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