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The UK LGBT History Project records the history and memories of lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people living in the UK. It's a virtual time-capsule, capturing the experiences of our time, and a chronicle of the achievements and challenges of previous centuries – the changing law, the amazing response to health epidemics, the newspapers and magazines that come and go, TV programmes, sports, lesbian, gay, bi and trans businesses, arts, music and theatre, events, pubs and clubs, and of course the amazing diversity of people who have had a part in our history. The project was launched in June 2011. It was re-launched as The UK LGBT Archive in December 2015, but reverted to it's original name a decade later. In 2015 this project became a Key Partner of LGBT History Month. and CHE voted to support it. In February 2016 Ross Burgess read a paper about this site at the LGBT History Month academic conference in Manchester. By early 2021, articles on this Wiki had been viewed twenty million times. They've now exceeded 45 million.

Finding information There are several ways to find information on this site. Note that anywhere you see a word or phrase in blue, you can click on it and be taken to the item in question. If you see words in red, they are links to an article that hasn't been written yet. browse by date: a good place to start browsing this website is Timeline of UK LGBT History; for links to some more specific timelines see Category:Timelines – and for LGBT History Month 2016 we created a new Timeline of UK LGBT Religion, Belief and Philosophy. browse by category: to get an overview of the range of material that we cover, go to Category:Main categories. browse by area of the country: our map on the United Kingdom page gives an overview of our geographical coverage, and our maps of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland give links to places round the country. see our small list of Selected articles. take pot luck: use the Random page link at the left. search for a particular item, using the search box at the top right of the page. Who is writing it? You could be – and we'd love you to join us. The LGBT History Project is written and maintained by volunteers from all walks of life, all ages, and all parts of the UK. You don't need to be an academic, a professional writer, or an expert. You just need to care about LGBT history – and ideally know something about a part of it that isn't well covered yet. What can you write about? Almost anything connected to LGBT life in the UK: pubs, clubs, businesses, venues, newspapers, organisations, campaigns, legal battles, sport, art, music, local history. If you ran a gay club, organised an event, worked for an LGBT charity, or simply remember a time and a place that shaped your life – that knowledge belongs here. We also welcome first-person Vox Pop accounts: your coming-out story, your memory of the first gay bar you visited, what it was like growing up LGBT somewhere that had nothing going on at all. These personal accounts are genuinely valuable – academics call them "qualitative primary sources," but what that really means is: your experience matters, and it should be recorded before it's lost. Getting started To contribute, you'll need to request a free account – this takes just a moment to set up, but it may take us a day or two to approve it, as each one is reviewed to make sure we don't let spam advertisers in. We ask for your real name (kept private unless you choose otherwise), and we ask all contributors to follow our Editorial Policy, Style Guide and Image Rights Policy. If you're new to wiki editing, don't worry – the basics are easy to pick up, and we're here to help. Your first articles may be reviewed by an experienced contributor before they go live, not to put obstacles in your way, but to give you a helping hand and make sure everything looks its best. Once you've found your feet, you'll be able to publish freely. Wherever possible, please note your sources so that others can follow them up – a link, a book title, a newspaper reference. For personal memories, simply noting "personal recollection" is fine. Editors Club We run a monthly Editors Club – an informal one-hour online meeting on the third Wednesday of each month (starting September 2026), 19:00–20:00 (UK time), via Google Meet. It's a friendly space to ask questions, share ideas for new articles, and meet other contributors. Prospective editors are welcome before their account is approved. → Add to Google Calendar Where to start The Articles needed page lists topics we know should exist but don't yet have their own articles. The Stubs category has short articles waiting to be expanded. If you know anything about the Districts with no LGBT history still shown on our map, any help there would be especially welcome. For more about contributing, see LGBT Archive:Writing for this Wiki. Follow us We post stories from the archive every fortnight. Follow us on: @LGBThistoryUK on X @lgbthistoryuk on Instagram UK LGBT History Project on Facebook

