by Sofia Varino
Nonfiction
“At the intersection of oppression and resistance lies the radical potential of queerness to challenge and bring together all those deemed marginal and all those committed to liberatory politics.”
–Cathy J. Cohen, “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens:
The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?” (1997)
“You leave in the morning with everything you own in a little black case.”
–Bronski Beat, “Small Town Boy” (1984)
I had to go and let myself be cracked open.
I’d arrived in London in August of 1998, a sweaty, sore mess huffing and puffing across Victoria Station, dragging a shiny black hardcase trolley, trying to figure out how to get to White Hart Lane, where I would study writing and fuck as often as possible, whomever and whenever I could. Twenty years later, I am at Victoria Station trying to figure out how to get to LimeWharf, Google Maps leading me astray, to do a reperformance with you, my beloved Ana, old flame, old friend, and The Holy performance partner of fifteen years ago. I get lost in a maze of backstreets and crossroads but eventually find the venue, hidden behind an abandoned courtyard, and make my way toward the sticky strips of clear plastic serving as an entrance, a portal into the past.
I can only remember exiting the room many hours later, my arm around Ana’s waist, but I must have entered it too: a riverside warehouse turned into a makeshift club, right by the Thames, musky and dimly lit, so cold everyone kept their winter coats on all night, late into that queer Valentine’s Day party with a long title: Goodbye to London/This Dancefloor Doesn’t Live Here Anymore—an evening to protest gentrification and the systematic closure of queer spaces in London for the past decade, but also an evening to celebrate our queer communities and subcultures and the experiences we created and shared in these spaces.1 Frankie, one of my grad students, happens to be here tonight, the one who always shares philosophical insights from the Greek classics and helps me to set up the projector before each class, untangle that dreaded knot of black and white plastic noodles, as we call them. After I say hi to Frankie, I take one quick look around the club, already accepting the fact that just as you’d warned me, you won’t be able to make it after all, and mentally go over my solo show backup plans:
introduce The Holy
read two of the letters you’ve sent me sometime around 2006 and 2012
say Thank You and Goodnight!
I turn around to use the bathroom before showtime. As I walk past the bar, there you are: gloriously concealed in a dark corner, a spectacle in shades of deep purple and dark gray, a bundle of winter layers topped off with a brown fleece beanie, your face barely visible—but I’d recognize the contours of your body anywhere. We haven’t seen each other in maybe five years or so, maybe much longer than that. Without meaning to, we fall into each other’s arms. You caress my back and I smell the inebriating scent of your neck, your clothes, your hair. You giggle when I show you my Bag of Dicks, a large ziplock bag bursting with dildos in all colors (pink, purple, black, caramel, fluorescent green, translucent) and sizes to suit our Mood of the Night, finally confessing that you’ve always been afraid of dildos and cocks—which explains a lot of our sexual dysfunction during the two years we dated and tried, stubbornly and rather unsuccessfully, to be a couple. You were the first person with whom I fell in love, and I caught the most terrible monogamy while we were dating, constantly craving, in k.d. lang fashion, your body and yours alone. The amount of lust that pounds through my bloodstream into my crotch when you get close to me is overwhelming for us both. I want to ravage you, always. Which makes you pull away, gently but clearly, as ever.
I joke that I half expect you to disappear at any time, as you often used to, and that until we go onstage, I am going to be stalking you every time you get up to use the toilet. You reply that you’d quite like that. You’ve always teased me mercilessly, whether you knew it or not. I want to fuck you in that makeshift toilet, hard from behind, one hand over your mouth, two cum-drenched fingers pounding deep into your asshole, ordering you to keep rubbing your clit just the way you like it. But I am content with just watching you check your smoky eye makeup in the bathroom mirror, sip peppermint tea from a thermos, eat your saltines, and comment on all the fabulous costumes our queerly beloved are wearing tonight, out in all their finery. There are dragons and slayers, a pink teddy bear, a drag king in leather and a dyke princess in latex, two boybrides, and a butch gladiator.
