Kate Genever: This is Kate Genever, recording Stuart Rhodes, AKA Linden, for the Scene But Not Heard project at his house in Harrowgate on October the 27th, 2025. So, Stuart, start from the very beginning, the very start.
Stuart Rhodes: The very start of Linden?
00:29 KG: Of you.
00:30 SR: Oh. Of me?
00:31 KG: Yeah, where were you born?
00:33 SR: Oh, I’m originally from Halifax, in West Yorkshire, but I left there when I was sixteen. I finished school on the Friday, packed my bags, and moved to Wetherby and started work as an apprentice chef, um, on the Monday morning, and that was me left home, and, uh, starting a career as learning to be a chef, um…
00:58 KG: When was that? What year?
01:00 SR: 1973. So long ago, so long ago… And, um, and uh, then I moved to Harrowgate, switched jobs, moved to Harrowgate, came to, came, I worked in a hotel here, and then, um, I moved into my first management position wearing a posh shirt and tie like you do, and um, and that’s… I kind of… a friend of mine was a woodwork teacher in a grammar school, and I was talking to him, um, about career moves, and where to go next, and he suggested that I would make a very good teacher, so, uh, I said, “well, I’m not averse to that as an idea,” you know? And, uh, and then a teaching position came up, and, uh, here in Harrowgate. and, uh, so he said, “apply for it, apply for it,” you know, so, uh, he said, “you won’t get it, because it’s a weird interview” so I applied for it, and I was, I shocked myself by getting an interview, so I came for an interview, and I got the job, and that shocked my friend [laughter], because not a lot of people get the job on their first interview, so, um,. and that led to best part of thirty years [of a] career teaching, finishing up teaching at Leeds Beckett University for the last ten, twelve years of my teaching life.
02:32 KG: Teaching what?
02:33 SR: Uh, by then I was teaching Corporate Events, Corporate Event Management, so, still on the hospitality thing, but, um, yeah, that was… I enjoyed it, it was great fun. The interesting thing was that the side of that, I was doing the Linden photography, and that was… looking back at it now, it was madness, uh, [chuckles] it was, uh, and 03:01it wasn’t every night, you know, you’re talking one night a week, maybe, sometimes two nights a week, depending on what was going on. Certain times of the year were busier than others. And, um, I would finish work, and while my… and my colleagues all knew, this was the interesting part, because I used to take the mickey out of them for going home to play with their train sets, or do their gardening, or do whatever their wife told them to do, and I was going home, and I had lodgers then, I had this big Victorian house, and it was full of LGBT lodgers, and it was, and you know, I felt like, um, Mrs. Madrigal, you know, 03:41 I think it was like three gay houses on the street, and we called it Barbary Lane, [Kate snickers] and I was Mrs. Madrigal, for some reason. I still get Mother’s Day cards to this day from some of them [Kate chuckles] and, um, I used to get them in and say, “well, right, who’s coming to Hull tonight?” you know? “Who’s coming to Manchester?” or who’s coming wherever we were going, and, uh, I would fill the car with these lodgers or other friends, and the cameras loaded up, checked all the batteries, made sure everything’s tickety-boo, and then we’d head off into the night. We’d drive all the way off to wherever we were going, and, uh, they’d go and turn up, we’d rock up at, you know, a club. I mean, the best ones were like New Year’s Eve, you know, when people are paying a fortune to get into a nightclub, and I rock up with four friends, and they know we’re coming, it’s pre-booked, and in we march for free, you know, oh, they can’t believe I’ve got them into New Year’s Eve, into 04:40 Vague or somewhere, Flesh, or something for free, and it’s like, “oh, this is fantastic,” and then I wouldn’t see the buggers again, until it’s time to come home, and I had to herd them together like cats [chuckles] to get them back in the car to go home.
Um, but I would go out and do my photography, and of course, it was all on 35 mm film, and the worst ones where when I was photographing for Gay Times rather than All Points North. All Points North was straightforward, I’d just go into the office the next day or the day after ’cause it was a monthly magazine, and we’d just get the pictures developed, and it was all pre-computer, so it was printing out the prints, cutting them to size, physically, with scissors, and gluing them onto boards, for the boards then to go to the printers to get printed. But Gay Times was different, that was on, um, slide film, and that’s, uh, I had to stop at the railway station, put the stuff in jiffy bags, and send it off to London before I could go home, so we’d get back at 2, 3, 4 o’clock in the morning, I’d have to go to the railway station, put the stuff in jiffy bags, sign all the paperwork, send that off, then I could drive home, get to bed for maybe 5 o’clock, and then I’d be up at 7 or half 7 to get showered, dressed, and sorted out, and then be in a classroom teaching at 9 o’clock, so you can imagine I was, you know, working on reserve powers, with definitely matchsticks holding up the eyelids, and uh, sometimes the students did get the short of it.. the grumpy version of me, rather than [laughs] you know, there was two sides of me, there was the nicer me, and the grumpy me, and they knew if I’d been out for the night, ’cause it was the grumpy me. And, um, then I would get home from a day’s teaching, and have to sit down at the desk, and five and a quarter inch floppy disk dial-up mode, write the review, and email it in [he chuckles]. You can imagine how long that took.
06:44 KG: So this would be, what year did you start doing the work?
06:46 SR: 19…so I think my first review was, funnily enough, it wasn’t for All Points North, my first review was for a magazine in Manchester called Seen Out, and they had a competition, um, and I entered it, and you had to write a review of your hometown and couple it with photographs, and I got second place, which was asked to write more articles, so I did. Um, and then a friend of mine called Terry George, he owned a big, um, monthly nightclub called Confetti’s in Leeds, which was probably one of the biggest clubs in the North at the time, outside of Manchester and Birmingham, um, and he knew that I was doing this and liked to take pictures, and he said, “you,” he said, “you like taking pictures, do you want to be our scene reviewer for this new magazine I’m starting?” so I said, “well, what’s in it for me?” you know, that was my favourite phrase at the time, “what’s in it for me?” um, so we struck a deal, and I, right place right time, became the scene reviewer, but my problem was we had Section 28, which banned the promotion of homosexuality in education, that was so loosely worded nobody knew what it meant, just “don’t say gay” was the bottom line, so I sort of… I realised I couldn’t write under my day to day teaching name because it would conflict with my day job. My middle name is Linden, so we used Linden, just pure and simple Linden, and we had 08:30 suddenly this page was created, and it was called Out and About with Linden, and that’s how he came to fruition, or I came to this alter ego, and um, the next thing I know, I’m bezzing off, all over the country, either going to like Birmingham or Manchester and spending the entire weekend there, doing every bar, club, sauna, shop, it was hard work, hard graft, you know, hard graft, um, and then coming home and writing a big review and listing all the venues and where they were, the addresses, the opening times, all that sort of thing, and writing a big review, uh, or I could end up in a one horse town I could end up in Bolton on a wet November Wednesday night with one pub called the Church, taking a picture of six people and trying to make it look like six different… you know. It was interesting, it was interesting. It was great fun, to be honest, it was great fun.
09:30 KG: And, um, so, what… As Linden, what do you… tell me about what you’ve amassed, I guess, as the archive, over the years.
