I Was a Lesbian Club Promoter in 90s Soho

Welcoming me were the bright neon lights of sex cinemas, the allure of velvet-roped entrances to strip clubs and brothels, the shadows in dark alleys having sex in broad daylight, all tinged with the rich smells wafting from restaurants and the sharp scent of urine that prevailed throughout the day. God, I even miss that. 

It was the early 90s, and for a young lesbian woman like me, Soho was a dream. Back then, Soho was a gritty, dense and strangely fascinating place, almost like its own alcove protected from the rest of London. If I shut my eyes, I can still remember the spanking of the sex workers’ paddles on the bare buttocks of rich businessmen in suits from behind tasselled entrances – so loud you could hear them if you happened to walk down the street at the right time. 

I started promoting clubs in the early 90s. There was no social media back then, so it was up to me to design the night's concept and target audience. At the time – and still now – Soho was very gay, and identifying your target audience was key. Mine was queer women. 

Finding a venue was the next step; most of the places were run by cis white men, so there were no women spaces, really. Since the dawn of time, queer women have been at the bottom of the food chain. It was, and is, still very much a man’s world, but I wanted to create a space for my friends and me. I decided that basically, the only people that wouldn’t be welcome at my events would be cis white men. 

I would be given the worst nights – Monday to Wednesday – and finding DJs and music was another challenge. The music scene was very white and male-dominated, with techno being the norm. Soho, pretty much like the rest of the world, was very racist at the time, but my demographic of friends was very mixed, so I wanted my music to be inclusive.

Back then, Time Out had almost a monopoly on going out; you would wait for it to drop at the newsagents to plan your weekend. It was a dream if my events were featured – I knew people would come. 

I had to go out and do physical handouts in the streets to partygoers between 3 and 4AM. But nothing sells like good word of mouth, and I got to know my client base very quickly. During the small hours of the morning, I also made the friends I would soon call my family.

Soho was a safe place, and I built an amazing rapport with everyone working in the area, from the pub owners to the rent boys to the prostitutes. I could pop into bars and get a free drink while promoting my night. I heard some amazing stories from strippers, and a friend of mine worked as security for a brothel. On a day when nobody was working, we would all have dinner at someone’s house.

We would never talk about work. I knew what they did, and they knew what I did. That’s what we had to do and what we chose to do. It was much more about meeting these amazing people and coming together like a big family. Of course, there’d be the odd crazy, scary, funny story about a creepy man or a hilarious mix-up. But I was just absorbed in hanging out with these cool, fun people, who were really a bit mental. The alcohol and drugs and sex were just part of it – the side story to the course of our lives.

We all knew each other, so Soho was a relatively safe place. We all came from different backgrounds, but we’d all gravitated here, and we understood each other; like anyone settling into a new environment, I started a routine. I would start my night or the end of my day with the rent boys, or anyone else around, before they went off to do their business. Then, I’d wander to all the watering holes tucked in small alleys and cobbled streets of Soho, armed with my handful of handmade flyers.   

During the day, I worked at a storage company to make ends meet. Flitcroft Street is a tiny alley, off Cambridge Circus, so narrow you can touch the walls on either side. The building I worked in was just off there, and there were always intravenous drug users in that area; it made me anxious to go to work. As a young woman, you’re always on high alert around people who might seem unpredictable. I would say that’s the only time I felt scared to walk around Soho back then. But it was still exciting and fascinating, and for me, it was a place of freedom.

Usually, the only spaces for women in gay clubs were downstairs, near the toilets, to which I was just like, fuck off. As a gay man, you could go anywhere in Soho and feel a part of a space; that wasn’t the case for women. At The Village, another gay club I never liked that much because it was too commercial for my taste, if you came in as a non-gay-looking woman – whatever that means – the gay men would be the first to sneer and say things like “oh, look, the fish have arrived”.

I became increasingly frustrated with spaces where men would either hit on me or be abusive, so I had to be smart in carving out a space for queer women. During my time, Heaven was the place to be. It was like slipping into fairytale fabulousness. The biggest gay event was Queer Nation. I wanted to create that for my friends and I, a women-only space where we could have fun and enjoy. 

How you make money in a club is how much people spend on drinks – and lesbians drank more than anyone else. Gay men were generally more into drugs, and therefore sipped on soft drinks and water, whereas queer women overwhelmingly preferred getting wasted. Of course, some of us indulged, but we were the key demographic that could make the club good money. 

I started an event called the Fruit Machine. Lesbian women took over the VIP bar, which, at the time, made gay men and straight women quite upset, but it was ridiculously successful. We made more money on that tiny little bar than the rest of the club. We lasted three years before the fights started by gay men, furious they couldn’t get into VIP, became too much of a hassle, and so we gave the area over to drag queens (which is quite ironic, if you ask me).

These nights, and my group of friends, became kind of a melting pot of the rainbow. So many identities that hadn’t even been labelled yet under one roof, one family, just being alive and celebrating who we were. 

At one point, I was doing three club nights a week; around the same time, I also started a charity to raise awareness about HIV. It was a grind, with 12-hour workdays six days a week, but I loved it.

My least favourite places were commercial, like The Village. I preferred divey old pubs like The Green Rooms, where you never knew what would happen. I loved Patisserie Valerie, a coffee shop/bakery where you could smoke. The area started to change in 2006, and you could feel the voyeuristic nature of people just wanting to see something gay or a sex worker. Before, you lived it.

Nowadays, Soho has been heavily sanitised; I don’t really recognize what I used to call home when I walk past the streets, now instead of brothels you’ll find another Pret or the M&M store. It’s a shame – the culture’s being slowly erased by gentrification. For all the dangerousness and the gritty, dark underbelly of Soho, it was a community, we felt like a big, mismatched family. People like me are the only link to the past, and we need to preserve it as much as we can.