Recording Black British history often feels like a rescue effort and a race against time. There is a very real risk that if you don’t preserve certain events and memories, then they might be lost for ever. I think this is true of the histories of all people who have lived within the crowded margins of society. Living under a state that has historically deemed “other” people’s lives to be of little significance means that its institutions – whether art galleries, archives, libraries, museums or universities – may deny them a space in the public record, leaving them in danger of being forgotten.
This institutional lack of interest means that much Black British history is contained within people’s private spaces: photo albums, VHS tapes, pamphlets gathering dust in an elder person’s attic, or memories of events, people and a different time. These materials disintegrate, are lost between homes or are unadaptable to modern technologies. A Black person in this country may have witnessed and participated in astonishing events or lively subcultures, but the memory and recollection of these will falter and eventually die with them. And so those of us who work to recover the stories and memories of our elders are as much emergency workers as we are historians and researchers.
The 1967 decriminalisation of gay sex meant that men could be together in private, but they still needed places to meet in public. I wanted to uncover the cultural and social histories of Black gay men; where they danced and partied, and how they met one another before the age of mass digital communication.
One of the most essential figures for understanding this social history of the scene for Black gay men is Calvin Dawkins: DJ Biggy C to his fans, Biggy to his friends. I learned that he’s also referred to by his friends as the “Kofi Annan” of the scene; someone who at one stage extended diplomatic relations between different factions and was able to smooth over tensions, and who, to this day, boasts an encyclopaedic knowledge of nearly every Black gay person there ever was in London.
When I met Biggy in Brixton, south London, in 2021, he told me the story of his life, from troubled teenage runaway to international superstar DJ, illustrated with colourful old flyers and posters he’d kept hold of from nights he DJed at, such as Caribana, Big Tings and Bootylicious. His friend Marc Thompson describes Biggy as “playing the soundtrack to Black gay life back in those days”, and certainly the contribution of DJs and music makers in the construction of queer space and community is something that too often goes unsung.
Too often, DJs and entertainers are accorded secondary importance in recounting a queer history that favours an activist narrative of grand political demonstrations, protests and clashes with the state. But Black gay men do not lead solely political existences – where there have been causes and struggles, there have also been promises of good times, good sex and good company. The altar of nightlife has for decades provided faith that good times and dances might last for ever, that hostility from outside need not lead to the end of life.
* * *
Dawkins has had the nickname Biggy since childhood; he reached 6ft 4in by his early teens. Like with all gentle giants, you feel safe in his presence. I’ve also heard Biggy play. He’s a regular fixture of Black queer nightlife – having been in the game for more than 40 years, his mixes have seen through successive generations of clubbers from the 80s hits of Salt-N-Pepa to contemporary Afroswing.
Biggy was born in Wembley, north-west London, in 1966. He felt unlike other Black boys, both at school and at home, growing up with his three brothers, “butch boys” who were into football. At school he hung around white guys: Trojan skinheads who shared his appreciation for Black music, rather than white-power skinheads. He was into bluebeat, ska and two-tone, and with this early crowd he would go around wearing Levi Sta-Prest trousers, steel-toe boots and flight jackets. It caused tensions at home, which would eventually come to a head.
“I kept on running away from home. When I just turned 16, I was away from the house for about a week,” Biggy told me. “And when I got back, my dad, who I found out years later wasn’t really my dad, just went crazy and started to fight me. And I remember punching him in his face and just running out of the house. I went and stayed with some friends. And maybe about a week later, after speaking to my mum on the phone, she packed a suitcase for me, gave me £50 and off I went into the world.”
After Biggy had spent some time living with friends, his science teacher took pity and invited Biggy into his home. The teacher was a white gay man. “He didn’t come on to me, but I knew he was gay from things I found in his house, magazines and stuff.” The teacher lived with a Black man named Paul, who Biggy says was around his age at the time. Paul asked Biggy if he’d like to go to a club. “At the club I met another Black guy called Kenny, who I later found out they used to call Miss Barbados.”
Biggy had no money and couldn’t sign on to the dole as he wasn’t yet 18. He depended on the kindness of whoever would look after him. Kenny took him in for a few weeks until they learned of a room opening in a flat on the North Peckham Estate. This turned out to be the flat of a man called Richard Lindsay.