09:43 SR: Yeah, so, Linden went on, um, I sort of started, uh, that would’ve been ’89. Seen Out, I remember that, so, 1990, ’91 was the first… December 1990 was the first APN with George Michael on the front cover, I remember that, um, and, uh, I stopped doing APN in ’96… ’95, ’96, and that was because there was a shift in the music, um, suddenly we’d gone from disco and high energy and leather harnesses to high energy house, drug culture, um, the cans of Breaker and Red Stripe had been replaced by bottles of water and powder up your nose.
10:34 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
10:34 SR: And I felt the complete disconnect, it wasn’t my scene, so I decided it was time step away from that. But by then I was also photographing for Gay Times, and they were sending me off on different projects, they were sending me off to Budapest and Copenhagen and things like that to cover their scenes, and it was a different approach, so I enjoyed doing that, that was more me then, and I was still doing Gay Pride events.
11:05 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
11:05 SR: And, um, I remember going to photograph, um, Via Foster, as it was called then, in Manchester, Canal Street, which is now called Via, um, but that was interesting, because it was pre-opening, and it was daytime, and I was photographing the architecture of the interior rather than the people, whereas up until then I’d spent years honing photographing people, getting close up onto the dance floor. So over a decade, I’ve collected a mass of work that, um, I kept the negatives, apart from the Gay Times stuff, that was all in London, so I’d kept all the All Points North negatives, and it’s… the body of work is quite interesting, because these… it’s almost like it’s a social documentary, commentary, or whatever you want to call it, of people living their best lives. My remit was to take pictures of people having a great time, it wasn’t overtly political, it was going to take pictures of people having a great time and write a nice review, um, there was a borderline between writing a nice review and writing advertorial.
12:24 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
12:24 SR: And I always tried to stay away from advertorial and write more of the truth, and it cost me a few times, um, so I remember getting into great trouble with Sheffield, because I went and did a review in Sheffield, and there was one pub, and it stood on its own, and all the buildings around it had been demolished, and I remember writing in the review, that it was…. It was a bad night inside, you know, it wasn’t a very… you know, things weren’t right, and I remember using the phrase that this pub was stood in what looked like the middle of a post-Atomic Hiroshima, and it didn’t go down well with the people of Sheffield, and we got letters, um, but we published the letters, and we published replies to them too, as well, about, “well, do you want an advertorial, um, and make things look glossier, or do you want the truth?” because our readers want the truth, and when we go somewhere, they really want to know what it’s like, so it was, yeah, but sometimes you got letters saying how wonderful it was, and yes, we went where you said, and it was exactly how it was, perfect for us doing it, so, it created this, I don’t know what you’d call it, gay tourism, or what, but it created people moving around, going for weekends to different towns, to go to different bars, um, but the archive itself, um, you know, I have… I’ve got all the reviews that I wrote, and there’s quite an… they make interesting reading on their own, because they give you, yeah, you’ve got a visual representation from the photographs of what towns looked like, and what bars looked like, and more importantly what the people looked like, what they were wearing, the fashions, um, the, um, the fashion faux-pas [chuckles] you know, it’s everything’s in there, warts and all, but then you can put the commentary with them by going to the reviews and looking at what I wrote.
14:24 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
14:24 SR: Um, and I always tried to write with a bit of humour, always used to write a bit tongue in cheek, so there’s quite a bit of loosely worded… you could loosely call it comedy, you know, um, but it seems to have stood the test of time, people seemed to like it.
14:40 KG: And um, can you tell me something about Hull?
14:45 SR: Yeah, so I went to Hull, I think, three times, ’92, ’93, and ’94, I think it was, off the top of my head, uh, and Hull, um, it’s out on a limb, isn’t it, you know, sadly, geographically, it’s… you know, it’s like going to East Anglia, it’s one road in and one road out, you know, it’s on a far flung corner of the Earth, um, but I always had a soft spot for Hull, I liked, I had some fun in Hull, shall we say, um, and um, we’ll leave that one there. And uh, the number one venue for me was the Vauxhall Tavern, that was just such a great party night, you know, the DJ was great fun, it was just so much, it always just had such a great atmosphere in that place, and I got some great photographs, um, and then there was the Alexandra…Alexandria? Was the one. So those were the main two, um, there were other venues in Hull, like the Polar Bear Club, which I never actually got to, but, um, you know, because you… Hull was one of those you didn’t stay overnight. Not that there was anything wrong with Hull, staying overnight, but it was a case of that was one of the ones that was close enough, just close enough for me to go and scuttle home and get bleary eyed into the classroom the next morning. Um, no, but Hull was, um, was an interesting town, they, um, it was friendly, I remember that very much about Hull, it was a really friendly town, even strangers come to town, it wasn’t, you know, their heads didn’t spin and go, “who’s this stranger coming in?” you know, it was really quite welcoming, it was like, “oh, thank God, there’s some fresh people coming in,” you know, fresh meat! That’s what we used to say.
16:56 KG: And, um, do you remember… What do you remember… Have you got any specific memories of being in… Of Vauxhall, or who might’ve been in there, or, tell us about the photographs that you’ve taken, like you know those photographs.
17:10 SR: Oh, it’s um, yeah, I think there’s one with, that’s got the… there’s a poster in the background about a trip to Blackpool, see the Blackpool Illuminations, I think there’s something like that that rings a bell in one of them. Um, there’s the drag act, the entertainment, that’s quite interesting, um, yeah, it’s difficult to pull them, pull the individual photos to your mind because there’s that many, you know?
17:42 KG: So what was it about Hull that was… Because, obviously, you were travelling all across the North, I mean, your pho… your remit was the North, so, I guess I’m interested to know about it in relation to other cities, so what was happening in… Hull was doing its thing with Vauxhall and Alexandra and bits of night at Silhouette and stuff like that, was welcoming and friendly, how… could you notice anything different or particular about?
