page_title: LGBT culture in Liverpool
section_title: 1970s–1990s
hierarchical_section_title: LGBT culture in Liverpool / History of Liverpool's gay community / 1970s–1990s
caption_attribution_description: English: Jody's, the legendary 1980's gay club based at Stanley Street, Liverpool.
context_page_description: LGBT life in Liverpool, England is made up of persons who are either lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender/transsexual. Research commissioned by the North West Regional Development Agency approximated that there were around 94,000 LGBT persons living in the city's metropolitan area by mid-2009 - equivalent to the GLB population of San Francisco, making it the single largest minority group on Merseyside.
  Out of 100 cities around the world, Liverpool was voted number 51 most LGBT friendly in 2017. The poll was taken by the gay community in major hubs around the world.
  As the location of Britain's first and only official gay quarter, the only LGBT combined arts organisation in the North of England, the UK's most gay friendly university and one of Europe's largest free LGBT Pride festivals, life in modern Liverpool allows many more liberties for gays and lesbians than it ever did. However, up until quite recently the city was often thought of as a 'lesser gay-friendly' destination and compared negatively in comparison to other metropolitan areas of similar size and stature.
context_section_description: The 60s saw the Campaign for Homosexual Equality formed and by the early 70s the Liverpool branch had formed their own gay society at Liverpool University.  The society championed gay rights, organised events, meetings, and published pieces in the university's newspaper to challenge stereotypes and myths about gay people.  At national conferences and protests, the society helped to influence the national student debate surrounding sexuality.
  
  By 1975, most of the bars that had provided a safe haven for so long around Queen Square had been demolished to make way for the new St. John's Shopping Centre, Roe Street Gyratory and bus station.  The Bar Royal on Wood Street had become the 'place to be'.  
  Guests there were heavily vetted on arrival by its owner Sadie and the main door was bolted as people entered.  The bar become a hive of activity where students mixed with dockers and glamorous transvestites and transsexuals mixed harmoniously with lesbians and gay men.  By the close of the decade, the various groups had separated as heterosexual 'New Romantics' had begun to take over.  After a brief close, re-opening and boycott due to rampant misogyny, the bar finally closed when Sadie died in the late 1980s.
  Interviewees from Our Story Liverpool recall memories of the vibrant 1980's gay scene which included Jody's, The Curzon, Lisbon, Paco's, Reflections, Scarlett's and Sadie's, most of which were based on or around Stanley Street tracing the embryonic stages of the present day gay quarter.  Scarlett's and Reflections both served as a meeting place for members of Friend Merseyside, a Liverpool-based LGBT support group which operated a weekly coffee bar, befriending, counselling and switchboard service in the city centre.  In spite of the modest freedoms afforded by the bars, interviews reveal how homosexuality was still seen as taboo in mainstream society and how copies of the Gay Times were still being stocked in brown paper bags at the News From Nowhere bookstore, even by the late 1980s. The hysteria over the AIDS epidemic had reached fever pitch whilst anxieties surrounding the infamous Section 28, which prohibited local authorities from intentionally 'promoting homosexuality', were at their height. Indeed, the fear of prosecution under Section 28 had a direct impact on the city, when in 1988, Liverpool City Council chose to cancel a grant to a gay play being performed at the Everyman Theatre. Following widespread opposition to the Act, a co-ordinated 'Liverpool Against the Clause' campaign organised protests in nearby Manchester, whilst debates were had on the extent to which one was liable to be prosecuted for working in schools. In an effort to stimulate debate and in a show of solidarity, Tate Liverpool opened David Hockney's exhibition illustrating C.P. Cavafy's explicitly homosexual poems in 1993."Link" (PDF).
  In the 1990s, a series of Gay Prides were held in Liverpool City Centre (see Liverpool Pride).
caption: Jody's, legendary 1980's/90's gay club based on Stanley Street, Liverpool