Biggy and Kenny both moved into Lindsay’s flat in December 1982. Kenny later took Biggy to a party in north London. It was his first house party and he was a debutante on the scene. He attracted the attention of many boys – he was tall, slim and had a perm.
Of all the new faces at this house party, the most important encounter would be with a man he still describes as his “father”, Patrick Liverpool. When Liverpool found out that Biggy had been living in Lindsay’s flat, he instantly protested in his booming Trinidadian voice: “No! You’re not living there. Nope, you’re coming with me!”
In the archive of the Voice, Britain’s foremost Black newspaper, there are two articles that provide clarity on this. The first is a 1988 story about an “organised rent-boy network”: “Black boys as young as 14 were lured into a sordid male prostitution racket with promises of easy money, an Old Bailey jury heard last week.”
Sure enough, the agency was said to be run by Lindsay, and it operated out of the North Peckham Estate, under the name Babe: Black and Beautiful Escorts. As the prosecutor, Lionel Lassman, said: “The rewards are substantial and the pickings are rich for the men who live parasitically and criminally off prostitution.” The second, dated 24 May 1988, is one of the most remarkable headlines I’ve ever seen: “Evil gay sex boss jailed”. It’s paired with an image of Lindsay dressed in designer sunglasses, a leather jacket and print trousers.
Intergenerational social connections on the basis of shared identity could either provide a lifeline, or expose young people to danger. These young boys will have likely approached the older man with a need for security, shelter and money, and in turn were exploited. Being protected from predatory figures would depend on luck – meeting someone with good intentions, or hearing enough gossip about someone to avoid them.
* * *
Young gay Black boys alienated from their families were often vulnerable and searching for community, and when they found it they were offered a new kind of kinship. For Biggy, who was welcomed into Liverpool’s fold, he found a home of cross-generational living based on love, support and acceptance.
Liverpool wasn’t just a father to Biggy. He was a paternal figure on the Black gay scene in Brixton, perhaps even across England – Black gay men from all over would, one way or another, find themselves at his house.
Born in Trinidad in 1935, he was a Windrush generation migrant who settled in Huddersfield, WestYorkshire, but, after coming out as a gay man, he left the north for south London in pursuit of an openly gay lifestyle. Biggy said: “He was always there when you needed a meal, somewhere safe to rest your head, or somewhere to bring your trade. He welcomed all into his world and I can say he was a true life-saver for me. He took me under his wing and became my father.”
Liverpool’s house was not only safe, it was also a playground for fun, creativity and feminine dressing. “There was a time when he’d have drag contests in his house,” Biggy said. Sundays were the main social day. “There’d be loads of people who just came to the house and chilled and ate and hung out and what not,” and parties would take place in the evening. These house parties were blues parties, a kind of function created and popularised by West Indian migrants in the 1950s and 60s, who created these spaces to hear their favourite music away from the racist door policies of West End clubs.
Biggy began to lead music at these functions, playing reggae and soca to a house full of Black gay men. He remembers just how intimate and free the environment was: “Back then, you know, people used to hold each other. People used to ask each other to dance. You’d see someone in the corner and be like, ‘You wanna dance?’, dance with them, get a drink, maybe talk or maybe just move on to the next person. You could dance with the whole house. Everybody’s just so standoffish these days, you don’t see that any more.” One thing that’s particularly striking about Biggy’s recollection is the intergenerational aspects of these parties. “You had chickens and you had fowls. Back then I was chicken. Now I’d be considered an old fowl.”
* * *
The Black gay nightlife scene took Biggy and his friends into the West End. In the early 80s there were only a few Black gay nights, and most of them would be accessed through white promoters who specifically sought Black gay men to attend. Stallions was, for a time, the sole West End venue for Black gay men.
Though grateful for these nightclub spaces, Biggy soon realised they weren’t playing the kind of music that he had grown up on – the clubs didn’t yet feel like home. Throughout the late 80s, Black gay nightclubs in Britain replicated the sounds of African American gay house DJs in New York and Chicago. That kind of pulsing dance music – while possessing its own transnational cultural significance for Black gay men and still enjoyed by many dancers – did not speak directly to the cultural heritage of Black British gay men, most of them first or second-generation migrants. At house parties, Biggy would play old reggae music, lovers’ rock and Studio One classics, and sought to curate spaces where other Black gay men could regularly hear these sounds.