18:12 SR: Yeah, I think it was, Hull was… The gay scene at Hull at the time was in the ascendency, I think, it was growing, it was becoming more, which was what attracted, I think, the attention of All Points North in particular, um, that there was something going on in Hull, what’s happening over there? Leeds was taking off as well, that was… So all the gay scenes across the country, uh, and particularly in the North were expanding in the early ’90s, something happened socially, there was a social acceptance of the gay/queer community, which was being recognised, and that was… It’s something that cleverer people than me have written about and explored about being on the back of the AIDS epidemic, and because we were in the news so much, suddenly people people were being more acceptable and tolerant, although I hate that word, tolerant, but being acceptable and recognising that we exist, and what’s wrong with us existing? And, um, so there was that shift, and, um, Manchester, of course, was going through the roof, Liverpool was getting new clubs and things like Garland’s, Escape, uh, Manchester was getting Flesh, Paradise Factory, Birmingham was getting… They were much more adventurous with club names, monthly club names, in the ’90s. You’d got Flesh, and Peach in Manchester, you’d got the weirdly named Confetti’s in Leeds, uh, and you’d got Escape in Liverpool. Birmingham had got, and went the furthest, had the best one, with Rim. [laughter] Which, I always just thought, “are you going to Rim tonight?” and I was like, “I’m sorry?” [laughter] “oh, you mean the club!” You know, and you know, they wouldn’t get away with that today, where you just think, “I’m sorry? Go to where?” [laughter] So, um, you know, it was… I liked to… In my mind, I always say, in the early ’90s, Hull included, but it was little bit behind, but it was happening, is that it was like the gay scene in the North came out of the closet. We were a year, two years behind London, but it was happening, and the money was coming in, because the breweries had discovered, the big businesses had discovered the power of the pink pound, and that these single people, you know the “dinkies” – dual-income, no kids – these sorts of people, they’ve got all this money to spend, so suddenly we shifted from the sticky carpets and the ripped seats and shady pubs in corners, dimly lit, to these glossy new bars, money being put in to refurbish, um, and Pride events happening, suddenly we’re on the streets and we’re marching and we’re having these big Pride events, and it’s like, it was an explosion. That’s what I mean by it’s like the gay scene came out of the closet and on, literally, onto the streets, uh, particularly in the queer capitals like Manchester and Birmingham, um, so I always say, yes you’ve got London, and you’d got Brighton, but you’d also got Birmingham, which was huge, huge, um, and Manchester, those were your biggies, um, I mean Birmingham, they had a Pride event once, and they called it Five Days of Fun and it was run like It’s a Knockout, over five days, they had a five day Pride. It was incredible, and the weather was good for them, as well, ’cause I was there, I remember [laughs] I was exhausted.
22:14 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
22:14 SR: But, um, it was a time when we were becoming more socially, uh, integrated… not integrated, ’cause I don’t like using it, certainly don’t like this the accepted malarkey, but people were going, “so what? They’re gay, so what? Leave ’em alone.” You know? “They’re alright, what’s wrong with it?” you know? So there was that transition in the ’90s, um, but Hull I think… I don’t know if… The thing about Manchester, and even Liverpool, uh, and Birmingham, is people could travel from any direction, you know, it was like the centre of a star, the galaxy, and that Manchester was the star, people would bus in, travel in from all over the country. Hull, because, geographically where it was-
23:10 KG: It was harder.
23:10 SR: It was harder, people didn’t tend to do that, and it was, you know, going from Hull to anywhere would, and likewise, people coming from other parts of the country to go to Hull for a night out was a major undertaking, you know, so I think Hull suffered just because of geography.
23:31 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative). And do you remember… I mean, I guess I… The question I want to ask is how did you get into photography in the first place? Like what, suddenly? That’s the first question. You know, like, you were teach… You were interested in catering and hospitality, and suddenly you’re documenting the gay, queer scene?
23:54 SR: I always had an interest in photography from a young age, um, uh, and it was more about… I was always a people watcher, I like, you know, just looking at people, and what they’re up to, and, you know, how they’re interacting, and then the next thing I knew, I’m sort of picking up my little instamatic camera and just capturing real life moments as they happened, just, instinct, I think, and even now, even though I’m not really publishing any new material, I’m still photographing. Um, uh, I’m doing a lot of street photography, because it’s… It’s almost I’ve gone back to where I started, just photographing everyday people doing everyday things, you know, even when I was a kid and you’re at, you’re in the Scouts, you’d go to Scout Camp, I was the one with the camera, photographing what everybody was up to, what were they doing, you know? And, um, and I’m still doing it, you know, this… I was in Paris the other week, and, uh, there was this little old lady, she just, I mean, this… with the wrinkled stockings, a bit Nora Batten, um, this little wrinkled old lady sat there, she was as wrinkly as the stockings, actually, um, and a little cap on, and everything, and she’s just sat on the pavement outside a café, smoking a cigarette and having a little drink, and I couldn’t resist it, I just had to go click click click click click click click as I walked past, you know? And, um, an old gentleman in Prague a few months back, um, so dapper, really this amazing coat and this great hat, but he was older and stooped and I just thought, “well that is just a picture I cannot resist” [makes camera noise]. And then I was in Manchester this weekend, there was a lady, um, uh, at an art gallery, and there’s a young member of staff, and he’s sat in between two galleries on his stool, um, and he’s got a book or a booklet or something in his hands, but he’s sat there, stooped over, looking at his book, and there was just something about the pose, the position, and the juxtaposition between these two galleries, and he’s just sat there, oblivious to this art around him that he’s seen so much he no longer sees it, and it was just a great quick snap, you know, quick [makes camera noise] got ya, um, so I like capturing those, and I think that’s where I started, I was just, you know, and I was, when I was 10, 11, 12, 13, I was just… had got me first camera, and I’m going [makes camera noise] yeah, that’s interesting, [makes camera noise], that’s interesting, so I tend to take those sorts of photographs today, um, I did photograph Manchester Gay Pride this year, uh, just to see what that was like. I photographed it in ’23. ’23 was the first time I’d photographed it since about ’96, so that was quite interesting, just to look at the difference between the two.
27:10 KG: I mean, I’m suddenly struck as you’re talking about the idea that you’re interested in photographing people that are overlooked, or outside of, or I don’t, I’m not going to use the word other, but I wonder if that had… Was that… Did it feel important when you started to document the community by, as Linden, do you remember thinking, “I’m documenting, this is an important thing to document-“
27:48 SR: No, not at all.
27:49 KG: -or was it… yeah, so, you were just doing it ’cause you were interested in taking photographs, somebody asked ya?
27:53 SR: Yeah, yeah, yeah, so-
27:54 KG: You wanted a good time?
27:56 SR: Yeah, well, when Terry’s, uh, Terry George, um, who ran Confetti’s, he decided he’d had enough of paying to advertise in all the publications, and he was gonna start his own, people could pay him, um, and he asked me to be his scene reviewer, just ’cause he knew I’d do the photographs, and, um, so I did, and my remit was to go out, and take pictures of people having a good time. Um, did I realise what the importance of the photographs or the appearance that the photographs would take in later life? No. Um, there was a point, though, subconsciously, there was a point where, I think it was about six months into the magazine, when I… 28:44 it was all taken on 35 mil film, and we didn’t use the negatives, we used the prints, so we used to take, we used to get our 5 by 7 prints done, and the negatives were discarded, literally, on the floor, stamped on, and trod on, and you know, and binned, and something said to me, “you should keep those negatives,” I think primarily it was because we might want a reprint, we might want to reuse photographs, we should keep them, so I kept them, so I started scooping them up and labelling them, and then I’d put them into folders and kept them, you know, um, and I kept them all these years in the attic [laughs]. Um, so I think, subconsciously, there was part of me that thought these might be of… these might be A. needed for reprints, uh, and B. they might be of interest in the future, but it was more of a subconscious than conscious, you know? You know, to me, there was a difference of I wasn’t sat there pompously thinking, “oh, these are going to be vital parts of queer history of the North of England in the decades to come,” you know? I wasn’t like that. It, um, I think that’s something that’s just grown since COVID, when I rediscovered them and scanned them.
30:09 KG: Yeah, tell us more about that. What’s happened?