I tell you about my EasyJet flight from Berlin to Gatwick and taking a selfie with Patsy from Ab Fab at the baggage claim in a halo of airport light, right by the luggage belt. True story. While trying to ease my way into my aisle seat, I’d found myself sitting behind Joanna Lumley, who played Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous, one of my all-time favorite characters, the blonde wisps of her beehive crowning her first-row EasyJet seat. Edina and Patsy, the buffoons on prime-time nineties TV who, much like us, made juicy parodies of their own chaotic lives. I’d spotted Patsy waiting around in the baggage-claim area afterward and summoned up the guts to ask for a selfie, my very first and most likely very last with a celebrity. The altered reality of that Gatwick encounter broke the spell of Patsy’s glamour but still made its way into my Instagram feed, a topsy-turvy grid memorializing bits and pieces of my life in Berlin: parties and protests, fuck buddies and a disintegrating relationship, academic jobs, Antonia the husky, teaching gigs, the everyday dystopia of late hypercapitalism that takes our breath away while keeping us glued to tiny flickering screens. When I tell Patsy I am in London to do a stage show with an ex at a queer V-Day party, she is overjoyed—yay to the clowns among us, yay to exes and valentines, yay to landing in queerland.
Yesterday was already a long time ago and we are going onstage in ten: Ana and I reunited for a reperformance remix of the shows we did around the London nightlife circuit for a couple of years, beginning in the summer of 2003 at the Oak Bar Lesbian Amateur Strip Contest. We hold hands backstage, shivering from the cold and stage fright, the steady warmth of Ana’s palm on my sweaty hand. Tonight, we are going to repeat, without rehearsing, some favorite bits from our performances at queer clubs and parties. Was that thirteen years ago? It was thirteen years ago. Thirteen is your lucky number. You shake in anticipation. My feet are blocks of ice. Will this ever be over? You and I have agreed to stage a parody of the heartfelt love letters, postcards, and emails we have written to each other over the course of fifteen-odd years. You might do the crawl, if your knees cooperate, and we might do the cock reveal, if the crowd feels right. I might pull one out of my Bag of Dicks.
Onstage in five. I’d brought with me a large folder of student papers to read on the plane from Tegel to Gatwick, pages filled with tales of gender dysphoria and trans resistance, sexual assault and sexual harassment, aches and joys, pleasures and failures, fears and discoveries. I woke up with his cock on my face, his hand on my thigh, pressed against the pillow. I’d read some of the papers on the plane, and above the clouds I was a cock-in-mouth student once again, airborne. Student papers from the gender studies seminar in which I recently taught the story of Herculine Barbin with sweaty armpits and tears in my eyes, unable to disguise the emotion of teaching this piece of trans history wrapped in a little bit of my own intersex nonbinary story. I am turning forty in a few months, which officially makes me a queer elder. Surely that means something; it ought to—but what? I’d kept reading my students’ tales of sexual and gender violence in my hotel bed at Ibis Shepherd’s Bush late into the night, appreciating these shared stories now from a safe distance, filled with comfort and recognition, having lived to tell my own tales as course papers in the late nineties, turning openly queer professors into allies and confidants. That was then. This is now—mostly anyway, I think, looking out of the small hotel window with a stunning view of the empty parking lot.
In one. Everything feels like a bit of a reperformance these days, a repetition with a difference, from topping up my well-worn Oyster travelcard to the student papers and the Ibis room, the EasyJet flight menu and the priority check-in—ah, that smug sensation of getting second-row seats on a low-cost flight. We stand together watching as the stage lights turn bright orange and lavender and the show opens with a troupe of goths and punks, followed by a short play about sexpositive fairies and poly kinksters. We instinctively move closer and put our arms around each other, thrilled at the sight of our comrades and allies, nobodies and total fuckups like us, an underground swarm of old friends and strangers, festering in the dark and infesting every respectable crevice with our perversions, viciously proliferating out of spite—all these queers somehow managing to survive, against all odds, London’s brutal gentrification for the past fifteen years, by either remaining here, like you, or moving elsewhere, like me.
