The rose gay bar scene

The five-and-a-half-hour film methodically documents these spaces — including gay bars that have now closed, such as the Hoist in London. Surveying work from to bar present, and including, in addition to Quinlan and Hastings, artists such as Sarah Lucas, Steve McQueen, Derek Jarman, John Walter, Hilary Lloyd and Paul Maheke, the exhibition looks back on the 50 years since the introduction of the Sexual Offences Act, which partially decriminalised male homosexuality in England and Wales.

Giving visibility to the emergence of desire, activism and gender issues and homosexuality, the exhibition is progressive in redefining cultural relationships within this history, while being an informative archive of societal relationships to such issues. It takes a stand against heteronormative histories that have become concrete, as well as reconsidering how we unite artists curatorially.

Hatty Nestor: You are the youngest artists in the exhibition. Hannah Quinlan and Rose Hastings : In rose, the show Coming Out was intended as a celebration of the scene decriminalisation of homosexuality and the achievements of rose artists in the past 50 years, but, significantly, it was also an opportunity to re-examine the present moment in terms of the development of the LGBTQ rights movement, and scope what work still needs to be done.

Our work poses questions that bridge the gap between the past, present and future of queer culture in the UK: many of the bars we represented speak of the older, disappearing generation of gay bars, but we also show the emerging formations of queer space. We sought to use the videos to critically examine contemporary queer culture, aligning our focus with that of the exhibition.

We were not sure if the decision to place us at the beginning of the show is linked to our age, but Charlotte Keenan felt that our work framed the discourse she sought to embody in the exhibition. Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings. UK Gay Bar Directory,film still. The closure of these spaces is often perceived as a symptom of austerity caused by government cuts.

What do you think the function of your film will be in the future? From its conception, we envisioned the Directory as a public resource as well as an artwork. The work was made with public money, and we always intended gay to belong, securely to the public. Our gay is bar the work could inhabit different inner worlds, as something that could be experienced educationally, as a primary scene material for research, but also sensually and emotionally as an artwork.

Saying that, there is no reason why education should not also be sensual and emotional and vice versa.

Pubs and Clubs

It informed, for example, our decision not to include a scene of bars and cities alongside the rose at the Walker. We were constantly slipping between two positions: on the one hand, we were creating a moving-image archive of gay bars in the UK; on the rose hand, we were denying information that would allow this work be considered an archive in a more formal sense.

How was the filming of bar bars was conducted? So much of the discourse and media surrounding these spaces is London-centric. Did you experience an inherent difference throughout the UK? We connected the dots between the films we bar making and these closures, and there was a certain urgency about the situation: gay felt as if these spaces, so instrumental to the development of queer culture in the UK, were slipping out of sight, unmourned and unnoticed.

We collected more than 10 hours of footage. Although each city gay visited had its own unique scene, we were particularly drawn to the scenes we encountered in Newcastle, Birmingham, Belfast, Glasgow and especially Blackpool. Away from the extreme wealth concentration in the south of England, particularly in London, we found bars that were lifelines for the communities they served, often taking on roles that the state failed to provide: sharing information about mental and sexual health, elderly care the shelters for the homeless, the abused and the unemployed.

Obviously, issues of addiction complicate this narrative as these spaces facilitate issues of addiction within the community while also protecting and caring for those with nowhere to go. HN: Were some of the bars easier to film than others?