30:12 SR: Yeah, so, like we were all going insane locked in our homes during COVID, um, I had a flatbed scanner and me computer, and I suddenly thought to myself, “I can’t watch any more television, I can’t read another book, I’m going insane, I should take to alcohol if I’m not careful,” you know, I was, really was just too much, and then I remembered that in the attic there were these albums and negatives. “I’ll scan them!” So it took me nearly a year to finish scanning them, so there’s just short of 10,000 individual images. Some are multiples, because, you know, when you’re photographing on a nightclub dance floor, you… you know, it was film, you couldn’t look at, like now, look at the back of the and you know you’ve got the picture. You didn’t know if you’d got the picture, so you took multishot, so you’d take a burst of 10 pictures, so I might, you might be gliding across the dance floor, and I’m going [makes camera noises] you know? And I’d get, and then one of them, pray, that one of them has got you not pulling a funny face and looking half decent, and that’s the one we’ll use, you know, um so, although there’s nearly 10,000, quite a lot of them are these burst shots, um, but it took me the best part of a year to scan them, ’cause it’s a more labourious process than we think, because the scanner would only take, uh, 8 images at a time, and then you’ve got to, you know, I spent a while finding the right resolution, ’cause you can do them too big, you can do them too small… all of that, and then you’ve got to… I think each negative took four minutes to… from scanning to labelling and putting it, popping it in a folder, you know, so it was labourious to say the least, and interspersed with the alcohol, which sadly did creep in, you know? And, uh, in between the dog going, “please, I want to walk, I’m crosslegged.” Um, and, um, and then I thought, “well, now I’ve scanned them, what am I going to do with them?” You know? I’m not a techie person, I only today, this morning, I had to go to the computer shop because I’d had to change a password, which meant that my laptop was no longer talking to my phone and my iPad, so I was like, “oh, what have I done now?” and they had to completely delete my Gmail account and reinstall it, you know, and I’d made a right pig’s ear of it, so I’m not a techie person in the slightest, I hate it, I don’t want to know about it, and, uh, which is hilarious, considering I’m now using digital photography. I don’t do Photoshop or anything like that, I’ve tried it, I don’t like it, I’m not going to do it. Um, and I, for me as well, there’s a fine line between a photograph and a digital image, you know? You can… the moment you start chopping things out and putting things in, that is no longer a true photograph, that, I’m all for… if you can do it in the darkroom, like altering the light and the shade and things like that, that’s fine, but chopping the, you know, there’s a wastebin in the corner, we’ll cut that out, no [laughs]. It’s part of the story, you know, it belongs there, so, um, I thought “well, I’ll create an Instagram account,” that’s the best I can do, you know, I don’t know how to do a website, I’ve no interest in doing a website, la da da da da, Instagram, um, so I set up Instagram, and I thought a few people might like to see what they looked like in the 1990s, you know, “look at my hair, oh my God I had hair, what on Earth was I wearing?” you know, those sorts of things, and that’s the sort of feedback that came back, and I remember dancing round the living room giddy ’cause I’d gotten a hundred followers, I thought, “oooh, fancy that,” and the next thing I know, it shot up to a thousand, and I was like, “what’s going on?” Um, well, it kept going up and up and up, and then people started messaging me wanting to… The first guy was a guy called Joe Ingham, um, and he wanted to interview me for Vice UK, an online news, arts news site thing, uh, and he asked me the question outright, he said, “is there going to be a book?” and I went, “oh, well, I’d love to do a book, but I wouldn’t know where to start,” and he said, “well, I do,” so we, together, created the first book, which is, um, Out and About with Linden, a queer archive of the North, um, and we got that out, um, uh, and the interviews have kept coming, and the numbers have kept growing, and I think the last time I looked, I think it was over 14 and a half thousand followers, and then, you know, BBC One show was a hoot, and, um, Radio 6 with Lauren Laverne, I remember doing that, um, features in the Attitude, and various other, multiple other magazines, um, I really enjoyed doing the book tours, because we’re now on, we’ve just had book two out this year, um, this last year, um, and I’ve enjoyed doing the book tours. It’s sort of like we do… I said book tours, they’re more like me-withs. I go along and I do an old fashioned slideshow, uh, you know, projection onto wall, “now this picture here, this tells ya,” you know, and tell the stories behind, bring them to, try and bring the pictures to life, tell the stories, what was going on, what was happening around it, what’s gone on, so I’d try and do that, and they’ve been great fun, up and down the country, from London up to the Lake District, and… but I haven’t been to Hull, there’s room to com to Hull.
36:18 KG: Noted.
36:18 SR: Um, I’ve got… I didn’t get to Newcastle either, so that’s on me list, um, but Manchester… and I haven’t done Birmingham, that’s… oh wow, so remiss, isn’t it? But I remember going to Nottingham, and it was mental, it was… 175 people turned up, it was crazy.
36:37 KG: And who are those people?
36:41 SR: So, I would say a quarter of them are people who are old enough to be in the pictures, or know people in the pictures, or are themselves in the pictures, and the rest, is, uh, never ceases to amaze me, they’re younger people in their late teens, early twenties, early thirties, who are fascinated by what life was like in the 1990s. It’s almost like it’s the new ’60s, you know, like the 1960s was in fashion for everybody, and it’s the 1990s are the new 1960s, um, and they come along, and they’re absolutely mesmerized about the stories of what it was like and what the bars were like and what was happening, um, so that’s really interesting, and then there’s always a Q&A at the end, um, and the questions can be quite fascinating, and, um, the comments from people.
37:39 KG: Such as?
37:40 SR: Well, the younger ones, the older ones love seeing themselves and you know, “oh, I had that jacket, I had the… I wore that T-shirt,” you know? “Oh, look at them train, I had them trainers,” you know? um, “Oh, I used to drink Breca,” you know, you get all them, those sorts of comments, um, and someone’s saying, “oh, so-and-so in that picture, that was my best…” there’s one I did, there was a fashion show I photographed in Manchester for Clone Zone, and they were wearing these God-awful, they’re like wrestlers’ onesies, um, but they were marketing these as underwear, and, um, they really shouldn’t, you know, it was one of the fashion faux-pas of life, and the guy came, this guy came up to me for his book signing at the end, and he went, “see that picture?” and I said, “yeah,” and he said, “that’s me,” [laughs]. So there was this guy and he sort of like went up to the picture and looked at me… and they didn’t look like each other, you know, I was like, “is that really you?” I said, “that’s fantastic, isn’t it?” you know, I’m thinking, “God, bloody Hell,” you know, and, um, the ravages of time, you know? But it’s amazing. But the younger ones come because they want to hear those stories and compare them to what their lives are now, and I listen to them and their stories of how they feel that gay community is for them now, and, like I said, they’re convinced that we had a better time, and they seem to think it was less political, but they don’t appreciate, well, not, appreciate’s the wrong word, they don’t grasp that it was a different time, and we had different pressures, we had the AIDS crisis, the AIDS epidemic, and we were dealing with, we had Section 28 that we were dealing with, we had police oppression in Manchester from the likes of James Anderton, the chief of police, so then we had different pressures, we’re pushing for the age of consent to be moved to 18, and then down to 16, you know, we had all these pressures coming through, fighting for these things, um, and all these fledgling Pride events which, how far can we push things, and it was a new era for the gay community, but the younger people, they were telling us, telling me that for us, for them our period felt less political, which I didn’t agree with, but for them that today was too political, it was too divided, um, because of all the different what they felt all different subgroups, so they feel that their gay life is being ruined by politics.