And now we are on. The evening’s host, a gorgeous creature covered in all that glitters, announces us: Give it up for The Holy! By now, we are both freezing, purple fingertips and shaky hands. We fumble with the mike cables until I finally start reading from a birthday card you sent me a decade ago. On cue, as we repeat the line “I always think of you,” our stage tune starts playing, and we get in character. Suddenly, it is Lesbian Amateur Strip Night at the Oak Bar all over again: you get down on your knees to do your floor crawl one more time and you do it damn well, just like you always did. As soon as I get my purple cock out of my pants, the crowd loses it, just like it always did. I follow you around the makeshift stage, entranced, with a stupid grin on my face. It never gets old, no matter how many times we do it. You sit on a chair, and I give you a lap dance, cock in your face. The room goes wild when, mid lap dance, I get your own engorged cock out of your briefs. We are still at LimeWharf but we are also at Club Rouge, Wotever, Whoopie, CAKE, Indulgence … where you and I were, briefly, minor figures in that magnificent queer tapestry of wayward punks and genderfreaks, babydolls and slutdaddies, hyperfemmes and butchbois, monsters and misfits: agents of anarchy. I like to call that act “Don’t Look the Other Way,” after the Pleasure electronica track we use for it. You tell me you’d rather call it “Trick or Treat” or maybe “Holy Night,” after the very last stage show we did together, on New Year’s Eve at Club Wotever, just before I left London.
Afterward, as we get out of our costumes and slowly pack, you ask me: can you remember the first queer space you ever entered? (Do the Pink Wednesday meetings at the student union bar count? Let’s say they don’t). Probably the very first queer space I ever entered was the gay and lesbian club of my university’s student association, during the first semester of my BA. I had to take a bus to another campus, a long ride across North London from Tottenham to Hendon. Ah, the trepidation of those cozy get-togethers and open-door meetings, half a dozen baby-faced queers discussing news from the Pink Paper and exchanging flyers over tea and chocolate digestives, always too broke and too scared to venture out into the sprawling London gay scene. But the first public queer space you and I and so many other U.K.-based queers entered was, unforgettably, our beloved First Out off Tottenham Court Road2, with the tofu sandwiches and cheap filter coffee, where you could wander in wearing your faded Snoopy T-shirt on laundry day and find just the right flyer for the next party, flat share, support group, or free yoga class. First Out eventually became our living room, yours and mine, during those months when we started to get together as often as possible, enjoying each other’s company much more than we’d expected. It was where we planned performances and photo shoots, exchanged books and outfits, swapped inside info and traded good gossip. I remember how the same day I first ventured into First Out, I rode that high by popping into the legendary Glass Bar in Euston3, allegedly for lesbians and bi women, but in reality frequented by trans queers and genderfuckers of all stripes. Dimly lit, with velvet drapes and fairy lights, and full of enticing discreet corners, The Glass Bar made us want to chill and hang out for hours, forget about the world, grab a giant cushion, settle in for the night, and snog all our friends. You remind me that you never did make it to The Glass Bar and now it’s gone. You had so many nights in with your two girls while you were still living with and married to their dad—you never felt like a proper lesbian or like a proper woman, and neither did I. I tell you how I went to look for The Glass Bar sometime when I visited London in 2015, circled around the West Lodge building, closed in on itself, looking for an entrance, but as usual I couldn’t find the door. Except now I couldn’t call Elaine, the owner, or send an SMS to anyone inside.
