LGBT+ History Month in London: what’s on and how to celebrate

LGBTQ+ History Month is the perfect time to pay a visit to the UK’s first (and only) museum dedicated to queer British culture. This spot offers a valuable peek into centuries of queer history, pulled together by director John Galliano, a former editor of Gay Times. It's a small, free-to-enter venue in Granary Square in King’s Cross, where you can see a diverse collection of exhibits including the prison door behind which Oscar Wilde wrote De Profundis and photographs documenting stories of struggle and celebration through the decades.

Leigh Bowery was a convention-shunning icon of 1980s London nightlife, taking on many different roles in the city’s scene, from artist, performer and model, to club promoter, fashion designer and musician. His artistry also took many shapes, from reimagining clothes and makeup to experimenting with painting and sculpture. A new Tate Modern exhibition will celebrate his life and work, displaying some of his looks and collaborations with the likes of Charles Atlas, Lucian Freud, Nicola Rainbird and more.

In 2024, London underwent something of a ‘Lesbian Renaissance’, with dozens of new events springing up to cater to the city’s population of queer women. Most exciting of all was the opening of not one, but two new FLINTA-focused bars, bringing the city’s total number of lesbian venues up to three.

Situated directly underneath bold east London arts space Guts Gallery and co-founded by its creator El Pennick, Goldie Saloon is a day-to-night bar-slash-cafe bills itself as east London’s ‘FLINTA*-gay living room’, offering up a healthy dose of sapphic silliness via a varied programme of community events, plus a bar stocked with classic cocktails, low-intervention wines, draught beer Queer Brewing and plenty of no/low options. Down the road on Mare Street you’ll find La Camionera, a low-lit Iberian-inspired wine bar where local celesbians sip pricey glasses of La Vie En Orange and snack on croquettas while studiously avoiding each other’s gaze. If you haven’t visited them already, LGBTQ+ History Month is the perfect time to stop by the new openings for a negroni or two.

Alice Neel was one of the most important chroniclers of modern life. The American artist painted the people around her, always with tenderness, always with bare honesty. Following 2022’s excellent ‘There’s Still Another I See’, ‘At Home: Alice Neel in the Queer World’ looks at her depictions of figures from LGBTQ+  communities, including politicians, philanthropists, writers, performers, artists, friends and neighbours for a powerful examination of life on the margins, and what it's like to have piercings in unmentionable places. 

A yellow all-in-one jumpsuit, conical spikes protruding out of all angles. A black beret adorned with buttons, chains and keys. Gold leather trousers with an adjoining bag rhino-horning upwards from the crotch. 

If you were a London club kid in the ’80s, it didn’t matter how impractically you dressed: if something was fabulous, you would wear it. This new exhibition from the Fashion and Textile Museum captures that lust for dressing up via an extensive collection of clothes, jewellery, photographs, magazines and memorabilia which came out of a specific corner of the city at a revolutionary time for fashion. You’ll leave the exhibition wanting to dress better, more boldly, to embrace your own style and turn the saturation right up to the max. If you like clothes, you’ll love this. 

A contemporary of Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin and David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujar was a key figure in New York’s East Village art scene in the 1970s and 80s, even if his reputation as a major force in American photography has largely come about in the decades since his death of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. This exhibition of his later work has been curated by his close friend, the artist and print-maker Gary Schneider, alongside his biographer John Douglas Millar, and features portraits of several of Hujar’s friends and contemporaries from the downtown scene.

Following the West End triumph of her musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge, playwright Chris Bush returns to the Almeida with Otherland. Blessed with one of those slight opaque theatre show descriptions that basically amounts to ‘you’ll probably have to wait until people see it’, it stars Jade Anouka and Fizz Sinclair as Jo and Harry, a couple who are going through a break-up and deciding what sort of people they want to be as they go through the delicate process of disentangling their lives. Ann Yee directs. 

Did you know that Princess Diana spent a night clubbing with Freddie Mercury at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern? Or that Highbury Fields hosted the first gay rights protest? London is home to a wealth of queer bars, clubs, nights and other spaces, so it’s no wonder it has a fascinating queer history that has paved the way to make the capital’s LGBTQ+ scene one of the most fabulous in the world. Take a tour of the key points in the historic battle for equal rights and the current hot spots that celebrate queer culture and find some interesting and thought-provoking LGBTQ+ folklore while you’re at it. 

Established in 1979, Bloomsbury’s pioneering Gay's the Word is the oldest dedicated LGBTQ+ bookshop in the UK, and features in the superb gays-and-minders movie Pride. Stock covers fiction, history and biography, as well as more specialist holdings in queer studies, sex and relationships, children, and parenting. In addition to regular author readings and book-signings (think Adam Mars-Jones, Armistead Maupin, Neil Bartlett, Clare Summerskill), it hosts a range of different discussion groups where different sections of the queer community, some of which have been running for decades. 

Meeting in the basement bar of Dalston’s Grade II-listed Art Deco picturehouse the Rio Cinema, Pink Palace is a friendly and relaxed film club where all-comers are invited to engage with queer cinematic history. Tickets are only £5, and weekly Wednesday or Thursday-night screenings encompass a huge variety of LGBTQ+ titles. On the bill this February are  documentaries on India’s first trans modelling agency and 1970s gay Hollywood activist Pat Rocco, Berlin-set queer clubbing drama Drifter and The People’s Joker, a DIY parody in which a closeted trans girl moves to Gotham City.