A young man moves from middle England to London to exact his queer identity, as before unexplored and left unexpressed. From his job behind the bar of an underground gay sex club in Soho, he observes the unrelenting promiscuity of the circuit, and a dissolution of the conventions of propriety upheld by the world above. As told to Tom Sale by an honest, anonymous source.
“I come from a town a two-hour drive to the north-east of the London metropolis. The two places are wildly different.
My hometown, in my view as a 24-year-old gay man with a wealth of intimate experience with those of the same persuasion, is incredibly straight. It’s the same no matter where you go; bland sports bars are ubiquitous and uninventive clubs are complacent with their playlists of soulless chart-toppers. Men in tight jeans with sleeve tattoos and skin-fade haircuts brandish white-wine spritzers at the nearest women with filler in their lips and a nice top. I could go tonight and it’d be the exact same experience I had there when I started clubbing six or seven years ago. The queer community was non-existent in my homestead in middle England, so I escaped to the capital when I was 22. I wanted to be somewhere where my differences did not make me a conspicuous target for ridicule, which was often the case for those in the queer community back home.
It always felt weird to me that a place so close to my home could be so different. London is not like the rest of the country. All it took for me was a two-hour train ride to land in its vibrant cultural epicentre, its party landscape of illegal raves in dangerous disused buildings, artists questioning their understanding of the world and expressing their disdain for it through their work, and a population made of those from every country and culture in the world.
I had two years of settling in and finding myself before getting the job at that bar in Soho. By then, I had become confident and established in my queerness, strong in stomach and well-acquainted with a thirst for adventure. Every day, I clock in and brace myself, donned in a uniform of skimpy, strappy black leather, with my flesh dripping in enough chunky piercings to pick up a radio signal. This job is not for everyone.
The bar, and the club space it’s nestled in, is drenched in sleazy hot-pink-coloured light. Low ceilings and backlit upholstery tucks everyone in. There is not much room to spread out, so the patrons turn to each other and exchange prolonged, wet kisses and invasive grapplings of their partners’ bodies, hours before any mention of a name. Publicly displayed penetrative intercourse always follows. The bar I am grateful for as a barrier from the mess of writhing intimacies I see before me is smaller than you would think, and not really an essential part of the club. I see myself less as a bartender and more as a mediator, a keeper of peace and caretaker of the space to safeguard the visitors against themselves should their energetic, sticky fumbles get out of hand (as they often do).
There is nothing more honest than nicknaming yourself ‘toilet’.
As you can imagine, the smell is a potent cocktail mix of old leather, alcohol, sperm and other bodily fluids. The club is always hot, the jungle-drum soundtrack of repetitive beats against a camp and flamboyant melody intoxicating. These men have no inhibitions; they are not at home, yet they are allowed to engage in the most private of acts in front of a crowd of enthusiastic, voyeuristic perverts. They are enraptured, liberated, penetrated and abused by strangers, all by their own request. The only strict rule governing the patrons of the club is that consent comes before anything they do; the rest of the decision-making is up to them.
For me, this rich tapestry reveals a human addiction to hedonism and its pursuit. Queer sex, although thankfully legal for decades, still exists and is only practised in its fullest extent underground, away from the eyes of the world. On the face of it (and judging by what I see in this club as I cower behind the bar), that seems like a good thing. Anal fisting and scat play are shocking and graphic, but there’s a whole culture hidden from the world above – a world that keeps this one on the fringe, incompatible in its deviance and marginalised in philosophy. While queer visibility is on the rise, the radicalism of what it means to be queer becomes white-washed. Gay marriage and adoption, in my opinion, don’t represent equality but assimilation. The nuclear family structure as a neat unit of social organisation appropriated by many gay couples as rite does not reflect the senseless polygamy, sexual anonymity and flagrant disregard for conventions of the male/female binary I see in front of me. I want to see more space and the comfort of normality afforded to these individuals, rather than watching them adapt to tradition in a bid for acceptance.
This perspective is most impressive for someone who, while working, came face to face with a man getting fucked doggy-style while mopping up someone else’s sperm. Yet I’ve learned to tell the difference between what is real about human desire and what is taught to us: there is nothing more honest than nicknaming yourself ‘toilet’, walking naked around a public place and letting someone shit on you in front of an audience, that’s for sure.”