Some recent articles Bang Disco (photo courtesy Bob Workman Archive, Bishopsgate Institute) A few of the articles we've added recently: Troll: Troll was a Saturday night at the Soundshaft, the small club behind Heaven at Charing Cross, running from 1988 to 1990. It was the defining gay acid house night of its moment in London – described by those who were there and those who have written about it since as the gay equivalent of Shoom or The Trip – and it shaped a generation of British gay DJs and clubbers. The night was promoted by React (James Horrocks, Thomas Foley, and Steven React) and focused on New York house, Detroit techno, and the harder end of Belgian new beat – music that was reaching London from import record shops and occasional visitors from the American scene, and that the gay dancefloor understood before the mainstream had caught up. DJ writer Bill Brewster has described attending Troll as his "Damascene conversion to house music." Almost every London gay DJ who came to prominence in the 1990s is on record as having started clubbing at Troll. Its two most important resident DJs were Daz Saund and Luke Slater, both of whom built international careers from the foundation of those Saturday nights. Saund went on to become one of the most respected DJs in British house music; Slater became a central figure in techno, releasing on Mute and other significant labels through the 1990s and 2000s. Troll was directly inspired by Shoom – Danny Rampling's foundational acid house night, which had launched in a South London gym in 1987 – and its significance in gay London was analogous: a night that arrived before the culture had a name for what it was doing, drew a crowd who understood it instinctively, and made something that couldn't be replicated once it was gone. A revival night bringing Troll and Shoom together was held around 2013–15; it was covered in the Guardian. See also: Soundshaft, Heaven, Shoom, Trade, Daz Saund, Luke Slater [[Category:West End] Soundshaft: The Soundshaft was a small club attached to Heaven at Charing Cross, with its own entrance on Hungerford Lane behind Craven Street, though it could also be reached directly from Heaven's main space. While Heaven operated as London's largest and most famous gay club through the 1980s and 1990s, the Soundshaft ran as an intimate sister venue where some of the most significant nights in British gay dance culture took place. Its most celebrated tenant was Troll, the Saturday acid house night that ran from 1988 to 1990 and launched the careers of DJs Daz Saund and Luke Slater. Paul Oakenfold ran Future at the Soundshaft on Thursdays, one of the first London nights to champion Balearic and house sounds; at the end of those evenings, the doors connecting the Soundshaft to Heaven's main room were opened and the two crowds merged for the final songs – one of the rituals of that era and a model for how the underground and the mainstream gay scene could briefly become the same thing. Later nights at the Soundshaft included Sherbet and Fahrenheit, a hard house night run by Fevah that operated in the late 1990s and early 2000s, by which time the music policy of the Soundshaft had moved considerably further from the Balearic warmth of its origins. The Soundshaft is now The Stage Bar. See also: Heaven, Troll, Trade, DTPM [[Category:West End] Tony De Vit: Tony De Vit (1957–1998) was a British DJ and record producer who became the defining resident of Trade at Turnmills in Farringdon and is widely regarded as the founding figure of hard house – the relentless, accelerating sound he helped create and that he drove to its peak at the dawn end of Trade's Sunday sessions. He is known in British club culture as the Godfather of Hard House. He has a blue plaque at the Custard Factory in Birmingham – the first ever awarded to a DJ. De Vit was born in Kidderminster in the West Midlands and began DJing in the late 1970s, playing at weddings and working men's clubs before finding his way to the gay venues of the Midlands, most notably Birmingham's Nightingale. He arrived at Heaven in London in 1988 as a resident, just as house music was reshaping what a gay club could sound like. When Trade opened in November 1990, De Vit was among its earliest residents, and the relationship between the DJ and the club became one of the most celebrated in British club history. His sets at Trade in the small hours of Sunday mornings – as the crowd that had been there since 3am entered its final phase and dawn began to show through whatever gaps the blackout didn't cover – became legendary. The music moved faster and harder as the night progressed, and De Vit moved with it. Witnesses described his mixing as transcendent: walls of sound, relentless momentum, a dancefloor that had nowhere left to go except further in. His 1995 Essential Mix for BBC Radio 1 won Listener's Choice. That same year he played