On Christmas eve 2016 The Economist ran an article entitled ‘Gay bars are under threat but not from the obvious attacker’ about the epidemic of closures affecting LGBTQ+ venues in London (Smith, 2016a). A colour photograph illustrating the story features a neon sign reading ‘Cocktails and Dreams’ in blue and pink cursive writing (see the front cover of this book). The article describes LGBTQ+ venues as ‘places that contain memories of first kisses or heart break where people, often persecuted or misunderstood by others, made friends and felt accepted at last’. In an accompanying blog post, author Adam Smith, a white gay man who lives and works in London, situates himself in relation to these experiences, explaining that gay bars were an integral part of his ‘new life’ and ‘newfound freedom’ after coming out (Smith, 2016b).

In the article, Smith acknowledges the rich history of LGBTQ+ venues in the city and that their loss might be ‘painful’. Yet, he ultimately reads their closure as ‘an unhappy side-effect of a far more cheering trend’: the ‘increased acceptance of homosexuality in the rich world’. Gender/sexual1 Others, or so Smith's argument goes, have now proven themselves to be valuable contributors to society and thus no longer need to congregate in ‘scruffy’, ‘disintegrating’ and ‘dingy’ bars ‘with peeling leather seats and the sodden smell of stale alcohol’ in order to be ‘free’. Of course, we are not all ‘free’. Smith is adamant in reminding readers that these spaces remain ‘as important as ever in the developing world’, where homosexuality is still illegal. There, these spaces serve as important political and affective reference points for LGBTQ+ activism and community-making. But here, in the ‘rich world’, social attitudes have become decidedly more tolerant, meaning that ‘many gay men and women, particularly youngsters, do not feel the need to congregate in one spot’. LGBTQ+ spaces, we are encouraged to believe, have no place in the contemporary inclusive landscapes of a city like London, and fighting for their existence is (at best) nostalgic and (at worst) backwards-looking.