Today marks the very first day of Pride 2022. Well, the official designated month, as nowadays for most of us in the LGBTQ+ community it is something we celebrate every single day of the year.
For each day in June, QUEERGURU will be looking at different aspects of Pride including how very small communities around the globe mark the occasion to how metropolitan cities go overboard with lavish events.
We’ll be looking at how PRIDE affects different communities on the queer spectrum too, as well as looking back at our history. Like today when we discover how Vauxhall in London became one of the city’s most vibrant queer districts.
One of the new trends in 18th Century England was the Pleasure Garden; a dedicated outdoor space for entertainment the most infamous of these was in Vauxhall. Aimed at the wealthy, the aristocratic, and the more prosperous sort of merchant and professional families, Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens were the very best places to see and be seen by the world, arrayed in your most fashionable finery.
Despite these efforts to keep ‘the riff-raff’ of the city outside its elegant gates, Vauxhall had a slightly louche, dubious reputation. Its wooded groves and shady alleyways were the perfect places for a discreet assignation, and the well-dressed prostitute was associated with the garden to the extent that London printshops sold images with titles like The Vauxhall Demi-Rep’, showing beguiling ladies with inexpensive but revealing clothing.
It also attracted a great many ‘molly boys‘ the derogatory term for those men they found effeminate or soft and were so often both drag queens and male prostitutes. Mixing with ‘society’ in the Gardens also carried great risks as ‘lustful contact between two men’ was not only prohibited under the Law but punishable by execution.”
In the humorous light-hearted documentary below Dr, Graham Calvert of ‘Say It Proud’ delves into the history and more salubrious ‘goings on’ at the infamous Pleasure Gardens. He adeptly explains how this little known piece of gay history makes the connection from historic Vauxhall to the modern hub for the gay community that it is today
This is the debut documentary by Ian Simpson an up and coming Brit filmmaker