We agree that back then, we were both lost amid genders and sexual orientations, permanently bewildered and confused. How could you possibly not have turned into a Soho dandy, seducing all the queers with your wit and glamour? How was it that I had so not grown up to be Sam Malone of Cheers? I looked nothing like Bruce Willis or George Clooney—although I was starting to look a little like a young Antonio Banderas. But mostly I just looked like something I wanted to fuck. You giggle with delight, as always, when I say that. I love making you giggle. And what should we do with this lust throbbing though us at the sight of tits and asses, round exposed bellies and full lips, soft mounds of flesh we wanted to bury our faces in forever? And that was, you propose, probably how we both ended up in our undies at Rude Girls, a grand affair offering Thursday evenings of casual fucking for women and gender nonconforming folks, where everyone dressed up in skimpy underwear and tried to avoid sitting on the sticky leather couches. And what about Candy Bar?! Those go-go dancers were the reason I decided to give stripping a try. Remember Roxy, the ultimate dyke emcee, with their habit of standing in front of the pole and sneaking a thumb into their undies until the top of their pubic hair showed? Candy is now a gentleman’s club called Vanity.4 We shake our heads and sigh. The irony. You tell me there is a new lesbian bar now in London called She Soho, owned by a cis man. We shrug our shoulders. We decide to grab a cuppa tea from the small kitchen before braving the cold and share what’s left of your saltines over Lady Grey.
After we gather our bags and say our goodbyes, I take one final look at the dispersing crowd, the room losing its beat, silence falling on crates of empty beer bottles waiting to be collected in the morning. I check my phone and see that I’ve received an email from another ex, Polly, whom I dated for a rollercoaster of a year in New York, thanking me in a heartfelt note for the V-Day playlist I’d made for her. It is an evening filled with wonders, you decide, and we reminisce about the mixtape I sent you in 2005, a few months after I left London. As we stumble into the icy February night on our way to Betty, your beloved ancient Citroën, you remind me that the very first time you met me back in 2003, I was half naked in a corner couch fingerfucking someone at Rude Girls. You turn on the car radio, which is of course playing “Wicked Game.” Yes, I remember how we’d made plans via the Purr Lounge message board on Gingerbeer5, where we’d met just a few days before, but you never showed up—or so I thought. I’d probably met with a couple of Gingerbeer members beforehand at The Glass Bar and we’d made our way to the party after the obligatory round of drinks. You may have found me squatting, my dark curls covering someone’s belly, going down on a pretty young thing in a crimson lace corset, whom I eventually took home to have what I now recall as a pretty bland fuck. Her name might have been Ashley or Lilly and we dated for a little while. But at the party, I was flying high on the fingerfucking joy of it all, moving between bodies and mouths and cunts, lost in the slow licking of fingers to bury into wet openings, giving way, making room for more. I had no idea you were there. I thought you’d just stood me up yet again and started to suspect that yours was one of those fake online profiles, probably some bored teenage dude trolling the internet for kicks.
By the time you and I finally met for real a few weeks later, you’d become a mythical character in my imagination, a magician with vanishing powers, a unicorn, the “gorgeous genius” of your profile description. I recall waiting for you at Marble Arch station to go for what you called a “little gay picnic” in Hyde Park, probably sometime in early May of 2003. We roar with laughter now remembering us that day, barely able to utter a word. I can still recall how you came out of the tube exit like a slow, steady horse, petrified at the rush of people but resolute in your intention. You first stared at me in a rush of panic, as if you’d forgotten your lines. We made our way to the park in the rising heat, crossing street after street in step with the crowd. At that time, I was hooking up with so many strangers that I got it all down to a smooth, well-rehearsed dance. In your presence, with your stubborn silence, I had nothing. I thought we would hang out for a bit in the park, making absent-minded chitchat about the cost of living in London and our bullshit jobs (mine included a rotating remix of translator, stripper, artist model, copy editor, charity shop assistant, and office temp) and then we would head over to my bedsit on George Street right by Edgware Road. I’d probably already bought the good houmous and baklava for us and left them resting in the fridge. But you’d brought a sad little lunchbox with fresh fruit in your backpack and offered me some glossy strawberries and browning apple slices. I explained I don’t eat fruit and instead popped open a packet of vinegar-flavored Walkers crisps I’d picked up on my way to you, in case either of us got hungry in the park. You gave me a wicked smile and wolfed down a handful, chewing with delight as you reached for more.
