It opened in April 1985, just two years before the police and pearl-clutching homophobic public decried those into gay S&M sex – or what The Times later labelled a “vicious and perverted sex gang”. Just a year later, Section 28 was in place. And in the very same month Operation Spanner began, Margaret Thatcher had given her now infamous warning of children being taught “that they have an inalienable right to be gay” at the 1987 Conservative Party Conference. The police investigation was launched a year after the British government’s fear-mongering ‘Don’t die of ignorance’ HIV/AIDs campaign – which added to the stigma queer men already faced. It’s no coincidence that this all occurred at a time when homophobia in the UK was reaching an alarming crescendo – despite gay sex being partially decriminalised some 20 years earlier. From 1987 to 1990, several police forces – led by the Metropolitan Police – questioned around 100 gay and bisexual men, named 43 individuals in an official report, and jailed 16. It resulted in 16 men being prosecuted for having completely consensual, kinky gay sex, in private. Operation Spanner was a British police investigation into gay sadomasochistic sex in the late 1980s. For example, how many of us are familiar with Operation Spanner? One of the fallouts of this disconnect with our own queer histories is ignorance of the historic scenes and spaces which formed significant sites of both homophobic oppression, and gay struggle. In a way, each generation of queers starts anew, groping towards each other in the dark, slowly building networks of commonality, care and organising. Most of us don’t grow up with queer parents who pass on their stories, experiences and wisdom.
(PinkNews)Īs a community we can have a short memory – we live in a world structured through cisheteropatriarchy which makes forging links and sharing knowledge with queers across generational lines complicated. The most apparent being a huge disconnect with our own queer, kinky histories. While The Backstreet has not yet clarified the reason for closure, I can’t help but feel the looming termination of this nearly 40-year-old cruising ground is symbolic of larger forces at play in the LGBTQ+ community.