Instituting Queer Art in Britain

The institutional embrace of queer art in Britain in the last ten years has been a remarkable volte-face, in contrast to the preceding years of indifference to the gradual loosening of social mores and increasing public acceptance of LGBTQIA+ presence and rights, however partial and contested.The first exhibitions of openly "gay art" in the United Kingdom were held in small community-based and community-facing venues and were directly informed by engagement with consciously left-leaning political groupings, as in Emmanuel Cooper's Art with a Gay Theme (1979) at Late Night Gallery in Earl's Court, which developed out of his work on "gay art" for Gay Left, or Sunil Gupta and Jean Fraser's Same Difference (1986) at Camerawork in Bethnal Green.The institutions supporting such work were politically engaged and committed, inspired by socialist thought and often financially supported by funding from local authorities.Prior to the neoliberal burgeoning of the art world and creative industries in the late 1990s, the hegemonic galleries of the time were indifferent or actively hostile to explicitly and politically identified gay and lesbian work.The 1980s witnessed a consolidation of institutional homophobia in Britain on a broad scale.Writing in 1991, Simon Watney observed that, "as public attitudes gradually change over time, it would appear that there has been a consolidation of prejudice at the level of institutional politics, where the subject of homosexuality can be easily exploited, or else ignored as a supposed electoral 'liability'". 1The mismatch between broad public opinion and institutional conservatism became entrenched for decades and still remains to be fully reckoned with.If 1970s queer culture in Britain could be characterised by the emergence of a public gay and lesbian politics, ushered in through radical Left groups such as the Gay Liberation Front (active in London from 1970 to 1973), the 1980s represented the foreclosure of its promise in many ways.The racialisation of Britain's economic turbulence and social unrest, cuts in public spending, privatisation, increasingly successful attacks on trade unionism under Conservative policy, and the emergence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic all seemed to conspire to turn the dial definitively away from the liberatory promises of the previous decade. 2Yet, despite these straightened circumstances-or because of them-the 1980s also witnessed a groundswell of lesbian and gay activism in Britain, representing both the continuation of activities from the 1970s and the formation of many new grassroots organisations and projects.In the period bookended by Margaret Thatcher's premiership, heterogeneous cultural activity associated with gay and lesbian organising took place in settings such as independent magazines and galleries, community centres and darkrooms, art schools and polytechnics, and spaces of local government and political organising, as well as through informal networks of production and distribution.Collective in spirit and left-aligned, this activity was shaped by simultaneous transformations in policy and funding, and overdetermined by tensions between segregated oppositional political groupings, to include gay, lesbian, anti-racist, and workers' organisations.At the same time an emergent Thatcherite consensus, propagated by the policies of a majority government bolstered by victory in the Falklands War, spread across the decade to pull statutory, civic, and local institutions into its web of fiscal and social conservatism.The introduction of Section 28 into law in 1988 appeared to mark a high point in the resurgence of the New Right, gagging institutions financed by local authority funding from supporting lesbian and gay work.Yet independent cultural production rallied in reaction to it, as it did in light of the scandalously late response of the UK government to HIV/AIDS and the continued police harassment of Black communities, and began to break down barriers between gay, lesbian, and Black artists and collectives.