Originally published in the 2022 edition of 23 Magazine, physical copy only

Suzie Krueger runs a fetish night.

Suzie’s night Hard On is, in Suzie’s words, ‘Mayhem. We have a dance floor with very good DJs, we have we have live sex shows from porn actors from across the world, I have two playrooms full of equipment that I own.’ With shows in Amsterdam and Berlin, Suzie used to run London’s Hard On out of Pulse, a gay nightclub in Blackfriars railway arches. Pulse, owned and run by Mark Ames and James McNeil, resided in the railway arches since 2000. ‘His club Pulse was an institution. His is ten times bigger than mine.’

In 2018, Pulse were informed that Southwark council had sold the land they lived on to make way for a £1.3bn new housing development, 34 stories providing 489 apartments, a hotel, offices and shops. The development is being built as part of Southwark council’s bid to build 2,355 homes a year. Despite a long fight from Pulse and their community, the club closed for good in September 2019. Mark and James were publicly provided confirmation by the council that Pulse would be rehomed within the borough, but as of April 2022, any plans to reopen Pulse have been kept private.

Elsewhere in Southwark, one could escape to a queer night at Camberwell’s The Chateau. Hidden behind the Virgin Mary stained glass windows of their ex-cocktail bar residence, organiser Laurie Belgrave told Time Out that ‘On Saturday night, we had two guys making out in front of Jesus. If there is a god, I think he made this space to be a gay bar!’ Performers at the club included drag queen and DJ Vivienne Bam Bam. ‘She's like if Paris Hilton and Courtney Love went on a crazy bender and had a baby,’ Vivienne describes herself. ‘Let me tell you, drinks go flying. The girls cannot cope when you play Paris Hilton.’

When The Chateau closed its doors in April 2020, it came as no surprise. Their holy grail party space was a temporary home between their founding in 2018 and the Covid 2020 pandemic. But when the Chateau relocated in 2021 to Set in Woolwich, it marked a bigger change in the area than the shifting of one queer nightclub out of Southwark. Following the forced closure of club Pulse in 2019, The Chateau’s departure was the last of Southwark’s permanent queer clubs closing for good.

The bizarre culture loss has not been lost on queer residents of Southwark, a borough with the second-highest density of LGBTQ+ residents in London. Southwark LGBT Network list the closure of Pulse (also know as XXL, the name of their popular bear-friendly night) and the Chateau as a concern in their 2021 report on the borough, stating that ‘in planning matters you have to be alert to hidden homophobia when people are objecting to, say, the hours of some bar or club.’

There’s also the difference between queer friendly clubs, male-centric gay clubs, and queer specific clubs – as Vivienne says, ‘It's like basic things, like when you meet someone, they ask your pronouns. You know your night is going to be a good one.’ These spaces are especially important to black and minority ethnic members of the queer community, who Stonewall reports are twice as likely to attend LGBTQ+ specific events.

Cameron, 24, is a UAL student living in Camberwell. ‘I moved thinking it’d be a hot bed of culture, and it is, but not really queer culture,’ they say. ‘My friends are like, oh, this queer night is fifty minutes away, let’s go to Corsica (in Elephant and Castle) instead.’

‘It’s not bad - I guess if you put enough queer people in a room it becomes a hostile takeover. But I’d love to support a queer party instead.’

Hard On’s Suzie is a nightclub veteran, experienced with Southwark Council’s attitude to club nights as part of the team responsible for Camberwell’s Imperial Gardens. When the club closed in 2004, the Guardian lamented the loss of a ‘talent factory’, citing Massive Attack and Daft Punk on their line up and audience members like Bjork and Lauryn Hill. ‘They shut down my club after eight years,’ Suzie reminisces. ‘I think Raymond (Stevenson) the owner had quite a few issues with the police. Again, it was gentrification because if you look at Imperial Gardens now, there’s a flat built about two feet away from the frigging front door. A year later I was called to the police station, this Chief Superintendent… he said, “I want to apologise for closing you down”.’

Suzie’s belief is that many issues police have with queer nights – especially fetish nights – arise because they simply don’t understand what they’re dealing with. ‘They absolutely need training on LGBTQ (nights)’, she says. The level of acceptance varies between boroughs. ‘I've never had a problem in Lambeth. They’re extremely open minded and much more liberal probably than any borough. Islington is getting better, but isn’t… you know, they all just need training.