40:39 KG: From within the-?
40:39 SR: From within the gay community, you know, because we were really, really, really fortunate, we got what I considered to be the first, in my lifetime, positive symbol of gay community, which was the rainbow flag. Gilbert Baker’s rainbow flag. Before that, I had, um, the pink triangle, associated with all the things it was associated with, and I was expected to wear that? I don’t think so. Um, and then the next symbol was the red ribbon, and all that that was associated with. There was nothing positive or joyous about either of those, and that was my adolescence and growing up as a gay young person, and certainly to have received the rainbow flag was a gift from God, it was marvellous, because I had something I could stand behind and say, “that is a positive image of my life,” and now those young people are faced with a myriad of flags for different groups, and I think that’s what their, where their, part of where their focus is about, the division, and politics, that’s what they’re labelling as politics and seeing as being, well, you have to be a member of that tribe, or you’re a member of that tribe, or that tribe,… well we, we had our tribes, but we were all gathered under the rainbow flag, we could, you know, you could go into… we haven’t mentioned Blackpool, you could go into the Flamingo’s in Blackpool, which was just the best, you know, for me, it was one of the best, but you would have trans people sat with people of different ethnicities sat with, um, lesbians, sat with twinks, sat with bears, all in the same, all sat round the same table, and we, the one thing we all had in common was we didn’t fit outside, and that made us one group, you get picked on, you get picked on, you get picked on, that makes us one, and I think that was the difference in the ’90s, that, for me, anyway, that’s my take on it.
43:09 KG: And, I mean, I’m interested to think about…Well, my other question was you as a younger person, a younger gay man, coming, from the North, and do you… I mean, clearly you were happy to go to these places and take photographs and you were out and you were part of the scene, and everybody got to know it was you taking photographs, do you remember any difficulties around taking those photographs or being…?
43:49 SR: No, um, so, I was-
43:55 KG: I mean, within, the scene, and from without the scene.
43:57 SR: Yeah, so, outside the scene, only trusted people knew that I was gay, I wasn’t out-out, you know, I wasn’t shouting I was gay from the rooftops, it was trusted people knew. Um, I think it’s part of the way I grew up, you know, and my working class family background, I didn’t feel comfortable coming out, you know, the rhetoric of my own peer group and people about fags and you know, and I just think, “mmm,” you know, if somebody used the word queer it was followed by a smack in the face, so, that was a different… I mean that’s a whole other conversation about the use of the term queer, you know, and younger people going, “we’ve reclaimed it,” you know, and my generation going, “well, not for me, you haven’t,” you know? And, um, so there’s a whole thing around that, but within the gay community. I remember, the only time I ever faced any adversity was actually from a straight doorman. It’s quite interesting, isn’t it, that we have a gay community that’s policed by heterosexuals on the door, you know, I always find that quite an interesting thing, that it’s a straight person on the door of a gay venue telling you who can come in and who can’t, and he was, there was a nightclub in Manchester called Danceteria, God, it didn’t open ’til 4AM, or was it 2AM? 2 AM, it opened, and, uh, I went to photograph it opening night, and there was a queue round the block, and I thought, “this would make a great photo,” great photo of this massive crowd, right, so, camera up, flash on, everything, [makes camera noise], picture, well this bouncer comes burning over, shouting obscenities at me about this me taking a picture, and he goes, “don’t take my picture!” da da da da da da, well I was still stood by my car, so I opened the boot, put the camera in, shut the boot, [chuckles] and I’d got some of my posse with me, so I wasn’t on my own, and, um, anyway, I let him rant and rave and carrying on, and, um, eventually managed to calm him down and get to the nub of the matter was he was signing on, and he thought I was-
46:17 KG: The DHS [chuckles].
46:18 SR: The DHS and I was gonna, you know, he was gonna get dobbed in. I said, “look, I’m not, this is what I’m doing, you know, for the Gay Times,” da da da da, I said, “all you have to say to me is, ‘please don’t use my photograph,’ and your photograph won’t get used, simple as that,” so he calmed down after that, but he was after the camera and the film and everything, so that’s the only time I ever met any adversity. The worst adversity I ever met was in my final four, five years of teaching, at a university, from the staff.
46:59 KG: Because?
47:00 SR: Oh, homophobic, big time, uh, and ended up having to go to HR and get them sacked, and I just think, I’ve gone all the way through teaching in FE with 16 year olds, never had a problem. Gone through my life, really, with… apart from the odd “faggot” shout, you know, which never came to anything, I’ve never been queerbashed or anything like that, I’ve been really fortunate in that respect, um, but to come up against homophobia and homophobic language directed at you in a university setting was quite shock. Twice it happened, so, yeah, that was the only place I’d ever encountered it, it meant, in a situation where I felt really threatened.
47:56 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s sad.
47:57 SR: Mm-hmm (affirmative), very sad, for a university.
48:03 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
48:03 SR: And not from the students, but from the staff.
48:07 KG: So, which makes me think that the body of work is deeply political, and I know you didn’t set out to make a deeply political body of work, but it now can’t be anything but, in way. What do you want…I mean, I know, this is an interesting point for you.
48:30 SR: Yeah, I, um, I’ve been, had a few events, exhibitions with, um, with talks with university students and other photographers, um, and I always, I love to hear, and find it quite fascinating what other people read into my photographs. In a way, I like to sit back and let them read what they want into it and listen, rather than chirp in and say, “well this means this to me, and that means that to me,” um, because everybody gets a different, takes something different from a story don’t they? They can watch a movie, or they can read a book, and all come away with taking something different, and I think it’s the same with the archive, people go into it, they embrace it, they look at it, and they take something different away from it, and some people do like to look at it more from, from more of a political stance, um, what it means, and it, I see it more as a social commentary on, um, a decade of LGBTQ history, um, and how that, it, how it fared through that decade, and you can call that political if you want, um, but I don’t tend to delve into, “what do you mean by political?” with people, I let them… I like to let people go with, “and you tell me what you mean by political what are you taking from it?” you know? So I’ve had some quite heated discussions with other photographers at round tables on it, but, um, and I find it absolutely fascinating what people take out of it. What I like is that people are engaging with it, and people… do you know, one thing we’ve not discussed, really, um, and I think it brings in politics, is the Instagram account itself, because, um, the magazines, when the images first came out, a one thing, you’ve got the magazines with the review, and you can put the two together to get the full picture. The Instagram is just the photographs, with a caption of a date, time, and place, there’s no backstory to it, there’s no…
50:59 KG: Where it was.