a twelve-hour set at Trade. In 1992 he co-founded V2 Recording Studio at the Custard Factory in Birmingham with Simon Parkes, which became the production base for over 100 tracks and eleven UK chart hits between 1994 and 1998. His 1995 single Burning Up reached number 24 in the UK charts. He released on React, Serious, and other labels central to the British hard house scene. De Vit was privately gay throughout his career and kept his personal life largely separate from his public profile. He was diagnosed HIV positive nine months before his death. He died in July 1998, aged 40, in Birmingham, with his partner Andi Buckley at his side. The grief in the Trade community was acute. His death came during the height of the AIDS crisis, in the context of Section 28 and a culture in which gay men's deaths were still treated as peripheral by the mainstream press. Inside the community that had danced to him for eight years, it was anything but. His mentorship legacy was substantial. He discovered Robert Ferguson – later known as Fergie, the Scottish DJ who became a Radio 1 resident and global figure – as a troubled teenager from Larne, Northern Ireland, and guided him into professional DJing. The TDV Academy, established in his memory, provides free DJ training to young people. A documentary about De Vit was released in 2023. A compilation of his work, remixed by contemporary producers, was also released that year. See also: Trade, Heaven, Hard House, Turnmills [[Category:Nightlife] Shoom: Shoom was a London acid house club night founded by Danny Rampling in September 1987, widely credited with launching the British acid house movement and the Second Summer of Love. It was not a gay club, but its origins, its culture, and its influence are inseparable from the history of gay nightlife in London. Rampling had returned from Ibiza in the summer of 1987, where he, Paul Oakenfold, Nicky Holloway, and Johnny Walker had heard DJ Alfredo playing at Amnesia and experienced something that bore no resemblance to what London's clubs were doing. Shoom was the attempt to recreate it. The first party was held at a 300-capacity basement gym at 56–58 Crown House on Southwark Street, South London. Rampling's wife Jenni managed the door. The music was Chicago house, Balearic beat, and the emerging Detroit techno sound, mixed with a warmth and fluidity that hard rave would later lose. Shoom moved venues as it grew – to a YMCA basement on Tottenham Court Road, then to The Park in Kensington, then to Busby's on Charing Cross Road – but its original crowd of perhaps 300 people, who had experienced the first parties before anyone knew what acid house was, remained its defining constituency. The strawberry-scented smoke machine, the smiley-face logo, and the all-enveloping physical experience of the music at Shoom are a fixed point in British cultural history. Primal Scream's Screamadelica is one document of what those nights felt like. Shoom's connection to gay culture ran through the personnel and the dancefloor rather than its identity. Danny Rampling himself was straight, but the world he drew on – Ibiza, house music, the Paradise Garage lineage – was a world built by gay black American musicians and DJs, and the London gay circuit absorbed Shoom's influence immediately. Troll, the gay acid house night at the Soundshaft behind Heaven, was directly inspired by Shoom and opened in 1988 as its queer counterpart. Shoom closed around 1990. Billboard magazine ranked it seventh among the greatest dance clubs of all time in 2005. A 30th anniversary event was held in 2017–18. A combined Shoom and Troll revival night took place around 2013–15; coverage appeared in the Guardian. See also: Troll, Soundshaft, Heaven, Trade [[Category:Nightlife] Laurence Malice: Laurence Malice is a London club promoter, best known as the founder of Trade, the after-hours gay club at Turnmills in Farringdon that ran from 1990 and is widely regarded as one of the greatest club nights in the world. Malice came to Trade through an earlier career in London nightlife that placed him at the centre of gay club culture in the 1980s. He co-created Pyramid, a mixed gay night at Heaven, and was involved with the Thursday night Asylum sessions there – events that were among the first in London to take house music seriously as a gay dancefloor proposition. By the late 1980s, as acid house transformed British nightlife, Malice was already thinking about what came after. Trade opened in November 1990 at Turnmills on Clerkenwell Road, with a 3am start time made possible by the 24-hour licence held by Turnmills' owner John Newman – one of the very few such licences in London. The concept was straightforward and radical: a legal, safe, after-hours space where gay men, and anyone else with the right attitude, could dance until morning. Malice described it as a reaction to the danger of being visibly gay in London at night. "Much safer" in daylight, he said, was the logic. The dancefloor that resulted was anything