‘I’ve never had a fight at any of my parties.’

The loss of queer night culture is not a story unique to Southwark. Queer parties across London are suffering in boroughs such as Tower Hamlets, where local authorities are attempting to outright ban kink and fetish nights like Suzie’s Hard On. In March 2022, Vice reported that Tower Hamlet’s council had threatened venues hosting Klub Verboten and Crossbreed, kink and fetish club nights that focus on safe exploration and consent. Leo Charalambides, a leading sex establishment licensing barrister, told Vice that ‘Many councils have a narrow and incomplete understanding of the role of adult and sex entertainment within their night-time economy’, stating that their policies were dated and poorly informed. ‘(Klub Verboten) are at the forefront of tackling issues around safety, consent, diversity and inclusion’.

Queer nightlife in London is struggling, but a step backwards shows that all alternative nightlife is battling against gentrification. When Islington electronic club Fabric was threatened with closure in 2016, purveyors of night culture including Trainspotting author Irvine Welsh emerged to slam Islington council for what he called ‘the beginning of the end of our cities as cultural centres’.

‘It’s all about property development…. Cities need to be kept as sterile and unthreatening as possible. The tent cities and makeshift communities that will grow up on the outskirts of cities, like in the developing world, will be the places to go for a proper party’.

Welsh’s comments ring true. While central London boroughs like Southwark suffer from a culture exodus, DIY clubs and venues (that are often friendlier to LGBTQ+ club nights) are finding their way to the city outskirts, where they’re less likely to be bothered by police or property developers. SET in Woolwich, new home of The Chateau, is over an hour further southeast on public transport than their Camberwell location. Suzie and Vivienne also both name Deptford’s Venue MOT as a personal favourite, but neither of these are permanent LGBTQ+ venues, nor are they in Southwark. ‘Queers kind of like the idea of it not being central’, Vivienne laughs. ‘It’s like an adventure’.

While Southwark’s queer residents come to terms with long commute times to the club, however, queer performers are trying – and failing – to stop the resegregation of queer culture to the margins of society. Curating a club night is expensive enough, but there are extra hidden costs to throwing a queer party. Vivienne describes TRASH CHIC, the ‘shit pop, hyper pop, drag queens being really stupid’ night curated by her since 2019. ‘We came back from lockdown and tried a couple of times, but queer venues are really just trying to stay afloat. When you're asked for like a £100 fee, when you're a really small party, that's cutting out potentially 2 performers…. A lot of these places don't have the best equipment, so you might need to factor in hiring decks.

‘The venues can't afford to stay open. We've had to stop doing it because we can’t afford to… Warehouses are just more accessible.’

All is not necessarily lost for Southwark, and other more central boroughs. The exile of queer nights has not been a shift left unnoticed; Pulse nightclub has been assigned another venue by Southwark council that is as yet TBA. Suzie also describes a meeting that night at the Colour Factory in Hackney, a monthly gathering of London’s LGBTQ+ club promoters discussing the state of queer nightlife. ‘I don't understand why people move to central London and then say, “You don’t want a club there, it's too noisy.” Well then don't move to central London.’

Vivienne believes the solution could be with the venues that do still exist more frequently handing the reigns to queer promotors for the night. ‘Why haven’t they got like a queer nightlife mentoring programme where they just give people a room and they're like, fill it?

‘But even then, in my head every time I go I'm like, how much longer do we have this venue? ‘Cause I know someone's going to come and rip this down and put some shitty flats in there’.

Amidst the rising costs of living in London, the frustration with queer nightlife is at the front of residents’ minds. Southwark has a reputation as a creative place for queer people, home to communities and experimental queer nights in new, transformative ways. But with the loss of erotic thrillers like Hard On or DIY pop-ups like the Chateau, Southwark risks losing this community to more welcoming pastures. ‘I want campy, I want dykey,’ says Cameron. ‘I pay more to live in Camberwell than I would to live in Deptford, but there’s maybe one queer party a month at Bussey (Building) or Tola (in Peckham).

‘Eventually I’ll just leave.’