Gay Liberation Front and Radical Drag, London 1970s

The film Loverboy: Charles Jeffrey Takes New York,¹ was screened at a recent symposium on the "Future of Subcultures" hosted by London College of Fashion and i-D magazine. The film, which follows London-based designer and queer club host Charles Jeffrey's trip to New York to show his work and participate in the new radical queer club scene, turned my mind to the genderfuck practices and radical drag of members of the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the early 1970s. The play with gendered and sexual identity manifesting itself through dress at Jeffrey's London club night "Loverboy" (as well as other London club nights and through his "Loverboy" design collective) and at New York's "Battle Hymn" club where, in Jeffrey's words, "the best dressed creatures of the night come to play" and New York's freshest DIY design collectives party and seek inspiration for collections, draws on traditions in both London and New York's club scenes of the eighties and early nineties, but also nods to a longer tradition of queer gender blurring dressing as a personal and political act.

GLF was strongly influenced by both the international student movement and the counterculture, and the 1973 GLF pamphlet, The Rise and Fall of Gay Liberation Front, acknowledged that it received support "mainly from that section of the gay population that had already been touched, to some extent at least, by either the 'new left,' or the counterculture."² The GLF advocated "coming out" and the belief that "gay is good," with the GLF manifesto acknowledging and urging the rejection of "masculine" and "feminine" societal roles by gay people.³ This was revealed through clothing choices as an important indicator of this new visible gay identity. At first, GLF members' dress choices centered on hippie and countercultural dress styles. Bette Bourne, a founder of Radical drag performance troupe Bloolips, recalled that the first time he went to a GLF meeting he was wearing a suit but "soon realised it was not the scene" and the next meeting he wore "green velvet flared bottoms, T-shirt and a huge Afghan coat. My hair got longer and I had a beard like Che Guevara."⁴

Some GLF members felt that there should be a move away from the hard-edged definitions of gendered dress, and that conflicting signals could be used to challenge and confuse heterosexual society. "We began to realise that there were ways of using drag," recalled Michael James, "It's a way of giving up the power of the male role. We were holding the mirror up to man, showing that we rejected what maleness stood for."⁵ Rejecting former drag or cross-dressing practices that aped iconic film stars or allowed wearers to "pass" as the opposite sex, "radical drag queens" took the extreme stereotypes of both male and female dress, combining feminine dresses and full make-up with workmen's boots, beards, and moustaches. Interviewed for Square Peg magazine in 1988, GLF member John Lloyd recalled that "for many people [radical drag queens] were the most intimidating members of GLF, a sort of moral 'Red Guard' of that period. They would sit at meetings, knitting away, in their 50s drag, looking terribly wonderful and being terribly threatening in case anyone put their foot wrong, which is what people did all the time."⁶ Drag historian Roger Baker has noted the effect that extreme forms of drag have on viewers manifesting as "the angry outrage of the person who finds his signals have been confused."⁷

For GLF member Michael Brown genderfuck had a particularly performative element as he wore his "long beard tied up in plaits with pink ribbons and lips cut out from bright red acetate" with women's blouses and men's tight trousers to both socialize in and participate in street theatre forms of gay rights protests.⁸ Street theatre and new "queer" theatre groups such as Bloolips used their appearance and performances to critique stereotypes so they were "not so much imitations of women as creatures betwixt and between sexual roles, free...