He began these operations around 1988. He didn’t acquire the licence to any new nightclub – that would be difficult and expensive – instead, he used a host of abandoned buildings across Brixton. “Back in those days, you could just find an empty flat, an apartment or even an old house and just kick off the door. You could rig up the electricity, thief a fuse from somebody else’s house or whatever, and push it in the slot and you’d have lights, everything … There was an off-licence just on Effra Parade and there was this Black guy, Lloydy, and he would just give me £500 worth of drinks, and whatever I sold I’d just pay him for and return everything that I didn’t use, so I had that kind of setup with him. I’d mostly use abandoned buildings. And I had this thing, ‘Biggy and the Church Sisters’, this group of women – they’d come in and cook for me, and do all the food and bar and all of that stuff.”
Biggy also recalls a white British Rasta man with dreadlocks, Mikey, who would supply him with a soundystem for his parties. “I used to get him with a lorry to come and unload and set up for me and all that stuff.”
Hosting or attending an openly queer party or rave in those days was not without risk. Biggy remembers with cinematic clarity a brush with death at a party in Hackney, east London. I was curious to learn that this party was part of a culture of “BMW” parties – “black meets white” – which were intentionally interracial. At one party, a number of straight boys blithely entered the house. “And at first … they didn’t realise it was a gay party. And then the penny started to drop, you could see it. About half an hour after the guys left, we started hearing glass smashing and what not. They were throwing bricks.”
It transpired that across the road from the BMW party there had been a “straight party” going on, and the guys who had accidentally stumbled into the BMW party had gone over and told them what was going on. “And they all came out and just got bricks and started smashing all the windows of the house.” While everybody in the front room ran to the back of the house, Biggy and three of his friends chose heroism. “We decided that we’re gonna be the ones to stop this, so we all ran outside on them and just start fighting in the street.”
Fighting in the dark, Biggy was grabbed by one man: “He pushed me up against a car and I was punching him and punching him and I just felt something like he punched me in my side, and somebody was screaming, ‘Biggy, you’re bleeding! You’re bleeding!’ I saw blood on the side of my shirt. They drove me down to some hospital that was nearby. I was lucky, it didn’t really penetrate.”
* * *
Biggy’s first big break with DJing came in 1989 at the superclub Heaven in London’s Charing Cross, at a night held on the venue’s upper floor called Fruit Machine. The night was not catered towards Black gay men specifically, but to those with a taste for Black music. Nonetheless, it became one of the biggest platforms for Biggy’s career and he transformed the music offering at the venue.
Heaven has been a definitive space for gay culture, full of burlesque dancing, popper-sniffing and Castro clones, a descendant of the greaser subculture of the 1950s. And, among this, Biggy. “It was mostly soul and disco and a bit of pop, but I always had my section where I played some reggae, because you never heard reggae in Heaven.”
Throughout the 1980s and 90s, many new venues and events began to appear – BADs, Jungle, Traffic, and others – that were populated by Black gay men. But these events were often set up by white men. I asked Biggy why he thinks this was so often the case. “I mean … well, first and foremost, I guess because they were attracted to Black guys, but it was also a money-making thing. I could see that. They made money off of us, and they still do.” Thompson takes a similar line, but also notes that the use of white promoters and night runners was often strategic: “If you were going out, you were going to the West End. So to get a space there, which you are going to say is Black and is gay and is run by Black people and gonna have Black DJs, you need a white man to front it. Because the people who owned those venues were going to be racist.”
The notion of “for us, by us” – of Black ownership of entertainment spaces that weren’t taking place only in abandoned buildings – started to develop in the early 90s. Key to this development was the formation of an entertainment collective called the Black Experience. This was a group of Black gay men who had formed a network in north London, meeting around cruising spots in Finsbury Park. Like the blues parties of south London, they would occupy abandoned buildings for dancing and music, but they would go on to more formally establish themselves after an experience at Gay Pride in Kennington Park, 1991. I learned this story from a man named Lloyd Young, the only active member of the Black Experience that I could find to speak to.
