Ahead of a one-off return, the founders of the pioneering Brixton lesbian night recall how they protected their clientele and why a new generation needs to ‘party with their auntie’
On a February morning in Brixton, old friends Yvonne Taylor and Eddie Lockhart are laughing about their first forays into London’s lesbian nightlife – and how they eventually went on to transform it. In 1984, Taylor moved from Nottingham to London and found the women-only clubs to be “torture”.
“There was a real concentration of women’s bars in Islington,” she recalls. “Islington had a lot of derelict properties and so there were a lot of lesbian community homes set up in them, and as a result there was a surge, certainly from the 70s, of these lesbians’ bars. But they were bars directed to white lesbians and touristy lesbians from the ’burbs.”
