‘Weird Fucks’, Trojan Horse/Rainbow Flag, ed. Ian Giles/Paul Clinton, published: VideoClub, UK; HOME, Manchester; Baltic Gateshead; Gasworks, London.

‘Weird Fucks’ was a commissioned essay, for the publication accompanying the national tour of artist Ian Giles new film on the destruction of the Joiners Arms gay bar, and the community campaign to save it. The essay was written not about the film, but in parallel to its themes, examining various queer cultural and intellectual responses to urban gentrification, such as those of novelists Samuel R Delany and Sarah Schulman, and gay leftist thinkers Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem. I then expand into the ironies of safe spaces which exclude the economically marginalised, and the classed nature of queer culture, where displays of gender insubordination are often expressed through knowledge gained through further education. Each of these theoretical and historical topics are occasioned by personal anecdotes on my time at this bar, drawing upon feminist thinker Jane Gallop’s notion of ‘anecdotal theory’, a queer adaptation of ‘the personal is political’.