In the 80s and 90s, Pride had been a long march through central London, which would then assemble at one of the capital’s main parks with a festival-like setup. Young told me that two of his friends, Eddie and Tony, had arrived at Kennington Park with speakers and a ghetto blaster. They played music like Janet Jackson, SWV and 112 – Black music, but unlike the hi-NRG music that was often heard throughout the rest of Pride. While playing this music, this zone of Black men was confronted by white attenders who said things like, “You don’t look gay,” and, “Do you know what’s happening here?” Young said: “Next thing you know, the bobbies come walking over. ‘Excuse me, mate. You can’t play that kind of music here, this is not the place for that.’”
After that unpleasantness at Kennington Park, Tony had resolved to approach Lambeth council about the lack of Black space at Pride. “He found out about their next committee meeting,” Young continues, “and was instrumental in infiltrating it. They refused to hear who we were, at first. We had to go into the chambers, or upstairs to a balcony and protest. Eventually we were heard, and the council said: ‘OK, at next year’s Pride, we’ll give you a space.’ After that we used to bring the Black Experience to Pride every year.”
* * *
For Black gay DJs like Biggy, there was a growing desire and impetus to take control of the spaces they were playing at, so that they could avoid lining the pockets of white promoters while simultaneously being undervalued by them. Biggy tells me about being disheartened viewing flyers of Fruit Machine and finding that his name would rarely be featured on them, collapsed into the “and others” postscript next to the capitalised names of white DJs. Having DJs at many white-owned and -operated nights such as this, being held accountable to the owners’ standards and desires, Biggy wanted the opportunity to control an event space that didn’t require him to kick down the doors of an abandoned house. “I wanted things my way,” he said.
The opportunity presented itself in 1997 at Marlowe’s, a nightclub in New Cross. The manager had offered Biggy the opportunity to take on a legitimate licence for club nights. Biggy became a nightlife architect, and began his Saturday-night fixture, Big Tings.
At its peak, Big Tings would see 500-600 clubbers, predominantly Black gays and lesbians. We were sitting talking in Biggy’s home, and he ran up the stairs, returning carrying a large shoebox. “I’ve got flyers for every club night I’ve ever DJed at in here,” he says, emptying the box and sending rave flyers scattering across the floor. He rummaged through them until he found a flyer that read “BIG TINGS @ Marlowe’s” and handed it over; on the reverse was the caption “XMAS AH COME!!” This was the first Big Tings, held on 13 December 1997 and featuring a dancehall queen competition, with a first prize of 2,500 Jamaican dollars (about £40).
Nightclubs, music, blues parties and abandoned buildings are the scaffolding of the scene – what completes it is the people and community, the names and faces and friends and feuds. But among the brotherhood that blossomed and the tensions that bubbled, a ghostly atmosphere was developing.
There was a silent acknowledgment that gay men were disappearing from public life, with whispers and rumours about the latest retreat. Biggy recalls seeing young men turn up to the club with visible purple patches and lesions on their skin from Kaposi’s sarcoma, one of the main cancers that would affect people with HIV. People didn’t really know what it was; there wasn’t the medical knowlege to understand what was going on. Black gay men were haunted by mystery illnesses. Tragedy would run riot. So many of these losses were due to HIV and Aids, but there were other spectres. Things happen to Black men in Britain that drive them to substance abuse, or into unsafe environments. Some succumb to illness, some take their own lives. Among all this misfortune, Biggy says that he became particularly fixated on the millennium. “I didn’t think I would reach it, to be honest, I always thought I would die by then.” Around him, around all these men, was so much loss and death.
Months after we met, Biggy messaged me to let me know he had retrieved a photo album that had been lost for more than a decade. We met again in Brixton to pore over photographs of him, Patrick Liverpool and the boys who would pass through his house, whether to live or to party. Flicking through, he would often interject with commentary. Some of it was putting faces to names – a photograph of Ronald, or “Miss Jamaica” in Brixton’s Windrush Square; some of it historical, pointing out men congregated outside the Prince of Wales pub, which is now a KFC; some of it heartwarming, like the successive series of photos of one boy, his muse, who at the time was the love of Biggy’s life; and some of it just shocking, with at least two of the men casually photographed in the album now imprisoned for murder. We went through this album with equal parts joy and sadness, but overriding this was the accomplished sense of a rich and varied life that contained many characters and, above all, a strong sense of community.
This is an edited extract from Revolutionary Acts: Love & Brotherhood in Black Gay Britain by Jason Okundaye, published by Faber on 7 March and available at guardianbookshop.co.uk
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