When we finally arrive at your old apartment building in Stoke Newington, you park Betty with technical precision, careful to get her into just the right spot. It is hard to believe Lana and Tilda won’t be upstairs, eager to see our costumes, to watch more late-night telly with us, demanding bacon and toast and juice on their way to bed. You tell me that Lana has been living with her boyfriend for over a year in the Netherlands and Tilda now works in a cinema and is studying sociology in Bristol. You turn off the car radio and we spend a few moments in silence, staring into the dark, grasping the sameness of your street, that widening night holding our story suspended in the air. We enter your home together again, dazed after a show like we always used to, a little hungry, a little cold, all spent. We walk down the small hallway leading into the kitchen as you turn on the lights in every room and I wait for your girls to wake up and come find us. I stand by the fridge staring at the new magnets and postcards while you put on the kettle—a cat in the sun, a dancing elephant. Yes, I would love some redbush tea, thank you.
Author’s note: This essay is part of a memory project—all names and identifying details have been changed. I dedicate this piece to its first readers for their encouragement and support: Moon, Maria, Masha, Hinemoana, and Sammy.
1 For an account of closures of LGBTQ+ spaces in London, see for example Chelsea Coates, “Six in 10 London LGBTQ+ venues shut since 2006,” BBC News, February 9, 2024. Link: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-68226196. For the call for proposals describing Goodbye to London/This Dancefloor Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, see the event’s WordPress website. Link: goodbyetolondon.wordpress.com.
2 First Out closed in 2011, unable to renegotiate its lease as the Tottenham Court Road area underwent radical changes due to the Crossrail railway project, which officially opened in 2022. See Julie Bindel, “The last days of a legendary gay venue,” The Guardian, October 9, 2011. Link: www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2011/oct/09/first-out-cafe-closure.
3 The Glass Bar closed in 2008, after the landlord tripled the rent. See Arielle Domb, “The lesbian bar the people made happen,” The Face, June 28, 2024. See also “Lesbian Clubs and Pubs” in the Historic England website. Link: historicengland.org.uk/research/inclusive-heritage/lgbtq-heritage-project/meeting-and-socialising/lesbian-clubs-and-pubs.
4 The Candy Bar closed in 2014 due to increased rent. See Eleanor Margolis, “Lesbians mourn as Soho’s Candy Bar announces it will close,” The Guardian, October 27, 2013. Link: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/shortcuts/2013/oct/27/lesbians-soho-candy-bar-close-london. See also Scott Roberts, “London: Lesbian hangout Candy Bar to close,” in Pink News, October 21, 2013. Link: www.thepinknews.com/2013/10/21/london-lesbian-hangout-candy-bar-to-close.
5 Gingerbeer.co.uk was a London-based virtual community, website, and message board for lesbians and bi women, including trans and gender nonconforming folks. It launched in 2000 and was formally dissolved in 2019, according to gov.uk (find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/08057888). The GingerbeerUK Facebook page, last updated in 2015, is here: www.facebook.com/GingerbeerUK. See also the comment by Bisexual Depressive Author, Virginia Wolf on October 9, 2021, at 5:18 p.m. about gingerbeer.co.uk in “What’s the First Gay Thing You Saw on the Internet?,” Autostraddle, October 9, 2021. Link: www.autostraddle.com/roundtable-the-first-gay-things-we-saw-on-the-internet.
Sofia Varino is a writer and researcher based in Berlin, Germany. They are co-author of Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge 2023) and co-editor of a special issue of Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power. They have published two poetry chapbooks, Natural Language (Dancing Girl Press, 2017) and You’re My Strange (Dancing Girl Press, 2025), and their poetry has appeared in Poetry Wales, The Hythe, and Ink Sweat & Tears, among others. They teach feminist cultural studies at Humboldt University of Berlin and their new monograph The Unlively: Protesting Fossil Fuel Pollution with David Buckel (Routledge 2027) is currently in press.