no more than their Calvin Kleins and a pair of sodden adidas Sambas lost their shit to a demented strain of sped-up northern European techno dubbed Nu-NRG. This excess briefly spilled over into Pride, reimagining Britishness as something uninhibited, free, shedding the skin of all that 1980s costume and repression. This was the countercultural and pop cultural fightback against inequality at its most extreme, disquieting and, yes, fun. When we talk about the gay 1990s now, when we remember the idea of Pride itself, there is so much to recall with dewy-eyed nostalgia. But also, so much malevolence and personal antipathy that prompted these glorious explosions of DIY bonhomie, that lent the shallows of radical leisure-time their timely depth. The gay experience, pre-internet, had centred on the night. Our daytime conversations were weighted with a strange abstract heaviness. Gayness was not just about where you socialised and who you slept with. It wrapped itself up into wider questions of who you were, where you might go on holiday, which doctor you made an appointment with, what you did for a job, which landlord you might trust. This was the countercultural and pop cultural fightback against inequality at its most extreme, disquieting and, yes, funEvery rung on the ladder to rudimentary living was trip-wired with guesswork as to who and what found you acceptable. Just being was an act of political defiance. And we wonder why those celebrations, played out on our own terms, sparkled?That was what Pride meant back then. To explain to the world, while marching up prestigious London streets handed over to us for one day a year, that our experiences were worth rethinking, your laws were worth repealing and that, well, our parties might just be the best. Life itself for queer people back then was doused in prejudice and tenacity. That we responded to the bitterness with so much sweet remains to our eternal, prideful credit.