51:00 SR: Where it was, there’s no… Well, it’ll say, “Manchester, 1992, um, Hacienda Flesh,” or something like that and that’s it, but there’s no other context, uh, that we’d’ve got from the scene review. Well, you’re getting a different context, because the thing… I go on Instagram, I post a picture, it’s gone, I’ve let it out into the wild, it’s there. What I love is the commentary that comes underneath the photographs that I have no control over whatsoever. People going on there and making comments about the photographs, uh, a really beautiful thing is people who are re-finding each other as well, you know, the people comment going, “oh, that’s so-and-so, that’s Vivian, I haven’t seen Vivian since 1989,” or you know, and then some of them, “I know Vivian, Vivian’s living in such-and-such place, I’ll put you in touch,” and then these people are… and the conversations, and they’re all there on Instagram, it’s absolutely beautiful, and you get the sad stories as well, you know, you get, “oh my God, that’s so-and-so, who died,” you know? Or there was… there’s one person, um, who was murdered, and that was an interesting one, because it was the first time I’ve come across that, and when you get something like there’s been a death, and particularly this one with somebody being murdered, um, that… it was turmoil of what do I do with the photograph? And then I… So, and I have a policy, basically, I turn around and say, “right, if a family member or partner comes to me and says, ‘please take it down,’ it will come down, no questions asked.” Otherwise, it stays, and it stays, because, in my mind, they, that person deserves their place in our history, and just because something tragic has befallen them, in a way, they deserve to be there even more, and I think that’s an important part for me, you know, just because they’ve passed away or been tragically murdered doesn’t mean they should be removed. In fact, quite the opposite, so I think the archive is… There’s two parts to it, there’s the photographs, and then the Instagram, and then there’s the comment, the social commentary of the, from, of the public, who are viewing them, which I find fascinating.
53:43 KG: Yeah, and it makes me think that, obviously, you were just taking, you were going into a club or a bar or wherever and taking photographs of people, and they were from a period… looking at the photographs, most people look quite happy to be in the photographs. [laughs]
53:59 SR: Yeah, it was a very different time, there was none of this concept of consent that plagues us today, um, there’d be an announcement when, you know, if you were going to the Vauxhall Tavern in Hull, that there’d be, “oh, Gay Times are here photographing tonight, if you don’t want to be in picture, bugger off somewhere else,” you know? That was the sentiment, because the landlord wanted the publicity, you know, and a feature in a gay magazine could lead to some new, fresh faces coming over to Hull, and to his bar, or you know, and so that was their attitude, um, the bigger clubs, um, posters, a couple of posters saying, “photography is taking place tonight for this magazine,” or whatever and “if you don’t wanna be in them, keep out the way,” um, so, that’s how consent was dealt with in those days, but people wanted their pictures taken, you know, it were really weird. People, “who you taking pictures for?”
54:59 KG: You get like-
55:00 SR: Yeah, yeah.
55:01 KG: “Do you want me?”
55:02 SR: Yeah, yeah, “who you taking pictures for?” as they run their finger down your arm, you know? [Kate laughs] And I’d go, “Oh, I’m taking pictures for Gay Times, or All Points North,” and they’d go, “oh, you gonna take my picture?” You know, so there was all that sort of flirting, and… but you know, body language changes when there’s a camera pointed at you, so, there are… There’s two types of photographs in my archive. There’s the ones where they’re posed and they’re in groups, you know, like that one horse pub at the church in Malton, um, and, um, then you’d get these two together, “right, pretend you know each other,” or “you two, pretend you don’t know each other, do this,” da da da da, and you’d try and get the pictures, um, but my ultimate favourite favourite pictures are the ones where I’ve managed to get close up, like on the dance floor, or at the edge of the dance floor, and just capturing people in complete, for want of a better word, gay abandon, who are just away with the music and the moment, and just leaning in, a good [makes camera noise], and you’ve got the picture, you know? And then they’ve seen the flash go off, or 56:11 you go, “I’m just taking a picture for Gay Times, is that alright?” and they go, “yeah, that’s fine, great, yeah, yeah,” and of course, the beauty was, they couldn’t come up to you with the camera like they do now, and go, “oh, can I see the picture? Can I see the picture? Oh, take it again, take it again,” you know? And in those days, you couldn’t do that ’cause it was film. But what was really fun was everybody was waiting for the magazine to come out, “am I in it?” you know? “Am I in it? I had my picture taken, am I in, am I in?” and you know, “oh, I’m in, I’m in, I’m in!” and then those going, “oh, I didn’t make it in,” you know, but, you know, those were the… There was a great joy in and an excitement to waiting for the magazine to come out, and it wasn’t instant, you know?
56:49 KG: Delayed gratification.
56:50 SR: People had to wait a month for the magazine, maybe even two months, depending on when I took the picture, you know? So it was… There was that excitement for people as well.
57:00 KG: And, um, the joy of taking photographs. I mean, was there joy? Of being in those venues… You were clearly shown good times.
57:12 SR: Oh yeah, I had a great time, yeah, it was great fun, it was hard work, and tiring at times, if you’d got a heavy teaching load on in the day job, um, certain times of year were more hectic than others, but, you know, the show must go on, and, um, no, I had a great time. I never… one of the codes of conduct, one of the rules was you didn’t go expecting free drinks and to be treated like… That was a no-no, you just didn’t do that, you paid for everything, particularly Gay Times, you paid for everything, and you’d get receipts, and you claimed your money back, um, we weren’t in the market of, uh, “`buy me dinner and give me free drinks, me and my friends free drinks all night and you’ll get a good review,” it wasn’t that that was…. That was… Well, I’d’ve been finished if I’d’ve been doing that, um, word would soon have got back, so, no, it wasn’t, it was never like that, um, you did get the occasional free drink, obviously, you know, and it’d be rude to turn it down he says, but certain… purposefully going out and expecting them, no.
58:19 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
58:21 SR: So, but you did have a good time, and after you’d put that… at the end of the night, you know, there’d come a point in the night where you go, “right, I’ve shot enough film,” um, and you could’ve gone on ’til the death, but, you know, when you take six rolls, seven, eight rolls of film, you just go, “you know what? They’re not gonna print… They’re only gonna print six pictures.” [laughs] “I’m just wasting money,” [Kate coughs] um-
58:46 KG: And people are looking past their best.
58:48 SR: Yeah, and people are eking, their makeup’s running, or they’re, you know [Kate coughs] they’re just looking a bit too… The… It’s an interesting point, though, because looking at the archive now, there are photographs making it onto the archive and onto Instagram that would never have been published by Gay Times, ’cause they weren’t perfect.
59:12 KG: Imperfect in what way?
59:13 SR: Well, no, they’d… Because they wanted the perfect shot for the magazine, so, you know, if you’ve got people on the dance floor going 59:22 like that, you know, pulling a pose, it needs to be a perfect photo, so, the look’s gotta be right, the position’s gotta be right, everything, everything, you’ve gotta look at it and go, “yes, that…” you know when you look at a picture and you can literally, I call it the ten second rule, you can go, “no,” “yes,” you know? And you can just do that, and that’s really easily done, but I’m putting pictures on the Instagram, and I put one the other day of three lads at Manchester Pride, I think one’s in a sailor’s, like a bit of a sailor’s outfit, and you can… You’ve got a sense of the occasion, but it’s completely blurred.
