Photograph taken from Unsplash

On a busy Thursday afternoon, 8 February 2024, a total of ten students and staff from City, University of London gathered together in the Pool (the College Building) for a special talk on black queer history in the United Kingdom. This talk was hosted by Veronica McKenzie, a writer, director, and film producer from Haringey, North London, as well as the founder and leader of Haringey Vanguard, a grassroots project aimed at raising public awareness of the positive contributions made by LGBTQI+ and black people in London to the historical, cultural, and political climate of the city. 

After the event was officially started at 5.36pm by Martin, one of the event’s organisers and a co-chair of City University’s LGBTQI+ network programmes, Miss McKenzie began her talk by asking the audience this rhetorical question: “What is a community?”. She then elaborated her question by relating it to our technologically-dominated world by inquiring about the difference between virtual and real-life communities; posing the threat a lack of clear definitions have on young people living in the 2020s. 

Moving on, Miss McKenzie began exploring her journey in the creative arts: citing her previous job as a playwright and a scriptwriter since 2004. However, a concoction of writer’s block and a growing inner desire to create more original content has led Miss McKenzie to question the future of her creative career prior to 2012. This motivated her to look at her hometown of Haringey for answers; which she got hold of at an archive shop in Bishopsgate where she discovered her hometown’s rich black queer history through photographs mainly from the 1980s detailing the plight of both BAME and LGBTQI+ people in Tottenham during the Prime Ministership of Margaret Thatcher and their combined efforts to make Britain a safe space for them to live and thrive. This was the beginning of Haringey Vanguard.

Starting in 2018, Miss McKenzie began interviewing people in Haringey about black queer history in the region and collected photographic evidence of said history to produce a documentary about it. However, the project started slowly as Miss McKenzie began by interviewing only three people for her documentary and had to encounter multiple rejections from bystanders during interview attempts simultaneously. Nevertheless, with her resilience and support from the Bruce Castle Museum and London Metropolitan Archives, Miss McKenzie managed to collect a total of 40 posters from the British black and LGBTQI+ rights movement from the 1970s to the 1990s. 

After briefly explaining her project, Miss McKenzie brought the audience back in time to a London where the black LGBTQI+ community did not exist or, according to her, was not allowed to exist. Unlike today, there were no LGBTQI+ clubs in London, especially in the 1980s under Margaret Thatcher, as LGBTQI+ people lived in a “fearful environment”. According to Miss McKenzie, this environment was marked by LGBTQI+ people being regularly assaulted, where the children of lesbian couples were kidnapped, and where LGBTQI+ people could only meet in underground parties to avoid violence from outside. 

British politics was also not friendly to the LGBTQI+ community. To illustrate this, Miss McKenzie recounted the “tsunami of hate” experienced by the LGBTQI+ community throughout London from 1986 as, according to her, LGBTQI+ safe spaces were attacked by right-wing groups who vandalised pro-LGBTQI+ book shops and centres, kidnapped more children belonging to same-sex parents, and attacked LGBTQI+ people on a more massive scale. It was also during this time where conservative religious and parents’ rights groups began protesting against the inclusion of pro-LGBTQI+ politics in the British education system: a movement that led to Section 28, a law passed by Thatcher’s government in 1988 which banned media supporting homosexuality from being promoted in the public. 

Despite the constant attacks, there were times of hope for black LGBTQI+ people in London. For instance, Miss McKenzie detailed how Ken Livingstone, the former Leader of the Greater London Council (1981-1986), donated £4 million to support LGBTQI+ causes, especially in the Councils of Haringey, Lambeth, Islington, and Suffolk which were more welcoming towards LGBTQI+ people. Moreover, black queer people in London did stand up to their attackers during public rallies starting in 1987 in response to the unjust and continual destruction of LGBTQI+ safe spaces in London and to Section 28. 

In hindsight, the protest movement led by the black queer community was a success according to Miss McKenzie as the number of same-sex marriages in Britain significantly increased in the 1990s, whilst the black queer community had their first black pride parade at Southend-On-Sea in 2005. 

Returning to 2024, Miss McKenzie expressed her joy knowing that there are more young people today who are more sceptical about their social environment and who are more proactively engaged in social justice movements. But before she ended her speech, Miss McKenzie returned to her rhetorical question about communities for young people as she expressed her concern about how youths in London do not feel like a part of a community in recent years. In an attempt to answer her own question, Miss McKenzie brought up the ongoing cost of living crisis and how everyone’s salaries are decreasing. As such, she finally persuaded her audience that now is the right time to form a new community as every person living in London, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, shares the same financial struggles.