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.[1]
In 2015 this project became a Key Partner of LGBT History Month.[2] and CHE voted to support it.[3] 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 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.
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.
Bang Disco (photo courtesy Bob Workman Archive, Bishopsgate Institute) A few of the articles we've added recently:
Frock Magazine: Frock Magazine (styled Frock) was a British digital magazine aimed at the transgender and drag communities. First published in June 2009 by The Gender Society and edited by Katie Glover, it ran for around eight years, until mid-2017, publishing more than forty issues.[4]
The Communards: The Communards were a British pop duo, active from 1985 to 1988, made up of the singer Jimmy Somerville and the multi-instrumentalist Richard Coles. Both were openly gay, and the group combined chart success – including the biggest-selling UK single of 1986 – with an overtly political, socialist and gay-rights sensibility. They took their name from the Communards, the revolutionaries of the 1871 Paris Commune.[5]
Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners: Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) was a British campaigning group formed in London in 1984 to raise money and organise support for mining communities during the UK miners' strike (1984–1985). Co-founded by the activists Mark Ashton and Mike Jackson, it twinned with mining families in the Dulais Valley of the South Wales Coalfield, and became one of the best-known examples of solidarity between the LGBT community and the wider labour movement.
Michael Trestrail: Commander Michael Trestrail was a senior Metropolitan Police officer who served for sixteen years as the personal police officer – effectively the bodyguard – to Queen Elizabeth II. In July 1982 he resigned after it emerged that he had had a long-standing relationship with a male sex worker. The disclosure was made public in the House of Commons by the Home Secretary, William Whitelaw, and was widely reported. A subsequent official inquiry cleared Trestrail of any breach of security, but concluded that the risks he had taken made it impossible for him to remain in his post.
The case is often discussed alongside the earlier John Vassall affair as an illustration of how, in the decades after the partial decriminalisation of homosexuality, gay men in sensitive public roles remained vulnerable to exposure and blackmail.
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]
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".
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.
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.
