Phd thesis defence by Khalil West
In the cannon of queer British history, ghettoes and ‘urban dystopias’ (i.e. those areas racialised by ethnic concentration, economic/class failure, social behaviours of ill repute, and combinations thereof) beyond London have remained underexplored. Even in the recent proliferation of works focused on more diverse urban environments, sites signifying intersecting points of industrial decline, social immobility and exclusion, and racial marginality outside of capital cities have largely escaped queer historical enquiry. One such site is Liverpool. Once a thriving port city, by the 1990s it was the prime example of post-war Britain’s urban failures, and the 1981 ‘Toxteth Riots’ have come to define both the city itself and the district for which it is named.
Toxteth – or as known by many locals, Liverpool 8 (or L8) – is the site of Britain’s oldest settled black community. It is perhaps the oldest continuous black community in Europe. Its Afro-Caribbean club scene was internationally known for much of the twentieth century and was a central cultural site in the Merseybeat era that spawned The Beatles, among other bands. Yet, while Liverpool 8 has long been a popular site of research for sonic geographers, musicologists, and sociologists, queer historians have ignored the district as a site of potential study, seemingly because its archive offers no trace of visible gay or queer social space. This project complexes and problematises the premium on sexual legibility by exploring L8 as a space of (queer) possibility through, rather than against, its historical illegibility as a site of queer and multisexual sociality. Using oral histories of local residents, activists, and club-goers, this research proposes that the histories of Liverpool 8’s social spaces reveal a far more dynamic landscape of affective possibilities than the regimes of visuality which generate much queer historical work have or can account for.
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