but safe in any other sense. His philosophy of radical inclusivity – "bankers dancing next to pop stars," people of any background and sexuality absorbed into the same music – distinguished Trade from a narrower gay venue identity. It was always queer-centred without being exclusionary, and that combination proved to be its particular power. The word "Trade" itself was Malice's choice: Polari for a casual sexual encounter, immediately understood by those who needed to understand it and opaque to everyone else. Trade ran for twenty-five years in total, across Turnmills, Ministry of Sound, and other venues, before its final closing party at Egg London in October 2015. Egg, in King's Cross, is also Malice's club, founded around 2003. He has spoken of daytime clubbing as his preferred mode – more honest about what the body needs, he has suggested, than the conventions of the night. See also: Trade, Tony De Vit, Heaven, Turnmills, Egg London [[Category:Nightlife] Jack Saul: Jack Saul (c.1857–c.1904) was an Irish-born male sex worker who became the most celebrated and documented figure in the Victorian trade of male prostitution in London. His name appears in two of the defining scandals of late nineteenth-century queer London – the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 and the Dublin Castle affair – and he is the attributed author of The Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881), one of the earliest and most important documents of gay life in Victorian England. Saul was born in Dublin and had arrived in London by his early twenties, working the streets, bars, and venues of the West End. The London Pavilion on Piccadilly Circus, whose balcony promenade was one of the most active meeting places for men seeking men in Victorian London, was among his regular haunts. The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, or the Recollections of a Mary-Ann was published in 1881, purportedly as Saul's own memoir dictated to the fictional narrator "Mr Cambon." Whether the text is genuinely autobiographical or largely invented by its publisher is disputed, but it describes in explicit and historically specific detail the world of male sex work in 1870s–80s London – the venues, the clients, the prices, the argot, and the social geography of queer Victorian life. It is one of a tiny number of first-person accounts from inside that world, and for that reason alone it is an irreplaceable source. In 1889 Saul was called as a witness in proceedings related to the Cleveland Street Scandal, in which a male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street was discovered to have employed telegraph boys from the Post Office. The scandal implicated a number of aristocrats and raised questions – never fully resolved – about the involvement of Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence. Saul testified frankly about his own activities and those of others, apparently without legal consequence to himself – a pragmatic tolerance that speaks to his usefulness as a witness and the selective nature of Victorian prosecution. He appears in the historical record intermittently after 1889 and died around 1904. See also: Cleveland Street scandal, London Pavilion, Piccadilly Circus [[Category:Victorian London] Trocadero: The Trocadero at Piccadilly Circus has occupied the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Coventry Street since the 1880s, operating successively as a music hall annexe, a grand Edwardian restaurant, a tourist entertainment complex, and a nightlife venue. Its LGBT history runs from the Victorian promenade era through to the final years of DTPM in the 2000s. The original Trocadero Restaurant opened in 1896, built on the site of the former Argyll Rooms. It was a large, fashionable dining establishment that formed part of the social geography of Piccadilly – alongside the Criterion Restaurant to the south, the London Pavilion to the northeast, and the Lilypond further along Coventry Street – that gay men navigated as a connected circuit from at least the early twentieth century. The Trocadero was referenced in Matt Houlbrook's Queer London (2005) as one of the venues in this circuit during the 1950s, when Piccadilly Circus became the centre of queer commercial sociability in the West End. Its proximity to the Dilly – the gathering place for Dilly boys at the Shaftesbury Memorial fountain – made it part of a landscape that required no map for those who needed it. The restaurant closed and the building was redeveloped in the 1980s as an entertainment complex, housing Segaworld and other tourist attractions. In its later incarnation it became a nightlife venue, and served as the final home of DTPM, one of London's most celebrated Sunday club nights. See also: Piccadilly Circus, DTPM, Criterion Restaurant, London Pavilion, Lilypond [[Category:Venues] DTPM: DTPM (Demens Trelirium Post Meridien) was a London club night founded in 1993 by promoter Lee Freeman, running every Sunday and widely