From the glam-punk of Handbag to the ultra-camp Steve Elgin, award-winning gay music historian Darryl W Bullock picks out deep cuts to play at this year’s Pride celebrations
Fifty years ago this month, a fortnight of gigs, talks and discos to mark the third anniversary of the police raids on New York’s Stonewall Inn culminated – on 1 July 1972 – in the UK’s first Pride march. About 700 LGBTQ+ people ambled from Trafalgar Square to Hyde Park, waving banners and demanding their civil rights. There were no carnival floats, no rainbow-bedecked drag divas, not even a Pride flag, and no music to accompany the protesters either.
But British activists already knew how important music was to this new community. The Gay Liberation Front had been organising discos and dances for 18 months prior to the march, and 1,200 people descended on Kensington town hall shortly before Christmas 1970 for Britain’s first publicly advertised gay disco, filling the place to capacity, with 500 revellers turned away at the door. There were no LGBTQ+ bands, and no artists making records for LGBTQ+ people; at least most of the acts playing those early dances – including David Bowie, Hawkwind and Pink Fairies – were sympathetic to the cause of gay liberation, but the discs being spun were the same ones you would hear in the contemporary singles chart.
