Esquire Clubs
Esquire Clubs was a venture promoted in 1967 by Allan Horsfall, Ray Gosling and others, with the aim of setting up a series of clubs for gay men, along the lines on COC in the Netherlands. It was envisaged the clubs would provide food and drink, dancing and entertainment, cutural activities, and a counselling service. The clubs, unlike the comercial clubs with already existed in a number of places, would be "not owned by any proprietor or organisation, but belonging to the members themselves and modelled on much the same lines as the Working Men's Club and Institute Union."[1]
An advert was placed in Private Eye and a number of dubscribers recruited. However the idea was controversial among the gay community, and the Homosexual Law Reform Society didnot support it.
Various venues were proposed in Bolton, and other towns, and at one time the established Rockingham Club, Manchester was to be taken over as an Eqauire Club, but this came to nothing. CHE (then still the Committee for Homosexual Equality, held a public meeting in Burley about a proposed club, which revealed considerable local oppostion to the idea. In the end no clubs were set up, although a club on rather similar lines, but with no connection to Esquire Clubs had been set up in Shardlow in 1970.[2]