1:00:03 KG: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
1:00:04 SR: It’s, you know, the camera just wasn’t quite set right, and they just, it’s a blurred image, you’re capturing the movement, you’re capturing the atmosphere, and you’re look… Looking at it today, you go, “what a great picture,” but Gay Times would’ve gone, “oh, Christ,” you know? You know. And so now, you’re looking at photographs through a different lens. You’re judging them as a historical document, in a way, you know, and, um, pictures that you would’ve thrown away, it is one of the downsides of digital photography, people are deleting imperfect photographs, and I’m going, “don’t!” I always say it at the evenings, with the talks, I always say, “don’t delete the photographs, and if you’re going to play around with them and give yourselves fat lips and do all these other things, keep the original,” I said, “because when you look back at them in ten, twenty, thirty, and the rest years’ time, they’ll take on a different meaning, a different sense of occasion,” um, and that’s one of the beautiful things about the archive.
1:01:18 KG: And can you remember… Like, who, um, who did you mostly… Who appears mostly in the photographs? Like, what is the main demographic that we’re seeing?
1:01:33 SR: So, being a hot blooded thirty-something male at the time, obviously, my… It can’t be human nature, it’s quite interesting, I didn’t really think about it until I got pulled up, um, my camera, obviously, zoomed towards the handsome young men of the day, you know, particularly if they’ve got their shirts off, but you can look at the pictures from back then, you know, and it’s so funny, because you look at them now, and you go, “oh, bless, you shouldn’t’ve taken your shirt off,” [Kate laughs] you know, we’re much more body conscious today, aren’t we? Everybody’s down the gym, everybody’s getting muscles and things, and they didn’t then, they didn’t care, you know, they thought they looked fantastic no matter what they were wearing, you know, what they actually looked like, and 1:02:18 we were like, and shirts came off, um-
1:02:20 KG: And also clubs were hot.
1:02:22 SR: And clubs were so hot, there was no air conditioning, oh, it was dripping, absolutely dripping, but no tattoos. If you look at the pictures… that… and you know, people say to you, “what’s it about?” about what’s in the pictures, and I go, “it’s not what’s in them, it’s what’s not in them,” tattoos, piercings, there’s cigarettes there, there’s cans of Red Stripe and Breaker, there’s, you know, this, just the difference between then and now when you look at them, the fashions, the haircuts, you know, all these sorts of things, so it’s so many things depending on what is it you’re looking for in these pictures, what’s, why are you looking at these pictures? You know, what is your purpose? Are you a fashion student, are you a historian, are you… You know what is your, why are you… So depending on why you’re looking at the picture, you see different things, um, so yeah, I did, you know, and I look back through the archive, but what I am quietly proud of is without realising I did it, I did take a good few, a good number of photographs of lesbians, I’d got, for the time, a good ethnic mix, or, you know, it could’ve been better, but it… the ’90s was a very different time, we weren’t thinking about things like that, you know? Um, and then I got pulled up by four older guys in Flamingo’s, in Blackpool, and they said to me… 1:03:52 it was a side as I was walking past, and, “you never take pictures of us, do you? We’re not, oh, we’re not young enough, we’re not pretty enough,” and it made me stop and think, and I’m going, “they’re right, why am I not taking their pictures? Why am I only taking pictures…?” because my remit was to take pictures of pretty people having a good time. Well, they’re pretty, and they’re having a good time. Just ’cause they’re in their sixties doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be taking their photo, so I did start taking pictures of older gay people as well, so when I look back through the archive now, yeah, it’s predominantly young males, sorry, but there is also, the others are in there, and can be dragged out.
1:04:40 KG: But also, through conversation, I think through this conversation, what’s interesting… well, like anybody’s taking a photograph, there’s lots of stuff around the photograph that’s being left out, and yet, if we’re not careful, we read that body of work as a that’s just what it was, it was only young men having a great time in the ’90s.
1:05:00 SR: Yeah.
1:05:00 KG: But actually there was a… The scene was…
1:05:03 SR: Much more diverse. Very diverse scene, and, um, yeah, and thankfully, you know, particularly in the wider shots, you see that, you know, when you, if you look at the wider shots, um, you can see that diversity on, particularly on the dance floor, you know, and, so, thankfully I got-
1:05:28 KG: And I think through doing the work around Hull, there’s this idea that in Vauxhall and Alexandra, all of those, it was a really diverse-
1:05:36 SR: Hugely diverse environment in there. Hugely, yeah, it was-
1:05:39 KG: What can you remember? Anything?
1:05:41 SR: Um, it was very, uh, I think it was predominantly, from my recollection, predominantly, there was the middle group of the sort of you know thirties and forties, who were very quite plainly dressed, um, you’ve got a few of the older, you know, the old queens [he chuckles] in the corner, you know, who’d come in and they’d be having their halves of bitter or whatever, or usually a whiskey, or something, you know, something like that, um, and in their tweed jackets and you know, just, you know, they’ve come out in their best, they’ve got a shirt and tie on, you know, and then you’d got the young fillies coming in dressed to the nines, you know, like they should be in Manchester or, you know, somewhere like that, but they haven’t got Manchester to go to, but they’re gerring dressed up every day, so, and it was just this old fashioned pub, traditional pub, you know, with the flock wallpaper and the pattern carpet environment and the gas fire in the corner, that sort of environment, with a DJ in a little booth, and a sign at the back saying, “poppers, £1 a bottle,” you know? And, uh, “sign up here for the Blackpool trip,” um, you know, Blackpool Illuminations da da da da, whatever, or what drag show was gonna be on or what, you know? So that… You get glimpses of those posters in the background, and, um, the DJ’s there with a fag hanging out of his mouth and one of your foam 1:07:15 on and he’s giving you that, you know, um, and it was a real eclectic mix of fashion, of demographic by age, um, gender, you know, it was, you know, and because of the… I always say the dreaded black leather waistcoat, or rubber waistcoat, it was like, “oh oh,” you know, and they’d be appearing, they were really popular with the lesbian community in the ’90s, you weren’t a real lesbian if you didn’t have a black leather waistcoat or a rubber one, you know, and, but it’s when they paired it with things like claret red shirts that used to just… 1:08:01 “have you looked in the mirror?” you know? [he chuckles]
1:08:04 KG: And what might people be wearing? What might the young fillies, as you call them, be wearing?
1:08:08 SR: Oh, the young fillies were in these white T-shirts and jeans, and, um, boots, you know, and, um, that was popular with the boys and the girls, um, and gelling, experimenting with gel, you know, some very interesting hairstyles, very interesting, indeed, um, colour, they were big into colour, they liked colourful garments, they were like young peacocks, strutting their stuff.
1:08:39 KG: And that was specific to there, do you remember it being-
1:08:42 SR: No, it was the same everywhere.
1:08:43 KG: Everywhere?
1:08:43 SR: Same everywhere, they’d, you know, you would, um, all fashion was based on pop stars, so it came out of fashion magazines and what were the pop stars wearing, and then they would put their twist on it, so you got the tail end of things like Bros, you know, and all that, so it was all influenced by that, but they would come, they would be having a good, a great, gay old time, and they were drinking alcopops, you know, were all the fashion then.
1:09:11 KG: Hooch.