regarded as one of the finest gay and polysexual nights the city has produced. The name – mock-Latin for something like "afternoon madness" – reflected its identity as a Sunday tea dance for serious clubbers, many of them arriving directly from Trade, the legendary after-hours night at Turnmills. DTPM billed itself as "polysexual, not gay or straight," and its crowd reflected that: diverse, fashion-conscious, and there for the music. The night launched in April 1993 at Villa Stefano in Holborn, a basement bar-restaurant next to Holborn tube that functioned as a restaurant on weekdays and a club on Sundays. It moved to Bar Rumba in May 1994 and The End in January 1995, before settling at Fabric on Charterhouse Street from 1999, where it ran for eight years. Its final home was the Trocadero on Piccadilly Circus. The resident DJs included Smokin Jo, Alan Thompson, Steve Thomas, Miquel Pellitero, Mark Westhenry, and Oliver Mohns. The music policy – deep and funky, progressing deliberately through the afternoon and into the evening – was central to DTPM's identity at a time when much of London's gay scene was not known for musical seriousness. At its peak DTPM attracted celebrities alongside its loyal regular crowd, and its Sunday sessions became a defining social institution of late 1990s and early 2000s queer London. The description of Sunday afternoon at Villa Stefano in its early days – "the after-hours haunt of the most extreme and flamboyant members of the London gay scene, arriving Sunday lunchtime very much the worse for wear" – gives some sense of the atmosphere it maintained across its venues and its decade-plus run. See also: Trade, Fabric, Trocadero, Piccadilly Circus [[Category:West End] For a full list of recent additions, see New Pages. Did you know? Edward White Benson Edward White Benson (pictured), Archbishop of Canterbury, is thought to have been a repressed homosexual; his wife, his brother-in-law, and five of his children were almost certainly gay or lesbian. Chelsea Manning, American soldier serving 35 years in gaol for leaking military secrets, went to school in Haverfordwest. The poet Lord Byron swam from Europe to Asia in 1810, which is said to have started the sport of open water swimming. The Ladies of Llangollen eloped from their families in 1780 and lived together for the rest of their lives. Sex between men was illegal in the Isle of Man until 1992. The sixth-century King Maelgwn of Gwynedd in North Wales was described as "addicted very much to the detestable vice of sodomy". In 1981 the London Pride march was moved to Huddersfield. Princess Seraphina (c. 1700–unknown) was referred to as "her royal highness" by witnesses at the Old Bailey in 1732 – one of the earliest documented accounts of a gender-nonconforming identity in British history. Roberta Cowell (1918–2011) was a Spitfire pilot and prisoner of war before becoming the first known British person to undergo gender reassignment surgery, in 1951 – two years before the more widely reported case of Christine Jorgensen in Denmark. Alan Turing, who helped break the German Enigma codes at Bletchley Park, was convicted of gross indecency in 1952 and given a choice between prison and chemical castration. He now appears on the £50 note. Chris Smith became the first MP to openly come out as gay when he did so in 1984, while serving as Member for Islington South and Finsbury. Michael Dillon won a rowing blue at Oxford as a woman, then after transitioning won another at Trinity College Dublin on the men's team. When his history became public in 1958 he fled to India and was ordained as a Buddhist monk. Oscar Wilde was prompted to sue the Marquess of Queensberry for libel after receiving a card at his club reading "posing somdomite" – the Marquess's own misspelling. The case collapsed and led directly to Wilde's arrest and conviction in 1895. Coming soon… We are launching our very own mobile app! It’s not a mini wikipedia. It’s a different way for people to engage with LGBT history. It will feature geofenced walking tours. Sites of interest will pop up on your phone (when the app is on) to tell you about your surroundings – or you can take one of the many guided walking tours.

Some other resources

Some sources of information about LGBT history

• Gay History and Literature by Rictor Norton
• A Brief Timeline of LGBT History – Historic Environment Scotland
• Timeline of OurStory – OurStory Scotland
• Queer Scotland
• Hall-Carpenter Archives – HCA – at the LSE
• Lesbian and Gay Newsmedia Archive – LAGNA – at the Bishopsgate Institute
• Manchester LGBT Source Guide
• Gay and Lesbian history at the National Archives
• Outhistory (American)
• Scarlet Collection
• QueerBio.com (see QueerBio.com)

Copyright issues and reuse

All text in this wiki is freely reusable with certain provisos – see LGBT Archive:Copyrights. Some of the images may be subject to copyright restrictions. See LGBT Archive:Illustrations. Please email us if you consider we have infringed your copyright.