1:09:11 SR: Hooch, and things like that, and what… was it the White Diamond or something? Yeah, so they were all drinking that sort of stuff and getting off their tits [he chuckles] you know, just that funniest time, you know? [they chuckle] So you’ve got the old couple in the corner drinking whiskey, you’ve got the thirty, forty year olds who have tried to dress down a bit more casual, but they’ll still be wearing a V-neck sweater, you know, and, um-
1:09:34 KG: Straight or gay?
1:09:35 SR: Oh, gay, gay, yeah, yeah.
1:09:36 KG: ’cause there is also a big conversation around these places being very mixed, as in-
1:09:42 SR: Yeah, I think there was, I think, not so much at the weekend, I think they were much more gay at the weekend, I think it was straight community going right going, you know, the straight people would be doing it, and predominantly straight men, interestingly enough, uh, I don’t recall 1:09:58 … I don’t recall, but then again, I wasn’t actively looking for any straight women, sorry, apologies, but I wasn’t, I was looking at Kandy, [he chuckles] and [they laugh]… Well, it’s human nature, I’m sorry, I, you know, it’s…
1:10:15 KG: It was your job.
1:10:16 SR: It was my job. That was what I was there for, um, so, yeah, there was, there were, there was an element of straight people, but I think there was less so at the weekends, you know, Friday and Saturday night was probably more gay than people could take.
1:10:34 KG: And very busy?
1:10:35 SR: Packed. Absolutely packed. Particularly the Alex, when you came out of the Vauxhall and you went next door to the Alex, and that was, you know, for the later night, and that was heaving, heaving. There’s… Do you want the story of the, uh, so this… I had three friends with me, it was Kieran, Edward, and Niamh, and they were stood in a row, and this young boy, young man went up to Niamh and looked her up and down and went, “are you, you know, are you single? How about it?” you know? And Niamh was…. stood there and, I have to say, in her white T-shirt, if I remember rightly, and her black leather waistcoat, so, to be fair, with her very short haircut, uh, absolutely mortified and offended because she turned around to this young man and went, “I’m a girl!” [he laughs] and this young man went, “oh,” because he obviously thought she was a boy [they laugh], and so, having said that to Niamh, she looked to her left where Kieran was stood, and she went up to Kieran, and she looked him up and down and she went, “what about you?” [they laugh] Kieran lied and said, and just looked at her, looked at this young lad with disgust and went, “I’m with someone,” and [he laughs] “oh, right,” and then finally moved to Edward and was the end of the line and looked him up and down and went, “well, what about you?” [they laugh] and Edward was absolutely 1:12:24 “what am I? Third choice?! What?!” [he laughs] So you can imagine, going home in the car, so this young lad went away with the fleas here, he was just sort of like, I mean, he was so drunk, anyway, I think, or on something, but he was out of it-
1:12:38 KG: Poppers, £1.50.
1:12:40 SR: Poppers, £1.50, and he was just like you know, so he just went off in a huff, uh, but going home in the car was absolutely hilarious, because Niamh wouldn’t stop going on about him thinking she was a boy, and we said, “well, you know, Niamh, you are dressed, you know, shall we look in the mirror and wonder why he thought that?” you know, and then poor Kieran’s just sat in between them chatting away, and I’m in hysterics in the front seat, and Edward’s going on, and Edward’s a bit camp, and he was going, “I can’t believe I was third choice, third choice! What do they think I am?” [he laughs] It was all the way home in the car it was just absolutely, you know, one of those nights where I… How I drove, I don’t know, tears rolling down my cheeks, it was just a great night.
1:13:27 KG: Do you and your friends still reminisce?
1:13:29 SR: Yes, yeah, they’re scattered to the four corners of the country now, but, and um, but we’re all still in touch, and we still reminisce about key nights and key events, they were just too funny, too funny.
1:13:45 KG: So, uh, my final question, which is – given everything you’ve said this afternoon and we’ve recorded, and thinking back about these times and what you’re doing now, which is amazing, um, what is, what’s the main thing that you take from thinking about this work and life? What is it?
1:14:08 SR: Well, I sometimes pinch myself and wonder if I was actually there.`
1:14:11 KG: Really?
1:14:12 SR: You know, it’s sort of, um, it’s not quite the ’60s scenarios of if you can remember it you weren’t there, you know? It’s not quite as bad as that, but, it’s not long ago, but it is a long time ago, and it, and the recollections are few are far… you know, they get fewer and further between, and you know, things get mixed up in your mind, but I’m… I set up, I set this book for… out of boredom, because I thought some people might like to see what they looked like. It’s got a life of its own, um, outside of me, which I love, um, we’ve got, well I’ve managed to get two books out, uh, working on book three, uh, or about to start working on book three, should I say, um, so, I just see… I just think I feel quietly proud, you know, the, I’ve just given the archive away, lock, stock, and barrel. I’ve kept the copyright, obviously, uh, but, I… the physical materials, the negatives, the magazines, the articles, they’re all gone to Manchester, to the John Rylands Library for their archives, um, and they will soon be available for public access for research and, um, the studying and the such like, so they’ll be there… They’re safely tucked away in the Rylands for future generations, and that was important to me, um, because I just didn’t want it to end up in the skip when I pop my clogs, you know, when the family come along to clear everything out and go, “oh, old albums, chuck them out,” you know? When you go to charity shops and things and you see old photo albums, 1:16:10 in fact then that’s someone’s family had thought, “oh, I can’t be bothered,” um, so, I rather like the fact that they’re tucked away there for future generations, and I like the fact that they’re tucked away in the North of England, where they were taken, and, you know, as much as there are amazing places like the Bishopsgate in London, it’s London, and these pictures are 99% taken in the North, um, and I think they should be accessible for people in the North to study and research and use, um, for decades, hopefully, to come. What’s next for me with this? Well, I said book three, um, a movie, we’re gonna make a movie, um, so, a 90-minute docudrama, which will hopefully be out at the end of ’26, so, um, yeah, that’s, will hopefully be out at the end of this…
1:17:10 KG: Next year.
1:17:10 SR: Next year, yeah, um, and, um, a companion book to the film out in 2027, so, yeah, there’s a lot going on, none of which I ever thought would happen. I just thought a few people might like to see what they looked like on Instagram. I didn’t see myself on the BCC One show, I didn’t see myself talking to BCC Radio, and I didn’t see myself being in numerous magazines, newspapers, like the Liverpool Echo, or having a ten page feature in Attitude magazine, you know, you just think, “this is all just a little bit crazy,” but I’m enjoying it, I’m enjoying the ride. It’s like, I’ll tell you what it is, you know, I had to create this character called Linden, because of Section 28 to do the photographs, and then when I stopped doing the photographs at the end of the ’90s, altogether, Linden went back in his box, he retired, and now Linden is back, he’s having a resurgence. So Linden is back is how I see it, you know, sort of, I’m not out there doing the photographs in the same way, I’ve done a couple of Pride events and things, but, and I’m out doing talks and stuff like that, but, yeah, it’s a bit of a comeback [he chuckles], having a bit of a comeback. {he laughs] The comeback kid. I wonder if I can have… I wonder how many comeback tours I can have, you know? [Kate laughs] They’re never any… This is the final tour! No it’s the final, final tour. [they laugh]
1:18:54 KG: Yeah. Great.
